Fisher Paykel- Australia's most sexist?

While so-called feminists, along with puritanical christian types, got their knickers in a knot over a Nando's ad that featured a working mother who happened to be a stripper, I haven't heard a peep in the media over the insanely sexist Fisher Paykel ads that have been plaguing our TV screens.

Sexist advertising is not really a phenomenon peculiar to Fisher Paykel- one only has to look at any ad for home cleaning products or appliances, or foods aimed at kids' lunchboxes to know that in the mind of Australian advertisers a woman's place is in the kitchen (or the laundry or the bathroom, if something needs cleaning).

But the Fisher Paykel ads display a peculiarly offensive bent. In each of them, a woman experiences difficulty with a particular household chore while her husband watches and does nothing to help her despite her obvious discomfort, but goes away and comes up with a 'brilliant' solution to enable her to do her chores more comfortably- one that doesn't involve him taking on half the workload. If Fisher Paykel were aiming to make their ads somehow tongue-in-cheek, they missed, and missed badly. It just seems that they are yet another addition to the litany of sexist advertising permeating the world of Australian advertising. None of these seem to gain any attention, however, because they don't feature any half-naked women, just ordinary housewives clad in appropriately modest attire.

Killer Cabbie Rampage- welcome to Queensland's media fantasyland

I'm not sure what the media is trying to achieve with a beat-up over the fact that there are convicted murderers registered as cabbies in Queensland. I'd be more worried if it was murderers who'd never been convicted who were behind the wheel. But of course then we'd never know.

What on earth do the people trying to stir up a panic think that people who've served time for a crime like that should do with their lives- would they rather we have a bunch of unemployed former criminals?

There are some people convicted of murder who should never make it out of jail, sure, but the ones that do need to be gainfully employed and contributing to the community. A witch-hunt on cabbies by the media isn't going to achieve anything. It's not as if there aren't investigations of the criminal backgrounds of prospective taxi drivers already, and it appears that restrictions are applied appropriately.

I'd be more interested in a crackdown on unsafe driving behaviour among both cabbies and the general public, but there's a much lower hysteria quotient for that, and such crackdowns are generally unpopular because of the vast number of people that engage in unsafe driving practices, so I won't hold my breath for the newspapers to start a safe driving campaign any time soon...

Lima, Ohio: police shoot mother and baby

Reading this piece in the New York Times on how a SWAT team attempting a drug bust on a residence shot dead a young (african american) mother and also shot her 14 month old son, you've got to wonder what excuse the (white) cops who shot them both will come up with for committing the murder...

My guess is it will be 'we thought the baby was a gun'.

I love how the article states that previous internal reviews of the police service (that is, conducted by the police themselves) have found no evidence of police misconduct in the face of a torrent of accusations by the community, but there is a 'perception' of systemic racism. Riiight. A 'perception' that arose spontaneously and without grounds.

Scary stuff.

Bloody rain...

Why is it, over the last couple of days, that when we even think about leaving the house it begins to pour rain? Today is Mummy's last day with us, we'll be catching a taxi to the airport at 3am tomorrow, and she wants to visit Fortitude Valley and buy some presents for people in Botswana before she leaves. And we wanted to take her to A Salt and Battery for dinner (Mummy loves fresh seafood, and it's non-existent in landlocked Botswana, so we want her to make the most of it here). Gam and I had to go out yesterday in the horrid rain and leave Mummy at home, abandoning our plans for the day, and decided instead to go today. Of course it had to rain as soon as we were ready to leave the house. It looks well set in, too. Grrrrr. Brisbane weather sucks... it used to be so good- predictably hot and steamy with evening thunderstorms, in past years (with the exception of last Summer)... now it's shite.

Anyone thinking of moving to Queensland should not come expecting a decent Summer! Even Hobart has had more of a Summer than we've had this year... and barely any rain is falling in the catchment area for the main dam, either, and in what seems to be a most ridiculous situation, Brisbane is still on level 6 water restrictions. Last I heard, Wivenhoe was at 17% capacity. And we don't even have a council progressive enough to think up something they can do to capture all these megalitres of stormwater eventuating from the rain. Instead, Lord Mayor Campbell 'retarded monkey' Newman has come up with the hare-brained idea of a desalination plant on Mount Cootha. WTF???

