Singular Scene

So Singular in Each Particular

The Top Five

by

Fi has posted her Christmas favourites this evening and as I was of a mind to do similar this week I’m following suit. I’m a big Christmas fan, not so much of going overboard with decorations and frills and furbelows but with all the things that make it a special time. The God stuff for sure, but the music, baby, the music is a big deal come Yuletide…
Counting down from number 5… Carol of the Bells. I heard this first on the Home Alone movie… dates me, for sure but there’s a catchyness about the track and this version of it done by Celtic Woman is no exception. I love hearing how others have arranged fabulous tracks. I plan on doing it in our choir’s Christmas repertoire eventually… we actually have to get the choir off the ground first…

Number 4… The Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. This is a dodgily recorded version of the ‘Soulful Messiah’ which is a brilliant cover of the oratorio, given the gospel treatment… have I said I used to sing in a choir like this???
Was the time of my life…

3. Walking in a Winter Wonderland. What is it about a white Christmas that just seems more… Christmassy? I think it’s our European heritage in the Antipodes that puts us crook… we really are young countries and our ancestors had white Christmases and we follow suit… this song says Christmas to me… I love too that this version is sung by one of my teen idols… Amy Grant.

Number 2 was a toss up. I could have put it in as number 1 but God always wins in these contests…
You can’t grow up in New Zealand without singing a Christmas folk song called Te Harinui. It recounts the bringing of the gospel (all that Jesus stuff) to New Zealand, not on a snowy night… not with angels… but in the words of Samuel Marsden, the first missionary to NZ. Fi, he preached this sermon up your way… guess that’s where Marsden Pt gets its name…
Anyway, couldn’t find a video or even a halfway decent track so I did what every Garage Band owning singer does… I made one for you. Red, this is for you… you asked me donkey’s ago to sing for you… and now I am… So, here it is, one night only. Deeleea Singular singing her homesick Christmas song… (PS… please forgive the tragic midi backing track… )

Number 1. Christmas is the God stuff for me. An outlandish tale of God stepping into the world all for the sake of ratbags like us. That’s some big love, right there.
There isn’t a song that captures it better for me than Silent Night. Josh Groban gives it his treatment here…

Bull Meet Horns

by

I’m committed. I’ve booked an airfare from Melbourne to Sydney to complete a week I’m planning on spending down that way.
I’ve a bunch of clients who need to pay me to make the trip affordable… but the opportunity to spend a week with Shoe taking it easy in some of the most beautiful landscape in Australia was too good to pass up.
You know? It will be the first holiday I’ve had for me since the epic Brisbane Trip… 2 years ago.
This holiday will be a little different… Shoe and I are both take it easy types… books, sleeping in… the occasional bit of sight-seeing. Low Stress. I’m so desperate – I can’t wait for the 27th!!! We’re hitting the road baby… LOOK OUT!
I’m working like mad to get my job book clear before I leave town and I’m not planning on doing any site work/updates until February…
Heh… brilliant.
This isn’t to say I won’t be taking the laptop… can’t do that… I’ll have blogging to do and photos to process to make you all jealous.
But I’ll be taking books. Lots and Lots of books. And I’ll be reading them too. So don’t wait by the computer…

Beady

by

There are few things that one may find fascinating about kitchen appliances. Surely. Even those fancy ass fridges with the internet on ’em.
Not fascinating.
However, cats apparently are fascinated by things other that those which captivate me. I know this because his nibs spent most of this afternoon and evening staring at the stove.
I’m not kidding. I mean, as I write it’s 12.30am (yes innernet, I am addicted to you) and it’s only in the last little while that the fascination has abated… I got home from church at 9.30pm that’s 3 hours… who’d have thought he’d have such a long attention span?
I was fascinated by his fascination so I opened and closed the oven doors, pulled out all the utensils therein and found nothing of interest to me… but I figured that there must have been a roach or an errant lizard that he’d let get away indoors on one of the occasions where he’d been left with the run of the in and the outside of the flat last week.
Of course, if you’re a cat owner yourself you’ll realise that the fascinating thing about the stove was noteworthy and that patience such as Chino exhibited today is for far more interesting a prey than a common and garden variety lizard or roach.
This prey was warm blooded – mammalian – and no, it wasn’t a mouse.
Mice are so last week.
Blow me down if as I was sitting here on my sofa tweaking my latest site two little beady eyes and half a dozen whiskers didn’t appear, attached to a rodent doing a tightrope walk along the little shelf rails in the grill.
What the rat couldn’t see (yes, a bloody rat) was that sitting on the bench to his left, looking into the top of the grill through the stove top was ‘Chinois the Dogged’ who was waiting him out.
The first time the rat had appeared I didn’t see it but got the gist of events because the cat went nuts shoving is forepaw down between the elements. Beady the Rat having made good his escape didn’t poke his nose out for another half an hour or so… I guess he didn’t count on the cat’s determination…
The 2nd time I he came out I saw it, but the cat must have made a noise (or I did) that scared the little bugger back down the stove so I caught no more than a glimpse… By this time I was actively encouraging the cat to sit on the bench… not usual behaviour…
Finally, persistence paid off… Beady emerged the 3rd and final time at around midnight. This time Chino was prepared and he knocked the rat onto the floor leaped from the great height of the benchtop and followed the rodent under the fridge, knocking its footplate off in the process…
Happily Beady wasn’t quick enough off the mark and Chi got his jaws around him and brought him out into the light complete with Beady struggling for dear life…
I sure hope you’re not squeamish or one of those ‘animal loving’ ‘live and let live’ kind of readers… if so look away now… or skip a paragraph…
Chi wasn’t letting me near the rat. He growled and carried on and took the bloody thing into my bedroom. I personally wasn’t taking any chances on him letting it go to get a better grip and having the blighter take off under my bed so I took my own turn at the rat and at an opportune moment I hit it over the head with my monopod…
Heh.. take that you little varmint…
Then, when the cat was distracted I picked it up by the tail and threw it into the bathroom where Chino proceeded to chase it down and attend to it like it was a tickle me Elmo or some such Top 10 Christmas Gift. (The bathroom’s where all the live prey goes… I figure it’s easier to clean up entrails off tiles..)
Happily, entrails are not currently an issue… the cat doesn’t seem to have figured out that rats are edible.

You Can Handle the TRUTH

by

How many people do you know who actually take the high road? I mean really, even if it means stepping up to an uncomfortable place and putting themselves out there?
Well, if you know me, that’s at least one.
I sincerely hope that doesn’t sound boastful. But I stepped up this week, and it bothers me more that I’m basically the first one who has said anything about an awkward situation that straddles both my day job and my business and that has been making me crazy; actually, not only me, but a bunch of people who haven’t said anything and who are all agog that I did.
So I made an appointment with The Big Cheese (not to be confused with the Baby Cheeses) and looked him in the eye and said “I’m going to be completely honest with you.”
And it’s something I don’t think he hears that often. Not that people aren’t honest with him but people are so used to jumping to whatever tune they think he’s playing that they don’t want to rock the boat, don’t want to stress him out don’t want to look as though they’re complaining.
Screw that.
There are too many people in pain, too many people getting trodden on (and no, not by him). I’ve been there before and I made a promise to myself I am NEVER going back there and if it means stepping up, making those appointments and telling the truth?
I’m doing it.