It began raining sometime in the early morning. I had wanted to show Josef some of the Melbourne beaches and offered to drive with Mum to nephew Ben’s store which I have not even seen yet myself.
We had the blind down, but the room was already getting light and the rain was pouring down. Down here in Melbourne it is not quite as pleasant as up in Queensland where the temperature is about fifteen degrees warmer, even when it is wet. Mum had found some of the home movies and I offered to check them out and even to see whether we could copy some, even though I did not find the two that I wanted, the one from our trip to Ayers Rock and the one from our trip to Queensland in December 1969-January 1970. I was surprised to see that I was in fact in some of the films and even the Ayers Rock film had been joined to others and was much less spectacular than I remembered it. We set up the projector and then I asked Josef to use his camera to record the running film. Of course the sound of the clattering projector was loud and even though we asked Babi to make her comments to record as accompanying sound, the discussions went in all directions and I see the digital versions of the video as an indicator of what is possible, not an ultimate solution. The sound can be edited out and the picture needs to be taken from a horizontal position not from below as we did, which created a pyramid, not a square picture. It kept us occupied and we had quite a late lunch. In the late afternoon we took Mum to the chemist and she wanted to buy us some duck for lunch tomorrow. We waited in the Chinese restaurant admiring the live barramundi, silver perch, lobsters, snow crabs and muscles as they prepared our duck. Seems Mum really wanted the whole duck and was disappointed and suspicious when it arrived in two containers.
Back home, she wanted me to try it, even though we had just finished eating lunch before going shopping, and said she wanted the duck for lunch tomorrow.