Gone North

I'm at the Winsome, which is no longer gay: they have retired their rainbow flag and started selling $17 mezze platters. As the bar girl put it: "Less DJs, more live bands". I'm kind of sad for the locals, Google doesn't report any other gay pubs in this area of the country- and I don't care how many Rainbow Bowling Leagues you got, sometimes there is nothing more comforting than a gay pub.

Last night Luke and I stayed at a tiny country town called Dorrigo, which was surprisingly beautiful, if slightly scary in that Very Straight Country way (a lot of unironic flannel). We went bushwalking very early this morning and spotted much birdlife in the temperate rainforest- and a pademelon! At least we think so- I'm not very good at telling a pademelon and a wallaby apart. It was reddish and adorable and stopped halfway up a hill to stare at us.

We are up here quite a few days before the Big Gay Party kicks off. Hopefully this means I get to wear each of my swimsuits in turn at Kings Beach (of course I packed them all!).

For Midsummer

Fairy Princess C has been in shrieking pursuit of Fairy Princess M for several hours, battling for possession of a spiky inflatable fish. Little Mr C in a pink hoodie looks amused and perplexed, lining up presents with the care and logic of a two year old. My teenage brother has retreated into video-game world with the expensive new console I bought him, plus a stack of new games, and all the girls, as usual, have chocolates, bath things and sparkly singlets. The sun has just dipped down and people are eating the third extension of the meal that has been going on all afternoon, outside under a sliver moon and sparkling lights. Me, my sisters, scattered friends and a teenage cousin are enjoying a bowl of champagne punch that has been leaving us pink-cheeked all afternoon.

My haul is impressive: three pretty dresses, three pairs of "Love Kylie" knickers, three boxes of chocolates (incidentally, my niece only eats things that come in threes), perfume, lollies, a hamper of goodies that will be perfect to take on holidays, a handbag, homewares, framed pictures and photos of my young cousins. In the loud frenzy of present-distribution (my family goes so far overboard, the under-fives were drowning under their mountains of new toys) my aunt recorded a video of us to send to my cousin and her new baby. Hugs and kisses all around. My niece wants to go see Santa again.

The Pinnacle Of Human Endeavour

Last time I saw my niece she was about eighteen months old, a chubby-armed marvel of mobility and personhood beginning to emerge from a blobby baby-shape. I thought she was the best thing on the planet, without a doubt, that my niece was the best child ever to exist, a child with whom human evolution could cease because it had created perfection.

What with being out of the country for a year, and my sister moving way up north before I returned, I haven't seen her at all in a year and a half apart from photo-updates. Sister & child have come down for Christmas this year (hurrah!) so off I went on the train (braving the odd stares I always get when I go further south than Hurstville), to the wilds of suburban Sutherland.

Walking through my parent's newly-built house was odd. I stayed there for a brief period when I first got back from OS, and it was nothing more than a construction site. Bare walls, no floor, entire portions of the structure missing- I lived in one almost-finished room and trod a narrom path to the barely-functional bathroom and minimal kitchen facilities. Walking through the finished version was disconcerting, because the floor plan was almost the same but the rest was so, so different.

I found my niece out the back, where I struggled not to make too big a deal of it- definitely the right idea, because within seconds she was giving me an imperious guided tour of the entire house. "That's my dog!" (pointing to my parent's dog, who is at least four times as old as my niece). "Thats my chicken!", "That's my Grandpoppy!", "That's my mum!", "That's my bed!". She helped me gift tag the enormous bag of presents I'd dragged along (which consisted of me writing initials on paper and cutting out shapes, and her sticking the paper to the presents with far more sticky tape than strictly necessary). She told me off because I had a skinned knee and I ought to put a band-aid on it. When she caught me counting her freckles (six) she tried counting mine, but got lost after sixteen. Then she showed me how to frog-jump, complete with sound-effects.

With this extensive evidence in mind, I think you'll all agree that my niece is, in fact, the most awesome thing to ever walk the face of the earth. Does this sound clucky? It doesn't feel clucky. I am completely swept away by how awesome this kid is, but much more interested in being a fabulous aunt than in popping out my own miniatures.

Merry Midsummer!

Before I left for work I was in an utter panic trying to get an outfit together for the Sly Fox, and after all that I didn't even wear it. I got there at about 10:30 (thanks to convenient technical difficulties I got to leave work early) and before I'd even had time for a beer I was fluttering around delivering Midsummer cards & gifts (many of them hand-made over the past week- I am so puffed with pride about that accomplishment). To my unending surprise, I got presents back! So still before I'd even had one mouthful of beer, I found myself in possession of a beautiful white frilly half-apron and a vintage all-cotton hot pink bikini set, exclaiming delightedly: "I love these so much I could just put them on right now!".

