A very HOT Christmas

We were not looking forward to the hottest Christmas in living memory. The forecast was 40 degrees plus! On Christmas Eve, we made a plan to go for an early morning swim at South Beach, followed by breakfast at the cafe. The beach was quite windy, with a strong Easterly, the wind that would bring all the heat from inland. The water was lovely, though. We must do this again!

Breakfast was delish: I ordered a stack of pancakes:

C and E had savoury items:

After breakfast, it was my job to brave the crowds at Kailis to purchase seafood for Christmas Day. I was on the hunt for Garlic Prawns, which we’d enjoyed last year, plus a small pot of caviar for the blinis.

C pours some non-alcoholic rose wine:

E prepares the blinis:

We always forget the exact recipe from one year to the next and have to google it from all the vaiations.

My turn to cook the Garlic Prawns:

Prawns in the pan with a few mushrooms:

Prawns and salad for main course:

C had made tiramisu for dessert, which we had much later whilst watching a film on TV:


This film was an interesting choice. It’s an award winning film about a Tokyo toilet cleaner. E is going to Japan soon, so it seemed very appropriate. The toilets on his round are all different architectural structures. I hope E can track them down!

After the film, I drove home without any fear of getting stopped for drink driving. My first job was to water the community herb garden, which I knew would be suffering from the heat. There were sounds of merriment from the pool, but I had already had a swim at 8.00 am while things were quiet:

Finally, a pic of my Christmas/Birthday presents:

Countdown to Christmas

I’m not feeling in the mood for Christmas as I’m still below par with the effects of shingles. The blisters have gone from my face, but the area is still itchy and I have to keep off it as best as I can. I have absolutely no energy and spend most of the day resting. My sister sent me a lovely bunch of flowers to cheer me up:

The Bushwalkers Christmas Lunch was held on Thursday at the UWA Club. We were a somewhat diminished group compared to previous years:

I chose the Turkey, as this would be my only stab at traditional Christmas fare:

The barista made an interesting coffee:

On Friday night, C knew I wouldn’t have the energy to cook for them. She took us to a local Japanese restaurant, where they ate often during their kitchen renovations. I was sad to discover that it wasn’t licensed, but the green tea came in a most beautiful pot:

The food was delicious, though. Mine was tempura king prawns in a bento box (a generous portion and more than I could manage).

This weekend we are expecting a heatwave which will be something else to contend with.

Shingles update

I think the worst is over, but it’s been something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy! I felt pretty tired all the time, with no energy to do anything and certainly not to go out. Besides, I didn’t want anyone to see my face in this state:

That photo was taken on Sunday. It’s now Friday. 

At its worst, I didn’t dare take a shower or wash my hair. C brought me some shopping and finally persuaded me to go down for a coffee. With my hat and glasses on, nobody could see my face. On Wednesday, my cleaners came. This time, one was a French girl who told me her mother had had shingles a month ago. She showed me a photo and her eye was the spitting image of mine. There’s a lot of it about!

The advice is to take your mind off it as much as possible. I moved from the book version of Phryne Fisher to watching her on Netflix, which hopefully I’ve cancelled after the month’s trial.

I’ve finished a week of medication and the blisters are scabbing over. Bits are flaking off:

Luckily I’ve got dressed, as window cleaners are descending from the roof of the building, first his feet and then his head:

I don’t suppose he has time to look in.

Shingles

I’m basically a healthy person. I came through the Pandemic unscathed. I wash my hands as soon as i come home. So it was quite a shock to be diagnosed with shingles - completely out of the blue.

On Tursday morning I woke up to find my eyelid really swollen up and a rash developing on my forehead. What could this be? Should I just rest and hope it would go away? It didn’t seem serious enough to go to the doctor. In any case, it’s virtually impossible to get a same day appointment. At about 4.00 pm I finally did call, asking for an appointment next morning. They said I could see the Nurse Practitioner.

This man was experienced. He took one look at me and said you’ve got shingles.  On his computer, he called up a diagram of an eye and coloured the affected areas in red. Because it was near my eye, he sent me straight away to the eye doctor who had a surgery in the medical clinic next door. It can be serious and cause blindness. After an hour's wait, the eye doctor told me there was nothing visibly wrong inside the eye. I was safe to drive home because they had only put drops in the left eye to dilate it.

Not a pretty sight!