Thankyou *sniff* Thankyou!

A couple of days before our wedding I got an email from Susan Prior, the editor of Online Opinion, saying my post 'Porn is no one religion' had been voted one of the Best Blogs for 2007... I never knew that 'Best Blogs' existed, nor that we had been nominated and that voting had been going on (or I totally would have voted for myself...). So now it's been posted (sans porny pictures, and with 'P*rn', not 'Porn' in the title!) on OLO and when I retrieved the ten day old email from Susan letting me know the post was up from my hotmail junk folder*, Gam and I went and had a look. We were pleased (and somewhat surprised) to see that the comments were largely very intelligent and well-informed- only one or two nutbag anti-porn types in there.

One person thought I should have saved my breath- generally something to keep in mind for anyone annoyed by the crap that appears in the opinion pages, and something I tell myself every time I see a Miranda Devine column, but the difference in this case was that my criticisms of Adele Horin's article didn't arise in the context of a long history of annoyance at stuff she'd written. In general, I find Horin's writing inoffensive and unremarkable at worst, and quite enjoyable at best. I also get a bit annoyed at the occasional war on porn that the media feels the need to wage to get some hits- everyone loves to click on the articles that have a whiff of sex about them: one has only to look at the top 5 articles on the home page of the SMH or The Australian to know that- without having any reasoned views either against or in favour of porn. Porn is too easy to bash, and criticisms of it, however baseless, are too readily accepted.

So thanks to whoever nominated the piece, and I hope everyone (or at least the people worth pleasing) enjoyed it... or at least enjoyed the pictures :)


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* I'm always forgetting to check my junkmail folder, so if anyone emails me and I rudely don't reply, it's probably because Hotmail has picked it up and stashed it in junkmail, meaning my email won't pick it up. My apologies if this has ever happened, and if there's anything anyone needs me to respond to in a hurry it wouldn't hurt to let me know via the comments that you've sent an email!

Botswana photos- monkeys, warthogs

Gam discovered an old photo CD of our 2004/05 trip to Botswana... there is a serious dearth of photos from that trip, as it was done in the days before we had a digital camera, and the ones we do have are of very poor quality. But they are nice memories, regardless.




This set of photos was taken on a trip to the game reserve in Gaborone. The first time Gam took me there, in 2003, we'd eaten Steers (takeaway- Botswana's answer to McDonald's, only with much better food) and I had leftover chips in the car that I wound up feeding to the monkeys when they came begging. I know there are signs saying not to feed them, but they are so cute when they come begging, and the fact that other people clearly do it too, well, I could easily justify it to myself.




When we arrived, there were two warthogs that had become accustomed to human contact wandering around the barbeque area, but there were people there so we drove along the road to find some monkeys. When we found a group of 5 or so I gave them pieces of banana and rusk, which they clearly enjoyed, and I poured muesli into my hand for a mother monkey with a little baby to grab and eat- the baby was too young to eat food, but I thought muesli would be an okay food for a lactating monkey...




But I had felt guilty about feeding them junkfood, and our trip to the reserve in early 2005 was planned, so I prepared healthy food to feed them. I took along snow peas, rusks (not the baby kind but the snack kind available in supermarkets over there), a banana or two, and muesli.





We then did the game drive, spotting various animals, before heading back toward the reserve entrance. The other people had left the barbeque area by this time and the warthogs were still trotting around, so I hopped out to feed them. The monkeys I had fed earlier also showed up, with an entourage of about 10 extra monkeys, all wanting food.




I honestly thought the warthogs would appreciate the snow peas, but after inspecting them they just ignored them. They only paid attention when I threw rusks, which they eagerly snapped up. The monkeys took the snow peas when I offered them, clearly expecting something tasty, and proceeded to throw me the most disgusted looks. They chewed on them with all the enthusiasm of a child being made to brush its teeth- as if they knew it was good for them but they really didn't like it. When I tossed rusks for the warthogs, the little monkeys threw their half-chewed snow peas into the dirt and raced to snatch the rusks!