One beer later (so I can't even blame the alcohol) I decided that I would put the plan in action, and ducked into the bathroom to get changed. Putting aside my anxiety over wearing a combination of pink (bikini) and red (boots), I decided I didn't look like too much of a dickhead in the new outfit, and spent the entire night socialising in my gorgeous new bikini & apron. It was really fun, the way everything has been really fun since I stopped worrying about my sex appeal and began ignoring the possibility of scaring people. It's totally been the best lifestyle decision ever.

I don't think I have the world's hottest body, and I don't think that the sight of my half-naked self in a pub full of dykes wearing jeans and polo shirts was particularly revolutionary or uplifting. It was just fun, and stupid, and surprising, and so much part of that thing I am sometimes committed to of, you know, the world is a performance opportunity.

The only downside to wearing a small quantity of pink cotton & bakewear in a pub is that it's hard to get anyone to talk about anything else, and also people were obsessed with trying to undo the bows that held everything on.

In case you hadn't noticed, I am totally hooked on this time of year as feast-time frivolous festivity. Wandering around the Northern Hemisphere in November last year was scary and strange, because what was going on? People gearing up to celebrate the turn of the year in the cold, with snow? It's supposed to be about heat and the outdoors and plentiful good times! Although this year's heat has been a little disappointing, I am willing to forgive for a week or two of celebration with my queer family and birth family.

End Note: How does a girl who now owns THREE gorgeous vintage swimsuits choose which one to take away on holidays? The agony, the dilemma!

Fast Approaching

Midsummer (I mean, um, that thing with the pointy trees and fake snow) is fast approaching, and I have had to cut down on my gift-buying extravagance in a painfully abrupt manner. One of my jobs has halved my hours in a display of spectacularly inconvenient timing, not only in the realm of gift-giving but in that I am going on a long-anticipated holiday immediately afterwards and being there with no cash will suck in an extreme fashion. Still I am thrilled about a number of things in the upcoming season: the chance to see my niece (three years old now!) and my older sister, the chance to see the house my parents have just built for themselves, visions of long afternoons in the Northern Rivers with an icy gin & tonic in my hand... and, of course, nude swims at Kings Beach. The party to which I will probably wear the outfit I am making is also exciting to anticipate, but it's not nearly the only exciting thing.

Summer clubbing has also ramped up (damn it's expensive but oh so enjoyable hide!). On Friday my shoulders and back were being licked by a very forward & rather attractive dance-floor dweller at Kooky, and on Sunday I was enjoying the most fabulous (and possibly only) electro mix I've ever heard of "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon". Wednesday will no doubt find me frolicking with the lesbians at the Sly, oh my!

On Saturday I ventured out to Unsilent Night with Miss Z, boombox in hand- it was really wonderful, although quite a few boomboxes shy of the 1500 they apparently get in New York. What was so beautiful about it, I guess, was exactly what I love about this time of year in the city- people everywhere, fairy lights in the trees, animated displays in the windows, and everyone out much later than they really should be. The music itself was beautiful, and the effect of the distribution- sounds concentrating when we all gathered in one place and expanding when we drifted apart- was fascinating. After that I somehow wound up at the Town Hall with a cheeky girl beneath my voluminous skirts, until about 2am when I suddenly realised I had to be at work at 8am the next morning. Bugger.

I am working most days from now til I leave for my holiday, up to and including December 25th. The only possible upside to this that I can think of is that I will hopefully be able to smuggle beer & fruit mince pies to work and enjoy them at my desk. There is certainly not going to be anyone around to catch me.

What I didn't need

Today has been an awful sick-day, one of wretched moaning and clutching of my belly and ensuring a constant proximity to the nearest bathroom.I blame the dodgy Chinese last night. Fie on you, dodgy Chinese place! Combined with a fairly stunning hang-over, I'm just all kinds of artistic misery right now.

Then I opened up my email to discover a message with about 6 FW: at the beginning, from my work. Apparently they had sent Very Important Instructions to an email account I use only for job applications, not to the email account that they have sent things to at least 300 times since I started working with them. Oh goody, I love it when things go horribly wrong in ways I couldn't possibly have anticipated! Then when I called my boss to sort the matter out, she mentioned I was rostered on tonight (contrary to what was written in my diary), and it turns out she was right. Fie on you, stupid having to work when I am horribly ill!

