Lorna Leigh

This one is Kristopher's fault. There is music. Have to get it down somewhere.

Lorna Leigh

When the night is over
And the dawn has come
I will stop this fighting
And lay down my guns
I will say goodbye
To this place I see
And go home to Lorna Leigh

Back home the sun is shining on the waving grass
And the deer are running 'cross the mountain pass
And my love waits for me to come home at last
I'll go home to Lorna Leigh

When they sign the treaty
And the war is done
It won't really matter
If we've lost or won
I will pack my bag
With a heart set free
And go home to Lorna Leigh

Back home the sun is shining on the waving grass
And the deer are running 'cross the mountain pass
And my love waits for me to come home at last
I'll go home to Lorna Leigh

Lorna Leigh
Lorna Leigh
I'll go home to Lorna Leigh

Lorna Leigh
Lorna Leigh
I'll go home to Lorna Leigh

When the war is over
And the peace begun
I will sing to heaven
And lay down my guns
With the light of glory
Shining down on me
I'll go home to Lorna Leigh

I'll go home to Lorna Leigh

Neither here nor there

I was having one of my "I should join that club - it could be fun" moments today when I realised I had made an error in judgment.

The club in question was Rockwheelers, the local mountain bike club. I thought I might be able to learn a thing or two and go along to some of the events - where there would be people to notice if I break my neck or something.

Then, the thought popped into my head: "Your 'mountain bike' wouldn't be up for those sorts of things, because it's not a 'real' mountain bike. It is, as previously mentioned, a 'comfort mountain bike'."

Then I thought - "but I should still join a cycling club anyway" as I had also been eyeing off the road bike club and their velodrome. Ever since I noticed the track racing at the Olympics was actually not boring (I get easily bored by races) I've been wanting to try out a velodrome.

"Ah," my obnoxious sense of reality pointed out, "but you don't have a road bike worth mentioning either. What you have is a 'cross' bike designed for riding around town."

It's true! It's true! While the old Merida managed to survive the Julia Creek Dirt and Dust Triathlon, it didn't exactly shine. Granted, my coming dead last probably had a lot to do with my level of fitness (and the fact that I can't swim in a straight line to save myself), but the bike wasn't exactly my secret weapon.

It turns out that, while I am now the proud owner of two bikes - both of which I ride every week, I don't really have a mountain bike and I don't really have a road bike. I'm not even sure I have a touring bike (although the guy at my bike shop knew I wanted something for touring when I asked for his recommendation, so I'm going to assume the Sedona will do the job).

I definitely have at least one commuting bike, which is probably just as well, considering I do a fair bit of commuting by bike these days. It doesn't help with my occasional whim to join a bike club and ride around a velodrome, though.

Curse my desire to do a little bit of everything! Why must I want to a) ride to work, b) ride around the country, c) ride cross country and d) ride around a track when I cannot afford to collect a commuter, a tourer, a mountain bike, a track bike and a road bike?

Why can't they invent one bike that will do everything?

Yet, even as I make that plaintive cry, I know that any bike which was generic enough to do both cross-country and track riding would probably be terrible at both. Especially if it was affordable.

*sigh*

How "good" is a Giant Sedona as a mountain bike, does anyone know? Could it survive some actual cross-country trails without stranding me in the middle of no-where?

Not something that happens every day

Something happened to me the other night that has never happened to me before, and will probably never happen to me again:

A kookaburra threw a frog at me.

I had just gotten onto my bike and was about to leave the nursing home where my grandmother is currently feeling miserable, when I heard a very peculiar sound. It sounded a bit like a gecko with an attitude problem, but was a lot louder and more expressive than the average gecko noise.

When I glanced in the direction of the noise I saw some sort of flapping and fluttering of wings.

"Surely a bird wouldn't make a sound like that?" I thought to myself. I pedaled towards the strange sight to investigate.

Suddenly, even though I would have thought it long past its bed-time, a kookaburra flew from the location of the strange noise and threw something at me as it went.

With a rather sad-sounding "plop", a frog landed on the ground not far from where I had paused on my bicycle. As the kookaburra made a sound that was very much like the kind of sound an annoyed kookaburra would make, the frog hobbled over to the nearest garden bed and buried itself under a plant.

