Michelle the Expatiator

SIGNPOSTS

2011-09-02T14:34:00.001+10:00

‘What did that signpost say?’ Doug asked.

“95 kilometres to go.’ Sue told him.

‘How are the kids travelling?”

Sue turned to check the back seat passengers.

Little Robbie was fast asleep in the infant safety capsule.

“I wish that boy would sleep so soundly in his cot. We’ve been a few hours on this rough road and all the bumps and stops and starts haven’t disturbed him at all.”

They had crossed the Queensland – New South Wales border some time ago and Doug dropped his speed to cope with the poor condition of the road and also to give them a chance to take in the new territory.

“Katie is awake though. That booster seat gives her a bit of height so she’s got a good view of the countryside.” Sue reported.

They were driving through a closely settled rural area and the recent signposts had promised a town was coming up.

“I’ll stop for a break at this next town. We can stretch our legs. Find some toilets and a picnic area.”

Doug had taken regular stops on the long trip to their much anticipated holiday at the beach.

“Oh, I know that shed.” Katie said suddenly.

Sue looked back to Katie. She had jolted forward, her passive gaze replaced by an attentive scan of the road side.

“I used to live here.” She said excitedly.

“No baby, we’ve never lived in New South Wales.” Sue corrected her.

“No. Before. With my other family.” Katie told her. “In a white house with lots of stairs. And a cubby next to a really big tree with a swing.”

Sue looked to Doug. He just grinned at her and shrugged.

As the car rounded the bend, there was a high-set white house on their left. Its tall stumps a precaution in case of flooding. In the yard was a large tree supporting a home-made swing. A wooden cubby house was nearby.

“The red car isn’t there. They must be out.” Katie observed, then relaxed back into her car seat and cuddled her teddy bear.

Sue looked to Doug again, her eyes wide with alarm. This time his face was quite pale and rigid.

Neither said a word until they’d reached the small town.

They sipped the coffee they’d bought from the takeaway shop and watched Katie climbing on the playground equipment.

“She’s never been one for creating stories.” Sue said.

“No.” Doug agreed. “Perhaps she had a bit of a dream.”

“Must have been a very vivid dream.”

Sue looked across to the highway intersection where the signposts pointed in all directions including the road they had just travelled.

“Next time we come down this way I think we should take the coast road.”

END

VIEWS FROM OUR BACK DOOR

2008-12-26T06:53:00.005+10:00

A COUPLE FROM OUR WALLABY CLAN

A FIERY SUNRISE

MY DAUGHTER'S MUSIC BOX

2008-12-23T06:18:00.001+10:00

When I was a young girl I was entranced by music boxes.

I have a vague memory of a little pink music box that played “One Enchanted Evening” when the lid was raised and the tiny ballet dancer twirled about in front of the mirror.

No doubt it belonged to a first-born daughter in our extended family.

I never gave my daughter a music box.

In retrospect, I am most surprised and guilt ridden about this oversight.

So it was most difficult for me to deny my daughter’s request for a music box when she was asked what she would like for her 21st birthday celebrations.

We had considered whatever was essential for the party.

We booked the lovely old country hall and we arranged for the food and drinks.

When it came to the music for the evening, I had foolishly thought that one of our four stereos could be carted to the hall along with the family’s very comprehensive library of CDs and tapes of music ranging from the early 1900s to the current releases.

But no, my daughter wanted a music box and she promptly gave me the name and telephone number of a reliable jukebox hire company.

We met with the owner of the company and we filled in the request form and we passed over the deposit and he handed over the list of available music for my daughter to peruse and the deal was sealed.

I quickly warmed to our jukebox provider because he was sincere and friendly.

However I did worry about his abrupt and inexplicable bursts of laughter during our interview. They did seem a tad manic.

On the day of the party my daughter, my sister and my nieces were helping to decorate the hall whilst my husband, brother-in-law and son were busy erecting the hired marquee in the grounds of the hall car park.

Suddenly word filtered into the hall that the music box had arrived.

Fortunately I had warned my extended family about our jukebox provider’s merry bursts of laughter.

I was the sole witness to his entry to the hall which was from the front stairs. As he backed up the stairs, tugging the music box on the wheeled trolley, I saw more of his nether regions than I needed to see due to his work shorts slipping well below his waist.

I have always been far too quick witted for my own good so, before I could stop myself, I heard myself saying to him, “Oh, I am getting a peepshow here.”

Manic laughter echoed about the empty hall.

My extended family, safe in the supper room, could titter without causing insult to him.

My daughter’s music box was the highlight of the party.

No one enjoyed it more than her Uncle Darryl.

He had studied the song list and he found his favourite song and memorised the number.

Whenever my daughter approached the music box, Uncle Darryl would call out, “Put on 5105 lovey.”

The song in question was Harper Valley P.T.A.

Only one person enjoyed the 21st party more than my daughter. Uncle Darryl.

I am certain it was because he was born and bred in the country and he had spent many Saturday nights in a country hall, just like this one, attempting to get some girl up to dance with him.

I am so very pleased to report that Uncle Darryl was not without a partner all night and, more often than not, it was with the birthday girl.

The music box remained in the hall until mid Sunday so that everyone got great value from its presence until our lovely merry jukebox provider came to pick it up.

It seems I did eventually give a music box to my darling daughter.

Michelle ©

RETIRED SHED

2008-12-22T18:36:00.002+10:00

An old shed on our property that is in retirement now.

GHOST STORY

2008-12-20T07:30:00.002+10:00

In the early hours of the morning, a bedroom can harbour ghosts. They become apparent as moonlight filters through the windows.

You wake to find a figure lurking by the door. You blink and look again and it is still there. You squeeze your eyelids tight and then refocus and try to force the ghostly form into something commonplace. And at last you do. With relief you realise that it is not a ghost but your winter dressing gown hanging on the back of the door.

One night I woke to see a luminous figure standing at the end of my bed. I blinked and tried to refocus a number of times but it refused to transform into something mundane. It remained steadfast, a glowing apparition in the form of a woman standing at the end of my bed where dressing gowns do not hang.

Oddly I did not feel any fear.

Was this my guardian angel?

No. I don’t believe in such things. The idea that someone or something is stalking you and watching your every move is downright creepy.

No thanks. I can do without that sort of intense scrutiny.

So I decided that it could be the ghost of my great grandmother who had decided to take a quick visit to Earth to see how her great granddaughter had turned out.

She had died long before I was born but I knew about her because my mother had loved her dearly and told me about her.

Yes, I decided. That is who it is.

So I took one last look then pulled the blankets over my head, willing dawn to arrive.

Michelle 2008©

Michelle 2008©

MEG AND THE BLOWFLY (or Don't ask your family for help with fiction)

2008-12-20T06:40:00.003+10:00

(As the links to the right of my blog will reveal, I am part of a writers' group. We have monthly assignments that we can contribute and the fiction below is a response to one of the topics. The task involved writing about "diamond, fly and beer". My imagination produced the work below.)

“What noise does a blowfly make when it hits a window?” I asked the family.

“Buzzing.”

“No. No. Not buzzing. I can’t use that. It’s a cliché. I can’t use a cliché.”

Despite my concerns, the family vehemently insisted that buzzing was the only word for a distressed blowfly.

“I can’t use buzzing in my opening sentence.”

“Well don’t make it the opening sentence.” The son said.

“It has to be the opening sentence. The fly being trapped at the window sets up the storyline.”

‘Why?” The son asks.

“Because of my next sentence: “Tell me about it.” Meg scoffed. “I’ve been trapped in this house for 36 years. The last four have been in solitary confinement.”

“Who is Meg? Do I know her?” The son asks mischievously.

“Why is she trapped in the house?” The spouse asks.

“Because her children expect her to maintain the family home even though they never visit and she is left to pay all the ongoing expenses.”

“Why don’t her kids visit?”

“Because Andrew is a solicitor in London and Jody and her family live on the other side of the continent.”

“Why can’t her son be a Formula One driver or a C.I.A. agent?” The son asks.

“And why can’t Jody be a long haul truck driver?” The spouse asks.

“I need one of them to be settled and responsible.” I explain. “Meg has put the house on the market and she is going to travel Australia and New Zealand by house-sitting. So she needs one of them to be responsible for the family heirlooms.”

“What’s house-sitting?” The son asks.

“There are websites where you can contact people who need someone to live in their house, feed their pets, collect mail and look after their indoor plants and gardens while they are away for a period of weeks or months. You don’t get paid but you get free accommodation. I looked up the sites and some of the houses are in really nice places. So that is what Meg is going to do.”

The second half of the football game had resumed on TV and my advisors lost interest in my story.

Meg sorted through her meager collection of jewelry. She decided to keep her diamond engagement ring, her wedding ring, a string of pearls and three pairs of earrings.

She placed the rest into a padded postal bag and addressed it to Andrew.

She had been feeling lighter, happier and free since listing the house and shedding her chattels. Her aim was to fit her belongings into one large suitcase and one large piece of hand luggage.

Soon she would be an itinerant touring the country in her small car stopping off to house-sit now and then but basically she would have ‘no fixed address’.

“Just like Jody.” She smiled.

There was an ad break on the TV and the spouse strolled over with a cold can of beer.

“How is it going?”

“Good. I have decided to take your advice. Jody is going to be a long haul truck driver.”

Michelle © 2008

SURPLUS TO REQUIREMENTS

2008-06-08T22:59:00.005+10:00

(As the links to the right of my blog will reveal, I am part of a writers' group. We have monthly assignments that we can contribute and the fiction below is a response to one of the topics. The task involved writing about "an empty room, a window and a chair". My imagination produced the work below.)

“I’m here to look at the room.” Raine told the punk who answered her knock.

His pale face registered bewilderment.

“I’m meeting Rob Jamieson.”

“Ah, you’re a friend of Robbie’s. He hasn’t moved in yet.”

The slumped black-adorned figure suddenly became animated, “Knew him at boarding school. Great guitarist.”

He led her towards a large empty room.

“Biggest in the house.” He enthused. “I’ve got an upstairs bedroom. Shared kitchen and bathroom.”

They stood in the doorway. An incongruous pair. Michelle Phillips and Sid Vicious.

Raine wondered if he knew the Mamas and the Papas.

“Was it a lounge room?” She asked.

“Dunno. Look. Gotta go. Uni assignment to finish.” He sauntered off.

She wondered what uni course an anarchist would choose.

Raine looked into the room. There was a three pane window overlooking an unkempt garden and Milton Road.

A bay window, she decided. Not that she knew for certain. There were no bay windows in the suburb where she grew up.

She scanned the rest of the room and was surprised to find an abandoned chrome and vinyl chair, in good condition, in a corner.

“Surplus to requirement.”

A term used at her day job when returning stock.

She decided that the previous tenant, now graduated from uni, could afford more refined furniture.

“Move in with me.” Rob had insisted.

She examined Rob’s new residence. The floor boards were bare and grubby. The smoke-stained walls harboured the ghosts of posters long removed.

“You don’t love Barry.”

It wasn’t a question. Rob was 18 and certain about everything.

He was right and it was the reason why she had succumbed to her sexual attraction to the beautiful young Rob shortly after he joined the band.

There was no guilt. She was no longer the besotted 17 year old who’d caught the eye of the lead singer. Barry added her to his band when he found that she could carry a tune.

They had been living together for seven years now and it had become more of an arrangement than a relationship.

Raine knew her place.

She, like Michelle Phillips, had a sweet but somewhat weak voice. And she, like Michelle Phillips, was attractive, a drawcard for the male audience.

“He just wants to play covers on weekends. I want my own band, write my own songs. Music is my life.” Rob’s youthful enthusiasm was endearing. “I’ll buy a house in L.A. and London and Sydney. And you’ll be there.”

However, Raine knew that she would not be a part of his dream.

She didn’t like the new wave music and she believed that the punk movement was an excuse for middle class kids to dress up and act atrociously.

And she vividly recalled that look on Rob’s face when she questioned his lyrics and criticised his favourite songwriter.

It wasn’t disappointment or hurt. It was disdain.

Raine knew that, before too long, she would be surplus to requirement.

She tapped the doorway with the toe of her cork wedged sandal, unwilling to cross the threshold.

Fashion, not music, was her life.

The company had offered her a well paid management job in a new boutique opening in Indooroopilly Shoppingtown.

She’d seen a phone box at corner when she’d got off the bus.

Raine decided she would call her sister and ask if she could stay with her while she arranged a place of her own.

Michelle 2008 ©

MEET MY NEW PET: HUGHIE

2008-01-07T11:08:00.000+10:00

I have already stated previously that I am a great fan of spiders and you can read more about this in my post Spiders are our Friends from 2006. (I did try to link it but it won't work at the moment, sorry).

I even appreciate the poisonous spiders because I know that they have a role in the ecology.

In the past, when our spider population becomes too numerous outside our house, I know that I need not intervene because our good friends the Butcherbirds will come and feed upon them thus solving our problem.

So, why am I once again singing the praises of spiders?

Well, it all happened a number of months ago.

I had noted that the Daddy Long-Leg spiders were flourishing inside the house and I felt it was time to cull them. I refuse to use poisons so I normally use the vacuum cleaner to remove any over abundance of spiders.

Being extremely lazy, I waited a week or so before assembling the vacuum cleaner to suck up the unfortunate spiders and also to clean the rest of the house.

Having managed to work up enough energy to set about cleaning the house, I noticed that the Daddy Long-Leg spiders had disappeared.

I was a bit startled and somewhat confused. Where had they gone?

Before too long, I came to realise that there was another spider living amongst us. It was a Huntsman spider. I suspected that he (I decided it was a he but I am sure that any spider expert viewing the photograph will immediately know if I am correct) must be responsible for the disappearance of the Daddy Long-Leg spiders.

I loved him immediately and I told the family that he was my new pet and that his name was Hughie and that he was now a valued part of our family.

Note that there are cobwebs about him which indicates that Hughie was at work at the time this photograph was taken.

As Hughie was a member of the family, we were always concerned about his welfare and also we would always check to see where he was.

I must admit that no one in the family wished to have his presence in our bedrooms during the night. We loved him but we did not wish to worry about the possibility of him crawling about our bed and body parts during the night.

So, if he had moved towards a bedroom at night time, we would always relocate him back to the living area.

We also had another concern for Hughie's well being. And that was the presence of my beloved Burmese cat Bill. Whenever Hughie ventured to the lower regions of the walls, Bill considered that Hughie was on for a game.

I knew that any encounter would only end in tears so we would ensure that Hughie was returned to the upper regions of the walls whenever he ventured south.

When I began to write this blog, all was well in our household. However I do have to admit that, since taking the photograph, there was been an unfortunate event.

I have taken time out to grieve so now I feel strong enough to complete the tale.

One day late last year an unusual event took place. It began to rain. I got overly excited and I decided to take my indoor plant outside so that it could enjoy the shower of rain.

Okay, that wasn't the real reason. The real reason was that because I am extremely lazy I do not dust and therefore I was really just hoping that the rain would wash away the dust on the leaves of my Peace Lily.

As I placed it on the front lawn, I realised that Hughie had been resting in the pot plant. I was in a hurry so I made a bad decision. I decided that Hughie would be fine. I decided that Hughie would wend his way back inside the house. Why wouldn't he? He found his way in once before.

A couple of days passed by. No Hughie. Then one day I returned home to find a body beside the doormat at the front door. It was indeed Hughie.

I was somewhat distraught. It appeared that he had indeed tried to make his way back inside but was unable to complete the journey.

I must admit that I do feel that I am completely to blame.

VISIT MICHELLETOWN

2007-12-17T13:15:00.000+10:00

I have my own city. It is called Michelletown. I am Mayor and therefore I am in control of the planning scheme in my city.

