Kate and Andrew Scott

And the cold descends!

Sarah, Claire, Kate and Catherine at Port Fairy.

Originally uploaded by Kate Scott.

With the cold, wet and windy weather really hitting its stride in the last month we’ve spent a lot of time indoors, happily enjoying our newly serviced gas heater! It might be ugly but it can really heat the house. When we have ventured out we’ve got up to the following:

Australian Impressionism Exhibition
Whilst the NGV doesn’t have the master works of the European art galleries it really makes up for this with the time and effort it puts into its exhibitions. We went along to see the Australian Impressionism exhibition and were as impressed as always with the gallery’s attention to detail and ability to develop a story. The exhibition follows the early years of some of Australia’s greatest artists, Charles Conder, Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, and Jane Sutherland, and really shows how radical they were at the time. A great review from The Age of the day, The Argus, which slams one of their early exhibitions, highlights how ‘modern’ impressionism was at the time. And the wall of Mentone paintings was a highlight, given that Kate’s parents have had prints of them up for as long as she can remember.

Port Fairy Escape
With the last of the long weekends until *sob* Melbourne Cup in November we had long established plans to head to south for the Queens Birthday weekend. We booked a holiday house in Pt Fairy with Catherine, Sarah S and Claire, heading down on the Friday night and back to Melbourne on the Monday afternoon. It was a great weekend, far warmer than we were expecting (everyone turned up with their own heater after we read that the house had only one electric heater, which turned out to do a great job), so the scarfs and beanies we’d brought didn’t get much of an outing. We went for a walk along the gorgeous ocean beach, and went to the Saturday craft market. Sunday we headed into town for the Dachshund Dash. Ever thought that Dachshunds, some of the world’s lowest dogs, would be no good at racing? Well you’d be wrong! OK, so they weren’t exactly fast but they were incredibly cute, and what more could you ask for in a racing dachshund? We did think the sausage sizzle set up near by was a little bit poor taste, but when Walter the puppy made a bolt for it we figured that everyone likes a grilled sausage!

On our way back to Melbourne we stopped off in Warrnambool to visit Sarah Mc, and to see Flagstaff Village Maritime Museum. Well it wasn’t the best recreation village we’d been to, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. A few more volunteers would have made it a better excursion, and a lot less wind and rain! But it was lovely to see Sarah and her house and her hospital.

Birthdays and Happenings
We had Hannah, our niece’s, 4th birthday early in the month, which required Kate to shop in Tokyo in her lunchbreak. Luckily she has a colleague who speaks fluent Japanese and otherwise Amazon.co.jp would have been all in, well, impenetrable Japanese. Must ensure that we’re more on the ball for Rosie’s birthday later this year! And it was Kate’s Mum’s birthday on the 6th of June, which we went down to Mentone for, and had a lovely dinner with family and friends. Kate’s friend Emily gave birth to her gorgeous twins on the 7th of June, Oscar and Violet.

We also saw the MTC’s production of ‘The Pillowman’, which was very dark and very interesting. It’s rare to have someone walk about of an MTC play but there were a few pikers for whom obviously dark and grim murder fairy tales were not how they planned to spend their Tuesday night. Their loss, we thought it was great, and a great set and cast too.

And we bid farewell to Debbie and Andrew who are moving to Sydney later this month. It was sad to say goodbye to them, although they’ll hopefully come up with lots of excuses to visit Melbourne, but also to their house, which was a MonUCS fixture for many a year, certainly it was lovely to see some familiar faces at their farewell lunch.

House Update
Well it wouldn’t be a blog post without a short update on the progress on the house. We’ve had the last of the light fittings installed, so new lights in every room in the house now, and, ooo posh, dimmer switches in the dinning and lounge rooms. We also cut back the deeply diseased lime tree, after harvesting a good bucketful of fruit. Hopefully its for remaining four leaves will allow it to make a come back in spring. And we’ve had the builder come around to prepare a quote for us to re-do the veranda, cross your fingers for us that we don’t need a building permit for the work we’re hoping to do!