pedanther

1. We won our division again, and retained the title of National D Grade Champions. I gather this means that if we contest again next year, we'll be required to move up to C Grade and give someone else a shot. I also gather that we're probably not going to be contesting next year; the expense in time and money is not sustainable for many years running. (Of the two, the time cost is perhaps the more important. Over the past few months, the amount of time we've spent preparing for the contest has meant that we've done hardly any performances locally, and those we have done have sometimes suffered for our attention being elsewhere. That's no way to carry on.)

2. The flying turned out to be no problem. It was actually a lot like being on the train, except that it's been years since the train had a meal service included in the price of the ticket. (And the view out the windows, of course. One striking moment there was when I realised that not only were we flying above the clouds, we were so far above that they seemed to be almost on the ground themselves.)

3. Brisbane continued the theme by being a lot like Perth. The details varied, but the only time I got a visceral sense of unfamiliarity was on the second day, when I was walking down the street at twilight and heard an utterly strange bird call out of the gathering darkness.

4. Saw quite a bit of the South Bank while I was in Brisbane, it being on the route between the hotel and the contest venue, as well as the Botanical Gardens, Australia Zoo, and the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. At the latter two, I kept wanting to tweet a running commentary of the animals I had now seen in the flesh ("Have now seen a real live komodo dragon. It was asleep."), but since I don't have Twitter I settled for texting my observations to

poinketh instead. ("Giant African tortoise: on close inspection, probably awake.") I didn't take many photos myself, since I'm not much of a photographer generally and anyway the whole point of the experience was about seeing the animals without a camera acting as intermediary, but I did decide I might as well shell out for the official Portrait of Tourist and Koala.

5. At one of the ANZAC Day services yesterday, in between a hymn and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer, a choir sang "Imagine". I think this means "Imagine" has now reached that point of comfortable familiarity where the words go straight through the listener without slowing down.