This weekend kicked off with a bit of a cooking session as I made some potato and leek soup, and tried a Chocolate Orange cake recipe from Iron Chef Shellie, a local Melbourne food blogger. I’d been craving a jaffa-flavoured cake like the ones I used to get from a bakery in Balgownie, Wollongong. This one wasn’t quite like those I were trying to reproduce, but it was delicious and I’ll definitely make it again in the future. I was pretty happy with my cooking, particularly after some recent bad experiences in the kitchen.

Whilst browsing Iron Chef Shellie’s blog, I came across a review of Dahon Tea Lounge, a South Melbourne-based Filipino restaurant. Nico often laments the fact that you can’t buy Filipino food around, so we decided to head down there on Saturday for lunch.

Dahon focuses more on teas (ice and hot) and lunch repertoire rather than more elaborate Filipino foods. I had a crumbed chicken baguette (unlike Nico, I’d had breakfast and wasn’t as hungry), Nico had Java rice with Chicken Inasal and we shared Pancit Bihon (Filipino noodles). We also sampled the ice teas. Everything was delicious and I think we’ll be back soon so I can try the various pork dishes they serve.

Nico and I had decided to have a night in at the movies on Saturday, even going to the extent of making homemade (and somewhat dodgy) choc tops and popcorn. After all the food of Saturday (including a reprise of the potato and leek soup for dinner), I could barely stomach it all, so our freezer is still full of choc tops.

We watched the classic 9 to 5, then an episode of The West Wing before I crashed out at around 1am.

Since last writing, around thirty days ago (a period which is less than 3/1000ths of my life thus far, and when you put it like that I don’t feel so bad) I’ve been to catch a few shows. The last two-thirds of the Jerry Herman triptych were enjoyable, particularly Dear World which featured a very ill but still magical Diedre Rubenstein (probably not known to her fans for playing “Crazy” Svetlanka, Russian lover of Lou from Neighbours). I had missed the first show, Milk and Honey because I was busy passing out in the hospital foyer. The final show in the set was Hello, Dolly which suffers the misfortune of being concerned with Small Town America™ which is just one of those alarm bells for me and means I’ll probably spend a lot of time looking at my shoes when they’re talking on stage.

Last weekend Phillip and I took to the streets of Melbourne and took advantage of Melbourne Open House, a situation where otherwise private areas of city buildings are made public for people to explore. This meant I spent most of the morning posing in embarrassing ways while Phillip kept saying “No, I’ll do it again, the light/focus wasn’t right.”

Most recently, with Jess as our house guest, we took to the Regent Theatre to view Love Never Dies again. Just proving that I wasn’t having a bad night when we first saw it, I was still enraged by the show’s all-too-obvious flaws and PERHAPS SOMEONE SHOULD HAVE NOTICED THAT WE DON’T PUT THREE DUETS BETWEEN THE SAME TWO CHARACTERS IN A ROW BECAUSE THAT’S SIMPLY NOT A GOOD IDEA AND OH GOD I’M BORED AND NO ROTATING THE SET DOES NOT MAKE THIS SONG DIFFERENT TO THE LAST ONE. In truth I spent most of this viewing listening to Ben Lewis as The Phantom and studying his character voice in the off chance that I am ever offered an audition for The Phantom/Batman/Will Arnett.

Paul Duffus (Deputy Commissioner of Taxation To The Stars) helped me pay my medical expenses (personally, I think if they’re going to do crazy crap to me while I’m asleep they should be paying me), which sorted me out to book flights to New York and Los Angeles with Nico early next year. This means the zipper on my bumbag which holds my wallet will need to be locked even more tightly than usual so that I can be reckless and break all sorts of personal rules when traveling*.

Other than this it’s back to work (for which I set up a small site), and hoping to have some time to pay my blog some more attention.

* I’m expecting to break my “Don’t eat anything bigger than your head” rules quite a few times.

The day after I arrived I was right back into theatre to conduct Dusty: The Original Pop Diva, a musical about Dusty Springfield’s life. To say I had to paddle fast is an understatement. I arrived back in the country less than two weeks out from opening night, and didn’t know a note of the score. Neither did the orchestra, who hadn’t rehearsed yet. I spent a week at 3 rehearsals getting as familiar with the large score as quickly as possible, and then spent 4 rehearsals with the orchestra of which three were dress/tech rehearsals. When working on a show I have a recurring nightmare that I’m working on a show but have no knowledge of the script and am just pushed on stage while everyone else knows what’s going on. Well, that nightmare came to life in this show. The orchestra, who were almost all alternating with another musician for the run, worked really hard to get up to speed quickly. By the time the opening night came around, we were just finding our feet enough to get through it and sound decent. I’m about to race off to the final two performances today. I’ve had a blast, but I sure will be glad when the anxiety is over.

