Go the Eagles!

A couple of weekends ago I went to my first AFL match at the Subi Oval! The West Coast Eagles v Port Adelaide. Having never seen a match before, neither live nor on tv, I had an evening to get up to speed with the game. R ran me through the aim of the game - kick the ball through the goal posts. Okay. Easy. The match was great fun and I find it really exciting learning about the sport and the rules. (Oh, and we had pie at half time!)

Caveat. The following is written by me based on what i remember. It may or may not be quite accurate, but I'm sure it will sound very basic, and I'm sure there's probably a lot more to the game than i'm describing. Here goes!

At each end there's 4 posts, 2 tall ones and 2 shorter ones on each side. If you get the ball in the middle bit (the goal) you get a goal (6 points). If you get it in between the posts on either of the 2 sides, you get a behind (1 point). The ball is kicked into the goal. You can run with the ball but if you do you have to bounce it every 10 metres or so. You don't throw the ball over arm, you tap it to your team mates. If you catch the ball without dropping it, you can't be tackled.

Each team has 18 players on the pitch, and you can interchange players without subbing (meaning you can go off but still come back on). Whilst the game's in play, there might be men in fluorescent yellow running about, these are like messengers. They come on to pass messages from the manager/coach! (spot the one in the in middle in the second photo!)  There are a lot of officials wearing red - 9 in total. So, all in all, there are a lot of people on the pitch!

The match is played in 4 parts of 20 mins each. This is 20 mins of actual play time so usually a quarter takes longer, say about 28/30 mins. The bit i liked best is when the ball goes out of play, an official stands on the boundary line facing away from the pitch and throws the ball in backwards over his head! Funny. Oh, and the ball's like a rugby ball.

The games are a real family affair, all ages go from young kids to old grannies. There wasn't a great deal of shouting or chanting, until towards the end when people got a wee bit more excited. Although, we were playing Port Adelaide who are quite low down the table. Now, if it had been a derby (West Coast Eagles v Fremantle Dockers), it might have been a different story. Oh, and derby is not pronounced 'darby', it is pronounced 'derby'.


p.s. not quite sure about the date on these photos!  These were taken on R's little old camera.  

1 year in Oz!

At about 1am on 25th June last year I arrived in perth.  It was about -1 degrees.  I didn't think it got that cold!  Not only did I arrive on 25th, it's also the day that i started living with Mr R.  Ahhhh.  To celebrate our 1 year of living together bliss (ha ha), we had a yummy home cooked meal.  Master Chef (as he insists on being called, and i oblige because it means i don't have to cook at the weekends.  Yesss, i know i sound like a housewife but god, cooking every day has made me detest cooking.  Thinking up meal ideas and doing the grocery shopping is not fun).  Rusty made beer battered barramundi (we used the good old aussie favourite, Coopers green) with Mashy Peas (a Jamie Oliver concoction of peas, broccoli and potatoes with mint).  It was really tasty.


The second photo is of our salt and pepper mills affectionately called Oopsy Daisy.  Nowt special but Rusty inherited them from his parents and they're called this because they fall over very easily.  How cute it that.  And I love the fact that they have history and we get to use them in our home.

a blustery sunday

To make up for the fact that we spent an entire saturday in retail hell, traipsing around the big stores along Scarborough Beach Road (an area of town that is lined with store after store after store. It's basically one huge retail park. This is where you find Ikea, which actually i don't mind during the week ($1 hotdog anyone? Yes please! And of course, Spotlight, which is a fabulous craft superstore that sells absolutely everything and more a craftster could want - this week i'm making christmas crackers for our Christmas in July party we're having next weekend. Eek!) Anyway, i digress, so after a day of shopping and eating bad food (Subway for lunch and Nandos for dinner... I know! What were we thinking!), Sunday we went for a blustery walk along the beach. The beach was surprisingly busy, (which for Perth, means there were some other people aside from us there), a couple of fishermen, some bodyboarders, a few cyclists and other walkers. We had a lil' stroll along the beach, 'oohed' a bit at the big waves and then ducked into Clancy's for a take out coffee. Clancy's is a new bar/restaurant right on the beach. As we were getting take out coffee, we didn't have time to sit down and appreciate the view in the warmth but i did sneak a photo. How's that for a view!

I feel like chicken tonight

This isn't news, but we had takeout Nandos for dinner. And it tasted good. And i was so impressed that the take out containers were environmentally friendly, i took a photo.

it's winter here so what better activity than a jigsaw puzzle. I was recently at the library and noticed that they had jigsaw puzzles to borrow. How exciting, I thought! An opportunity to sit in, don my head torch and unleash my inner dag (some might say, not so 'inner'). Anyways, so i spotted a jigsaw puzzle of a dolls' house! I tell ya, if I wasn't one of those people that still think you should whisper in libraries, i would have squealed. In fact, maybe a little 'eek' did escape. (I LOVE dolls' houses). At home, I set up the box lid for reference as I sorted out the straight edged pieces and realised, rather unhelpfully, that the lid didn't show the full dolls' house. Nope, instead, for the sides of the puzzle, I had to work from the teeny tiny image on the side of the lid that showed the 'actual puzzle area'. AND, i got to the last but one piece of the puzzle to notice that the last piece was missing. Ah well, it is from the library, probably borrowed by a lot of people, one piece missing aint so bad, i thought. And then along comes Mr R, finds the piece on the floor under the table and inserts it to complete the puzzle. (Call me cynical but I reckon he hid it up his sleeve just to take that moment of glory from me).

Birds of a feather

The other weekend we drove up to Caversham park, which is a huge park for picnicking, walking etc and there's also a wildlife park and a tractor park (i might have made that one up actually) and a birds of prey show. Now, we love birds of prey. I (oops, that's actually 'we') got a gift of a pair of binoculars from Tonica after their stay back in November and they've been put to good use spotting birds of prey, dolphins, dugongs(!). Anyways, i digress, so we decided to go up to Caversham park to check out the birds of prey. As i say, this is because we like birds of prey, but also because we had a 2-for-1 voucher from the entertainment book. So, it was a small affair, only about 8 people watching but we got to see the birds flying and landing and catching food and R even got to hold one. Now, clearly, if i hadn't just had a biopsy on my arm, i would have held one too, (yeah, right) but i couldn't because it had to be on your left arm. Aw shucks. The only one upsetting thing was that a very lovely and enthusiastic little girl in the audience, who had lots of questions, kept being told by her mother and grandmother to put her hand down and stop asking questions. Yeah, good one parents, how to discourage your kids from learning and having confidence.

Bol Reverse

On a trip to the Bottle-o (that's the offie to your english folk), Els spotted some Mauritian beer - Phoenix. Els lived in Mauritius for a couple of years and has fond memories so she was very excited. We decided that we would buy some Phoenix beer and she would cook up a mauritian feast. Et voila! Bol reverse. How cool is that. The dish is prepared upside down in the bowl and then put on the plate. If you twist the bowl a couple of times, when you lift it up, it stays like that. So, it's chicken, chilli, oyster sauce, mushrooms (tinned! because they don't have fresh mushrooms), carrots (which Els sliced very effectively and prettily into lil' flower shapes) rice and a fried egg. YUM! It was delicious. And, i think, pretty simple to make. I might even have a go myself. We do pretty well out of our houseguests, i must say. Our previous houseguest (R's sister) cooked us a three course meal from my new Jamie Oliver book which was pretty darn tasty (although, like most of the recipes in that 30 mins book, they take a lot longer than 30 mins!) Gosh, i love being cooked for.