The Stawell Gift

I looked up the TV guide this morning to see when the football was going to be televised and saw that channel one was televising the Stawell Gift today. It has always been held on Easter Monday and although I am not really into athletics because its close to my hometown this is one meet that I like to watch.

The heats are held in the lead up with the semi finals and finals on today, we watched while having lunch. Stawell was one of the gold rush towns and the Gift has been going for one hundred and thirty three years.

It is only running and events are held from 50 metres to 1600 metres, the gift itself is the highlight, think Melbourne Cup, as there are others events and distances but the main event is 120 metres. The semi winners were posting times of 12.21 to 12.42 sec, now that is fast! It is a professional race so the runners are handicapped and it is also run on grass/turf not a sealed surface.

Stawell, the township is in the western part of Victoria, a pretty town especially this time of the year with Autumn leaves starting to turn and fall, its on the main highway between Adelaide and Melbourne and besides being known as a gold rush town, it is famous for the Gift.

We used to watch it on TV when I was a kid so it brought back memories of sitting around the TV with family, I guess because it was "just over the border".

Crap Wrap

As I had the family here over the weekend, ten altogether for meals, it required bigger plates, so I reached further into the cupboard to draw out one of my platters. I always smile when I look at this, its certainly not anything that I would buy, the colours don't go with anything else that I have and it doesn't go in the dishwasher!

I do like it though and use it often when there is a crowd. A full loaf of bread made into sandwiches, a kilo of chicken wings etc will fit on it.

I heard about "Crap wrap" and thought it would be good for our Red Hat group as we like to keep the costs down as much as possible and so we adopted crap wrap for our birthday celebrations a couple of years ago.

Everyone takes a wrapped gift and exchanges it, the gift is not to be purchased, so it is something from home, an unwanted gift or something surplus.We had all gifts in one place and used a numbers system for people to elect their gift, they came to the front, picked one and unwrapped it so everyone could see what they had. Once everyone had their gift, we set a time limit of ten minutes to swap their gift with someone else's, the only rule was they couldn't swap back. So if A swapped theirs for B, B couldn't swap with A again  but B could swap with C then C could swap with A etc etc. It was a lot of fun but in our group a couple almost came to blows over a small coin purse that two people wanted, hence the time limit.

I ended up with the above tray, which someone thought was ugly. It is true "One man's trash is another man's treasure"