My car has had a reprieve. I picked it up on Saturday morning, and it appears to be in fine working order, and without costing a significant amount of money. Bizarre.

I had better finish the story of the burning woman. After all this build up, it’s not going to be particularly spectacular, I’m afraid.

So, we had run various errands, and my cold had gone into ghastly overdrive. It was pretty clear mid-morning that this was going to be the absolute suckiest cold in quite some years, and the peak of it was definitely on the day of the wedding. The great part is, it didn’t greatly diminish the happiness of the occasion. I had arrived pretty early at the castle and did a bit of exploring, and it was really quite cool. Lots of mysterious doors leading randomly into closets, rooms, and walls. Lots of narrow windy stairs, and fairly sporadic and shambolic attempts to add period touches, including amateurish paintings, expensive vases, concrete statues, etc, all slightly worn and all the more charming for it. It felt as lived in as a castle could be.

Anyway, I was drafted into managing the iPod + mixing desk for the wedding ceremony if the mixing desk guy was unable to make it, and I had a play with the massive mixer/amp combo and decided that I absolutely must have something like this myself. (I ended up buying a Yamaha Stagepas 300 as my new stereo/mixer a few weeks ago)

Then people started arriving, including the real mixing desk guy thankfully, and we all gathered in this little stone grotto for a candle-lit wedding ceremony. It was lovely. CB had flowers in her hair, and the hundreds of raucous guests (CB and Aodhagan even hired a bouncer) went quiet. The ceremony had a blessing of the four elements (which I’d never seen before) and a non-denominational priest who was a bit of a character. Then the two-day reception began. There was a very cool jazz band who were unfortunately positioned inside – everyone else was outside taking advantage of the lovely sunshine, leaving me and Von, and my heaped pile of tissues. I didn’t even feel like partaking of the enormously over-catered open bar.

Much happened that I will not relate. The vegetarian reception dinner was delicious, and the easily-angered chef came out to chat with Claire and Aodhagan and got a spontaneous and huge ovation, much to his surprise. Celebrations went on very late, but I did not.

The next day was relaxed and full of left-overs and further drinking and celebrations. The day passed quickly, and one of the guests brought out some juggling equipment, and started showing off her cool moves – pois, twirling sticks, etc. As it happened, I too had brought my juggling balls and pois, and I joined in and showed some of the other guests (including Von!) how to do poi swinging. It was fun and relaxed, and the fact that everyone was a little tipsy didn’t really matter, because we weren’t weilding anything dangerous – at worst, swinging the pois too quickly could give you a bit of a bruise, but no more so than being hit by a lobbed tennis ball.

Just before dinner, the (still very large) party went outside to the gazebo (Gazebo!) where a hundred odd helium balloons had been inflated. We each wrote our name on a balloon and simulaneously released them – they had tags on them asking whoever found the balloons to return them, and the balloon that went the furthest would win a prize for the finder and the person with the name on the balloon. Cool idea!

Anyway, we watched the balloons disappear into the distance. I was feeling considerably better, but Von and I were still happy to get to bed early. I saw, just before going to bed, the other juggler get out her fire pois.

And so I didn’t see her set herself on fire.

I *did* see, through the window of our room, her start swinging the fire pois at around sunset (which would have been about 9:30pm). I didn’t think anything of it. But we got the full story and picture the next morning.

So, she was a bit tipsy. And she didn’t have her hair tied back. And she was wearing a dress. She was standing on the gazebo (Gazebo!) successfully swinging the pois around, and Dad was taking pictures, and then the pois got tangled together and simulaneously set her hair and dress on fire.

It was over in an instant. She yelled, and quickly patted out the fire, and disappeared back to her room for a bit to cut off the burned hair and mourn her ruined dress, and came back rather embarassed. But Dad got a highly disturbing photo. It looked rather like a cross between something from “The Ring” and “The Wicker Man”: a slightly blurry photo of a woman in a dress, looking down standing with hunched shoulders, holding two chains. Her hair is on fire on one side, a bright big flare of flame you might get from burning a generous handful of dry grass. The end of the chains on fire of course (that’s how fire pois work), and a similar flare from the corner of her dress. It really looks like the fire is going to completely engulf her.