I thought to myself, "That was a bit different", and then rode home.

You speak-a my language?

According to a recent report in the Baltic Times:

"Many primary school and kindergarten teacher can’t speak Estonian well enough to teach." [sic.]

Apparently, this is a shocking state of affairs that requires redressing, and all bar eight of the tested kindergarten teachers will be expected to lift their game in time for another test in a year.

They should come to Australia. We have high school English teachers whose English isn't that good. The kindergarten teachers leave you in tears.

When I was studying for my Education Degree, I came into most of my courses with a firm grounding in English grammar and a strong love for language, linguistics and communication. Most of my classmates were hard-pressed to explain what a noun was - and they didn't see that as a problem.

For some reason, over the last twenty or so years the powers that be have come to the conclusion that learning "correct" English is a) elitist, b) pointless and c) discriminatory. After all, expecting a high standard of English communication implies that any other dialect or discourse of English is somehow "below standard" and inadequate. Heaven forbid children be told the way they speak at home is "not good enough" for their assignments and essays.

"English is a vibrant language", they say, "It changes all the time - and so it should." And thus they justify having entire cohorts of students graduating year after year without a basic grasp of sentence structure.

Not only have we created a culture where a high standard of English is neither taught nor expected, but we now have a culture where the very idea of a "correct" or "better" English is bitterly rejected.

"How dare you suggest I could be doing better? Who are you to decide what is and isn't good enough?" seems to be the prevailing attitude. Oh, and that's just the kind of response one would get for pointing out that bizarre and bazaar are two different words, and they've used the wrong one. Wait to you see the kind of reaction you can expect for pointing out that "been", "seen" and "done" require the word "have" in front of them. The common man will have none of your auxiliary verbs, thank you!

I've lost count of the amount of times I've tried to correct someone only to have a raft of other people rush to their defence - even though they were clearly wrong. Apparently it is far better to express yourself by any means (even if you have used the wrong words in the wrong order and have, therefore, said something rather different to what you intended) than to pause for a moment and think about how you are going to express yourself. It's up to the listener or reader to determine your correct meaning from your expressions. I don't know about you, but I think this could be rather problematic at times.

Then again, I've also lost count of the amount of times I've been corrected and found myself wanting to react just as poorly. Even though I know great benefit can be had from noticing a mistake and correcting it, I still don't like being told I am wrong and I could do better. I guess I'm a child of this culture after all.

On the other hand, I know what a noun is. That puts me well ahead of many of the English teachers educating our children today.

Brass players are nutjobs

So, I'm learning the baritone horn.

I had intended to learn the cornet/trumpet, but the guy who is teaching me at an exceptionally reasonable rate suggested a baritone would be more suited to me, physically, and since I get to borrow one for free I thought I'd give it a go.

The fact that it uses exactly the same fingering to produce the same notes (within a different octave range) also made it an easy sell.

He was right - it is a better fit. I sound worse than when I was learning the cornet/trumpet because I'm starting again on a new instrument so I have to redevelop technique, but I can produce a larger range of notes without busting a gut. My lips seem better suited to the larger mouthpiece, and I have the lung power to make it work (although I'm going to have to build up some serious intercostal-diaphragmatic muscles to make it work smoothly). Trying to play my pocket trumpet after practicing the baritone for a while is... shall we say "interesting". And I was just starting to get the hang of it, too.

Anyway, having come from playing the piano, recorder and a bit of concertina, I'm having some difficulty wrapping my head around this "transposing instrument" thing that brass has got going on.

In my world, a C is a C. I can handle playing an instrument that is tuned to a different key, as long as I know that when I look at a C on the sheet music and play a C on the instrument, I am actually playing the note that is written, and could therefore play the same music with any other instrument and make the same notes (give or take an octave). The idea that I can look at a C on the sheet music, play what is supposed to be a C on the instrument, but in fact be playing a completely different note is a bit disturbing.

And yet, it seems from my limited research that a heck of a lot of brass instruments play X number of tones above or below what is written. What's the point of that? Surely its just as easy to know what a C actually is on the instrument instead of picking an easier one to hit and saying "this can be C for us"?