When I ran out of rusks I poured some muesli on the lid of the bin for the monkeys to pick up and eat, which they eagerly did, and poured the rest of the muesli into the ice-cream container I'd used to hold the rest of the food... I then held out the container for the warthogs who, despite showing considerable nervousness, plucked up the courage to trot over and stick their noses into the container. They loved the muesli... in fact, we even have a video CD of this somewhere, along with a video CD of a little of our time in Ghana... if I can ever dig them up I'll put them up here too!



When we left, there were numerous half-chewed snow-pea pods littering the dirt... so much for healthy food! Still, it was better than feeding them chips...

Froggy Tuesday

Today Gam and I had an awful, awful trip to the city for Gam to sit the licence for a learner driver's permit. It was pouring rain, there were smokers concentrated under all the sheltered areas, and the sheer number of the bastards we had to walk past made our lungs sore and my hair smell of smoke. On top of that, one of Gam's slides broke when we were almost at the Queensland Transport office and nowhere near a shoe store. We ducked into the Big W across the road to buy a pair of cheap thongs only to find out that they only sell men's footwear up to a size 12 (Gam is a 14), and all the size 12 thongs had sold out, so he bought a pair of size 11 thongs and went to sit his licence test. Even the small amount of walking that entailed nearly crippled him, so afterward we went to the Zelus store to buy some slides to replace the ones that had broken (they were admittedly on their last legs, they just chose a very bad time to die).

Several good things came out of the day- Gam did pass his road rules test, and also discovered that he can sit a practical driving test straight away and progress straight to an open licence, meaning he's been told 3 different things by the 3 different Queensland Transport people he's spoken to on the matter. The poor lady at the counter was very helpful, but it sounded as if the rules were different not only for every single country, but also depending on how long a person has been in the country- the convoluted path to discovering the correct information to give nearly did her head in. Nevertheless she was very pleasant.

On our way home it had stopped raining and as we walked up the hill to our place I spied a green tree frog on the road. Just as I did, a cyclist nearly ran it over, and as I was about to pick it up a car turned into the street: the frog was right in its path and made no attempt to move. My frantic gestures, if not the frog's presence, were noted by the driver, who managed to swerve around it, and I hurried to pick it up, not sure if it might have even been previously injured.

It seemed fine, so I made the decision to take it back to our place and put it in our back balcony garden- we have a cylindrical fishbowl with water weed that breeds mosquito larvae for our fish and a nice canopy of sweet potato leaves as well as a few other plants and broken terracotta pots (placed there for our original lizard, Fatso) that should provide a nice damp, froggy habitat. I've never seen a live green tree frog in all our time living in our current place (though I've seen a frog or two as roadkill), so it will be nice to have one living in our backyard. I thought about releasing the frog into the main garden of the complex, but there is no permanent source of fresh water there, and it's more at risk from cats, so hopefully our place will provide a nice home for it. And I hope it eats the cockroaches that venture over the balcony wall and into our garden. I hate cockroaches.

When I tried to encourage it to leave my hand and climb into the garden it climbed up my arm like it was a tree, but it didn't take much prodding for it to clamber down into the nice wet bed of dead leaves under the sweet potato canopy. Here's hoping our new frog is set for a much longer and happier life than it appeared it was about to meet on the roads of St Lucia!

Dead fish, smelly reporting

In the SMH travel section this weekend is a piece by Keith Austin on his visit to the 'biggest fish market in the world', the Tsukiji fish market. Austin managed to do what was effectively an entire piece on the biggest market for bluefin tuna without a single mention of the fact that the Bluefin tuna is considered endangered, not to mention that Japan has a huge, effectively government-sanctioned trade in black market bluefin tuna.

I wonder if we'd see the same kind of detachment and disinterest in important conservation issues in a report on a market selling gorilla meat or panda steaks?

Poor effort by Austin and the SMH.

Meanwhile, Mummy (Gam's mother) was telling us over our Australia Day dinner of seafood (barbequed barramundi, marinara mix and green tiger prawns, hopefully none of which are endangered!) that when she was a girl there would be times of the year when herring numbers were so thick in the water off Cape Coast that the fish could be caught by hand, and they would eat fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The same thing would occur at different times with another kind of fish whose name I can't remember. Now these events never take place, thanks to all the Spanish, Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese vessels fishing illegally off the coast of West Africa, taking millions of tonnes of fish every year. Puts a more personal perspective on the two articles on illegal fishing off West Africa that I linked to a bit over a week ago. There are sanctions on Zimbabwe because of the actions of Robert Mugabe and the effect they have had on the people in his own country. Why not sanctions on these more powerful countries who send boats halfway across the world to steal food from people's tables? Illegal fishing should really be treated like the crime it is.