After two days taking the Valaciclovir tablets, there has been no improvement. I wake up with the eyelid and area below so swollen up that I can hardly see out (more than in the photo above). I think I'll just go back to bed and hope for the best. 

When I googled shingles, I discovered that some people have a headache or unbearable pain. Others find the itching intolerable. The Nurse Practitioner told me to put my hands behind my back and pretend I'd got handcuffs on. Living in Singapore for seven years, I had trained myself never to scratch mosquito bite, so I didn't think this would be a problem. I just need to distract myself: I'm reading the latest, and last, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.

W A Day

It’s all going on right in front of me as preparations hot up:

I can see many, many toilets for a start. They are the red cubicles all lined up on the bottom left of the first picture. Do they really need that many? Nobody will find themselves caught short or need to find a bush on W A Day!

The other thing that strikes me is how hot the weather forecast is for the weekend. Last year, the event was scheduled for the middle of winter, when it had to be postponed because the ground was waterlogged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Saturday.

In addition to all this, there is a big event at the stadium: the first Ashes Test between England and Australia. I’m not a cricket fan, but I feel sorry for the English team having to play in the hot sun. Apparently it was an exciting day yesterday, according to this report in the British newspaper The Observer 

Awaking from an anxious sleep at 5am this morning, I turned on the television. TNT were showing the clattering fall of the first seven England wickets. Crawley, 0, Root, 0, and so on. I groaned and looked at the BBC cricket website. Go back to bed, the commentator instructed me. So I did just that. When I awoke an hour or so later, Australia were batting. England had been bowled out for a paltry 172. All our hopes and expectations of this hotly anticipated Ashes series seemed to have been overblown.

Then began one of the most thrilling passages of cricket of recent times. Four fast bowlers unleashed an unrelenting barrage of hostility, the likes of which I had never seen from England. The Aussies, jubilant only hours earlier, staggered, losing four wickets. In came England’s talisman, Ben Stokes, and five more came and went, leaving Australia on 123-9. This already marvellous Test match could be over by Sunday, possibly even by the close tomorrow.

Fish on Friday

On Fridays, I always go over to Como to cook dinner for C and E.  This saves them thinking about food after a busy working week.  Straight away, E asks what's for dinner. I usually tell her, but this week I said it's a surprise and it's something we've never had before. She took Rocky out for a walk, whilst I got busy in the kitchen. This was the menu:

Baked Fish Heads

Spaghetti Marinara

Fruit Salad.

The Fish Heads were not well received!  E felt intimidated by the fish eye staring up at her from the plate, even though I had tried to cover it up with onion slices! I told her that the "meat" inside the head was supposed to be very tasty and extremely nutritious (albeit in short supply and not easy to dig out).

Fish eye top right;
Fish teeth bottom left.

Because they are not very popular in the shop, Kailis sells them much more cheaply than other cuts of fish. These were 2 big pink snapper heads. 

C ate hers politely, but E couldn't deal with hers at all. In the end, I took her portion home to enjoy next day with some rice:

This barramundi is more like the normal dinner I produce on a Friday:

Skin-on barramundi with black rice and salad.

Well, it was an interesting experiment.

Have a Go Day

Today was the day for seniors to “have a go” at all kinds of activities in Burswood Park. I had arranged to meet Val at the MG enthusiasts stand, where she goes every year in her little blue car. I set off early as I had a 15 minute walk along the riverbank and it was already hot. The temperature was 9 degrees above average for this time of year.

When I arrived, there was a row of MGs but no blue one. I was told that Val’s car had broken down on the way and she was on the side of the road, waiting for a tow truck. I later discovered that she had to wait 3 hours to be rescued!

What to do? I went for a ride in a trishaw with Cycling Without Age. This seemed like the coolest thing to do on a hot day - and it was very pleasant with a slight breeze coming off the river. My driver (pedaller?) wanted to point out all the landmarks, till I told him that I lived nearby and did this walk almost every day. But I really enjoyed this new experience of speeding along. Perhaps I should have tried the canoeing, but I wasn't dressed for it.

The lady organising the rides wore a yellow spotted dress which had a clever design, rather like those tie-back aprons which can be adjusted for different sizes by pulling on the straps. I asked her about the pattern, but she said it was an amalgamation of several.

MG on display

Trishaw rides

Yellow dress

How to make it?