alpacas and holy books

Happy Good Friday y'all. If there is such a thing as a 'Happy' Good Friday for people who even 'celebrate' it. I reckon it's one of those little oxymorons that come up every once so often.




I went to Daylesford today, to visit a certain PotatoQueen on the premise that we were supposed to set gerri's chickens free. Or rather, into PotatoQueen's chicken coop. Or PotatoQueen's bf's chicken coop. Whatever.

Her (or rather, her boyfriend's) chickens have grown too large and no one remembers to feed them.

Instead, gerri overslept, and we left without her...or her chickens. Punkster reckons we should just all have a huge meal of spring chicken one day and her problem will be solved.

Daylesford was GREAT despite it only being a day-trip, and the three babies Ember, Ash and Diesel were in on the ride. I also got to see HotWaterBottle, Rambo, Punkster and Act-Cool for the first time in ages, AND take a ride in P & AC's brand new old car Ketchup, the Supercar.

I've actually never seen a tired Jack Russell before. Today, I did.

I also saw 3 shorn alpacas in the cutest form ever. Black, white and brown. PotatoQueen's boy had one in each colour. It was SO CUTE. Rambo liked the brown one, and kept taking pics, but I liked the black one, and the black one seemed to like me too, except that Ash and Ember kept running inside and I was a little scared that the alpacas would do something to those tiny creatures.

I won't have photos anytime soon, so I thought I'd tell you the highlights:

A NottingHill-esque second hand bookshop
Ash and Ember swimming
Yabby hunting
Homemade pie shopping


When I came back, I hurried around stuffing contacts into my eyes and looking for "totally covered up" but nice clothing (not as difficult as I thought) . It seems I had to hurry for a religious Sikh ceremony I knew nothing about, and all that I knew was that it was a) religious and b) I had to cover my head up.

I knew it had something to do with my friend's sister's birthday, as well as something to do with her coming engagement party, but that was about it.

I turned up to hear singing, and was greeted to the sight of over 200 people sitting on the floor on white sheets, listening and chanting and singing along to the religious verses.

I managed to find several high school friends I hadn't seen in 5 years, and sat down next to them, listening to the prayers go on for another 2 hours. More and more people turned up, and by the end of it all, we had 6 ex-schoolmates sitting there.

It turns out that we were there for the Akhand Path, where the entire Sikh holy book is read out non-stop from cover to cover and we were attending the middle stages of it. My friend's family had invited some living holy men down from India for the readings, and apparently listening to these men sing the religious verses is considered a huge honour and blessing - which is why the family had invited so many guests.

After the layman part of the ceremony was done, all 200 people queued for a delicious dinner. MMMMMMMM good naan is so hard to find! I also stuffed myself silly with Indian sweets. For once, I threw my weight conciousness out the window and just went the whole hog. It's been too long since my last Gulab Jamun! (Ghee? What Ghee?)

Caught up with friends, met my beautiful friend and her equally beautiful family (seriously, some of these Sikh women are GORGEOUS. I was practically mesmerised by two women- one in white and the other in purple who were just so beautiful) before we all realised we had to go home and my friend realised that she was facing about 1000 people coming in and out tomorrow.

Sarah gave me a ride closer into the city, and at a red light, I simply jumped out and jumped into a taxi in the next lane scaring both the driver, and the traffic behind me. Oops.

So here I am, blogging too much, too late, and feeling too sleepy.

Have a great weekend peeps.