There will be no intensive animal feedlots in my city. My city will respect the amenity of its residents and I will refuse to let greedy nasty environmentally bankrupt persons to live within my city limits.

My sister city is New Intersol. However, to learn more about New Intersol, one must visit Incognita's Museum of Dust.

Or just go to Red Bubble and visit Incognita's art.

We all need a city of our own.

LOOK WHAT I BOUGHT MYSELF FOR CHRISTMAS

2007-11-21T06:36:00.000+10:00

I have decided to usurp Santa Claus and give myself a Christmas present. I know I am a bit early in heralding in Christmas but my present had to travel all the way from the United States of America to my rural mail box in south east Queensland.

Yes, it is a coffee cup adorned with my beloved cartoon characters Bub n Bill. I am totally thrilled to see them appear in this format.

I must thank Cafepress for arranging this for me. I hasten to add that Cafepress will be totally unaware of this ringing endorsement. Also, because I am buying my own image, I will not be receiving any monetary reward for the sale.

The cup is available (for a price) at
http://www.cafepress.com/bubnbill

My next project is to have my little characters on a tee shirt from the Red Bubble website. I am currently trying to get the image into an appropriate format to upload it onto the Red Bubble site.

You can already buy my photographs as cards from
http://www.redbubble.com/people/michelle422
for AU$3.00

Check back soon to see how my tee shirt turns out.

THE ALARM CLOCK, MY DREAMS AND ME

2007-10-27T06:30:00.000+10:00

We had a brief loss of power the other night and that meant that the radio/alarm clock was flashing its red numbers to alert me to the fact that it had lost its memory.

Normally I wouldn't concern myself about this situation because the radio/alarm clock is my spouse's responsibility. He has to rise early each morning and therefore he is the one who relies on this electrical appliance to alert him that it is time to "rise and shine".

However, he was away overnight and, as I was to work in the morning, it seemed like a good idea for me to remedy the situation as I do like to know the time whenever I awake during the night.

So I picked up this little contraption and I started pressing each and every button until I managed to make the digital numbers move towards 9:00.

I cared not if it meant 9:00 in the am or the pm.

The task completed, I drifted off to sleep and into Dreamland which is always an interesting place to visit.

Well, I must tell you that I did not have a very peaceful night.

The radio/alarm clock activated a number of times throughout the night.

As the alarm regularly activated, I remember seeing numbers such as 12:something, 1:something, 2:something and 3:something.

There were probably more occasions but I may not recall them as I was not exactly lucid. I would have been in my REM sleeptime during those early hours.

The first time that I was awakened by the radio chattering away at me, I reached over and I pushed a few buttons.

Happily, I found that the top left hand button seemed to quell the radio chatter.

Well, that was until the next occasion and the many occasions to follow.

By 3.10 I decided to leave the radio on for a while. There must have been a change in the programming because I found that the chatter had finished and, instead, I was being serenaded by (or should that read "subjected to") country and western songs.

It wasn't long before I decided that I could not cope with any more of those sad little ditties and I had to take action.

I may well have become a little more lucid at this hour because I suddenly twigged to the reason why I was being tortured. Whilst I was indiscriminately pushing each and every button trying to set the time, I had somehow managed to programme in a number of alarms.

I had a bright idea, "Surely there is a volume button somewhere on this evil machine."

I poked about the bottom front of the machine and managed to push a button that stopped the country and western music. However it left me with a sort of hissing noise and I immediately guessed that all I had managed to do was to move away from the signal for the radio station.

I decided that I may be able to live with this noise and I rolled over in the hope of finding some more sleep.

But no, this new noise began to irritate me. It felt like I was sharing my bedroom with an angry snake.

Once more I reached across and pushed at buttons and at last I stumbled across the volume button. Peace at long last!

You may ask, "Why didn't you turn on the light and solve the situation earlier?"

Sure, in retrospect, that would seem to have been the sensible thing to do when I had the first alarm at about 12:something.

However when one is drunk with sleep, one does not function in a sensible manner.

And now to my dreams. Mostly they were very entertaining. And I was enjoying a particular dream where I was attending a party with family and friends.

I am guessing that this dream would have been about the time of the 3:something awakening which is a time when dreams can get a little weird. (Ah yes, there is a separate blog to write about my strange and silly early morning dreams!)

As I cuddled into my pillow I had hoped to rejoin the party and as I tried to reenter the dream, I found myself confronted with an image something like:

Yes, my subconscious was asking me to verify my access to my subconscious.

Me thinks I am spending too much time commenting on Blogs on the Internet.

THE DAY I COULD HAVE DROWNED

2007-10-04T09:01:00.000+10:00

When I was in my late teens, I found myself caught in a very strong rip at a Sunshine Coast beach and I was quickly towed out to the deeper waters of the Pacific Ocean.

As I drifted further out, I realised that I was in danger of either being drowned due to exhaustion or being attacked by a shark.

It was also possible that if I continued too far out to sea and I ventured into the commercial shipping lane, I may be hit and run over by a passing cargo ship.

Admittedly, I have never been a strong swimmer, but I do believe that the main reason I found myself being washed out to sea was due to the fact that I was unfamiliar with this particular beach. I wasn't aware of its possible dangers.

During this period of my life, I had spent many weekends enjoying our Queensland beaches but I would usually visit the Gold Coast area.

And, knowing that I was not a strong swimmer, I would always swim in the area of the beach that was patrolled by our wonderful volunteer lifesavers.

This particular day I entered the water with the intention of playing about in the waves close to the edge of the beach.

When a wave approaches you, you decide upon one of three responses.

You can begin swimming toward the shore, hoping to be caught up by the wave, and thus experience the thrill of body surfing.

Or you can choose to leap up and be lifted by the wave. Or alternatively, after pinching your nostrils together and shutting your eyes, you can dive beneath the wave and then resurface after it has passed over you.

I may have tried one or all of those options however, on this day, there was a rip that I was not able to overcome.

For those who aren't quite sure just what I am talking about, I will add a definition of a rip that I found on a website from Australian Government Department of Environment and Water Resources.

"Concentrated currents flowing back to sea perpendicular to the shoreline. Rip currents are caused by wave action piling up water on the beach. Feeder currents running parallel to the shore (longshore currents) deliver water to the rip current."

After I was tugged behind the first break of waves, I found myself dealing with a second break of waves further out to sea.

Again, any action I took was futile. I simply drifted out to the deeper waters and it became quite clear to me that I was in trouble.

I remained calm whilst deciding upon my fate and the thoughts of sharks and the shipping lane passed through my head.

I was calm because I have never been afraid of deep water. Unlike my older sister who always insisted that she needed to touch the bottom of the pool, I preferred to bob about in the deep end. The deeper the body of water, the easier it is to float and gracefully tread water.

Obviously I did not drown, get savaged by a shark or run down by a cargo ship.

Fortunately for me, as I drifted out I came across a young fellow atop a surfboard. I politely told him that I was in trouble and he allowed me to hold onto his surfboard as he raised his arm to alert the lifesavers that there was some stupid female in need of rescue.

I did not experience a skerrick of humiliation over becoming a public spectacle that day. All I felt was intense gratitude.

I will always be grateful to that lovely young man and his surfboard and I continue to have great admiration for those selfless lifesavers who sprang into action and brought me back to land.

I am also grateful for the opportunity to learn to swim that I and my peers were given during our primary school years.

It is an interesting recollection that I shall pass on in the very near future.

WHAT YOU DO WHEN IT DOESN'T RAIN?

2007-08-17T11:50:00.000+10:00

The drought continues. It is difficult watching our garden wilt and noting that native trees, which are decades old, appear to be dying.

The frosts were extremely biting this Winter and I have vowed not to tend our garden until late September just in case there is yet another very late Spring frost.

The return to a normal frosty Winter does give hope that we may be returning to a normal weather pattern which would mean rain may again fall.

So, what do you do when it doesn't rain? Well, you can't garden but you can still leave the house and take photographs.

I know this is silly but one needs to keep a sense of humour. The feral cactus (or is that cactii) is the only green thing on the farm. I decided to taunt them.

At least I have the wallabies! They eat from my struggling garden but their dear little faces melt my heart.

I THINK THE LAWN NEEDS MOWING DAD

2007-07-23T10:50:00.000+10:00

This old farm house harboured a family of seven for many years until it was superceded by a brand new brick house built elsewhere on the farm.

Perhaps, with a hammer and a few nails and a coat of paint, it may be restored.

Hmm, perhaps not.

One thing I know for sure, those vacant rooms would still recall the love, laughter and tears of the missing family.

IF IT IS WINTER, DON’T PLAY YOUR PETER ALLEN CD

2007-07-13T14:39:00.000+10:00

It is winter in South East Queensland and it has been very cold.

Last weekend we witnessed sleet hitting the ground!

I don’t like winter here on the Darling Downs. We have thick white frosts and something called a wind chill factor that means it is colder than the temperature gauge tells us.

Also ice forms in my birdbaths making it quite treacherous for the birds as they skate across the ice looking for actual water.

My aversion to winter is understandable given that I was born and bred in balmy Brisbane where, even on the coldest winter day, you just popped a cardigan over your usual summer clothes.

So you won’t be surprised to hear that I am rather depressed.

“Feeling lower than a snake’s belly.” I informed my good friend Juanita.

This is an unusual situation for me as I am not prone to low moods.

I have always been very resilient.

In the past, when something bad happened to me, I would think, “Okay, that’s happened. I’ll accept it. This is my new baseline. Now I will just get on with life again.”

Obviously it is more than winter that is draining my spirits at the moment but I won’t complain.

Okay, I will.

I have a severely burnt finger that is restricting my every activity. I expect to lose my job by next March. My arthritis is torturing me. I miss our cattle which were sold off last month. I would like to have chooks but the foxes are rampant. Etc., etc. and so on.

Now Juanita had a good suggestion. She thought that I may be afflicted by Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.) which is also known as seasonal depression. It is a depression that occurs each year at the same time, usually starting in autumn/winter and ending in spring, or early summer. It has something to do with a lack of sunlight upon one’s body. There is much more to it than that but, frankly, I am too depressed to extrapolate upon it today.

As Juanita has a medical background, I thought I would take her advice and get more sun.

So I decided to hobble up to our distant mailbox which gave me about 10 minutes in the sun.

Then I sat in a sunny spot at the rear of our house and unpicked the hem of my spouse’s trousers as they need shortening. Again more sun upon my less than sunny person.

But eventually I felt that I had been exposed to too much sun. After all, this is Queensland which is in a drought at the moment.

So, when I needed to take up needle and thread to complete the new hem, I decided that I would snuggle into my recliner rocker lounge chair and listen to music as I sewed.

What to choose? Fat Boy Slim, Dean Martin, Crowded House, Rammstein, John Lennon, Michael Buble, one or all of the three tenors, Tom Jones?

Then I spied “The Very Best of Peter Allen” CD.

“Yes! That will be good for a change.” I told myself.

I love Peter Allen and I wish he was still alive to entertain us.

I had seen him interviewed a number of times over the years and he had such a delightful happy personality with a quick wit and, well, he was downright hilarious.

In one interview I watched, he spoke about when he narrated the documentary “Deadly Australians”. It was about some of Australia’s most feared creatures on land and water. This 1983 video introduced us to the shark, the giant squid, the barracuda, sea snakes, black widow spiders and scorpions.

During the interview, Peter told of the moment where he was thigh deep in the waters of North Queensland uttering something like, “In these waters reside some of the most deadly creatures in Australia” and, of course, his immediate concern as he uttered these words was that perhaps he should not actually be standing in the “said” waters.

I popped the CD into the stereo and sat down and threaded the needle.

It started so well with song number one, “I go to Rio”, which is such a festive upbeat song. I was singing along and my toes were tapping.

Then came song number two. It was all about love gone wrong.

Song number three evoked the tragic figure of the talented Judy Garland struggling on stage.

Song number four was a tale of inappropriate and unrequited love.

Song number five was about a co-dependent relationship with a dodgy future.

Song number six was yet another shaky relationship with the threat “don’t push me over the borderline because anything can happen”.

Next came “Don’t cry out loud” with the advice “learn to hide your feelings” and a rather lame attempt to cheer the protagonist by telling her “remember you almost had it all”!

By the time “Tenterfield Saddler” got under way, a song about his grandfather and the suicide of Peter’s father, there were tears running down my cheeks.

Well, given my already S.A.D. condition, I had made a very bad choice. The bigger worry to me was that all these tragic songs were written or co-written by Peter.

Clearly I should have popped in the Rammstein CD. They have a driving beat with repetitive riffs and they thump and bash away on what sounds like an empty metal industrial rubbish bin. They “sing” the lyrics with a threatening growl.

But I do like their music.

And the best thing is that they sing in German and, as my knowledge of the language is minimal, I have no concerns about their lyrics causing me to cry.

But, back to Peter, I have decided to chase up a book about his very eventful life. However I won’t be reading it until the middle of summer.

ONCE IN A BLUE MOON

2007-07-02T07:22:00.000+10:00

Below is a photograph of the blue moon on 30th June, 2007 in Australia.

But is it really an authentic blue moon?

Well I have just done the research for this question.

You have to love Wikipedia and Google search. I do.

Whenever I want to know everything about anything I log into these websites.

They are so much more user friendly than the traditional encyclopaedias.

So I logged in to Wikipedia this morning because I wanted to find out a little more about the occurrences of blue moons.

It seems that, by referring to this second full moon in one month as a blue moon, I am only partly correct.

Wikipedia told me that what we had in June was a calender blue moon based on the Gregorian calendar.

There is an older meaning of blue moon which makes it a rarer occasion, hence our popular saying, "Once in a blue moon."

In the 1800s, the Maine Farmer's Almanac's defined a blue moon as the third full moon in a quarter of the year when there were four full moons rather than the usual three full moons.

Furthermore, their definition divided the year into quarters with the dividing line set between March 21 and March 22. This related to the rule for setting the date for the Christian Holy Day of Easter, which depends on the last full moon on or before the Equinox.

Okay, now my brain is hurting a tad as I am struggling to understand all that but what I do understand is that this original meaning was lost for a while after the editors of the original Farmer's Almanac died.

Of course the term has also been used when referring to the actual colour of the moon where it appears bluish due to atmospheric events such as smoke or dust particles.

Whatever the correct definition, there is nothing as mesmerising as a full moon no matter what the colour.

Wikipedia has told me that the next blue moon will be in May, 2008. And it will be one of those rarer blue moons.

So I will return with another photograph in about 10 months.

MEET MY TATTOO

2007-06-14T10:01:00.001+10:00

Last weekend we went to the Queensland Gold Coast to visit with family.

It was an excellent weekend to drive south east for three hours for two reasons.

The first reason being that Queensland was experiencing one of Australia's favourite events commonly known as "The Long Weekend".

It was a long weekend because we had a public holiday on Monday the 11th of June so that we could celebrate the birthday of the Queen of England.

Now just why we Queenslanders have a holiday for Queen Elizabeth the Second on a day which isn't actually her birthday is a discussion I don't wish to enter into today.

All I will say is that if it means we have an extra day attached to the weekend then I am not about to complain.

The second reason for it being a really good idea to run away from home is because winter has finally arrived. We live in the coldest region of Queensland so leaving home for a warmer climate was an extremely good idea even if it was for just a day or two.

And it was a glorious warm sunny day come Sunday as we strolled about the Wintersun Festival at Coolangatta on the Gold Coast.

This festival is all about celebrating Rock 'n Roll music and Rock 'n Roll dancing and the magnificent cars from pre-1974. For a taste of it visit here.