Merry Holocaust and a Happy Intifadah

Today's the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Much like the spirit of Christmas this event has come to be meaningless. The official history goes the Nazis gassed 6 million (mostly) Jews during WWII. While this was going on the 'Allies' had no idea, being busily engaged in freeing the world for freedom, democracy and my little pony. The 'Allies' were shocked to discover death camps and half dead people in them and, squaring their jaws, resolved 'never again'.

Of course the truth is hardly as self-serving. In reality the western powers knew about the Holocaust. They knew about it even as they turned back shiploads of Jews to their deaths. They knew even as Jewish leaders killed themselves in protest at the Allies' inaction, unable to live while their people died.

The simple truth is that antisemitism was a national sport in every country in the world at the time. It still is in most nations, despite the momentary crowning of Muslims as the global scapegoat. Eventually the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27 1945. Eight out of every ten German casualties in WWII were inflicted by Russians. Jaws were squared, impassioned speeches were made and 'never again' was declared.


Of course even as mournful ceremonies were taking place in Poland, filled with all manner of ghoulish 'dignitaries' the Israeli government was busy cutting off power and humanitarian supplies to the ghetto of the Gaza strip. The US was busy screaming at its Egyptian client government to clamp down on the Egyp/Gaza border to prevent desperate Palestinians escaping their fate by escaping into Egypt to buy the things they needed to live. In the beginning of the 21st century people are being crammed into ghettos and slowly starved. So much for never again.

Typical QLD

An Italian parks his car at the airport before flying to QLD to transfer his license

I learned something interesting about QLD car licensing today. It prompted this email.

Hi there

Can someone explain why I have been advised to obtain a learner's license instead of being able to transfer my drivers' license from Botswana to a Queensland license? Botswana uses the K53 licensing system, the same as the UK, which I note is on your list of approved transfer countries. It is a vastly better and safer system than that of, say, Italy (with one of the WORST traffic safety records in the EU) which is also on your list of approved countries.

Hilariously, if I were only visiting for a few months, instead of having moved back to live here 6 years ago, I could quite happily use my license without trouble. I am hopeful that I just got in touch with a QLD transport employee who didn't know what they were on about, but I suspect that yes, the license transfer system is as crazy as it appears to be. Just to sum up, my license, which is issued on the UK's licensing system, isn't eligible for transfer. Italian licenses are, despite the fact that it has a terrible licensing system with something like ten times the number of traffic incidents per 1000 than the UK. As a result, I'll have to fork out wads of cash trudging through the QLD licensing system (despite having held a license for almost 10 years and being over 25). Finally, to add insult to financial injury, my license is perfectly valid if I were staying for a few months, even if they drove backwards and blindfolded on the wrong side of the road where it was issued. Please, someone, tell me I've been told the wrong thing.

Warmest Regards

Gam and Sarah's wedding, part 1.

Finally, a proper wedding post! What with family around, it's hard to get any time to ourselves, let alone to the blog, and we've been literally looking through thousands of photos (thanks to my wonderful Uncle James, who took care of the photography side of things at the wedding- most photos will be his work). Plus Gam had an exam today, but I'll have a little bitch about that later.

Where to start? At the beginning, I guess. This will probably be two posts... two looong posts.

Some photos from the afternoon and evening before the wedding:

Gam and my Uncle Richard's partner, Leslie.

Mum and Leslie.

My brother's girlfriend Priscilla with Gam's sister Delali.

