The Things We Do For Love

I spent Friday morning at the Grade 12 graduation, trying to avoid the ceremony as much as possible. I hung out in the kitchen of the Presbytery with a bunch of other mothers, preparing morning tea, just ducking into the adjacent church to see where they were up to in proceedings. I happened to walk in when they were doing the final role call but I couldn't stay for long. I find the end of year/end of era celebrations an ordeal. I don't find any of it exciting; to me it's such an ending. I can't imagine what next year is going to be like when Drew finishes. Already I'm dreading it. 2010 has to be endured.

Gibbo and I went to Stanthorpe in the afternoon as he was playing cricket for the QCC on Saturday. We stayed the night in a little cabin in a caravan park.

Now normally, Stanthorpe is a rather cold place and often has the lowest temperature in the state. I packed a skivvy, two jumpers and a thick heavy overcoat with a fur-lined hood. What a mistake. It was so hot on Saturday I even resorted to taking my shoes off. Lucky I packed one t-shirt.

You could say I'm not the biggest cricket fan in the world. In fact, I put watching paint dry and grass grow on a par with watching cricket. However, I love my husband and I don't see that much of him now so I took the opportunity to go "on tour" with him. Here he is making me a cup of tea at morning tea before the game started.
Here's a photo of my favourite bag of the moment. It's the one I bought at Tree of Life with the money Mate gave me for my birthday.

This is the pitch. This was my view for most of the day (with a few overweight over 40's cricketers dotted across the field in different formations).

Wickets and bails.

Inspecting the pitch. Very important. Also, apparently it's bad form to show up to the match already dressed in your gear. There's a protocol involved here - you turn up in your civvies and you get changed into your cricket whites just before the toss.

This is where I spent ALL day, on this verandah....

...reading the paper from front to back.

Here he is fulfilling his umpiring duties - he "loves being out there" - I challenged that statement but he said it's great to be out there in the thick of the action, bowlers, batters, fielders, the crack of leather on willow etc etc. Scintillating stuff.
And to top it all off, he won Man of the Match for his Team with 63 runs scored! He hit three sixes in a row at the end of the day. He was presented with a rather thick tome of Test Cricket Lists - results of what appears to be every test match ever played since the game of cricket was invented. I can't wait to borrow it.

For me, it was a chance to meet some of the people that we'll be travelling to England with next August; and I got to spend some time with G. An added bonus is that I got to read the entire paper in one day, in one sitting actually. It was a looooong day!!

This was the most exciting thing that happened all day......