Why spend so much time and effort learning to play scales that aren't actually the scales you're playing? Why get to the point where playing the sheet music is a breeze, if it's all a big fat lie?

And, of course, whoever composes brass music knows (somehow) that the cornet is actually playing a Bb instead of a C, while the (French) Horn is actually playing an F instead of a C, while the Tenor Horn is actually playing an Eb instead of a C...

And then, supposedly, when you write for certain instruments in treble clef they are transposing, but when you write for the same instruments in bass clef they are non-transposing - which means the players need to know what a "real" C is anyway so they can play it in the bass clef...

What the heck? How come no one has turned around and said: "Transposing octaves is one thing, but the rest of you are a bunch of nutjobs and should just learn to read the music, dammit!"

I'm trying to work out exactly how I transpose the sheet music in my brain so that I can play the "true" notes when I need them, but my tired little brain is having issues with that...

Seat Post Blues

The new bike needs a new seat post.

No, I didn't break this one, and it wasn't faulty either, more's the pity.

It's just an inch too short. That's what I get for buying a bike that's a size too small, I guess. I had good reason to - all the better to land on my feet when I come off the bike, my dear. The trouble with learning to ride a unicycle is you tend to learn how to land when you come off a unicycle. I found the last couple of times I encountered an obstacle that unseated me from my regular bicycle, I landed on my feet in exactly the same manner I do when coming down from das einrad. Thankfully, the women's frame gave me plenty of clearance.

When I new the next bike had to have a men's frame as there wasn't a women's alternative, I went a size smaller to give me that extra clearance. Makes perfect sense, unless you factor in this weird trend bikes have for shorter seat tubes, these days. Damn fashion. It's never once done me any favours.

So, now I need to fork out money to buy a new seat post when I have a perfectly good, functioning seat post already. Too many things in this world cost money.

New Bike!

New bike, new bike, new biiiiiiiike!

I got my new bike today. It's a Giant Sedona LX. It's what Giant calls a "Lifestyle" bike. It's not actually a mountain bike, you see, it's a "comfort mountain" bike.

I'm not entirely sure what that means, aside from, perhaps, "don't take this bike down Mt Stromlo unless you want to die", or something similar. However, I asked my friendly bike shop people to recommend something that could handle a bit of off road and fire-trails type riding while being comfortable and sturdy enough to do some touring (say, riding my bike to Brisbane), and that's the one they recommended.

I had these grand illusions of collecting the bike from the shop and riding over to the Nursing Home to visit my grandmother this morning, but quite frankly it was all too new and weird, so I thought I'd skip taking it half-way across town through "real traffic" until I'd had a chance to get to know him better, as it were. This weekend I'm going down the river, baby.

I'm almost happy with it. I've been almost happy with it ever since I ordered it. "Why almost?" I hear you ask. Well, it's because it was affordable. In all of the magazines I've been reading the bikes on review are usually around the $3,000 to $5,000 mark. Heck, I've even seen a few that were around the $10,000 mark. Now, I don't know if I'll ever do the kind of cycling where I'll see the value of a $10,000 bike, so I'm quite happy to leave those Italian racing machines in Italy (although, part of me will probably always drool over The Prince), but when most of the reviewed bikes cost more than my return flight to Europe, it makes me wonder what kind of quality I'm getting for my $900 dollars.

Plus, there's that whole "comfort mountain" and "lifestyle" thing. In the back of my mind something keeps whispering "you should have forked out at least another thousand and bought a 'real' mountain bike". I know, deep down, that the kind of riding I'm likely to do is probably best served by a bike like the Sedona, but there's this niggling feeling that I should have payed more for a bike with less comfort and more grunt.

I'm sure it will be fine. It's a good looking bike and I'm sure I'll fall in love with it and never look back. I could feel it starting to settle in just riding it around in the back yard to get the seat height right and work out what this front suspension thing is all about. And, next to my old bike (which I'll continue to use to get to work), it looks pretty darn shmicky.

Will I use it to ride to Brisbane? Well, maybe. One day. If I can manage to somehow make sure my mother doesn't notice I've gone. She's already freaking out at the idea of my riding it to Ingham. Don't even ask her what she thinks of my whole "riding around Estonia" plan. I'm surprised she hasn't offered me money to hire a car...