But neither you nor I will see the photo, because Dad deleted it, and fair enough too.

We flew to Ireland via Abu Dhabi with Etihad airways which was great except for the very silly entertainment control unit, which is embedded in the armrest in such a way as to make it very easy to accidentally turn the screen on or off, or press the overhead light button. The unit spent most of my flights dangling from its cord over the edge of my seat. Oh, and the theoretically brilliant inflight noise-cancelling headphones (!) also had problems – if I nudged the plug, it would reward me with an ear-splittling crackle and several minutes of absolute awakeness. Between the headset and the control unit, I was encouraged to sit *very, very still*.

It used to be a fairly reliable rule of thumb that movies watched on planes would be awful. Reasons included the noisy environment, small screen, airline censorship, fixed film schedule, and limited choice of mediocre films. Nowadays, that’s changed completely – with the larger selection and better environment I really look forward to watching films on planes, often because it means I watch films that I normally wouldn’t. So it was that I watched “Enchanted” (lovely), “Meet the Robinsons” (excellent), “7 Zwerge – Der Wald ist nicht genug” (very silly, surprisingly fun), “Vantage Point” (daft), and “Penelope” (sweet, rambling). I’m beginning to wonder whether the rule of thumb should be reversed.

I know that Claire likes Bundy rum, so I asked at the duty free area whether I would be able to buy a bottle of bundy rum and not have it confiscated at Abu Dhabi. They said “Yes, that’s fine”, and I bought a nice expensive bottle of Bundaberg Rum Distiller’s No. 3.

It was, of course, stopped at Abu Dhabi. Apparently it *is* possible to get a bottle all the way to your destination, but you need a security bag and they forgot/didn’t know to give me one at the Sydney Duty Free. I put the bottle of rum on top of a garbage bin in Abu Dhabi airport (they didn’t confiscate it; they just wouldn’t let it through the security gate) and seethed with frustration until I fell asleep. Sydney Airport duty free now have the full story, and I await my refund with folded arms and tapping foot.

Nobody caught on fire on the flight over. That was later.

Irritating flight. Many relatives, some new. Grand craic. Sunny. Caught cold. Woman on fire. Jetlag.

Meanwhile, our lunchtime group (or a couple thereof) tried out a drumming circle. It was fun, and not even too embarassing.

Also on the weekend: two flat tyres. I have no idea what I’m doing that is causing so many flat tyres. I think it’s probably the number of potholes around Sydney at the moment, and perhaps I need to inflate my tyres above 30psi. Anyway, when I finished work on Friday, I found the front left tyre was flat. And so was the spare. The spare was a slow leak though, so I managed to get to a service station to inflate it properly, and got home at least. Got it repaired on Monday morning, and it turned out the last person to repair the spare had put an inner-tube in a tubeless tyre. Buggered if I can remember who it was, though.

The food was a particular standout, I think. Dave and Fiona in particular like to do interesting dinners, so there was home-cooking almost every night with various people’s involvement – I did the cooking for the BBQ, but failed to come up with anything for a proper dinner. Something for next year, I think. We had pancakes for most breakfasts, and I went slightly crazy with chocolate and put on approximately 3 kilos, mostly lost now thanks to the usual no-sweets thing.

However! One thing that particularly stuck with me was coffee. The Canberrites brought their own espresso machine, and made cappuccinos every morning. I got more and more into coffee and less and less into V, and by the end of the holiday my coffee addiction was more or less complete. I bought an espresso machine, a Sunbeam EM4800, which is a slightly newer version of the Canberrites machine. So far it has made several really excellent coffees. I’m no expert, but they’re at least as decent as the ones I was getting from Delifrance! Of course, the coffee I’m buying is also rather decent, which is probably more of a factor.