Getting back into the daily commute to Sydney is torturous, and I am taking advantage of the opportunity to work from home when I can. The extra sleep does wonders for my temperament. I’m being motivated by the end goal; a big change I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but I’ve finally got in my short-term horizon. In the past few weeks Nico and I have set the date for when we will be (finally) moving to Melbourne. Nico’s uni will be finished, so we’ll be packing up and heading down at the end of November. We’ve tentatively lined up a place (pictured below). I’m tremendously excited about the move. I expect this will be the first of a couple of life changes for me as I spend some time to determine where I want to be in another years time (or rather, what I want to be doing). I’ll be setting dates and making plans, and it’s all very energising.

As part of the upcoming move, I’m taking the opportunity to cull what I don’t need to hold onto. This time around, DVDs haven’t made the cut (with the exception of a few TV series which I haven’t got digital copies of yet). That has meant converting a large number of my DVDs for my Plex setup. The DVDs have always been at a disadvantage because guests have always preferred browsing the movies in the Plex library rather than the physical DVDs. Also going in this cull will be clothes, drawers full on random and useless things, and old technology (sometimes accompanied by their original boxes).

I’m also taking my first break from work at the end of this month to head down to Melbourne and catch up with some friends down there. Nico is also coming down, and we’ve got tickets to see three productions in the week we’re down there (Merrily We Roll Along, Anyone Can Whistle, and Sugar). Could I have any more to look forward?

Off to Dusty now for the last dash of two performances. Ah, to have my weekends back.

I was expecting to enjoy the process more than I did, but rather found myself quickly frustrated. Not by the crowds, for they weren’t that wild, but by the high proportion of business clothes that had been fashioned for Goliath sized men*. Poor Nico was in tow to carry things and alert me when I was beginning to resemble a character from Glengarry Glen Ross. I realise that I probably didn’t accurately show my gratitude as I bounced off the bottom of the escalator and loudly declared, “these clothes are made for man giants!”, nor when I poked my head above the racks and announced “I feel like I’m in Gulliver’s Travels… but one of the little ones.”

The hardest thing part was (of course) letting go of the money. I’m a long-time op-shopper and I’ve snapped some incredible bargains in my time. Even when I splurged on a fancy vintage shirt I loved in Melbourne a few months back, it only set me back $20, but I realised I was going to have to spend money. Real money**. My coping mechanism was to simply close my eyes and forget the money. I figured even though the tide was receding, I could expect it to my lapping at my ankles shortly (if not knee-deep).

We walked and shopped for hours before my energy and enthusiasm quickly wintered and I declared it was time to go home. In the end I came away with a suit, three shirts, a pair of pants, three ties, a belt, a cautious opinion of capitalism and a significantly altered self image.

* Perhaps some skew here as I am mildly petite.

** I came to this conclusion after recalling two childhood experiences; one where I tried to use Monopoly money as tender, and the other when I renounced capitalism and decided I didn’t agree that the checkout lady ought to control ownership of the Batman figurine. Both brought me admonishment.

Clearly the best gift I bought this year was for Greg. As long as I’ve known Greg he has been incredibly passionate about The Beatles, collecting obscure recordings, videos, news clippings and photos which now amass a gigantic library. I’m sure he’ll have to move his resources to it’s own site at some point and open a Beatles museum. As someone who has tendencies towards collecting and amassing myself, what I admire most is his love of collecting the really interesting things rather than those who hunt the collectables of the time. Greg’s passion is the art of it, and he follows the artists through all of the other facets of their lives. Greg spends a lot of his time on forums, mailing lists and eBay hunting out the next interesting snippet. He even contributed footage to the documentary “The US vs John Lennon”, which screened on SBS just two nights ago.

Greg’s passion spills out in his Beatle Photo Blog in which he shares many of the fascinating images and stories he has collected. It’s an extremely popular site which has been trapped at blogspot.com for many years. For Christmas, Nico and I bought Greg his own domain name (beatlephotoblog.com) and hosting for a year, and then I set about moving his blog and it’s massive archives to it’s new home under WordPress, and setting him up with cooler tools like Google Analytics.

It’s not always a great impression to receive intangible gifts, so I thought I’d create a little card with the domain name and his login details and mount it in a wrapped box so at least he’d have the excitement of opening something.

Greg opened his present last night and jumped right on to WordPress to play around with his new blog. It was really great to be able to help him progress his passion and encourage something he’s clearly so dedicated to. Be sure to check it out and leave a comment.