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perry is one

 

Perry was born a year ago today, and he's a healthy active curious young man. Barking is a problem, and there are some other behavioural quirks which I am working on ironing out. 

Yesterday at training the trainer saw something and said something about Perry: he said 'he's checking in with you all the time'. It had not occurred to me, or rather I had been aware of it but not what it meant, that as we went through the various loose-lead, sitting/lying ('dropping') exercises, Perry was frequently trying to catch or actually catching my eye. The trainer said this was something I needed to capitalise on (not easy) and reward (ditto) and I see what he means. I have always had this sense that Perry thought he knew better than me, but of course that's just projection - he needs my guidance and he is I think aware that I am the gateway to his getting what he wants. I know that he definitely wants to learn. 

Dog ownership is not cruisy, especially in the first couple of years, but I feel that there are only two columns ('satisfactory' and 'needs work') and no third column ('give up it's hopeless'). The excessive barking is lessening on the whole, certainly he is now aware that he can't bark for what he wants, although we do have a bit too much barking-at-noises-in-the-front-yard but we're working on that. Not sure if we'll ever be able to handle 'barking on tv', though this is a peculiar one, as he looks at the tv when he hears it i.e. he knows it's on the tv not outside. He also, the minute the tv is muted, stops worrying about that. So... why can't he apply logic to this situation. I'll have to take that one to the tribunal. 

happy 100th birthday leonard teale

Leonard Teale (seen here with his wife Liz Harris a year or so before they were married) was born a hundred years ago today. I must say I have greatly enjoyed the many hours I have spent with him in the last year or so as I witnessed the many travails of David 'Mack' Mackay in Homicide. I am sorry he is no longer around. 

 

happy sixth birthday lorraine

Actually, this blog started a few months earlier than six years ago, closer to May 2006, I think, but I seem to have misplaced those earlier entries so this is as good a time as any to be the birthday. The laughs and cries we've had over that time! All the friends found and lost along the way. I'd particularly like to thank Danny, Marshall Stacks and Ann O'Dyne my three regular readers, though of course my particular partickler thanks go to Mia who has put up with all of this for so long. Also thank you to everyone who follows the 'birdshit-encrusted pub steps' label through blog posts, I don't know what it means either.

I imagine it is tremendously dull to read the meanderings of a 46 year old academic who finds himself so terribly fascinating for no obvious reason. I try to be funny but often of course this being the internet that is in itself no guarantee of nuthin'. Well, here's to another six - nay, sixty - years of this guff (how much longer will this blog go for? They have to stop sometime, apparently. I'm always amazed by people who do a few posts and then quit. I'm reminded of Sue Grigg, when she and I were about 20, marvelling at a couple about ten years older than us who had been together about ten years, who had broken up. 'I mean,' she said, 'why bother?')

happy birthday

Today is Michael Hutchence's 50th birthday and Flinders Street Station's 100th birthday. Neither is really alive and yet both have a place in our hearts. I like three things Hutchence did: that song with Don Walker, that film with Richard Lowenstein, and the Max Q album. Oh, and Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, most of it anyway. I like many more things FSS did and still does. Happy birthday, you two fine old men.

April's party

April turned three yesterday and had a party today. I turned 44 last week and didn't have a party at all, in case you were wondering why you weren't invited. April's party was pretty good. Laurie asked me how Millie was after being in a car crash, and I told him she was doing surprisingly well. Florence held my finger in five of hers. Nicola lent me the Mark E Smith biography (via Laurie, who's just finished it). I talked to Jon Michell about the Virgins (again), I talked to Guy about Arthur Russell and also the Necessaries, I talked to Ellen about where she works which is like, some upmarket bar and what chances there were of persuading her to play the Huon reunion/launch show.
Earlier in the day I watched a bit of Secret Service with Rupert. This is an incredible Gerry Anderson series from 1969 which was the last of the supermarionation shows. It really blends live action with puppetr... er, supermarionation very closely. I had never heard of it or seen it before, it was very cool. If I'd had a dream that I was going to watch a show from 1969 starring Stanley Unwin as a clergymen called Father Unwin that blended a puppet of Stanley Unwin with the real Stanley Unwin, I would think that was appropriate subject matter for one of my dreams, which often do feature odd permutations of popular culture like that. This was not a sodding dream.

stingray

Our nephew Rohan and his mother Kerstin are in town for a few days. It is Rohan's birthday today (3) so we were lucky that we took him to the Aquarium yesterday as if we'd taken him today he would have cost sixteen dollars. The Aquarium is way cool, though it seems to have too many spiders and leeches - I mean it doesn't have that many, but considering it's an aquarium... you know. The sharks are the lure throughout, and these were what excited Rohan the most in prospect, in fact, a shark bit our noses that very morning in the living room. Yet the sharks were always just around the corner, and never quite there. Until we came across them. Mia thought they looked a bit gummy but Rohan and I were suitably impressed (some kind of guy thing). The stingrays were also fabulous as were the fish with human faces. I keep thinking they looked like someone but I can't quite place him. Perhaps you know him. After the aquarium we went along Southbank and saw a man on a unicycle with Yahoo Serious hair (where does hair grow on a unicycle? You're so naive) and a man pretending to be made of cement, also, an irish man who got some people to tie him up in a bag but his spiel went on for so long we had to leave.

Now it is the next day and I have been blowing up balloons for Rohan's birthday to the extent that I no longer really need to breathe. Did you know the lungfish is an ancient species with only one lung and in times of low water it can breathe air?

countdown

11 days to the third anniversary of this blog and only 16 days to the 43rd anniversary of my birth. Which is more exciting I don't know, and I am also unsure how to celebrate them. I suspect actually the first of these anniversaries will not be celebrated at all. That still leaves the question of the second. It may be dinner at Anatolian. Their state-of-the-art audiovisual facilities could come in very handy for the rough cut that movie of my life Claudia and Per are making.