What a thrill it is every year to anticipate, prepare for, then watch and listen to the first ball of the Australian summer come thundering down the pitch! I love this moment as it signals the end to the football hiatus and the beginning of many games of cricket in three formats for the upcoming season. Never mind that it was an Australian team in questionable form and under siege from without and within: despite a painful first outing for the Aussies, it's great to have them back on the paddock.
My Cricket Live app doesn't appear to need renewing and my worst fears of the takeover of cricket from Channel Nine to Foxtel and Channel Seven meaning a block on viewing have, so far at least, no foundation. It seems as long as I remember to put the VPN on and mask our country signature, we'll be able to watch at our leisure all summer. The commentators are finding their feet as are the directors: it's really weird not being on Nine and all the familiar commentators, but I suppose that's the way the world works....highest bidder and all that.
Another small thrill was to learn that the basement premises of the now defunct local Wellcome supermarket have finally been taken over by a new tenant. That tenant, to our delight, is a branch of Carrefour, the huge French food retailer. We'd relented eventually and started going to the main store nearby,(despite our misgivings) as no local boutique store had sprung up. The main store has pretty much everything you could possibly want, but everything in there is on a huge scale, including carts and the amount of people. This new store is a Carrefour Market, with a smaller range of food, but a smaller footprint, smaller trolleys and smaller hassles. We're happy with the change.
Through the week we had a Grade 8 community services day which was an amalgam of endless inspiring videos and documentaries and subsequent discussion points, all in our homerooms. The kids were uplifted beyond the usual, and I think were even happier than us when the day ended! The morning task was more hands on, however, and visits to various local parks to pick up trash and generally tidy up was a huge success, especially the location that I went to. Cassy's group got relatively slim pickings, but mine scurried uphill and down dale and into jungles and waterway edges to retrieve all sorts of rubbish, evidenced by the bulging bags of detritus we left for the local council to cart away.
Poor little Virgy probably won't be with us at the time I write the next blog entry. She's become increasingly listless over the weekend and apart from a tiny rally when she licked down a small plate of her favourite wet food, mackerel, she's pretty much given up eating as well. Previously, she'd been lapping up endless serves of water as her kidneys cried out for liquid, but this even seems to have stalled. I'm going to the vet this afternoon to ask about next steps, but we're pretty sure we'll need to take her in to be injected as we don't want her to suffer. She even seemed to have a faintly glazed look in her eyes this morning as she curled up on her cushion, so...