One last whole day in Da Grove

The treadmill at the gym in Ocean Grove has an action like it's full of sand. I'd say it was on its last legs, but it's been there on my visits to the place over the last three summers.

I weary of this town, it seems to be full of surfers, retirees and an odd tiny hippy population. At least, someone must be frequenting the hippy shop and the health food place with the goat's milk yoghurt.

And the whole beach thing, I don't know, I dislike sand and the sun hates me, or at least, all my exposed skin. Turns it a lovely shade of turnip.

Although, the beach here has some interesting aspects. The distance between the high tide and the low tide mark must be forty metres. The water level isn't much, maybe two metres of depth, but the beach has such a gradual slope, it goes out a whole long way. Pity about the rocks.

Sunday, we went out to the beach for another dose of UV rays. I drew something in the sand with my toes which looked vaguely like an intestine, so I announced that it was. This sparked a whole lot of perverse beach drawing – a pancreas, followed by a liver, then two kidneys, then a bladder to connect them too, three lungs (we lost count) a heart and a rather lumpy brain. Not sure what anyone made of the stuff, it all got washed away not long after.

We a visit from sshatteredd, stillbeing and a scruffy lefty cyclist friend of mine – who's idea of a good time was riding from Geelong to ocean grove then back again! Now that's keen.

And for future reference, Geelong on a Sunday night is the deadest place on earth, except perhaps for, well, I'm sure there’s a cave in Cooper Pedy under the desert which is more dull. Or possibly a place in the deep interior of Antarctica where nothing exciting happens of a Sunday evening. Damn, we wandered the town and miraculously found probably the only thing open – a 7 eleven. Thrillsville. Food, of sorts.

Today we watched... The Superbowl. First we had to find a place with a telly which was open on a Monday morning at 10AM. The nice people at the Barwon Heads Hotel assured me they could turn on one for us if we asked nicely. So we went there and asked nicely. Worked ok, except the front bar (which also served as their TAB) didn't open till 10.30AM! D'oh! We missed the pregame show! Ok, so no great loss there... We also missed the first three minutes of the game while they figured out how to put the telly onto the correct channel – as far as anyone could tell it was the first time that particular TV had been tuned to SBS...

Why the superbowl? Mostly as an amusing cultural experience for evildoom_bunny. The whole damn thing is so AMERICAN, the game itself happens in fits and starts, and really makes no sense if you don't know the elaborate rules. The teams are huge and specialized – there are eleven beefy men on the field at any one time, but the team might rock up with 35 players, just in case. So I spent most of the game explaining to Lifty what the hell was going on, except for the numerous moments when I had no idea what the hell was going on.

Lifty had the worlds worst pizza at the said hotel. It leaked an odd red liquid – ewgh – and had something which might have been processed ham as a thick layer on top of undercooked dough. I mean, pizza is inherently slightly disgusting, but still.

I used to follow the NFL some years ago, back before I gave up watching television, it's a bizarre sport, but I stopped really paying attention a few years back. So when the two teams rolled onto the field today, I didn’t have a clue who anyone was, except maybe for one player. It sounded like a lot of them were newbies anyway. And good to see the racial divide is still going strong – most of the players are African American and most of the quarterbacks and all the coaches are white. Welcome to America.

The game itself wasn't that interesting - Superbowl's rarely are, the teams play fairly conservatively for what's a pretty important game. The only bizarre moment was when a running back threw a touchdown pass. And if you understood that last sentence, you've got it worse than me :-)

We picked up a copy of New Weekly at the supermarket, just for a dose of celebrity weirdness. It has a whole huge section devoted to famous people's bottoms falling out of their bikini's. Riveting and important news. I should be so famous that my left butt cheek makes news. And we had an interesting conversation with the middle aged checkout "chick" suggesting that John Howard come and do her job for a week to see how it felt. Me thinks I hear a bit of a ground swell growing...