It's been a busy week. A and I saw a beautiful dance performance in the Festival on Sunday evening, Shelley Lasica's "Play in a Room". It's been wonderful to see all these fantastic artists in such a short space of time - quite inspiring. We also saw Joanna Newsom and SMOG perform last Friday. Joanna Newsom was quite amazing. It's rare to be in the presence of such an original musical talent, and she's still so young. I look forward to seeing where she takes her music.

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It was A's birthday on Monday and we had a lovely day with lovely weather to share together. I took the day off work, which was divine. We had breakfast out with A's cousin, opened presents, had a picnic in the park by the Yarra and got to hear the Federation Bells. We've been wanting to hear the bells since we first met, but they haven't been working. So we were treated unexpectedly for an hour long performance. It was beautiful. The bells are electronically operated, and quite sculptural in appearance. The compositions played are by local composers and the bells are tuned to just intonation. The overall sound is rather like a gamelan orchestra. The spatial effect of the bells is interesting too as you can walk around them and sit under them and so on, leading to a different listening experience depending on your location.

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We had a marvellous dinner out at a tapas restaurant. Incredibly intensely flavoured food - but quite wonderful. We had mojitos to drink. Also, there was a lunar eclipse, which we got to see at its peak as we left the restaurant.

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It was a beautiful day.

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Tuesday night we went out with A's mother and step-father for a lovely dinner in an Italian bistro. We've been eating like royalty!

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Since then I've been at work, which is beginning to drag me down again. I'm looking forward to the weekend. I'll work on my music and we'll see A's dad and stepmother and his sister for a late birthday lunch.

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The pedant in me has added in all those lines as the damn blog formatting won't seem to allow for paragraph breaks today...