Sweet sweat

It's a regular smorgasbord of delights every weekend in Darwin at the moment as we put on our best face for the tourist season. Silly thing is that most of them come up here for the horse racing season or the V8 Supercars (or even the cricket in a years when we get a cricket test). They stay on for a few days or a week to cover the regular tourist trail: barramundi fishing, Kakadu, Litchfield, Katherine Gorge, maybe check out the Mindil sunset markets, then rush off back to their rat-race, gerbil on a treadmill existences. Up in the dark (and/or home in the dark) to a cold house after battling traffic and fumes to get to an air-conditioned, neon-lit office - they rarely see daylight for 6 months of the year- while we bask in an even 32 degrees, day in day out, with never a sign of rain and evening falls at around 7 o'clock summer and winter. Anyway, I digress - most of them don't attend any of these events, sponsored at great expense by our civic authorities. At this time of year the NT Government and the local councils and the arts societies and the theatrical types all battle it out for prime spots on the festival programs, and for us who actually live here, it's fantastic.

This weekend I took in an Oz Blues show on Friday evening. Held at my local outdoor cafe (about 5 minutes from home), it featured two of the members of the Blues band 'Chain'.Billed as the founders of the 'Oz Blues' movement, the pair played solo and as a duo. Matt Taylor has a powerful voice and some good original music but it was Phil Manning who shone with some of the most exciting guitar playing I've ever experienced. Under the tropical stars, eating a wood-fired pizza washed down with a bottle of red - it doesn't get much better than this.

Saturday I ventured to the Roma Bar again for a big breakfast after a visit to the library, an art exhibition and the video store. Then out of town friends popped in for a drink before we headed out to dinner at local seafood smorgasbord place on Cullen Bay. Beloved of tourists and always packed out, there's plenty of variety and plenty of volume -although it's not my favourite seafood smorgasbord in town, the visitors seemed happy and I couldn't believe the amount of food those 4 people can pack away. Guess it becomes very good value at $27 a head if you can eat 5 platefuls of prawns, bugs, oysters, mussels, battered fish, grilled fish, calamari, chips, salads, pork ribs, chicken wings, curried chicken, curried beef, chili crab...each! Oh, I forgot the soup, sweets and coffee.

Today I took it easy and just hung out at home, markets, bit of a walk etc.

Three excellent DVD's watched over the weekend. My favourite was "Finding Forrester" with Sean Connery and a gorgeous young black guy called Rob Brown. If they could only clone Sean Connery at every age and give one to each unattached woman in the world I reckon life would be almost perfect! Great 'feel-good' story and fantastic acting from the whole cast. A must see if you have missed it. I've missed heaps of movies, so I can always find a good oldie. The others I also loved: Jodie Foster as 'Nell' I'd seen before but enjoyed even more the second time around and 'What Women Want'- laugh out loud, comedy with the glorious Mel Gibson. A 'must see' for women and one every man should see (they'd even enjoy it if you can get them past the title)!

My family has all abandoned me as scrabble partners so I play the artificial intelligence on the GameHouse version and have now found a random internet partner from the USA. She's a cool lady called Char - I picked her because her name reminded me of someone else I like a lot. We seem to be pretty evenly matched and it's nice to get something interesting in the inbox each day.

I'm going. Have a great week. Hope life shines for you all week. Think of me sitting in the sun playing games with the wild Aboriginal children of the Kimberley while you're battling sleet and storm, won't you... :)