My cousin David and Leslie's son Ben playing Xbox

Gam and I with Dad

Gam and I stayed up past midnight the night before our wedding because all our family members came over and squeezed into our flat and onto our balcony for a late afternoon tea that turned into a dinner- Gam and I had spent the whole day cooking. There were 17 of us in all. Gam's father wasn't able to come thanks to some of the people he's currently doing some work for heavying him into not going. We were all pretty disappointed about that- Gam and I and Mummy (Gam's mother) because we all wanted him there, and my parents because they were really looking forward to meeting him. Needless to say he was probably more disappointed than any of us. Gam's brother decided not to come but didn't bother to tell us that he wasn't coming, meaning we'd confirmed numbers with the restaurant and were set up to pay even though he didn't show. We weren't impressed. Mummy convinced herself that he was staying home to 'look after' Daddy, but notwithstanding our doubts about the likelihood of that scenario, it didn't really excuse the fact that he couldn't be arsed to get on the phone, MSN or email and tell us that he wasn't coming. I suppose the fact that Daddy is still planning to have a full-on catholic wedding in Ghana at the end of this year might have meant he thought he wasn't missing anything important, but it still seemed rude. I suppose we were already a bit upset by the fact Daddy couldn't come. Regardless, at the almost-impromptu family get-together everyone seemed to have a nice time. Grandma came along, but she apparently came around to the idea of us getting married in the nick of time, meaning that the promised tantrums never eventuated- instead, she was once again the archetypal sweet little old lady. She still cornered me (meaning she literally backed me into a corner!) in the kitchen to talk about that stupid 'Second Coming' book she wanted to give me, though, so it's not as if she's changed. Still, that was a relief. I didn't fancy having to explain to Mummy that my grandmother was a racist and didn't want me marrying Gam.


After everyone left, we stayed up making our bombonniere boxes and filling them with Jelly Belly jelly beans (until we ran out of beans!) and then used the 'past-midnight' excuse to open up the wedding present from my brother Richard and his girlfriend Priscilla. We'd asked everyone not to bring presents, but they did anyway... from them we got a picnic pack with a couple of bottles of wine and two Donna Hay cookbooks. Gam and I have been saying to each other for ages that we should get one of those things and go on picnics, but we've never got around to it, so that was a really good present... I suspect Priscilla chose it! Richard's card was a classic:


The story behind the card was that one day during my HSC, in the way of little brothers everywhere, Richard decided to engage in his favourite pastime: tormenting me. On and on it went, with verbal barbs going back and forth, until I snapped. I picked up a 1970s portable radio (roughly 20cm by 15cm by 7cm, weighing a kilo or two) and pegged it across the kitchen at his head. My aim was deadly, but Richard ducked and it went over his head, smashing into a cupboard. The radio still worked after that, but the plastic casing over the dial had cracked, forever serving as a reminder of the day I totally lost it. So in July 2002, when Gam and I had been together for a few months and he'd accompanied me to Kempsey for a few days, when he commented on the radio, Richard regaled him with a story that went something like this:

"That's from where Sarah chucked the radio at my head. Yeah, she was a heroin addict. It was really messing her around. She was high one day, just sitting at the breakfast bar, when I came up and I said 'Sarah, you've got to let me help you kick this addiction. Jesus loves you, Sarah'. And she totally went off her head and started swearing at me and then she flipped out and chucked the radio at my head. I was only trying to help her."

Heh. It was so outrageous that even I cracked up. Gam has teased me about it ever since. I'm not the sort of person who's quick to engage in physical violence, but to this day I maintain that the little brat deserved it (even though I can't remember a single detail of the confrontation prior to the point where I chucked the radio at his head!). Hence the card. Cheeky bastard. I couldn't stop laughing when I read the card- so much so that it took me 4 or 5 goes to get a photo that wasn't too blurry to use!

We also opened a card from my Aunt and Uncle James, whose present was a cheque (which will help us pay off wedding expenses we've put on the credit card! Yay!). There was a touch of the old 'You're a heathen but we love you anyway' sentiment about it:



*sigh*


Two days before the wedding we tidied our garage and found a stash of clothes. Most of them were crap, but there were a few gems in the form of shirts from Ghana that Gam's dad had bought him at various times over the years. One caught our eye as a potential wedding shirt- Gam had long ago decided that he wasn't going to wear a suit, but we hadn't really got much further than that in our planning for what he was going to wear. When we picked up the dress on Friday afternoon it became clear that the shirt would go nicely with my dress, meaning that Gam would inadvertantly comply with Dr Maria's fashion advice. I'm sure she'll be thrilled when we show her the photos.



