Summer hols

We have had a fairly busy time of the summer, what with camping and house minding and a big Christmas dinner. There was also Nadia's huge 30th birthday party, complete with karaoke box. During this time we also had the company of our homestay guest, Mio.

The week in North Bondi minding our relatives house was a mixed bag. I was able to retrace old pathways from my earliest years, spent in Bondi, Rose Bay and Vaucluse.. The old family house in Chris Bang Crescent is overgrown with 'shrubs' that my father planted forty years ago. What used to be a bamboo forest and wild valley out the back is now a huge apartment complex. The little hole in the wall sweet shop(at the top end of Vaucluse) run by the very old gentleman who seemed to dislike children is now a beauty salon. But Soos bakery on Old South Head Rd is still there, and I bought a big bag of rolls on the way home It's such a strange feeling going back to those old haunts. Sad, dislocating, sweet. and possessive of a strange evocative air.

One day we took the Rose Bay ferry into Circular Quay. Tom was very excited, though apprehensive that a particular kind of fish(whose symbol was at the wharf side) might be lurking in the waters beneath. And he has a thing about the wind too.

Nevertheless, we survived the journey and Mio kindly took this snap along the way.

whither?

Yesterday, after some months of procrastination, I enrolled in a course to become a counsellor. It is predominately a correspondence course with 10 days of practical workshops in Sydney. I've always liked the role of counsellor, especially when I was a teacher, and I do have a penchant for motivating people. So if I study and work hard at gaining the skills and knowledge that this course promises, maybe I can find a place in the industry. I really want to find a post-teaching career which stimulates and challenges me and that helps others.

Anyway, I've taken the plunge, or is it just the first few baby steps?

Homestay Mio

I think I mentioned before, but we had an idea (before leaving Japan) that running a homestay for Japanese people might be a good idea after the new house was finished. Nadia set up a homepage and I made up some business cards. The homestay was not designed to make money - just to cover costs. What we really wanted was to keep our links with Japan as strong as possible.

Mio was our first real homestay guest and she came over from Osaka at the beginning of December, staying for six weeks. That's a long time in homestay parlance (the average being a week or two) and she came at a time when she was thinking a lot about settling down, getting married and giving up her carefree existence. I think that these considerations coloured her experience to a considerable degree and perhaps she didn't enjoy herself as much as she might had her mindset been different.

We did some pretty fun things though. We took her camping down at Kangaroo Valley (no kangaroos, just cows!), spent a week in Bondi and did the tourist trail in a number of places. But I think she never really got into the swing of things, being a little homesick and somewhat lovesick too. I guess that's life.

On her last day with us, we took this shot. She seemed happy enough that morning and that's how we would like to remember her. We hope that this big year is a real blessing for her.

young david

Everyone who meets Tom thinks he looks 'just like his mother'. I had a feeling that somehow this wasn't quite true, so I searched for an old photo of myself, taken at 18 months. Of course I have no recollection of the time or place or persons, those details being long forgotten or buried deep within. But I had remembered the photo was once in a frame in my childhood room and I had this strange inkling that Tom and I looked uncannily alike.

Sure enough, when I put the photo up on the wall for casual perusal everyone actually thought it was a photo of Tom, though they were puzzled by the age and dog-earedness of the snap.

So there you go, one up for heredity.