We strolled amidst a throng of people gawking at the beautifully restored vehicles and bopping along to the many bands playing live music.

And I am pleased to be able to report to you that Elvis is not dead. Indeed, given his continued popularity over the decades, it seems he had the good sense to have cloned himself because I saw him, well a number of variations of himself, amongst the crowd.

No, people, Elvis is not dead.

Now there were markets in the park at Coolangatta and that is where I spied the tattoo stall. I told the spouse that I thought it would be a good idea if I were to get a tattoo.

Surprisingly, he thought it was a good idea as well. So I chose my tattoo and I had it applied to the inside of my left wrist.

I chose this particular tattoo with my daughter in mind.

In the recent past, she has mentioned to me that she would like to have a tattoo similar to the one I have just acquired (but much larger) placed on her lower back.

The long horned cow is a symbol of the very popular company started by the late R. M. Williams.

See the authentic symbol here.

Well, being a responsible mother, I told her that if she actually carried out that procedure then I would have to kill her because no daughter of mine was going to desecrate her body with something as nasty as a tattoo.

Her response to her mother's recent folly was as follows:

LOL. Dag!! Mum's mid-life crisis. Next you will be riding Harley's and getting piercing's. So that means I can get one too then?

Well, of course, I responded immediately, "No, you can't get one. I only got it so that I could show you how silly they look."

Alas, my tattoo will only be with me for a week.

And, alas, the daughter knew immediately that it was a temporary tattoo.

But I do try to educate my children by displaying good and bad examples in life.

A couple of years ago I purchased a fake belly ring and come Christmas Day I donned the hipster shorts and walked about so that the son and daughter could see my latest (pretend) piercing. Up until then my first and only piercing was just the one hole in each ear for earrings.

The son was appalled. He looked at me as if I was some sort of freak.

Ah, those were the days! Days when I could shock my children.

My only regret about the tattoo is that I have bitterly disappointed my good friend Juanita. I had emailed her a photo of my acquistion from the Gold Coast and unfortunately she thought that it was a permanent tattoo. She thought that I had been audacious.

So very sorry Juanita!

I HEAR MUSIC IN MY HEAD

2007-05-25T10:59:00.000+10:00

We meet many people during our lives and some of those people tend to remain in our memory. We even recall people we met only briefly and whose names escape us. No doubt we remember them because there was something about those individuals that left us wondering about how they would manage in the future.

I mention this because I wish to write about a young man I met whilst working in Sydney a very, very long time ago.

This memory was triggered early one morning when I could not sleep and I had a sudden suspicion that I was experiencing tinnitus. I became aware that there was a humming sound in my head and I thought, “I wonder if this is tinnitus.”

The noise sounded like two rather pleasant notes recurring over and over in my left ear.

I then thought, “If this is tinnitus then I can cope with a bit of music playing in my head.”

It was the thought of music in my head that triggered the conversation with the young man.

I don’t remember spending much time with him at work because I do believe that he wasn’t one of the regular people on my shift. He may have been filling in for someone on the night we had the interesting conversation that left me wondering about how his life panned out.

When we met, he had just finished his last year at high school and, as he had to wait a few months before beginning his university course, he had started work at the bank.

Our job involved shiftwork at the computer centre of the bank and I do know that the conversation occurred on a night when we were working the graveyard shift. There was nowhere to go during the meal break so we would spend that time with co-workers.

During our conversation, I asked what course he had chosen to do at uni and he said that he was going to do Law.

I must have appeared to be an empathetic listener because it wasn’t too long into our conversation before he began to confide in me.

He told me that it was his parents who wanted him to do Law. Obviously he had the academic ability to complete the course and they had decided that he would, indeed, do the course.

When I asked what he wanted to do, he said that he wanted to write music. He said that he heard music in his head and, as he tried to explain it to me, I could sense how important his need to capture this music was to him.

And he wasn’t talking about simple little “rock and roll ditties” but complex symphonies.

I was only a year or two older than him but I felt the need to offer some sort of reassurance and advice.

No doubt I would have told him that I completely understood about the concept of hearing music in his head because my head is always filled with words that swirl about until they formed into sentences and then formed into prose and eventually it becomes essential that those words are written down so that my head is left vacant allowing the process to begin all over again.

My advice at the time was that, if he couldn’t go against his parents’ wishes, he would always have his music and he may be able to concentrate on it sometime in the near future.

I do wonder if he ever had the chance to follow his passion. I hope he did.

My regret is that I can not remember his name so that I can Google it and find out whether the music in his head was written down and eventually performed by an orchestra.

The music in my head does continue. I am not sure if it is tinnitus or not.

I remember that my maternal grandmother would complain about her tinnitus so I have always been aware of this condition. My grandmother was very irritated about this constant noise in her ear and she would bitterly complain about it.

Given my suspicions about hearing music in my head, I did a bit of research and I found a most helpful site:

http://www.tinnitus.asn.au/tinnitus.htm

I have learnt that the word "tinnitus" means "tinkling or ringing like a bell". I have also learnt that tinnitus is usually a roaring, buzzing, or ringing sound in the ear. This site even has audio of the noises that tinnitus can produce.

My two recurring pleasant notes don’t seem typical of the experience. Maybe, like my co-worker, I am simply hearing music in my head. Although I am not sure that I can build a symphony upon those two notes.

CRIKEY, THERE IS A SNAKE IN THE GARAGE

2007-05-10T10:38:00.000+10:00

My beloved cat, Bill the brown Burmese, has his bedroom in our large double car garage. It is the best room in the house. It is cool in summer due to the concrete floors and the added insulation of being beneath the bedroom and bathroom section of the house. Also it is warm in winter as the bricks retain the heat and there are a number of windows which provide many pools of sunshine for Bill to sleep and to sunbake in.

Below is a picture of baby Bill when he was not much larger than a mouse.

When he is not in his bedroom, Bill is in the house on a bed or a lap. And, when he is not sleeping, he is pestering me for food.

I do allow him to venture outside the house on occasion but I do worry about his wellbeing as the farm is awash with dangers. There are snakes, of course, and you will hear more about them soon. And there are many feral cats, against which Bill has tested his fighting skills with unfortunate results.

I also try to limit his outdoor life because I don’t want him to practise his hunting skills on the local native birds and baby hares.

Fortunately he is intimidated by the birds that frequent my bird baths. They will squawk loudly at him and at times they will execute bomb dives towards him and he will retreat with his ears back and his tail between his legs.

When we are away from the farm, we always ensure that Bill is left safe and sound in his bedroom garage.

Well, we had always assumed he was safe and sound until a recent event when we found that we were in need of Steve Irwin and his snake handling skills.

I must digress here to say that I still find it difficult to accept the sudden death last year of my fellow Queenslander, the endearingly zealous and genuine conservationist, Steve Irwin.

Back to the event. It occurred on a Saturday night when we were relaxing with a drink, watching TV and Bill had retired to his bedroom. The son heard a noise coming from the garage and he remarked upon it. The spouse dismissed it assuming that it was Bill having a bit of a tussle with one of our many resident green tree frogs.

But the son wasn’t convinced and he felt that the sound was different and he went down to the garage to investigate. Suddenly we heard him yell, “Snake!”

The spouse, displaying a dose of optimism, said it may just be the blue tongue lizard that has been living in our yard. However he was soon to discover that it was a large and deadly brown snake.

Yes, Bill and a snake were having a bit of a dust up in the garage. Bill was taking an occasional swipe at the snake and the snake was lunging at him in defence.

We grabbed Bill from the garage and I took him to the kitchen where I started wiping his paws and body with a wet rag in order to remove any venom on his fur.

We all know how cats react to having nasty substances on their bodies.

“Oh dear, what is that on my coat. Best lick it off.”

The daughter decided that water was not enough to cleanse Bill so she got out the antiseptic and tipped it in a plastic container of water and she gathered a number of rags and she started to drown the poor cat in this solution.

Her actions only added to my distress. Will Bill die from an unseen puncture wound from the snake or will he die from ingesting the antiseptic solution after his next bout of grooming?

Meanwhile the spouse is in the garage with a torch and a spade trying to coax the brown snake out of his hiding place so he could dispose of it.

As a born and bred country lad, this wasn’t the spouse’s first encounter with a snake nor will it be the last.

The brave son was milling about behind his (extremely brave) father armed with a hoe and giving his father much moral support and lots of advice.

I was somewhere between the two events, that is, the drowning and/or poisoning of Bill in the kitchen and the dangerous "Steve Irwin" activity in the garage.

It should be noted here that snakes are a “protected species” in Australia. And that is fair enough if they would go about their business avoiding us as keenly as we try to avoid them. But when they enter the sanctum of your home it is another matter. We have the right to be just as much of a “protected species” as they are.

Also I would like to mention at this point that Australia has severe gun laws which restrict the ownership of guns to people who have a legitimate reason to own a gun and a gun licence. These people include farmers needing to cull feral animals and people who use guns for sport such as target shooting.

Oddly enough, criminals are not subject to any restrictions whatsoever upon their ownership and purchase of weapons or their ability to use their weapons on human beings rather than feral animals and shooting targets.

I don’t know why this is. Perhaps I should ask this current Howard Government who imposed these gun laws upon the non-criminal population about this anomaly.

I mention guns here because it would have been foolish of my spouse to have tried to “wing” the snake using his legal weapon given that all surfaces were concrete and brick. The ricochets would have made it very interesting indeed.

After a tense time, the snake was eventually “subdued”.

The Australian Eastern Brown Snake (Pseudonaja textilis) is one of Australia's more deadly creatures. They are fast-moving and aggressive and they have venom which can cause death to humans relatively quickly if left untreated. Brown snakes are not always brown and they can grow to over 6 feet in length and they are even claimed to be the world's second most deadly snakes.

After the encounter with the snake was ended, we had the long wait to see if Bill was going to start to display the telltale signs that he had been struck by the snake and in need of antivenom from the emergency veterinary clinic which was a good 30 minute car trip away.

We all watched his every move and he seemed to be okay and he even tried to return to the garage to finish off the argument with the snake.

The spouse's theory as to why Bill survived the encounter was because snakes are not good at moving about on concrete and it may not have been able to get enough of a grip on the slippery surface to make a really solid strike and therefore make good contact on Bill’s body.

Whatever the reason we are grateful for his survival. It was not his fault that his bedroom was invaded. The snake came into his haven, his bedroom. It may have been able to slip though the gap between the floor and the garage doors. Or it could have snuck in when the doors were open.

We are currently experiencing a drought so it is inevitable that the snakes may come in search of water in and about the house.

We have had a number of snakes arrive in the garage over the years.

And Bill has had three snake encounters that we have witnessed. Who knows what happens when he is on his boundary rides of the farm?

I should mention that Bill also survived his encounter with the antiseptic solution.

Below is a picture of older Bill relaxing.

The son was well pleased with Bill’s new odour. He insisted that everyone in the family have a very deep sniff of Bill because for once he smelt wonderful rather than his usual dusty, musty old cat scent.

Now I fear that the son may decide to take an antiseptic bath himself.

I LOVE A SUNBURNT COUNTRY AND HER CONTRASTING VIEWS

2007-05-01T10:16:00.000+10:00

We recently visited my in-laws who live at the Gold Coast, Queensland. It is about a three hour drive from our farm.

The contrast of views from their home and the views from our home evokes a well known poem My Country © 1904 by Dorothea MacKellar. I have quoted extracts from her poem.

Below is the view from the balcony of the third storey beachfront unit.

I love her jewel-sea

The view below shows a couple of the beaches south of the unit and also the mountains west.

The sapphire-misted mountains

This morning I took some photographs of my autumn views of the farm. We are experiencing a drought at present.

The view below is looking from the front of the house.

Her pitiless blue sky

The view below is from the rear of the house. It is the view I see as I wash the dishes, making it a pleasant task.

You may notice Pod (see post dated Janury 1st)who remains incarcerated in our sturdy yards due to his continued bad behaviour.

Over the thirsty paddocks

Though earth holds many splendours, wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country my homing thoughts will fly.

Bit too sentimental of me I suppose but I do love my country.

THE ATTACK OF THE PAPER WASPS

2007-04-16T07:24:00.000+10:00

Paper wasps (Polistes humilis) are vicious, vengeful insects.

I don’t wish to dwell too much upon their lives because, if I had my way, I would eradicate the entire population.

However I did wonder what role they played upon this planet.

Well, I was most outraged when I found the answer.

My reluctant research found that the only beneficial value they have is as predators of pest caterpillars.

Now, as far as I am concerned, that emphatically deems paper wasps superfluous to Earth’s needs.

I am sure that we have a large number of benign creatures who are already filling the role of curtailing an excessive population of caterpillars.

For example, we have a host of pretty, happy, timid-natured and music-making birds on our planet who quietly go about their business cleaning up pests (including caterpillars I am sure) without causing pain to the rest of the world.

Okay, you may have already guessed that I have been a recent victim of a paper wasp attack.

It wasn’t the first time, mind. I have been caught unawares a few times over the years but after a good dose of swearing and the application of ice upon the sting sites I normally settle down and I usually do not harbour the desire to see the extinction of an entire species.

However this last attack was unforgivable and unforgettable and I am going to insist that you relive the terror with me.

It began on a pleasant February Monday afternoon. We had received a shower of rain earlier that day and, because we are experiencing continued dry times lately, I was curious as to how much water had fallen into the rain gauge.

As suspected, it was a pittance. I tipped it out and as I walked away I found that I had company. About five paper wasps were pursuing me and stinging me on various parts of my anatomy.

I screamed loudly to alert the family that I was in peril and I moved as swiftly away from my attackers as my aged body would allow.

The family quickly sourced the ice for my wounds and all should have been okay.

But no, this time I was going to experience a serious reaction.

Whilst struggling with my heart palpitations and acute pain, I wondered where these nasty beings had nested.

We soon discovered that they had built a large condominium underneath our rain gauge. It could only have been a day or so in construction because it was only a day or so since I had visited the rain gauge.

Below is a photograph of the remnants of that nest.

Fortunately, the spouse has perfected a method to eradicate the paper wasps which leaves their nest vacant thus allowing me (weeks after the shock had subsided) to photograph the empty condominium which is now available for passing vandals and graffiti gangs to do what they do best.

Revenge is sweet!

Back to the day of the attack.

I soon started to get extremely itchy all over my body. I was feeling most anxious and agitated and I knew I was in trouble.

I searched the cupboard shelf that is designated to medicinal bits and pieces and I could not find any antihistamines.

We didn't even have a salve for the stings.

I was acutely aware that, as a caretaker of the family, I had failed us all in terms of ready remedies for any repercussions from stinging insects.

Within an hour my body was covered in a red rash. The area around my eyes turned bright red and became astoundingly swollen. My left hand began to balloon.

I had a cold shower but it didn’t help.

I kept rubbing ice on the sting sites and I soaked a cloth washer in ice water before placing it all over my body which was becoming increasingly red and inflamed.

Later, when the daughter came home, we asked if she had any antihistamine in her possession. She did have the drug so I took it. A double dose, as you do.

After a few hours the rash was going away and the redness and itchiness subsided somewhat but my left hand remained swollen.

I do remember sustaining a couple of stings on my left hand and it must have been a similar situation to having an injection of poison into one of the veins.

There were other sting sites but the most vivid recollection was the one on my left buttock which went through my shorts and my cotton undies.

The drama continued on Tuesday as my hand continued to swell and then the swelling crept up my wrist and arm (see below).

I did ring the doctor’s office but there were no appointments available so the receptionist put me through to the registered nurse who told me to keep taking the antihistamines and to keep the hand on ice and elevated.

