Amazing August (Part 3)

The Queensland trip came to an end (Amazing August: Brisbane and Amazing August: Cairns). The bestbit about coming home was on the flight from Melbourne to Hobart. One of Slabs’s school friends is a pilot and he always said how funny it would be to be sitting in a plane and hear his friend’s name called out as pilot. In the however many years his friend has been in this job, it’s never happened. Until this time.

So that was a cool way to end the holiday.

Amazing August Back Home Edition

Disclaimer/Disclosure: this post and all of my posts and all of my writing is done solely by me with no input from generative AI or any other form of AI. I have used the AI masking feature in Lightroom Classic in a small number of my photos for the purpose of selecting the sky to I can edit it separately from the rest of the image. I do not use AI for any other purpose. I do not give permission for my words or images to be used for training AI.

Entertainment

I went to several shows in August.

I have to talk about Don Giovanni, as it’s the only opera I’ve ever seen. I was 18 and living in Helsinki as an exchange student with a host family who took me along to see the performance. I don’t remember where it was (probably the Finnish National Opera House) or which company performed it. I didn’t understand a single word as the songs are all in Italian, and the subtitles on the screen in the opera house were in Finnish and Swedish. The only time I got it was right at the end, when the Commandant and Don Giovanni are exchanging their ‘sí’ and ‘no’ lines. But I worked out the basic idea and I loved the music because it was Mozart and it’s amazing.

Several years later I bought the CD and it became a favourite. I hadn’t listened to it for a while but I was very excited when Opera Australia’s production of Don Giovanni appeared on the Theatre Royal’s calendar this year and had to go.

And it was great! As well as the music being amazing, the sets and costumes were stunning. I can’t remember what I thought of it when I saw it in Finland but having gotten to know the music and the story over the years, I feel like I probably appreciated a lot more this time than I did when I was 18!

Wordy things

I entered the Australian Writer’s Centre’s Furious Fiction Challenge, which you can read more about here.

I went to Kate Forsyth in conversation with Danielle Wood about her new book The Changeling, which I got signed at the end of the event. I was very excited to meet Kate because I’ve done several of her courses at the Australian Writers’ Centre, at least one of which is going to be extremely useful when it comes to taking the story I’m currently working on further.

Photography

I went to the Hobart Photographic Society excursion at Lenah Valley. I didn’t have a tripod or a filter so I couldn’t make any long water exposures like a lot of the others were doing. Instead I wandered around and made some intentional camera movement shots. That was fun.

Other cool things

Wear It Purple Day was 28 August. This year’s theme was “Colours of Courage”.

I went to see the finalists in the Beaker Street Science Photography prize at the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery. The photo of the handfish on the bottom right is by one of my friends and it is very cool!

Remember I said last time that I tried the Daintree tea and am now a converted tea drinker? I ordered some of the tea so I can have it at home.

And because it’s proper tea, I needed to get a proper tea cup to drink it from. Amazingly, our local tip shop had EXACTLY the cup I wanted.

I have no way of knowing the history of this cup, but thank you to the person who donated this to the tip shop. I am very happy to have found it. I will take very good care of it.

And that’s it for Amazing August! There was a lot going on.

My next challenge is to come up with a name for September and see if I can post all those photos before the end of October ….