On the morning of the wedding, I had somehow managed to avoid sleep for all but a few precious hours. Delali and Mummy were staying in a unit in our complex in the tower next door to ours, and Delali's voice woke me around 6 in the morning and I never got back to sleep. It wasn't their fault for keeping odd hours, as Mummy was horribly jetlagged (and still is). Plus I was excited (about the wedding) and stressed (from having all those people around the night before). I required an IV drip of coffee for a few hours, so Gam went to buy some more Jelly Bellys for the bombonniere. I sat around and played Xbox while waiting for the caffeine to kick in. Then everything happened at once. The hairdresser showed up just as Gam, my cousin Rach and my Mum arrived back. So I was sat in a chair, had a bunch of hot curlers stuck in and was told to go and do my makeup with the curlers in so I didn't later mess up the hair. As it was, my hair wound up fairly messy anyway... I also paid (with Mum's help) to have Rachelle's hair done. I was happy with mine, but a little jealous that Rach's stayed so neat through the night and I wound up looking my usual scruffy self!

The florist had phoned me that morning to tell me that she couldn't get hair flowers to match my bouquet, which was fine by me because I'd never really wanted hair flowers to match the bouquet- I asked her for pale yellow flowers for my hair and she came up with Chrysanthemums. The flowers arrived while the hairdresser was doing her stuff... Daisys Toowong, they were from, and I think they did a great job- I asked for specific colours, including as many native flowers as possible, and preferably flowers that smelled nice... I think it wound up looking really pretty. Apart from a bouquet and hair flowers I had ordered 3 corsages- one for Mum, one for Mummy and one for Grandma. I must admit, I'd been thinking mainly of how much Grandma loves that sort of stuff when I ordered them (this was at the time when I was thinking we'd have Tantrum Grandma on our hands), but also as a way of making my mum and Gam's mother feel special. I ordered them to match my bouquet as I had no idea of what everyone was wearing: we'd specified that there was no dress code.

Uncle Richard, Leslie and Ben, before the wedding.

Delali and Mummy before the wedding.

Speaking of dress code, one of the most interesting parts of the day was seeing what everyone else wore. I was really happy to see lots of bright colours. Mum was successful in talking my brother Richard out of wearing a suit, but my Uncle Richard's partner Leslie was totally unsuccessful in talking him out of wearing shorts- he'd made a concession by not wearing stubbies! Gam and I thought it was pretty cool he was showing up in shorts- I'm not sure I've ever seen Uncle Richard wear long pants in my life... he lives in the Southern Highlands, working as a gardener/landscape artist/horticulturalist and wears shorts even in winter... he just wouldn't be quite himself if he didn't wear shorts. Mum also failed in talking my dad out of wearing joggers- she sent him out to buy some black leather shoes and he came back with some spiffy new joggers and decided to wear those to the wedding.

Empty chairs before most people arrived.

Despite the uniformly shithouse weather Brisbane had been having in the months leading up to the wedding, there was no sign of rain. Nonetheless, I kept an eye out for it the whole day, not quite believing that our luck would be in.

Uncle James, Auntie Anne, Grandma, Dad and Nat (with Mum hiding behind Dad!).
Uncle James did most of the photos, hence he's not in a lot of the pictures. Much appreciation goes to Uncle James :)

Gam had come home, got dressed and dashed off to the duck ponds ('Lakes'), getting a lift from my brother, where the ceremony was to be held- he'd lost the morning because I'd begged him not to ride his bike to Toowong to pick up more jellybeans. I'd had visions of some idiot driving on the wrong side of the road on the bike route to Toowong (as they so often do) and hitting him. My mum was there to take my side, so he gave in to the offer of a lift, only to be dragged around and forced to wait for all the various family members who'd also decided to do a spot of shopping... it was a much more stressful morning for Gam than for me!

Nevertheless, I was only just ready in time. I did Mum's makeup before she went back to the motel to get dressed- Mum never wears makeup (and has never done so in her life, to my knowledge!) so it was fortuitous that my newly-bought Clinique something-or-other (very good, replaced my crappy overpriced Dior something-or-other) was an exact match to Mum's skin-tone. I went very light on her, adding just a dash of mascara and a dab of lipstick as I still wanted her to look like the Mum I'm used to, and besides, she's naturally very beautiful :)

After doing all that, I'd realised that the time had gotten away from me and I had neither finished my own makeup nor gotten dressed. I only decided at the last minute not to wear flat shoes, as I remembered a pair of low heels stashed in the garage that I hadn't worn for years. My flat sandals were more attractive, but I felt the dress was brushing the ground a little too much. And who can deny the fact that an extra 3-4cm of height feels rather good?