I had to go to the chemist that day to pick up some medication and that is where I came across a piece of good fortune.

Our usual pharmacist wasn't there that day and when the relieving pharmacist looked at my dramatically swollen hand and arm she said, "Oh that happened to me recently and it took 10 days to go away and I just took antihistamines and the doctor finally put me on prednisone."

Well, what a relief!

I told her that I was currently on prednisone due to my arthritis and when I told her the dose she said that it was probably the same amount she had been prescribed.

Wednesday morning it was still swollen but it wasn't as red and it wasn't aching as much. So I began to believe that my hand would one day return to its normal size and it did deflate later in the week.

Whilst awaiting on the deflation, the sight of my hand was constantly alarming the general public. And I was teased and laughed at by my family who told me I looked like I had an ill-fitting prosthesis.

It could have been worse. It could have been my right hand and that would have been more inconvenient for me.

My brave spouse has been scanning the exterior of the house and yard looking for any new nests. He has found a further 3 nests.

Late in the afternoon when the wasps are less waspish he sneaks up on them and douses them in petrol and they die instantly.

Yes, revenge is very very sweet.

We will continue to engage in this War on Wasps.

BUB N BILL CARTOON - GOLDFISH

2007-04-07T13:32:00.000+10:00

"Bub n Bill" on cups http://www.cafepress.com/bubnbill

MEET OUR AMPHIBIANS – GREEN TREE FROG

2007-03-21T06:41:00.000+10:00

Below is a photograph of a Green Tree Frog (Litoria caerulea) which is the second most distributed frog in Australia.

Now, the more observant individuals will have noticed something amiss.

Yes! That Green Tree Frog is no where near a tree!

That Green Tree Frog is sitting on our shower curtain.

This is not an unusual situation. Our family has showered with frogs, on and off, for decades and we don’t like it at all.

Picture this. You are naked, wet and soaped up with one eye on the frog. Now I say frog, as in singular, but that is not always the case. More often than not it is frogs, as in plural.

Showering naked, except for a touch of froth here and there, whilst a frog looks on is most unnerving.

Showering as a frog hops and flops about that small enclosed area is extremely terrifying.

So, as you closely track the erratic movements of these green pests, parts of your anatomy are inevitably overlooked as you hurriedly soap up and flush off the most important bits.

Your only concern is to finish your ablutions before a cool clammy amphibian loses direction and flops upon your naked body.

Now, much has been said about frogs and our environment.

You know that guff about how the presence of frogs and their health and their happiness is a gauge of the health and the happiness of our environment.

Well, in our part of the world, the environment is far too healthy and far too happy with far too many healthy and happy frogs.

There was a time a few years ago when I counted up to 15 frogs of varying sizes in about our old toilet cistern.

Okay, the old toilet cistern did have a loose lid but that wasn’t an open invitation for all the frogs in the neighbourhood to come from far and wide to take up residence in our toilet.

And I am well aware why they have come to live with us. It is all about easy fast food for lazy amphibians.

We live on a farm which means that there are an enormous number of insects that flock to our windows at night, attracted by the house lights.

All these lazy frogs have to do is to flop up out of the toilet and onto the external walls and windows of the house to indulge in a veritable smorgasbord from the insect world.

One year the health and happiness of our environment became more than I could bear so I got a bucket with a lid and I captured a very large amount of these green pests and relocated them to another part of the farm that could offer them water and sanctuary.

It culled the number for a while.

A year or so ago, we replaced the old frog friendly toilet cistern with a brand new unit. I had hoped that the neat fit of the lid to the cistern would mean that the frogs would be unable to take a dip in the cistern and this would curtail their attraction to our toilet and shower room.

Alas, my hopes were quickly dashed. The frogs still live in and about the toilet and shower room.

They also continue to deposit their usual copious amounts of frog poo all about the room.

Today, as I entered the room, I was met with an extremely unpleasant odour. The toilet was flushed so I immediately knew what the problem was.

I lifted our seemingly well sealed cistern lid and my suspicions were confirmed. There, floating about in the water was a decaying frog.

How, when and why it died is of no concern to me.

How I was going to remove it was the immediate challenge.

So I fiddled about the internal workings of this new cistern and finally managed to extract this putrid being.

Then I had to spend the next few hours trying to convince my lurching stomach to calm down and not to throw up my breakfast.

Green Tree frogs are not one of my favourite creatures residing on the farm.

MY EXCELLENT TIPS FOR PERMANENT WEIGHT LOSS

2007-03-09T10:50:00.000+10:00

Recently I toyed with the idea of writing a book that would help people to attain financial freedom. The working title was “Two Steps to Wealth”.

You can read about this flight of fancy on my part by clicking upon this link.

Well, I haven’t gotten very far with the book. One reason is that I have no idea about financial matters beyond the advice to stop spending recklessly.

The other reason is that I haven’t been given an incentive to scribble something down because, to date, no one has forwarded on Oprah’s personal mobile number to me. I had hoped to launch my book on her show.

Lately I have been thinking that the concept of financial freedom may be greatly overrated.

I have two words to explain this hunch. Howard Hughes.

Howard Hughes ended up with an enormous amount of financial freedom. And where did it take him? Into a self-created prison because of his Obessive-Compulsive Disorder where he faded from public view and became an eccentric recluse.

The most bizarre piece of information I found from Wikipedia was not the bit about him not cutting his fingernails and hair but that the first doctor to examine his body diagnosed the cause of Hughes' death as neglect.

Yep, financial freedom may not be all its cracked up to be.

Now, I would like to introduce to you my latest idea for a self-help book that I hope I can flog on the Oprah Show.

Again, if I am able to make an appearance on her show and “talk the talk”, I expect to sell millions of copies and then find myself with lots of financial freedom.

I know, it was a bad thing for Howard, but I have a lot of family and friends who will pull me into line if I start to go weird.

My new book will be called “My Excellent Tips for Permanent Weight Loss”.

Usually, readers will check the covers of these self-help books to find out what qualifications the authors can produce so that the reader can feel confident that the advice is legitimate.

So let me outline my qualifications. I am a human being who eats food, I am not overweight and I have a university degree in Psychology. So there!

This is just an introduction to my book so I want to be brief and therefore I will list my tips in point form.

1. CHOOSE YOUR PARENTS CAREFULLY

This is very important.

Okay, I know that by the time you are born your choice of parents is null and void. But what I am trying to point out to you is that you are a product of your inherited genes.

An ideal parent would be the Australian-born supermodel Elle McPherson. She is very tall and naturally thin. And she looks good in a bikini which is not a bad thing.

With Elle as your parent, there is every chance that you will be tall and therefore you will have lots of places to put your weight.

Danny DeVito is a good actor but he would not be an asset as a parent. He is short and, hence, there is less room on his body to disperse any excess weight that he acquires.

What I am trying to tell you here is that you should take a look at your parents and your grandparents and any other relatives because what they have passed on to you, in terms of genes, is your baseline.

Accept your inheritance and don’t have unrealistic expectations about how you will be able to change your body weight or shape.

Very, very few of us will look like Elle. All we can hope for is a healthy and normal weight version of the body we have inherited.

2. EAT LESS AND EAT SLOWLY

Eat less if you are overweight. Simple advice.

There are a number of ways to do this. The best advice is to use a smaller plate when you are piling food upon your plate. Remember the old saying, “Your eyes are bigger than your belly” and heed it.

Also use smaller glasses when drinking beverages.

The other crucial tip is to eat slowly.

Wolfing down large amounts of food and beverages may be exciting for your taste buds and your brain but it is going to really piss off your stomach.

3. DRINK WATER

Yes, water. That stuff that God gave us.

Stop guzzling down all those “sugary, caffeine loaded and Lord knows what else are in them” drinks.

And don't go drinking some "sports drink" or "energy drink" after walking from your car to the shop and deciding that you are thirsty and you need to become part of the advertising image you saw last night on TV.

The 'sports drinks' are special cocktails that are designed for athletes so that they can rehydrate and replenish elcetrolytes, sugar and other nutrients to compensate for their depleted supplies after strenuous training or competition.

"Energy drinks are designed for people who are energetic. They are meant to give a boost of energy to people who have already spent energy.

'Energy drinks' and 'sport drinks' aren't designed for some sedentary clown.

Water contains no calories. So respect water.

Having said that, red wine is a great source of antioxidants which are good at destroying those free radicals running rampant in your body with a view to possibly causing some sort of cancer.

I don’t know what that means exactly but if it means you can drink wine with your meals then it must be a good thing.

4. EAT WHATEVER YOU LIKE, WHENEVER YOU LIKE

Now this is the most controversial advice I can give you but it is the best advice I can give you.

Why? Because knowing that you can eat whatever you like, whenever you like, frees you from that damaging mindset that says losing weight is all about deprivation.

I am not alone with this theory.

A number of years ago, I actually witnessed a guest (with a book to flog) on Oprah’s show who uttered this very same advice.

When she said it, I called out from my recliner rocker lounge chair, “Right on, Sister!”.

Then I heard a very audible and communal gasp from the audience.

I was so disappointed with them. How little faith they must have in their self control when it comes to food?

It is that sense of deprivation that leads to binge eating and those unrealistic promises to “go on a diet” next week.

You don’t have to “go on a diet”. What you eat IS your DIET.

Restricting your calorie intake by forcing yourself to eat food you don’t like will NEVER work.

Always eat what you want to eat but think about what you eat before putting it into your mouth.

If you want a chocolate biscuit then eat it guilt-free. When you don’t feel guilt you are more likely to only eat one or two.

If you think you shouldn’t eat chocolate biscuits EVER, then you will find yourself guzzling down a whole packet of chocolate biscuits and promising yourself that you will “go on a diet” next week.

Again, and I know I am labouring the point here, my tip is to eat a little amount of those bad foods you like to eat BUT make sure you eat a lot of the foods that you know are good for you.

Simple advice but it will ensure that you will eat sensibly for the rest of your life.

5. MOVE YOU BODY MORE

This is my last tip.

Those cantankerous six-pack bearing personal trainers have a lot to say about how often and how fast and how long to exercise.

My tip is to just move you body more than you usually do.

Walk up the stairs instead of taking an elevator, that is, providing that you aren’t heading to the 32nd floor.

Find a remote car park that means you have to walk a bit to go to work or the shops.

Basically, walk more than you usually do.

I don’t believe in jogging. Jogging has to be a health hazard. It must be hurting peoples' feet, ankles, knees, and hips.

And I do believe jogging does great damage to breast tissue.

If you are unable to move your entire body due to being frail and infirmed then simply fidgit. Wriggle your fingers and toes. It is all about burning up calories.

Well, that is enough for now.

Again I send out the plea, does anyone out there have Oprah’s private number?

I am sure that if I knew that I could discuss my tips on her show it would give me an incentive to expand upon my excellent tips for permanent weight loss and come up with a decent sized self help book.

MEET OUR INSECTS - BUTTERFLY

2007-03-01T08:59:00.000+10:00

I recently spied a butterfly visiting our Geisha Girl (Duranta repens) blossoms. So I grabbed the camera hoping to capture a good photograph that I could share with the rest of the world.

I searched a guide book on butterflies and I feel quite certain that this is a female Papilio aegeus aegeus or Donovan Orchard Butterfly which is found throughout much of Queensland and other Australian states.

The guide book also told me that the larvae commonly feed on cultivated citrus trees and on a number of native plants.

You may notice that the potplant contains a lime tree.

A while ago my husband was concerned about the grub like pests chewing on the leaves of my precious lime tree. Those pests have sinced metamorphosised into these beautiful delicate creatures.

I followed the butterfly about my garden in an attempt to capture a good photograph. It finally settled and spread out its wings as if it was posing for a fashion shot.

Below is the male Papilio aegeus aegeus. He also seemed content to pose for this photo.

BUB AND BILL CARTOON - BROCCOLI

2007-03-01T08:51:00.000+10:00

"Bub n Bill" on cups http://www.cafepress.com/bubnbill

REMOTE CONTROLS: CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT THEM, CAN NEVER FIND THEM

2007-02-21T07:58:00.000+10:00

Our household has 12 remote controls. That is a sizable amount given that they only control the entertainment (TVs, videos, DVDs, stereos and a game console) in our home.

Imagine how many remote controls we could amass if we were to invest in air-conditioning units for each room, ceiling fans for each ceiling and various new kitchen devices which are now controlled remotely.

Our lounge room boasts five remote controls. The reason for the large amount is because, over time, we have added the new items to the old items.

For example, our TV is 21 years old and over time we have connected a video player or three and recently we added a DVD player.

We also hooked up the stereo player to this conglomerate so that when we watch DVDs we have that disconcerting cinema-like experience where each speaker takes turns to talk to you.

If you are good at maths, you may be wondering about the fifth remote control.

Well it belongs to one of our deceased video players. However it will work with our current video player which controls the signal to the TV.

The son has been known to lurk about the back of the lounge room armed with this backup remote control and use it to change the TV channel whilst another family member is watching.

Okay, it was funny but only on the first occasion.

The remaining devices are shared amongst the three bedrooms.

There are two things I hate about remote controls.

Firstly, they enjoy a game of hide and seek. And they are really good at that game. The smaller they are the better they are at slipping down the sides of the recliner rocker lounge chairs or secreting themselves between the pages of a magazine left on the coffee table.

Sure, you can buy those nifty little remote control tidies in the belief that you can contain these elusive objects. You may have seen them advertised in some lesser magazine. They are little unattractive plastic resting places for your various remote controls that some ingenious person created in the hope of making an easy buck.

But do not consider buying one because it will be a complete waste of money. No one in your household is ever going to use it. It will simply get in your way and gather dust.

Remote controls will always be left in and about the chair where the last person to use them has discarded them.

Secondly, I hate remote controls because they don’t always work in a consistent fashion.

You will occasionally find yourself pressing buttons furiously with no result. So then you will begin to twist and turn and lean precariously about your chair hoping that a change of angle will be that vital factor in coaxing the stubborn little device to work.

Finally you will realise that all your tricks are not working. That special angle has evaded you. Pressing harder and harder on the button is merely bruising your finger. And slamming the device sharply on your thigh is hurting you more than that tough little piece of plastic.

So then you will have to admit defeat and actually rise from your chair and walk over to the target and physically press a button on a machine.

I have a very clear memory of the time I saw my first TV remote control in action. I would have been about 8 years old and that was a very long time ago.

Our family didn’t own a TV back then but I had visited homes where these magical machines resided.

One day I accompanied my older sister as she visited a school friend who lived a block away from our home. When we entered the living area of this very tidy house, we came across the father who was seated in his lounge chair watching the TV. I quickly noted that there was a long cord leading from his chair to the TV. The other end of the cord was attached to a little black box in his hand.

Yes, it was a remote control. I was most impressed when I learned that the father could control the TV from the comfort of his lounge chair.

What a progressive family these people were!

When I think back on that day, I feel sure that this prototype remote control had only one function. I believe that its only ability was to control the volume.

Now it is easy for us to scoff at its simplicity but the more I think about that one function remote control, the more I like it.

For me, the most important function on all our controls is the ability to mute the TV ads and to increase or decrease the volume of the programme I am watching according to my needs.

The least important function is the ability to change TV channels. This is especially so when you are seated next to someone in possession of the remote control who decides to surf the channels during the TV ads. The more frantic personality types will simply keep hitting the button and not stop to sample the programmes as they flash up before you.

It is very much like looking out the window of a speeding train. Just as you see something that interests you, it flashes by you leaving you curious and disappointed.

Yes, anyone who has been a victim of that sort of channel surfing behaviour and also a party to the heated discussions it provokes will surely agree with me when I say that we should never have improved upon that prototype remote control.

