A Chrissie Brekky

As many of you know, I manage a charity service that provides breakfast (and other services) to people who are homeless.

Well Christmas is almost upon us. We have debated for some time what to do for “our guys” over the Chrissie period. We have come up with a couple of solutions.
There seem to be a profusion of Chrissie lunches, some in the days leading up to the 25th and some on the Holiday itself.

So breakfast being “our area of expertise”, we decided to put on a BBQ brekky. Well our brekky has happened and I am pleased to say it was a roaring success.
We provided lashings of steak, lamb chops, sausages, bacon, eggs along with bread rolls and assorted condiments (plus of course our more usual fare of toast, cereal, coffee and tea for those who wanted it). We had a generous donation from a local church to cover the cost so we went to town on the amounts.
By the time we opened we had a large grill full to overflowing of food ready to go.

It was a real pleasure to see the delight of many of our guys at the sight that greeted them as they came in.
One of our regulars for example, a guy who is old beyond his years and who wears an eye-patch and has massive facial scarring from the ravages of cancer treatment, chuckled with glee when he was told he could pick whatever he liked and could come back for as many servings as he wished. Another fellow said he loves eggs and hadn’t had one for over a year; he came back for at least half a dozen.

These guys have so little and live such desperate lives. Their joy at something so simple was really one of those moments that help make a tough job more than worthwhile.

The other thing we are managing to do for the guys is to keep our service open throughout the entire Christmas period. Christmas coincides with summer here. This leads to a great number of charities and other services not only closing for the holidays themselves but in some cases closing for weeks. Fortunately because we have a very dedicated team of volunteers we are going to be able to stay open right through Christmas and January.

Now a couple of piccies.
On our way home on the weekend we stopped a couple of times so I could grab the chance to capture some evening shots.

This first was captured near Yarra Glen.The silvery look is partly due to a combination of haze and cloud, but is also an artefact of a very narrow aperture because I was shooting almost straight into the afternoon sun.
The next is taken a little later from a point called Garden Hill.It is looking across miles of suburb to the distant Melbourne CBD.

Finally, again from Garden HillThe city with a 300mm telephoto as the Sun set behind.

A brief note about the self-publishing experiment. Formatting is almost complete. I have to chose a different name for my publishing venture. I am also working on layout and images for a couple of web pages. This last has not been going very well as I have not been at all happy with what I have put together so far.