Mucking about in boats

I heard sirens today as I was walking down the hill, but it was just a drill. It reminded me of xmas eve when I rounded the corner to find two big fire trucks parked in the street where I work, but no, false alarm. I was really hoping Santa had read my letter.

Ah, it’s not so bad. Well it is, from an everything that’s wrong with the world point of view, but then a colleague slips me a biscuit when I’m frothing over impossible deadlines, and that’s not so bad.

I just wish it meant something. Seeing a decade’s worth of duty and dedication, not to mention hard work and sacrifice, go, well, belly up, it’s kind of… dispiriting.

It’s probably why I finally put my foot down and demanded a day’s leave I was entirely entitled to. That and I’m tired, like stupid tired. Heat and exciting times are not an ideal combination.

I did have one adventure. Normally I’m quiet on sorry my ancestors didn’t die on the beach in chains like they should have day, but not this year. It’s has been a wish of mine, since I was a child, to ride on a ferry in the ferry race, and not just watch it from a distance (and I don’t even do that anymore). This year, I saw the Sydney Festival were selling tickets on one of the ferries. There are usually four, but this year there were just two others that were sponsored, one by a property group of no great reputation (and the sleazy guy with gold chains who staggered off the boat with his rent-a-date well after it had docked has done nothing to change my opinion) the other a tech start-up I’ve never heard off, who were incredibly rude, pushy and boastful, in an imported frat-boy way.

We were in the blue ferry. We were told to wear blue and almost everyone did, albeit in varying shades and hues (but we looked great in the long-distance photo published in the paper). It was all very exciting. Ok, the queuing up for well over half an hour wasn’t great, and the scramble to grab a seat, well, I’m used to that (I got pushed out of my favourite ferry seat but where I ended up was fine enough and ironically close to the surprise (as in I wasn’t expecting it) open bar.

So, snacks, champagne and blue flag in hand, off we set, at a somewhat leisurely pace, for a measured course around Shark Island and back under the bridge, pursued by a flotilla of leisure craft. We waved, we jeered at the other ferries, we cheered on our skipper. Alas, we came last. I was this old when I learnt the race is entirely staged, but the occasional bursts of speed were thrilling, and the harbour was churned white with boats going everywhere.

After the race we bobbed along, up the Lane Cover River where lunch was served, an enormous box of snacks (chicken sandwich, art, brownie, California roll (my brownie had seaweed notes) a salad and a fruit salad. The beer was some big brand attempt at hipster beer that tasted like VB mixed with Passiona, so I stuck to water after that. Probably wise, as it was dashed hot in the sun. The cruise kept going, back around Cockatoo Island, under the Gladesville Bridge and up the Parramatta River before returning back to the harbour for some Navy shenanigans in the harbour and then back to the wharf.

It was such a lovely long cruise, and we were having so much fun we checked the destination boards and sure enough there was a ferry leaving back to Parramatta so it was all out all change and off we sailed, sorry, chugged, again, back under the Gladesville Bridge, past all the monstrous high-rises and execrable mega mansion until we turned a bend and the houses were suddenly the ones of childhood (one lone holdout pocket).

The mangrove swamps closed in, the ferry slowed and suddenly we’re going up river in a jungle film, all shrieking birds (ibis and cormorants, mainly) and strange, large plops into the river (Eels? Carp?). We drifted under the old gasworks bridge, that was just a pipeline when I clambered over it as a kid, tottering above shark-infested waters. Slowly old logs were joined with water bottles bobbing on the brown water and I knew we were coming into town. Past hidden industrial sites, then back to high-rises and finally the wharf. It’s been ages since I’ve caught the ferry (and rarely all the way up the river, for whatever reason, high tide, low tide, rain, sunshine) but there’s a café there now. It doesn’t serve snack food (huh?) but we had drinks and chips (a mistake) and then a not too long walk (but in the beating sun it went for miles) back to the bus stop with no shade.

But, basically, a grand day out.

Meanwhile, tv. Haven’t been watching much because the heatwave has been knocking out wifi, electricity, motivation and time because I’m spending 12 hours in the air-conditioned office. I did finally crack and watch the Roswell reboot though. I did ask why, and so soon, but the McCarthyist aliens under the bed (in the bed) themes they jumped up and down on in the first episode were so much more right now rather than then. So that’s why now answered.

And Roswell 1.0 was not good. At all. The acting was awful and the plots, if one could grace them with that title, were worse than pulp. So there wasn’t much precious to wring one’s hands over. I kind of like the aged-up angst puppies, and I do hope, as much as they twisted themselves in Celtic knots to incorporate the original series, from now on, let’s not, ‘kay?

So, as much as I’m against all this fixing what ain’t broke, Roswell hardly falls into that category.

Mainly, I just giggled over the whole Michael is gay now, sorry, Michael is canonically gay now thing. No problem with that. And if they want to remake shows and write certain characters as gay now, I have a list (unfurls, list unspools to floor, unrolls, keeps unrolling, vanishes from sight, still unrolling).

It is confusing for a girl, though. Not Michael, he’s fine. It’s the whole ‘you’re watching it wrong’ or ‘you can’t do that on television’. Roswell and Legends are going for broke, all praise, but then there’s that film I know I was watching wrong. I saw the trailer for the dvd the other day and I am still watching it wrong (to quote Siegfried from KAOS, we don’t do that here!). It was way more intense than anything on CW, but no, not even as subtext.

I was quivering like I’d just watched a Bodleian vid on print-making, though. So much wrong watching.

By the way, if you’re not on library and/or museum Twitter, you are not living your best life. I would have been lost in January is not for the MERL’s solicited duck pics meme.

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