MEET OUR FAUNA – WALLABIES

2007-02-04T18:13:00.000+10:00

Although most of our farm has been cleared for crop production, we have an area of uncleared land where the local fauna and birdlife can live and breed.

Occasionally they will venture closer to the house and yard.

The birds take advantage of the three birdbaths that I strive to keep topped up with water. The honey-eaters feed from the flowers on the native trees and bushes. I have found native plants will survive our current dry seasons and I try to ensure that the plants I chose have bird attracting flowers.

There are a number of native animals residing on the farm including koalas, possums, echidnas, wallabies and kangaroos.

Wallabies visit our house yard to nibble on the grass. Wallabies are macropods (literally meaning big foot) which are smaller and stockier in build compared to kangaroos.

Wallabies are herbivores and belong to the group of animals called marsupials meaning that they carry their young in a pouch.

The wallabies below were often in our yard last year.

I believe that they may be the Black-striped Wallaby (Macropus dorsalis), also known as the Scrub Wallaby.

The joey was soon to large to remain in the pouch.

Below is a wallaby with this year's joey on board.

The end of another day.

PRIMARY SCHOOL: A GOOD REASON NOT TO TURN FIVE

2007-01-25T13:20:00.000+10:00

A friend once told me that he considered school to be a prison for children.

When I thought about it, it did seem like a good analogy.

Schools are a convenient way of incarcerating those pesky five to seventeen year olds during the waking hours of each weekday.

It is a reverse of those day release programmes they have in real prisons.

By the age of about five, children have stopped taking those refreshing naps (refreshing for the parents, that is) and they begin whining about being bored, start to raid the kitchen cupboards for junk food, and they find it entertaining to fight with siblings and pets.

These days the only way to get any kind of peace is to invest your hard earned money into expensive electrical items such as large screen TVs, DVD players, and home computers choking with game programmes.

Then there are the video game consoles and Ipods and any other “must-have” toy being flogged by cunning advertising agencies (a.k.a. devils in disguise).

And we all know just how much added expense this technology will mean when you have to feed it with the latest game programmes, DVDs, CDs, Internet downloads etc.

It is little wonder that, years ago, some grown-up invented compulsive schooling under the pretence that once little children reached five years of age they needed to learn important stuff.

And the clever part of this plan was that the children needed to leave the family home to learn this important stuff.

When I began school (just a few years after the Ice Age melted), it was compulsory to attend seven years at primary school and then three years at high school.

After that you either entered the workforce or continued on for another two years at high school to qualify for university or a technical college.

In more recent times, this ten year sentence has been increased to thirteen years as kiddies in Queensland are expected to continue to year twelve (or equivalent) with a recently added preparatory year before year one.

Yes, committing severe crimes in the adult world will result in lesser sentences in prison.

My dislike of school began at a very early age.

Apparently, during my first week of school, my teacher approached my mother to inform her that, although I was participating in and completing the required schoolwork, I was doing so whilst crying quietly.

Of course I would be crying! Any sensitive child would cry.

I had spent the first five and a bit years of my life playing unhindered and happily in the comfort of my own home with my mother preparing meals for me as needed.

My mother even went one step further in enriching my preschool years by kindly presenting me with a baby sister to entertain and to torment.

Then for no apparent reason, except as some inexplicable punishment for having too much fun, I was put in a prison uniform, handed a little school bag containing a plastic lunch box and dropped off at a large “educational” facility filled with strangers.

It must have been traumatic as I have vivid memories of that first school room. If I were to return to that Brisbane institution tomorrow, I would be able to walk directly to that room (a.k.a. prison cell) and point out the very position of my desk.

I don’t remember the tears but I suspect that they were an involuntary response to my trauma and they simply slipped out of my large blue-green eyes and rolled down my chubby cheeks and on to my wooden school desk.

I do remember the little wooden desk and the smell of the Clag glue as I pasted the various shapes of coloured paper onto a large sheet of paper.

Because my family shifted residences a few times, I had to change primary schools four times.

I can still recall that hollow feeling in my stomach as I would turn up to yet another institution filled with strangers and hope that I would eventually find a friend to play with during the morning tea and lunch breaks. It would happen but not for a week or so.

My favourite times at primary school were the art lessons, the swimming lessons and the Friday afternoon sport.

Other then art, swimming lessons and sport, my next favourite school activity was watching the hands on the school room clock turn oh so slowly about its face.

I am sure that those school room clocks took 120 minutes to reach an hour.

Fortunately I was good at sport which meant that I would be able to escape school lessons on Friday afternoons to play netball and softball against a team of kids from some neighbouring school.

More importantly, it meant that I was not locked up in that hot box of a school room with sweaty, smelly peers and those less than enthusiastic teachers.

Yes, we did it tough back then in the sweltering Queensland days of summer. Winter wasn’t much cooler either come to think of it.

We had bare wooden floors and a couple of windows pushed ajar in the hope of catching a passing breeze. No wonder concentration waned and teachers’ tempers rose.

I vividly recall one episode in Year 7. A disruptive boy (there is always a disruptive boy in any school room about this planet) was testing the patience of our normally placid male teacher. After a number of warnings, the boy was told by the teacher that if he was to disrupt the class once more, our very tall and muscular teacher would throw the boy out of our classroom window.

Well of course the boy disrupted the class once again. Our teacher, true to his word, marched down the school room, grabbed the boy by the pants and shirt and carried him towards one of the open windows. The class watched in astonishment. We were all aware that our classroom was on the second floor of the building and therefore we knew that our classmate was about to suffer some sort of injury once he hit the ground below.

As our teacher reached the open window he seemed to hesitate for a moment. Somewhere within him sanity must have kicked in and he swivelled on his rubber soled shoes and carted the boy towards the classroom door and dropped him outside the room onto the verandah.

I think I can speak for all of our Year 7 class when I report, decades later, that we were more than a little relieved.

Compared to my primary school experiences, my children were pampered beyond belief. They had air-conditioned class rooms, carpet on the floor, a refrigerator for their lunch boxes and it seemed like they were forever on some sort of interesting excursion away from the classroom.

And, what is more worrying for me as a parent, they seemed to be happy to leave home and go off to prison, I mean, school.

BUB N BILL CARTOON - CHOCOLATE BISCUIT

2007-01-19T13:23:00.000+10:00

"Bub n Bill" on cups http://www.cafepress.com/bubnbill

MY LOVE OF COWS - PART THREE

2007-01-01T20:09:00.000+10:00

There has been an unhappy turn of events in our calm and contented herd of Herefords.

We have seven cows wandering freely about the farm, taking their time to stop and stare and contemplate the beauty of their surrounds whilst they chew their cud.

Regrettably, we have been forced to imprison our lone male calf named Pod.

Never before in the history of our herd have we had to take such drastic action against one of our own.

Pod is a trouble maker.

I do suspect that he may have brain damage. Perhaps, whilst his mother Hef was birthing him, he suffered some loss of oxygen to the brain which has affected that part of his brain which controls his ability to act like a normal bovine.

Let me tell you what has transpired.

Since his birth, Pod happily followed the herd and he would play the usual poddy games with his devoted mother. Hef would willingly let him suckle well beyond the usual weaning time and she would constantly lick about his body to make sure he was properly groomed and comforted by the fact that his mother loved him.

Whenever he and the herd came near the house we would call out a friendly greeting such as: “Hello Pod. How are you going?”

I now realise, far too late, that his reaction to our greetings should have signalled trouble. Pod would lift his head with startled curiosity in our direction when he should have simply tossed us an indifferent glance like the rest of the girls.

As he reached his first birthday we became aware of just how badly his behaviour had escalated.

Pod cannot be contained within fences. Also he is incapable of comfortably handling the presence of human beings anywhere within one hundred feet of his personal space.

We slowly realised that Pod had no respect for any form of fencing. If it was a three strand barbed wire fence he would simply step through the wires. If it was a single wire electrified fence, he had no problems pushing through and breaking the wire despite the shocking consequences.

Normally a jolt of electricity on a moist nose is enough to create a respect within bovines for that pulsing piece of wire for life.

Not Pod!

But we did wonder if there was some sort of cow conspiracy going on.

Did the girls get together, sans his mother Hef, and decide, “Look. He is a mere male. The pain will be temporary. There will be no permanent consequences. So let’s coax him close to the electric fence. Then let’s all surge forward and push him towards it and his body will break it and we will be free to roam that grass which is always greener on the other side of the fence.”

We didn’t have any evidence of this mobbing of Pod but we remained suspicious as more and more fence-breaking incidences began to occur.

Things came to a head six weeks ago as the feed started to disappear and the cows looked longingly, not just over the internal fences of the property, but at the crops growing in our neighbours’ paddocks.

One morning, after our goodbyes, I heard my daughter’s car return to the house with horn beeping and engine revving.

She had found our herd, led by Pod, heading towards the open front gate which led across a main road to the neighbour’s paddock of cow feed.

It appeared that, once again, Pod had broken a fence to allow the rest of the herd in a forbidden area of the farm.

Well, that was it. Something needed to be done.

To make it worse it was a day when we were all going to be away from the farm and unable to keep surveillance on the escapees.

So, as I left for work, I shut the front gate knowing that it was only a temporary barrier given Pod’s total disrespect of any fence and the boundary fence would be no exception.

We had to wait until day’s end before the family returned to organise a permanent solution for Pod’s Houdini behaviour.

That afternoon the decision was made to separate Pod from the herd and to lock him in the yards until we could ready him for the cattle sale.

Clearly he was uncontrollable.

It was very disappointing because, over the years, our girls have always been very tame. They knew when they had done something wrong and, when we would chase them back from trouble towards home, they would readily and, somewhat guiltily, return to the holding yards.

The making of the decision to get Pod into the yards was easy. Carrying out this decision was a gargantuan feat to which, unfortunately, I was not a witness.

The getting of Pod into the yards fell on the ingenuity of the spouse and the son.

As the men gently headed the willing herd toward the yards, Pod baulked and he decided to make a break. He took a left hoof turn, scampering through the stand of trees below the house and the cattle yard and he headed south-east towards the freedom of the acres of open ploughed paddocks.

A quick plan was devised to despatch the son in the four-wheel drive Ute to chase after Pod. The plan was to let Pod run free for a while so that he would get exhausted and then the Ute would overtake him and turn him back and guide him towards the yards.

At first the plan seemed to work. Pod galloped wild and free for a while and then the son caught up to him and he turned Pod back towards the yards.

As Pod turned and galloped in the reverse direction, all seemed to be going to plan until Pod faltered a little due to fatigue and he decided to take a stand.

Pod stopped, propped and turned to face the oncoming Ute. The son slowed to a stop and waited. Pod eyed his enemy and then lowered his head, kicked up the dirt with his front hooves and charged the Ute, head-butting the left hand side of the vehicle leaving a section of the front fender badly dented.

Having taken his revenge on his pursuer, Pod turned and headed north east in the general direction of the yards. The son followed in the Ute hoping to steer him towards the yards.

Because I was not there, I am not sure just how they managed to get him into the yards. I don’t think they can even remember how it happened either because it was a long afternoon dealing with an unpredictable and obviously deranged calf.

The best recollection is that an exhausted Pod headed back towards the stand of trees and sulked for a while. Then, because of the expert cattle handling skills of the spouse and the son, they managed to coax the faltering Pod towards the yards.

Perhaps the presence of the tame herd mustered near the yards was a calming influence for Pod as he eventually joined them.

One thing I know for certain is that it was a betrayal of one of the herd that led to his eventual imprisonment.

Apparently, whilst trying to coax him into the yards, Pod tried to make yet another break from the holding yards but one of the cows managed to nudge him towards the yards and he was accidently bumped into the confines of our very secure yards.

Who knows whether it was yet another cow conspiracy?

Once confined, we realised that Pod was a truly crazy animal. Having had his vast experience of escaping fences by mere force, Pod decided to charge at the sturdy metal rails of the yards in the hope of breaking out. This behaviour, plus the injuries of his attack of the Ute, left him with bleeding welts.

Now, animal lovers, remember that all these injuries were self inflicted. And, if we were to have let him have his way and let him walk off the property and on to the main road, he may well have ended up as a bloody trophy on the front bumper of a very large truck.

Since his capture, Pod has been living a life of luxury. He is being watered and fed each day. It is costing us a fortune as we have had to buy hay at an inflated price due to the current drought conditions. We have had to wait before sending him away to the sales as the Christmas and New Year season has meant that the cattle sales have gone into semi-hibernation.

And we have not gotten off lightly. Each morning at 4am, Pod will begin to complain about his imprisonment using his plaintive “moo” again and again and again as he calls for his now disinterested mother and the rest of the herd.

When we go to feed him, Pod will cower at the furthest point of the yards and then lower his head and alternatively dig each front hoof into the dirt as a warning that he will soon charge at the fence and us.

Pod’s temporary imprisonment may be unsettling for him but it is more unsettling for us as we have to pay for his expensive tucker and suffer his most unwelcome early morning “moos”.

Next challenge for us will be to ready him for sale. Yes, there has been a very, very unhappy turn of events.

I NEED A LITTLE CHRISTMAS

2006-12-19T09:24:00.000+10:00

I need a little Christmas this December, 2006 because this year has been a very sad year.

On a personal level, we have lost treasured friends and dear acquaintances through ill health and unfortunate accidents.

Also I would like to include the sudden death of a fellow Queensland resident, the endearingly zealous and genuine conservationist, Steve Irwin.

I have never met Steve but our family has visited his wonderful Australia Zoo twice over the years and we have witnessed how he has invested money accumulated from his many enterprises back into the development of his zoo with the view to protecting endangered species.

It is humbling to acknowledge that he has spent his relatively short life and his family's income towards protecting other beings on this precious and increasingly fragile planet.

Below is a photograph we took in 1993 at Australia Zoo of the late Harriet the Galapagos tortoise. She would have been 163 years of age when this photograph was taken and she went on to live to 175 years in the best of retirement homes thanks to the Irwin Family.

So, given that it has been such a sad year, I have done something most unusual for me. I started celebrating Christmas on the 1st of December.

I have erected and decorated the Christmas tree.

I have placed decorations about the living area and carefully displayed any Christmas cards given to us with their greetings of love and best wishes.

I’ve been playing our Christmas carols CD, “Crooners at Christmas” for a fortnight.

I know it is annoying the rest of the family but there is nothing more soothing and reassuring than Dean Martin singing “Silent Night”.

I have been wearing Christmas themed earrings since the 8th of December when we attended our first Christmas function.

Our tasteful Christmas lights display was placed about the front patio of the house yesterday.

And, this week at work, I will be wearing reindeer antlers on my head to inspire and amuse the library patrons.

Yesterday I cooked the Christmas pudding.

Most importantly, on Christmas Eve, we will attend the beautiful church in town where we were married and the children were baptised.

Yes, everything is falling into place and I am feeling very relaxed and happy about this special season.

Christmas is not just for children, it is also for people who believe in the magic of Santa Claus and the message of hope, peace and love that was evoked by the birth of a baby.

Yes, Christmas is not just for children but for adults who refuse to be cynical and believe that, although it is mandatory to grow old, it is optional to grow up.

Peace on Earth and Goodwill to all.

CHRISTMAS MEANS STONE FRUIT, PILLOW CASES AND SANTA CLAUS

2006-12-04T11:56:00.000+10:00

I bought some peaches last Friday knowing that they would take a while to fully ripen. So for a couple of days, as I passed the fruit bowl, I would pick one up and sniff at it and gently press against its skin, hopeful that it would be ready to devour.