I also hadn't paid any mind to what sort of jewellery I was going to wear, so at the last minute I decided on a pair of cheap, sparkly (my favourite kind of jewellery) pink butterfly earrings that Gam gave me as a present ages ago. Then my brother started ferrying us (Mummy, Delali, Priscilla and I) two at a time in his and Priscilla's little Peugeot 206, complete with magazines and assorted car crud on the back seat. Good fun- I didn't even get my dress caught in the door.

Brisbane's 'steel drums guy' Desmond.

Mummy and Gam before the ceremony.

When we got there I could see people milling around the bottom of the stairs, and Uncle James came up to take a few snaps of Richard, Priscilla and I. It felt a bit weird having all that done without Gam, but I thought about how much he would like the photos, so I relaxed. I'm sure the fact I'd fixed cosmopolitans for Rach, 'Cil and me while we were all getting ready probably helped too. Yum.

I used to be taller than him...

Me with Richard and Cil, just after arriving.

With Mum and Dad.

My cousin David (wielding our camera), Ben, and my brother Richard.

Afterward, Richard and Cil disappeared down the stairs and Mum and Dad met me about half-way up and Uncle James took a few more photos... eventually we got to the bottom of the stairs (it all seemed to happen so quickly) and Gam and I were standing at the front of a bunch of seats wondering what to do with ourselves. My heels were sinking into the soft ground (haha- should have worn the flats!) and I kept having to shift to pull them out.

Standing around just prior to the ceremony.

Next thing we knew, everyone was seated, the celebrant was doing her thing, Gam and I were standing too far apart to hold hands, I was constantly shifting from side to side to avoid getting stuck in the ground, and when he said "I do" I got teary. I felt it coming on and no amount of lip-biting or mental distraction could stop it! Oh the shame! I thought the worst case scenario would be someone else (probably Mummy) crying and me winding up with 'contagious crying', not me setting off a whole bunch of people! I somehow managed to get out my vows- we wound up saying only the bare minimum legal requirements, and it still felt like it took forever before I could go across to Gam. Glad I hadn't planned on anything long-winded, or I'd never have got it all out.

That, the crying, was probably the cutest thing I've ever seen. You big sook :). She nearly made me cry, would have ruined my 23 year record. Just to clarify, we weren't standing apart the whole ceremony. After sooky started up the waterworks I went over and gave her a hug and just held on to her till the celebrant was done telling us how our lives were going to change after the wedding (as if). When I turned around practically everyone was bawling, it really was a special moment.

Rachelle doing her prayer.

Rach did her prayer-thingy. I think she might have read something from Corinthians. To be honest, I can remember just holding onto Gam and being a bit overwhelmed by how grateful I was to have him with me. I can recall perfectly the picture of Rach giving her short speech, but I can't for the life of me remember a word of it. Rach is like a sister to me, so regardless of how little I can remember, the fact that she got up there and did it means a lot. Afterwards we had a few emotional hugs with Rach and Mummy, who'd got a bit teary thanks to my antics up there.

Everyone loved Desmond's music- even my grandma was raving about him!

Then we got straight to the signing bit, sat down at a little table and signed in triplicate, at which point the UQ Staff and Graduates Club manager who'd been standing around through the ceremony brought over two glasses of champagne. Boy was that exactly what we felt like!

Michael, the S&G Club functions manager, brought over champagne- impeccable timing! We had no idea we would be served champagne, so it was a nice surprise :)

Our Uncle Richard and Amelia being witnesses for the official stuff.

We hadn't arranged for witnesses, so we sort of did a 'hands up who wants to be our witness!?' thing from the table- our friend Amelia was quickest off the mark, and next was my Uncle Richard, so they witnessed our marriage certificates! I think we were sort of expected to have one of our parents do it, and I hope none of them felt miffed- I definitely gathered that Grandma thought Mum should be one of the witnesses, but parents are special no matter whether they sign a piece of paper, so it felt nice for us to do it in a more spontaneous way.

I've bored everyone enough for now, plus I can scarcely keep my eyes open, so I'll do the next half tomorrow :)