Tag Archives: photos

The lunch-hour rush

Urban, , , , , , ,
The lunch-hour rush -- © 2008-2012 jmnowak, all rights reserved

The lunch-hour rush — © 2008-2012 jmnowak, all rights reserved

Situated at the Little Collins Street end of the Royal Arcade in Melbourne’s CBD, this is a very popular, quite tiny eatery that serves good food and excellent coffee. Very Italian, which it is! The sub-plot to this image would be called Numbers…Located under the Gog and Magog Clock.

Emerald Hill Café

Food & Cuisine, , , , , , ,
DSCN1327.jpgA small eatery in South Melbourne (which in olden days was known as Emerald Hill, which I think is much more romantic and wish it were still called by that name).  Only open for breakfast and lunch.  They are real caterers too and the food they offer in the café shows that skill. The food is good and reasonably priced.
The male owner is nice too!  A little ‘gay’ in his manner, meaning sociable and friendly, he certainly makes me feel welcome whenever I visit; he even tries to remember my name and that’s a feat in itself!  ‘Gayness’ is a quality I appreciate in people in the service industries and wish other workers would take a leaf from their style.
Lately, too, I keep bumping into him while he’s walking his dog, a golden retriever, and I’ve commented he must live locally, to which he replied he lives above the shop. Aahh, how handy, I said!  Brought back memories, now long gone, of wanting to own an old Victorian style building, two storeys, with the shop at street level and my residence above.  It would be at a small seaside holiday town of some kind and offering true coffee to buy and drink (I would be the highly trained barista and ground coffee-beans mixer) with true European home-made cakes, and, being very small, it would also show my photographic works on the walls which would be for sale.  I would also, then, offer those same walls for local artists to exhibit just a few times a year.  Lovely idea!  Now, you’re saying to yourself, well why don’t you do it?  Something called money and energy, unfortunately of which I have neither, sadly.
The above image was taken inside the café at the front counter.  The day I took a few shots of this plant we had a chat about it as I’d never seen it before.  No-one really knew its name and guessed it to be an asparagus flower as, when it is still in bud, so to speak, it looks like a stalk of asparagus.  Therefore, that’s what I’ve called it!  Here’s an album of a few more of them, which I hope you’ll like.  Let me know what you think, as I’ve given different treatments to some of them, mostly using Picasa and one using virtualStudio.

Dust if you must

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Dust if you must, but wouldn’t it be better
To paint a picture or write a letter
Bake a cake or plant a seed
Ponder the difference between want and need.

Dust if you must, but there’s not much time
With rivers to swim and mountains to climb
Music to hear and books to read
Friends to cherish and life to lead.

Dust if you must, but the world’s out there
With the sun in your eyes, the wind in your hair
A flutter of snow, a shower of rain
This day will not come around again.

Dust if you must, but bear in mind
Old age will come and it’s not kind
And when you go, and go you must
You, yourself, will make more dust.

(Author unknown)

From an article by Felicity Loughrey appearing in Vogue Australia August 2007 edition, called “A clean sweep. There’s an art to cleaning and keeping house, but its secrets have been lost in our more feminist times. Just ask your mother.”

“As professional women, we have to live with a greater tolerance level of dirt and mess. It’s just not possible to do what we do and keep the kind of house that our mothers and grandmothers might have expected.”

I don’t mind a bit of dust. In fact, as someone who suffers from instant sneezing the minute the dust is moved, I prefer to leave it where it is and vacuum it up when necessary.  This has been my habit for decades. This is what I call living with nature.  I must disagree with the quote, however, as I would have thought one benefit of being a well-paid professional is that you could afford to have cleaners come in regularly, particularly when there are two of you earning good incomes and/or you have children, when the mess definitely would be triple the normal level. I’ve known plenty of people in that situation and who had weekly or fortnightly cleaners; it became a routine de rigeuer.  But, then, as an ex-professional, that is just my point of view.

Dirt + mess often can also be a signal to being in an unhappy emotional state.  As the saying goes, the state of your house is an indicator to the state of your mind, whether a sign of lack of self-respect or whether you’re just going through a period of depression, which is something I can certainly relate to. After the depression has lifted, the need to clean is overwhelming and it’s very gratifying to see the place clean again! Definitely!

So, as I was reading the poem, I did think it was a great ode to not being so obsessive about house cleaning and to be more kind and gentle on yourself; life is much too short to be worried about a little dust, children, depression and all!  Dust if you must, but, then, maybe not!  As I don’t have an image of dust to add to this post (‘though I’m sure it would have made an intriguing abstract image), here is something a little more interesting.

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