Each time, as I smelt the sweet perfume of the fruit, I was made aware of two things. Firstly, I was reminded that stone fruit are my favourite fruit. But, more importantly, I realised that the scent of stone fruit evokes cherished memories from my childhood Christmases.

My younger sister and I shared a bedroom all through our childhood and early teen years. Each Christmas Eve we would sing ourselves to sleep with all the Christmas carols we knew. Most of the carols would involve snow. I am not sure why we didn’t pick up on the absurdity of the situation given that we were sweltering away in a humid Queensland summer.

We would finally drop off to sleep comforted by the knowledge that there was a pillow case draped over the end of our beds.

Yes, we had come to trust that Santa Claus would find this handy little item of bed linen and deposit our presents within it.

In the morning we would rummage through it and extract our various presents and then, as we reached to the bottom of the pillow case, we find the added treats of stone fruit, exotic nuts and lollies.

As stone fruit were in season, we would find a couple of fresh plums, apricots and/or peaches. Obviously Santa Claus must stop off and buy locally as he races about the globe.

The nuts were also a great treat. They were also a great challenge. These tasty walnuts, Brazil nuts, hazelnuts, almonds and, in particular, the macadamias were safely hidden in their tough shells which meant that we would have to spend quite some time during Christmas Day endeavouring to extract them.

Tiny nervous fingers would bravely hold the nut as a hammer or brick would be called upon to smash open the shells on a slab of concrete.

The results were random. It could be bruised fingers, a mangled mash of shell and nut or, if the angle of the blow was a bit off-centre, a macadamia nut would skid off sideways at speed and never be sighted again.

I still feel the need to have a bag of nuts in their shells to play with every Christmas.

My older sister had a difficult time letting go of the pillow case Christmas tradition. She continued to lay out a pillow case for herself (even as she approached her 30s) whenever she was spending Christmas Eve at the family residence. And, invariably, Santa Claus would deliver something to her.

I continued the pillow case tradition when we had our children. I embroidered their names on their own Christmas pillowcase as I knew, from experience, Santa Claus does deliver to pillow cases.

Yes, I have a lot of faith in Santa Claus. And it was from an early age that I found out that I didn’t have to worry about that “naughty or nice” list that Santa supposedly makes each year before bestowing gifts on little kiddies.

I say this because of an incident which occurred one Christmas morning. I can’t quite calculate which Christmas it was because it was quite some time ago and I was very young at the time.

We were at my grandmother’s house for Christmas and my younger sister and I had been bedded down in an anteroom at the front of the house.

Okay, it wasn’t an anteroom but I have always wanted to use that word and now I have used it twice.

As most Australians will know, the room at the front of the house was merely an enclosed front verandah. Enclosing patios and verandahs was something people would do to their houses when their family outgrew their number of bedrooms.

Anyway, back to the Christmas morning.

I awoke early as kids are wont to do on any morning but especially on Christmas morning.

I checked the contents of my pillow case and, as my younger sister was still asleep, I had the opportunity to peer into her pillow case to see what Santa had brought her.

We had been given a doll each, a few other miscellaneous toys, and the fruit, nuts and lollies.

My doll was a pink plastic cherub. She was okay. But she wasn’t overly special. Just a baby doll in baby doll clothes with a pink plastic head with painted-on light brown curls.

My sister’s doll was very special. She was a more grown-up doll in a sophisticated emerald green velvet dress. But the thing I really liked about my sister’s doll was that she had a head of realistic looking hair.

This elegant doll had a wonderful head of shiny dark brown curls and it was a coiffure which, now that I think of it, looked very much like the hairdo that my beloved mother wore at the time. No wonder I loved her!

I felt immediately that Santa Claus had made a delivery error when depositing these two dolls in their respective pillow cases. It seemed obvious to me that, being the older sister, the more grown-up doll must have been meant for me. So I quickly swapped the dolls and went back to bed.

Although I felt Santa Claus would see that I had done the right thing by correcting his error, I was still a little uneasy.

What if my mother had been curious as to what Santa Claus had given her two younger daughters and late Christmas Eve she had done a bit of a pillow case check before going to bed?

The answer to that question hung over my little blonde head until everyone was up and about and showing off their presents later that morning.

To my relief, nothing untoward was noted and I knew that the doll swapping incident was now something only Santa Claus and I needed to know about.

Santa Claus continued to fill my pillow case each year so I knew that he was okay about my decision.

BUB N BILL CARTOON - IN MY MIND I'M STILL PLAYING

2006-11-20T10:57:00.000+10:00

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GIRLS IN BANK UNIFORMS MEET TRENDY TRANSSEXUALS

2006-11-14T11:00:00.000+10:00

Like many girls from my generation, I did my time in Australian banking institutions.

One of the advantages of working in a bank is that they give you uniforms.

One of the disadvantages of working in a bank is that they give you uniforms.

The picture below will explain those two conflicting sentences.

(I know that my ex-work mates will be pleased to see their identities have been protected.)

Uniforms can be handy. You awake each workday morning and you know exactly what you will be wearing. Unfortunately, you will also know that you will look pathetic.

Now, besides that alarmingly pink uniform, we also had the choice of another uniform which had the shape of a large navy blue pillowcase adorned with a white collar.

But then what could one expect, it was the 1970s and all fashion was ghastly back then.

I enlisted at the time when banks were introducing computers to help with balancing their books.

Now the computers back then were nothing like the lovely little PCs of the Naughties. These computers had memory banks which were huge white monstrosities that required an enormous amount of office floor area and a vigilant caretaker.

They could get so hot and they could be so temperamental that they had to be insulated to a ridiculous degree and kept in a huge glass cage to ensure they remained dust-free and also to ensure that they had a constant temperature similar to the Antarctic environment.

My bank employers had their computer centre in the city centre of Brisbane, Queensland. It was a pleasant enough workplace due to it being a new building with air-conditioning and also we had piped music or muzak to entertain us as we worked.

Each afternoon the daily transactions from the various bank branches about the state would be bundled up and sent to our computer centre.

The cheques and other bits of paper would be encoded by the complicated machines on the floor above my workplace and then I and my workmates would sit at our computer terminals and enter the details of these transactions into the aforementioned memory banks.

Later that night the computer would spit out a forest-worth of paper featuring lots of numbers and then a group of other employees (male only, I might add) would see to it that it all balanced.

Now I know you will already have noted two things about my job. Firstly that it involved shift work and secondly that it was mind-deadingly boring.

When we were hired and trained to work in the computer centre, we were told that we would not be able to transfer to other areas of the bank. So, when I decided that I simply could not bear the job any longer, I decided that my only escape would be to transfer to a different city.

So I moved to my bank’s Sydney computer centre for a while and at first it was okay because the surroundings were different and the people were different but eventually the overwhelming boredom of the job set in once again.

So I applied to work at another bank’s Sydney computer centre where, fortunately, I was granted a position where I was one of those people balancing the numbers instead of being the trained monkey at the computer terminal.

There was one drawback to my new position. My new bank had a uniform that was even more ghastly than the uniforms I had been wearing previously. This one was a grey-blue shapeless thing that buttoned up from neck to hem.

However I decided that I could overcome the humiliation of wearing this fashion atrocity due to the fact that this job was much more stimulating.

After one evening shift at my new job, a co-worker suggested that we all go for a drink. He suggested The Taxi Club. So six people from our shift went off for a mid-week adventure.

When we arrived by taxi at The Taxi Club we found that we were required to mount a large number of steps to arrive at a reasonably inviting room with a bar and tables. There didn’t seem to be many patrons there that evening but we didn’t care as we had our own party and all we really wanted was to imbibe in a number of alcoholic drinks.

When we three girls decided to “play Ladies” and retire to a table with our drinks, we found that we were quickly joined by a trio of transsexuals.

Our three co-worker blokes, being Australian males, steadfastly remained at the bar to ensure that they kept their distance and also to ensure that there were no annoying time-lapses between the getting of the next drink.

Back at our table, there was much conversation and we found our new friends were charming. We six girls talked about fashion, make-up, nail care and all those other girlie things.

When, after a few rum and Cokes, the time came for me to visit the toilet and one of my workmates announced she needed to go too, a couple of our new friends decided to join us.

So the four of us grabbed our handbags and headed to the Ladies Toilet.

It is a sociological fact that girls are very social beings and we simply can’t stop chatting just because we need to do a pee so it is essential that we travel together in a minimum of two when we go to the toilet.

At one point in the evening I approached the bar for another drink and one of my bloke co-workers asked that less than original question, “How do you know if they are blokes?”

He was noting that my new friends were quite attractive but he was also aware that they weren’t quite entirely female.

Being the worldly 19 year old from the deep North I simply gave him the less than original answer that all he needed to do was look at the hands. Blokes have larger hands.

Looking back, I picture us three young girls in our grey-blue bank uniforms sipping mixed drinks and chatting and laughing with those three glamorous transsexuals.

Their make-up was impeccable, their nails long and painted and they were wearing trendy colourful clothes. How dowdy must we three girls in bank uniforms have looked in comparison?

SORRY, THAT WAS MY FRONTAL LOBE SPEAKING

2006-11-02T08:25:00.000+10:00

Now we all have a legitimate, physiological and scientific excuse for those moments when we blurt out those inappropriate things.

Comments such as:

“Off to a fancy dress party, are you?”

“Good Lord! What have you done to your hair?”

“Are you pregnant or just putting on weight, dear?”

Now, as you watch the face of your targets crumple and their eyes tear up, you can point to your brain and say brightly, “Oh dear! Sorry about that. My frontal lobe isn’t quite working today.”

There is one little drawback I must warn you about.

If your targets know anything about the functioning of the brain or they have read the same article as I have just done, then they will know that you really DID mean what you said but couldn’t stop yourself from blurting it out.

However, I am sure that most people are quite unaware of the intricate functioning of the brain and they will immediately forget about their recently hurt feelings and begin to worry about you and your lazy frontal lobe.

I will give you a layperson’s view of the science behind this hypothesis but check this link if you wish to explore the research further.

The hypothesis is that, as the brain deteriorates, people become less able to inhibit themselves from saying inappropriate things. And the researcher states that there is evidence that this bluntness is due to the decline in frontal lobe functioning.

Normally, when you look into a pram and you see the world’s ugliest baby, your frontal lobe will inhibit you from stating this fact. You will be able to take a breath and tell the proud parents, “He is the image of his father, isn’t he?”

Because aging slows down our brain processing, bluntness is seen more in older people. Hence the research has been criticised as an attack on the over 65s.

It seems that there is no credence in our previous assumption that old people had earned the right to be blunt and that they are vessels of wisdom and we should just grin and bear it when they say something insulting to us. In fact, it is just that their frontal lobes are letting them down.

The researcher rightly defends his research and he dismisses the idea that it is age-ist. He points out that it is a health issue for the over 65s as their bluntness and their socially inappropriate questions can mean that these old people will lose their friends and thus they can suffer social consequences.

I am not over 65 but I intend to continue to use my frontal lobe to help me in times of inappropriate bluntness. If I am challenged by someone, I am simply going to say that I have had a blow to my head causing damage to my frontal lobe which will make me say socially inappropriate things from time to time.

Hopefully, sympathy for my plight will excuse my rudeness.

I will forge a doctor’s certificate confirming that my frontal lobe is dodgy if need be.

MY LOVE OF COWS - PART TWO

2006-10-17T09:22:00.000+10:00

When we bought our farm, we inherited a small herd of Poll Hereford cows. They weren’t as accessible and cuddly as the dairy cows of my youth but I do enjoy watching them stand and stare into the horizon as they chew their cud.

Over the years we have bred from that initial stock, occasionally adding new cows and introducing a number of bulls. As the herd increased and the feed got scarce, we would send the steers and older cows off to the sale.

That initial herd was led by an extremely intelligent cow who had been dubbed “Mother Cow”. She was a supreme example of the breed and she produced excellent calves.

When Mother Cow fixed her gaze upon you, there was a spooky sense that she possessed knowledge of the mysteries of the universe that stretched well beyond the innate pursuits of grazing and breeding.

She was the leader of the herd but she was cunning enough to sneak away from the others now and then to find a better paddock of feed. Perhaps she simply told them she wanted to be alone for a while. She knew that we wouldn't notice one cow was missing but a whole herd trampling through and chomping down our crop of barley would not go unnoticed.

There was one occasion when Mother Cow’s eerie wisdom came to our rescue. Two cows were fighting over the ownership of a new calf. As the little calf attempted to feed from its mother, the second cow would intervene and try to coax the calf away. We were beginning to wonder how to rectify this situation when Mother Cow took it upon herself to solve the argument.

We watched as she strolled up to the battling cows and, after some mysterious communication between them, she told the calf-less cow to come to her senses, which she did, allowing the real mother and calf to be reunited.

It was a sad day when Mother Cow walked up the ramp of the yards to board the truck that took her off to her last sale.

We decided to buy a Murray Grey bull as they were reputed to be a quiet breed and his genes may help in keeping the herd tame.

Unfortunately, the girls did not like the little grey bull. From the moment he stepped down the ramp and attempted to join the herd, the girls literally ran from him.

It was quite an entertaining though poignant sight to watch a herd of maroon and white streak pass the windows followed by a small but determined grey bull.

The chase went on for a couple of days.

We wondered just what could be done to reconcile the herd with their new bull. We knew that Mother Cow was not our saviour as she was the leader of the pack. Indeed, she was probably the one urging the girls not to breed with this small grey wimp.

Eventually the bull lost all self confidence and he went off and hid in the scrub seemingly unable to face a world filled with rejection.

It was decided that the saying “Familiarity breeds contempt” should be tested to the extreme. We locked up the cows and the bull in the close proximity of the small yards. We knew that contempt was already in place and we had hoped that familiarity may simply breed “familiarity”.

After a day and a night it came time to open the gate and release the cattle and, to our relief, they simply strolled off to graze. The Murray Grey had found acceptance.

When it was time to change bulls, we decided to purchase a Poll Hereford. Although the quiet gene of the Murray Grey seemed to be a good idea, we had been unaware that they also harbour a gene which leaves them with a total disregard and/or respect for fences.

Our new bull arrived with a pedigree and a hyphenated name and the girls fell in love immediately. He was with us for sometime and he produced some very good calves. We were reluctant to sell him but he brought the situation upon himself by constantly picking fights with an equally large and angry neighbouring bull.

Over time we borrowed a couple of bulls who gratefully visited with our willing girls and calves were born and the herd continued. But when the lack of consistent rain reduced feed, we decided not to breed for a while and the cows wandered about the farm bull-free.

However, Nature will prevail and a neighbour’s bull stepped through the fences and busied himself with the girls before being reclaimed by the neighbour. In time we were blessed with 5 male calves and a female calf.

Our daughter grew very fond of the heifer who galloped and tussled with her male peers. There was nothing feminine about Hef. She would gallantly fight and win the head butting contests against the bully boys. If she was a human she would have urinated standing up!

The calves grew and the mothers, unhampered by further pregnancies, fussed about their offspring. The steers grew fat from the feed and the continued suckling of their doting mothers. They grew bigger than their mothers and still fronted up for their daily feeds.

At last it was time to remove the boys from their mothers. They were getting too big and we were running out of feed. The truck arrived one afternoon and the boys were savagely separated from their mothers. There was much consternation. As the boys left the farm in the truck, their mothers trotted after them crying out in despair.

Once the truck had disappeared the mothers turned their anger upon the house. They knew who was to blame and they were going to let us know. They stood at the yard fence and bellowed at the house. We hid inside.