At least last night was fun of all sorts. I danced quite a bit- gosh it's been a while since I danced at the Sly- and flirted and was silly, which was all lovely. It was startling to walk in after two weeks of not going there to see that they've rearranged the entire place. I like the new layout, somehow it felt friendlier and less confrontational. I flirted quite extensively with one particular woman, and in the process realised that it has actually been freakin' years since I dated a dyke. I've dated leatherwomen, Daddies, bois, butches and queers but it's been three and a half years since I broke up with my last dyke girlfriend. It's a bit of a culture shock flirting back on that scene but kind of nice as well, a bit of something different.

Now, I am off to find the stodgiest, blandest comfort food Newtown has to sell, and then drag my sorry self to work.

Meanwhile, the description of the Hellfire Club in this article made me spit Gatorade all over my keyboard. Fie on you, stupid Sydney Morning Herald!

I coulda been a housewife (if only I liked cock and/or cleaning)

I have been fighting a small, well-mannered fight with custard for the past few months. Nothing hostile, just a little resentment, a lot of research, and a few attempts. Perfecting new recipes (ideally dessert recipes, yum) is one of my most-loved hobbies and probably the reason behind most of my curves. I decided to give custard a shot on the word of several recipe-book authors who vowed it was easy. My first attempt was heart-breakingly runny, and nothing on Baking 911 could rescue it. That put me off custard for a while. Then my housemate made one of his standards, a custard-based pie, and that failed where it has always succeeded beautifully. After some contemplation and much recipe-reading I decided to take it back to basics, and attempted my first quiche. I made it with pine-nuts and silverbeet fresh from my friend's backyard: a delicious success! And so tonight, having graduated successfully from eggy savouries 101, I attempted baked custards (at midnight, when I got home from work, because what better time is there for kitchen tomfoolery?). They came out of the oven a while ago and they're perfect. Words cannot describe how awesome they are. I have reclaimed the dessert prowess, and damn does it taste good. I feel like I could take on a fucking creme caramel at this point and kick it's wobbly gooey butt!

Next stop on my meandering journey through eggy things: frittata. Stay tuned for more riveting updates.

Also, I've spent the past few days elbow-deep in blue gingham and white fabric paint, attempting to construct my New Years Eve outfit. In it's current incarnation it looks fucking awesom from the back, but I fear the front may need something scary like darts or, I don't know, seams. I am an incredibly amateur seamstress, allergic to patterns, measurements and sewing machines. I don't think I've even really progressed beyond the minor alterations & repairs skillset, I just happen to focus on truly ambitious projects like entire new garments. I was so bloody excited when I discovered rivets & eyelets- "I can hammer my entire outfit together? No sewing? Fucking ace!"

Anyway, I am thinking of attempting to find someone to show me some tricks with a sewing machine, and maybe eventually buying my own. I've made part or all of my outfits for all of the major parties I've been to this year, as well as some of the smaller ones, and it seems like maybe I might be just a little bit serious about this sewing thing (also known as the "why the fuck don't stores carry things I want to wear? oh fine I'll do it myself" thing). I think a machine would let some of my projects last slightly longer than one or two dance-filled nights, and that would be quite awesome.

On the weekend I went to a party at a squat where I learnt that 18 years out of practise has left me with zero hula-hoop skills, and that I still can't pass up a bedroom full of heavy-breathing hot queers sprawled out in all directions (ooh, more please!).

Season Of Enforced Cheer

In my first rushed bout of Large Man In Seasonally Inappropriate Garb shopping, I failed to find candy canes, but succeeded in getting all of my siblings' presents out of the way- impressive, I think, given that I am one of five. Oxfam have opened a shop in Broadway which I suspect means that everyone's getting free trade organic non-slave-labour chocolate. Surprise!

I am not so big on the whole baby cheesus thing, or even the winter solstice festival that doesn't apply at all in my hemisphere, but I do so love a feast-time, party-time, family-time festival. My Half-Arsed Attempt At Vegetarianism deliberately excludes seafood because I can't even imagine December 25th without obscene quantities of prawns & things. I keep wanting to buy seasonally-specific foods for my house but so many of them are either meat-based or chocolate that I am left with candy canes and fruitcake- hence my search for candy canes, because who on earth eats fruitcake if it's not required to keep one of the Great Aunts happy?

Also, of course, cherries & mangoes, although this years mangoes have been a little disappointing.