That night the despair continued as plaintiff moos echoed about the farm. Next day they reappeared at the fence and continued to bellow at the house. It was time for action. The spouse gathered up the gun and strode out to the verandah. He aimed the gun to the skies above the irate mothers’ heads and let it fire a couple of times. The mothers, like all animals, possessed the innate terror of firearms and immediately ceased their complaints and turned on their hooves and headed towards the trees. We did not hear another complaint from them.

Once again the farm was without male cattle.

One day our daughter looked down to the paddock below the house to see her treasured Hef stretched out on the black soil. We rushed to check why she was down. Had she developed some disease? Had she been bitten by a snake?

As we neared her we noted that she was not alone. Hef had just delivered a son. It is clear that the genes within the herd had served her well. She was smart and independent like Mother Cow, taking it upon herself to sneak off unseen and locate a bull. And, thanks to whatever skerrick of Murray Grey gene resided in her, stepping through fences would not have been a problem for her.

Yes, Mother Cow would have been so proud!

BUB N BILL CARTOON - FUN OR NAUGHTY

2006-10-16T09:12:00.000+10:00

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JOEY THE BUDGERIGAR AND HIS BUCKS PARTY

2006-09-12T11:44:00.000+10:00

Our family has a long tradition of naming our blue budgerigars Joey.

My grandmother’s Joey was a dear creature with a vast vocabulary which made him most entertaining.

He would ask you, “Who’s a pretty boy?” and then immediately inform you that, “Joey’s a pretty boy.”

He would call out, “Where are you Dor?” mimicking my grandmother calling for my mother.

He also did an accurate rendition of my mother’s smoker’s cough.

As a child I would press my mouth against the cage and call, “Kiss, Joey, kiss.”

Joey would hop across his perch to me and tickle my lips with his beak and little dry tongue.

We lost Joey one day when my grandmother was cleaning his cage and the window was slightly open. Someone ran into the kitchen. I don’t remember who it was but, today, I have decided to blame my younger sister. Anyway, the sudden arrival of an excited child startled Joey and he flew out into the wild blue yonder.

It was very sad and most untimely as my mother had begun to teach Joey our telephone number and, given a little more time, he would have mastered it.

I would like to think that Joey landed on the verandah rail of a caring family who happily accepted the sudden arrival of a delightful bird and let him become one of the family.

When my younger sister left home, she was given a blue budgerigar by a good friend as a companion and she named him Joey. They were a devoted couple. When my sister was home, Joey spent most of his time outside of his cage familiarising himself with the flat and chatting to her.

On occasions when my sister would imbibe in a glass or two of wine, she would become festive and she would place the obliging Joey on her head and call him her Cocktail Hat.

My sister brought him with her when she came to work at the family hotel for a while. It was at this time that she felt that Joey should have a wife and she asked a local budgerigar breeder to select a suitable spouse.

She also decided that it would be a good idea to throw a Bucks Party for Joey to celebrate the end of his bachelor days.

The party was held one night after a social club meeting at the hotel. A small group gathered to wish him well.

With all windows secured, Joey was taken from his cage and placed on the edge of my sister’s glass of beer allowing him to sip at it and join in the celebration.

When Joey’s wife arrived I thought her a homely looking hen, thin and a pale yellow. She seemed to take an instant dislike to our dear Joey. In fact she lashed out at him physically. When she began to pluck the feathers from his head, my sister intervened.

The hen was returned to the breeder and the marriage was dissolved.

Joey and my sister eventually returned to the Gold Coast. One unhappy day she came home from work to find an empty cage. Suspicion fell upon the brainless twit who was a friend of my sister’s flatmate. We suspect that this unsavoury twit had spent some time behind bars himself so he decided to set free an unwilling and unprepared Joey into a world of cats and other predators.

Again I would like to think that Joey landed on the verandah rail of a caring family who happily accepted the sudden arrival of a delightful bird and let him become one of the family.

I did pine for a Joey I could call my own.

I would often tell my family that I wanted a Joey but they would remind me that my beloved cat may view the bird as a potential food source.

So I had to be content to watch the birds frolic in my birdbath and occasionally call out to them, “Who’s a pretty boy?”

One Christmas, as I unwrapped my presents, I uncovered a blue budgerigar. I instantly named him Joey. I asked him if he was a pretty boy and I asked him to, “Kiss, Joey, kiss” as I pressed his little plaster beak to my lips.

My spouse could not see why I was less than enthusiastic about my new pet.

“You don’t have to feed or water it. And you won’t need to clean up after it. And when you put it down somewhere it won’t fly off.” he pointed out smugly.

Michelle ©

DINOSAURS AND THOSE DAMNABLE "WIGGLES"

2006-08-29T11:51:00.000+10:00

My son became fascinated by dinosaurs at an early age. It began one day at preschool. His teacher was reading a picture book about these large extinct animals when she noticed the wide-eyed expression upon the face of my timid son. She asked him if he was frightened by the book.

But, as she told me later, it was quite something other than fear. It was awe.

His interest came at a time when there was a lot of excellent books being published on dinosaurs. Also it was at the time when the Jurassic Park movie was first released.

From then on, our visits to the library would see us leave laden down with books about dinosaurs and, being the overzealous mother that I am, I learnt a lot about them myself.

His favourite dinosaur was the Triceratops – “tri” meaning three and “ceratops” meaning…. well, I have no idea what ceratops means.

Just joking! I do actually know what it means because I found his Triceratops book and it says that the word means “three-horned face”.

Triceratops was from the Cretaceous period which came after the Jurassic period that you all know about thanks to those movies.

Triceratops was an herbivore which doesn’t mean it only ate parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. It means that it was a plant eater and it had a sharp, toothless beak to slice through rough leaves and twigs.

I did encourage my son in pursuing his passion for dinosaurs as I believed that a dinosaur digger-upper (sorry, palaeontologist) could have been a viable career option.

I found two good reasons for condoning this career choice.

Firstly, unlike a police officer, a lion tamer or jackeroo (Australian cowboy), I felt that the palaeontologist’s job wouldn’t be very dangerous. My son would have been unlikely to get shot, bitten or, indeed, trod on by a dinosaur.

The worst case scenario may have been that he could sustain an injury by kicking his toe on a very large bone and/or he may get a dose of sunburn.

Secondly I believed that, although the university fees for the 4 to 9 years of study (depending on whether you do a Ph.D) may have been high, when he completed his degree it wouldn’t have cost me much to set him up.

All he would have needed was a little pick to dig up the bones, a little brush to get the dirt off, a good sunhat and copious amounts of sunscreen.

I felt that this was much better than setting up someone for another career, such as, a person who has just done a dentistry degree.

Now that chair alone must set you back a bit. Then there are the drills and files and that porcelain sink with the swirling water and those plastic cups and that sucky thing they put in your mouth.

And then there are the wages for that young attractive dental assistant.

Also, I believe Venetian blinds are expensive these days too.

Sorry, off the track there for a moment!

Now, as I said, I learnt quite a bit about dinosaurs during those years. I practised those hard to pronounce names. I traced pictures and drew up a large poster for his bedroom door which featured all the dinosaurs.

I learnt that very young children are quite capable of understanding the difference between the various dinosaurs and they quickly learn to pronounce their names.

Not surprising really as they pick up foreign languages so readily at that age.

Now you are wondering about my disdain for The Wiggles aren’t you?

Well, I was in the library recently and I was most disturbed by a conversation I overheard between a mother and her young son.

“Dinosaur.” He announced as he pointed to a rather good plastic facsimile of a dinosaur.

“Ah, yes.” replied mother. “Dorothy the dinosaur.”

She was referring to an inane Wiggles ditty.

Well, it was too much for me. I had to intervene.

“You don’t know your dinosaurs, do you?” I chastised her. “That is a stegosaurus. Can’t you tell by the plates on its back?”

Fortunately the mother knows me quite well and she laughed rather than punch me in the nose.

So, damn you The Wiggles.

Damn you for dumbing down, not only our little children, but their parents as well.

There is no dinosaur called Dorothy and that big green yellow-spotted puppet wearing what looks like a rose-adorned cricket hat bears no resemblance to any unearthed dinosaur.

Just how lazy are you Wiggles when it comes to inventing characters? It wouldn’t have been that hard to make it look like a real dinosaur.

And, when your write those little ditties that line your pockets, it wouldn’t be difficult to whip up a rhyme using legitimate dinosaur names. Most dinosaur names usually end with ‘osaurus’ or ‘ceratops' and other easily rhymable endings.

I repeat, how difficult could it be. Young children are quite capable of recognising even the subtle differences between the many dinosaurs and, as I said, they can pronounce their names quite fluently!

I want caretakers to stop inflicting these inane Wiggle ditties upon our children.

There is an alternative and his name is Don Spencer.

Yes, the Don Spencer who has the honour of being Russell Crowe’s father-in-law.

Don writes beautiful songs for children that are not just entertaining but they contain legitimate information about animals.

I recommend “Feathers, Fur and Fins.”

Michelle ©

MY CAREER AS AN ACTOR

2006-08-18T09:16:00.001+10:00

I was surprised to discover that my older sister and my spouse were unaware of my brief career as a stage actor. So I have decided to write my Memoir.

It all began the day our English teacher told our Year 8 class that we were going to put on a play at the end of the year and invite the rest of the school to watch.

I suspect that our teacher’s love of Language and the Arts also meant that he harboured a desire to work in The Theatre. So he became a High School English teacher, as you do.

Perhaps I should set the scene by introducing my fellow class mates.

The Powers That Be decided to set up the Year 8 classes in groups of students with similar academic performances. Hence 8A consisted of the very smart kids who chose French as a subject. 8B, my group, was the very smart kids who chose German as a subject. 8C was the smart kids who picked French and 8D was the smart kids who picked German. 8E was the not so smart kids who picked French and it continued on, like so, down the alphabet.

I do wonder just what transpired in 8J’s classroom.

Yes, they placed my sensitive soul in a class filled with very smart, competitive, obsessive-compulsive over-achievers. These kids were actually there to learn something and they had plans to eventually go out into the world to become doctors, lawyers, corporation chiefs and other highly paid highly placed people in the community.

Now, the play in question was called “The Bushrangers’ Christmas Eve”. I suspect it was written by Kylie Tennant. There were parts for the boys as (19th Century outlaws).

And if I recall correctly, and it is all a bit hazy mind, Mrs. Chisholm (19th Century Do-Gooder) and a number of her young female protégés stumble into the bushrangers’ campsite thus allowing parts for the girls.

As our teacher announced each role, he would call for volunteers. Many arms would reach up to the Heavens accompanied by desperate mutterings of, “Pick me. Pick me.”

There was a lead role (read: he had a lot of lines to remember) which went to a tall skinny boy with the demeanour of an eighth grade Gary Cooper.

There was a small but pivotal (as we actors say) role for a timid young girl.

Hands flayed about as he announced the part.

Suddenly I heard the teacher call out MY name. I looked quickly to my right and then to my left and noted that my arms were not raised. And I knew I had not uttered the words “Pick me. Pick me.”

Yet he had the gall to foist this role upon me.

But, being a timid young girl, I didn’t have the mettle to say no.

I am sure his choice would have infuriated the other role-less girls.

“It wasn’t fair, mum. She didn’t even put her hand up.”

However, there were plenty of other positions to be filled as we needed make-up artists, hairstyle artists, costume designers, set designers, poster designers and ushers.

At one point in the play, a snake slithers towards the campfire which, thanks to the set designers, was a light bulb covered in red cellophane paper surrounded by lifelike pieces of wood.

Come to think of it, they were pieces of wood.

My character was called upon to panic and scream at the sudden arrival of the snake.

It was during rehearsals that I found out that I could actually act. I wasn’t from the John Wayne School of Acting where I would woodenly swagger through the role.

No, I was Acting. I may even have been channelling Sarah Bernhardt which was fortunate because it was a female part.

Now the reason I knew that I was a good actor was due to the fact that I had nothing in common with this wimp of a girl and I had to dig deep within me to find my Motivation for this character.

For example, I am wary of snakes but I am not terrified of them.

I recall one encounter when I was about seven. I was running through a grassy paddock in a westward direction and I saw to my right a snake scurrying in a southward direction. As we interconnected I simply leapt, gazelle like, over its shiny body and then calmly asked the girl cousin if she had seen it too.

Now, when I was called upon to scream at the arrival of the snake during the first rehearsal, I let out a rather respectable “AAHHH!”

Our teacher, wearing his director’s hat, shouted, “No, no. I want an authentic scream.”

I then let loose an ear piercing, blood curdling scream which echoed about the school campus. He approved.

Fortunately, I didn’t have a lot of lines to learn and I decided that the best way to know when it was my turn to speak was to memorise the line that immediately preceded my line.

Fast forward to the performances. Yes, there was such interest in our play from our fellow students that we had to do two matinee performances.

I was eerily calm.

We were partway through the second performance of the play when I sensed a prolonged silence and eyes fixed upon me. I am not talking about the audience here. My fellow actors and the prompt person were glaring at me in a menacing fashion.

I immediately threw an accusing glare at Gary Cooper. Sure, he had a lot of lines to learn, but why did he have to forget the crucial line that signalled to me that it was my turn to speak.

I took a superior breath and then bowed to peer pressure and the deafening silence and proceeded with my line.

It was after Gary Cooper let me down so badly that I decided not to continue with my career as a stage actor.

It seemed fairly clear to me that one needed to memorise more than that one line as a cue. And I wasn’t prepared to learn entire plays just because I could not trust my fellow actors to conduct themselves in a professional manner and to remember ALL their lines.

Perhaps I could have turned to the “cut and retake” world of film and television. But there would be no greasepaint and adrenalin rushes. No, it’s just not The Theatre, is it?

Michelle ©

BUB N BILL CARTOON - CAT WITH LIPSTICK

2006-08-15T19:00:00.000+10:00

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THERE IS NO "P" IN RUGBY

2006-08-04T08:20:00.000+10:00

(Author's note: As the title suggests, this is about the game of football in Australia. It begins with a light-hearted assessment of football and concludes with an amusing account of an inglorious moment during a Rugby Union match between Australia and New Zealand.)

I enjoy watching the sport coverage on television. There is nothing more exciting than setting yourself up in the reclining lounge chair ready for a day of sport armed with a cold beer, salty snacks and the remote control.

Regarding the beer, it is best not to start too early. If you don’t pace yourself properly you may find that you will nod off sometime during the early afternoon and snore your way through the crucial outcome of the game, match, tournament, event etc. Well, so I have been told.

I enjoy all types of sport but, in winter, it is mainly football that is on offer. We have three main codes of football in Australia – Rugby League, Rugby Union and Australian Rules football. I should also point out that both men and women play these codes but not usually against one another unfortunately.

Okay, okay. I just heard someone scream, “What about the “real football”. The World Game.”

Of course this clown is ranting on about soccer which is not important to the majority of Australians and rarely played by people over 10 years of age.

And that “World Game” thing is a scam. If a reliable study into sport was done and the research and statistics were to be deemed valid, they would find that the “World Game” title belongs to Netball. So there!

Why not use my formula? Add the number of participating countries to the number of card carrying players then multiple it by the civility of the spectators and then divide it by the number of people who give a damn. Netball wins every time!

I have a theory as to the evolution of soccer and it goes like this. One day two teams turned up to play hockey. They soon realised that they forgot the sticks and ball. One bright spark looked across the sports field and saw people playing netball. He scurried over to steal a ball and he returned with a plan.

“Okay. The aim of the game will be basically the same. We will use this big round ball instead of the little ball. We will use our feet and an occasional head instead of the stick. Oh, and no touching or tackling. But dramatic acting whilst feigning injuries will be greatly rewarded.”

Upon hearing this, one player turned to his mate and said, “I think my Mother will approve of this new sport.”

Now, back to the real football, in particular the games of rugby league and rugby union. The games where brave burly blokes run full speed towards the opposing team armed with little more than a mouthguard.

Yes, there is a lot of bruising, blood, black eyes, broken bones, colourful swearing, and the occasional fisticuffs but when it is all over there is a winning team and lots of handshakes and “Good on ya mate” exchanges.

I will admit that I am not so much a fan of the Australian Rules football. It is watch-able and I do like to see those tall athletic blokes in their tight shorts flying in the air or scampering up the back of an opposition player.

What I don’t admire is their “tackles”. They don’t smack into one another to see which one is sturdier. Or grab each other about the ankles with the intent of felling their opponent like a large tree.

No. Their “tackles” look a little too much like a cuddle to my liking.

Now the rugby union match I wish to expand upon was between Australia (Wallabies) and New Zealand (All Blacks).

Our two countries have a sibling-like relationship. We have nothing nice to say about one another, ever. But if an outsider should say anything derogatory about one of us or try to pick a fight then, like siblings, the other one will join in the fight immediately.

A warning to the rest of the world! We were willing to join forces when needed to fight in World War One and we were known as the Anzacs - Australian and New Zealand Army Corp.

Now, the match I speak of was played in June 2006 in New Zealand. I don’t think that I am giving too much away to say that we Aussies were rightfully thrashed by the better team.

The evening began with the All Blacks doing an energetic rendition of their haka. Words can not do justice to the fear and dread that this ceremonial tradition can evoke in non-New Zealanders. You have to see and hear it to get the full picture.

After the excitement of the haka, the players from both teams were milling about the field before kick-off. The television camera person was scanning the field, eager to record any meaningful activity. Suddenly he focussed upon an All Black player crouched on the field, seemingly attending to his inner thigh. An injury from the haka perhaps?

No. He was, in fact, shaking his penis after taking a quick pee on the field before play.

I turned to my spouse and asked, “Did you see what I just saw?” He confirmed that it was so.

At the very first commercial break I rushed to advise my daughter who was in her room watching a DVD.

“One of the players?” she asked.

“Yes.” I confirmed. “The one with the bleached hair.”

“On the field?”

“Yes.”

“Eeww!” She said and then added. “He must have been feeling nervous.”

Now this event featured in my next round of emails to friends and family.

Dave emailed me back with this message:

Hi Michelle, the title of your next blog essay should be: There Is No P in Rugby. What do you think?

Dave.

Michelle ©

BUB N BILL CARTOON - DIRTY HANDS

2006-07-31T12:39:00.000+10:00

"Bub n Bub" on cups http://www.cafepress.com/bubnbill

MY LOVE OF COWS - PART ONE

2006-07-20T12:49:00.001+10:00

My love of cows developed during the many holidays at my uncle’s farm at West Wooroolin. Uncle Bill and Aunty Flo operated a mixed farming enterprise which included a small dairy, a small pig sty and the cultivation of crops such as peanuts, sorghum and corn.

But it was the cows that captured my heart and, many decades later, I have the good fortune to be able to look out my windows and watch as our own small herd of Poll Hereford beef cattle stroll about our farm.

I say “love of cows” because bulls aren’t quite so lovable. Especially when you get between them and where they want to be and they start scratching at the ground with their front hooves and begin to give out a warning in an unnatural growl. Cows are supposed to “moo”!

I learnt early that cattle are wonderful placid beings if treated with sensitivity. They also provide many products to sustain the human race. It seems that every atom of their being is exploited by us. They provide us with milk, meat, leather, gelatine, blood and bone.

If only humans could contribute to the planet as unselfishly and environmentally friendly as these dear creatures do.

Okay, I know about their flatulence problem, but cows don’t jump into their huge gas-guzzling vehicles that spew out toxic exhaust fumes and drive just one block to purchase a carton of milk and some carcinogenetic cigarettes, do they?

Uncle Bill’s herd was a mixture of breeds and each animal would be given a name such as “Daisy” or “Pet”. Also there was “Peter” the bull who ensured that there would be calves for sale sometime in the future.

My favourite cows were the three Jersey cows. They were the closest thing to Bambi that I was going to find, and be able to cuddle, in the state of Queensland at the time. There were rumours of wild deer roaming in the hills around the small town of Esk which we passed through on the way from the city of Brisbane to the farm. But I could never sight one, let alone get close enough to one so I could toss my little arms about its neck.

Being young and a city kid meant that I didn’t play a large role during the twice daily milking of the cows. My duties involved coaxing the next cow up to the half dozen bales and perhaps participating in the tying back of the leg with a very loose leg-rope and then wetting the teats in readiness for the suction caps to be applied.

Milking machines are a most efficient way to extract the milk from these willing creatures, that is, if electricity is available.

When the power failed, which it often did, it was back to the old fashioned method where you sat upon a three-legged stool, head resting against the cow’s warm soft belly and then tugged away at the teats to squirt the milk into the bucket clasped between your knees.

The only fun part of this practice was when you tested your aiming skills by trying to squirt a stream of milk into the open mouth of a hopeful cat.

I still marvel at the memory of my diminutive Aunty Flo’s strong hands and determined nature during one of these powerless milking sessions.

My sisters, cousins and I had a game we would play with our bovine friends. It was called “skiing”. We would grasp the tail of a cow and ski behind it, barefoot in the powdery bulldust. It was quite a thrill as our respective cows would pick up pace in the hope of losing its passenger. The boy cousin, being a boy, would up the ante by choosing the less amiable bull as transport.

I am sure the cows were not overly upset about this game. We were only little mites and they still let us cuddle them afterwards and, bottom-line, their milk supplies never dwindled.

At some stage I acquired some literature about dairy cows which featured very colourful pictures of the various breeds available in Australia during the 1960s. Perhaps I found it at The Royal Queensland Show in Brisbane. Better known to us as the Ekka.

Armed with this vital information, I gave a lecturette to my fellow Grade 6 classmates at Mt. Gravatt State School. I spent some time pointing out the various breeds available in Australia and the origin of the different breeds.

I suspect that if my classmates were asked about the regrets they harbour in life, some would recall the 10 to 15 minutes loss of real education that transpired that day.

They may well still bemoan, “If only I had spent that time studying Maths and Science instead of having to listen to her rabbiting on about cows, I could have been a Noble Prize winner!”

Well! Where are you now my indifferent classmates I ask?

I would like to muster you all together in that sweatbox of a classroom and lecture you not only on dairy cows but on the innumerable breeds of beef cattle available to the farmer in 2006.

Back then I only had a handful of dairy breeds to offer. These included the Fresian, Illawarra Shorthorn, Guernsey and my cherished Jersey.

In 2006 I can offer well over 250 breeds of beef cattle. Indeed, someone is cross breeding and using Artificial Insemination to increase the bloodlines as I write this essay.

So, my ignorant city classmates, bring food, water and a swag because I predict that it will be an all-nighter.

Michelle ©

ARE DENTISTS HEADING FOR EXTINCTION?

2006-07-09T14:31:00.000+10:00

A few years ago I heard on the radio that Japanese scientists were developing a vaccine that would prevent dental cavities. I knew that it must be true because it was on the ABC Radio National news and they don't make stuff up.

I recalled this news item a couple of weeks ago whilst reclining in one of those comfy dentist chairs while David was busy drilling away at one of my back teeth.

More about David later!

I haven’t heard any updates about this vaccine. I had one thought though. Perhaps that research money, which was set aside for the development of the vaccine, has been diverted to another cause, for example, their intensive research of the Minke whales in our Southern Oceans.

It is comforting to know that such dogged and meticulous research has been carried out by Japan since 1987.

When the whale numbers eventually diminish, we will all recall that the Japanese did their very best to research these large and gentle creatures during their annual treks to the Southern Hemisphere to capture, kill and cut up our whales.

And, let it be known, that after all their scientific testing is done, there is no whale meat wastage because the by-products of the research are processed and they are made available to the market, fish markets I assume.

Indeed, any income from the sale of the Minke whale meat by-products is said to be used to partially offset the cost of the research (from the Factsheet of the Institute of Cetacean Research, Japan).

Greenpeace also has a view about this intensive research which you can read about at http://www.greenpeace.org.au/.

Given my upcoming dental appointments, I put my interest in whale research to one side and I went to Google to see if the Japanese scientists had made any headway with the vaccine for tooth decay.

I am pleased to report that a vaccine is still in the pipeline. The Forsyth Institute, an affiliate of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine in the U.S.A, has developed a vaccine which can simply be sprayed into people's noses.

Good news perhaps for all but our highly trained dentists. No tooth decay will result in a reduction in the demand for their services.

I thought of my dentist David who is the best dentist in the world. Not only is he very gentle when giving needles and very quick and thorough with the tooth repairs; he is also very funny, a talented artist and, I am sure he won’t mind if I say it, he is cute.

Now I was a little concerned about his long term future and the chances of retraining for all our highly skilled dentists. But then I came up with a solution.

I know they are good at drilling and filling teeth and they can improve the surfaces of teeth with bonding and capping. Also, they do bridgework.

Yes, you can see where I am going here can’t you? It’s obvious, with their core skills of drilling, patching, resurfacing and bridgework, they can move into road maintenance. All they have to do is think of the BIGGER picture!

However I do believe that David has a secure career in front of him. The vaccine is designed for babies of the future and it will be of no value to people born before fluoride and also those who have had a lifetime of bad eating and faulty brushing habits.

Besides, David can always fall back on a career as a painter of bold and colourful artworks.

MY MOST IMPORTANT SKILL

2006-06-29T12:02:00.000+10:00

The most important skill I learnt at high school was typing. Who, at the end of the Swinging Sixties, would have known how important it was to acquire the skill of finding your way quickly around a keyboard using all eight fingers and the occasional thumb?

And being able to do it without having to look at the keys!

Our typing teacher was an older woman called Miss Jones. Miss Jones was a tiny feminine thing who persevered with her Veronica Lake hairdo a couple of decades longer than she should have done so.

I always felt that Miss Jones disliked our class of uncooperative and uncouth teenage girls. Looking back though, perhaps Miss Jones was merely disenchanted with her career choice and she was weary of chanting:

“a s d f g f space ; l k j h j space”

and adding the occasional:

“Sit like ladies. Put those big clodhopper shoes together!”

Learning to type wasn’t a priority for most of the girls in my class. Their main aim at school was to evade the head mistress and her tape measure. If Mrs. Godfrey thought your skirt length was questionable, she would make you kneel so that she could measure the length of your hemline. Fortunately, hemlines could be easily manipulated by hoisting the skirt up over the uniform belt.

Well, it was the era of the mini skirt and we were far too cool to adhere to her matronly hem length.

One of my many jobs where I used my skill involved typing up insurance policies. I was assigned to an insurance clerk who would arrange the policy details with the customers and then pass the information on to me to type it into a large official blue form.

It was a repetitive and not overly taxing job leaving me plenty time to daydream about the upcoming weekend.

One day a co-worker told me that my assigned clerk had said that he didn’t really need to check my typing because I never made an error.

This was not quite true. If my clerk had looked a little closer at the forms he would have found that I did make errors, constantly, but I had a little tool called a typewriter rubber. This thin flat disk shaped device was a cross between a pencil rubber and sandpaper. And, if you weren’t overzealous whilst angrily scrubbing away at that wrong keystroke, you could replace your error with the right letter on the now furry spot on the form. Too much scrubbing resulted in a hole in the paper and then you had to begin again.

Overtime the typewriter rubber evolved from a disk into a pencil shape with a handy little brush at the end for brushing away the rubber crumbs and the paper dust.

Human ingenuity resulted in someone inventing correction fluid so that now we could paint over our mistakes. We girls took to this with great enthusiasm as we were very deft at using tiny paint brushes due to our love of fingernail polish.

Another invention to come to our rescue was a dry correction product which was like white carbon paper. It came in handy little strips which we would place over the wrong letter, smack it with the same keystroke again, and the letter would magically disappear, that is, providing you were using white typing paper.

The best correction method arrived in the form of the computer with its word processing software.

Ah, only a typist would know the joy I receive as I utilise the backspace and delete keys.

It was whilst working for that insurance company that I developed another skill. Through laziness, I memorised all the postcodes of Queensland. Fortunately, our customers were only from the state of Queensland.

I boasted to the abovementioned co-worker that I didn’t need to look at a postcode book because I had memorised the numbers. He scoffed. I told him to test my skill. He did. I got them all right. He was most impressed.

If the quiz show “The Einstein Factor” had been on television back in those days, then I would have been a certain winner.

I can just hear Peter introducing the contestants:

“Meet Claude whose speciality is the complete poems of Emily Dickinson.”

Respectful applause from the audience.

“Meet Joyce whose speciality is Australian cricket players since 1788.”

Enthusiastic applause from the audience.

“Meet Michelle whose speciality is postcodes from the state of Queensland, Australia.”

Sporadic applause followed by mumbles of derision.

I won’t be testing this skill though. Clearly, Queensland was a much less populated state back in the early ‘70s and therefore required fewer postcodes than are necessary today.

But I do continue to use my original skill for work and pleasure. The arrival of the computer and the Internet has meant that most people need to find their way around that curious arrangement of letters on the ever evolving keyboard.

I wonder what Miss Jones would have thought about these technological advances and about the fact that she was eventually replaced by a software programme.

But, right now, I feel the need to test my original skill. I am off to http://www.typingtest.com/ to see just how quick and accurate I am at getting about my keyboard.

Michelle ©

BUB N BILL CARTOON - MUDCAKES

2006-06-23T11:01:00.000+10:00

"Bub n Bill" on cups http://www.cafepress.com/bubnbill

2006-06-20T10:44:00.000+10:00

CARTOON - NUDISTS?

JURY DUTY - HOW TO AVOID THE CALL UP

2006-05-25T14:08:00.000+10:00

My younger sister has been called up for potential jury duty. She is most unimpressed about this as she is self employed and her time is precious.

My older sister is beside herself. She fears that her baby sister is going to be chosen for a case involving a crazed psychopathic killer. And she just knows that the killer’s equally psychopathic relatives will be in the court room and, once the said killer is found rightfully guilty, these relatives will stalk her baby sister with intent.

My advice to my younger sister was practical. Once chosen, she has two options to become unchosen. Firstly, she can call out to the said defendant, “Don’t worry cousin I will see to it that you get off this time.” Or, secondly, she can wait until the court room is settled and about to start proceedings and then nudge her neighbouring juror and nod towards the defendant and say in a stage whisper for all to hear, “That face has guilt written all over it.”

I sense that my sister is not going to take my advice because she simply laughed at me when she should have gasped and said, “Yes, yes. That is what I’ll do.”

Our recent conversation brought back memories of a similar situation which involved one of my favourite ex-work colleagues.

I will call him Stuart. I will use this alias not because I want to keep his identity confidential but because it was twenty years ago and I simply don’t remember his name.

Stuart and I worked for a large communication company. Mind you, “worked” is a very poor description for what I did.

I would turn up each day and I'd make two phone calls to follow up the two outstanding contracts in my very slim folder and then I would tidy my desk and then I would look at the silent phone and then I would tidy my desk again and then I would look, hopefully, towards the direction where the morning tea trolley would emerge.

This is well before the days of desktop computers which provide the idle worker with the opportunity for furtive Internet surfing and hours of Alzheimer-avoiding card games.

Stuart, who sat at the desk behind me, had a phone which rang constantly. Stuart arranged the tenders for the sale of excess goods and, even before Ebay arrived, everyone loves the challenge of competitive bargaining.

I loved Stuart. He was most amusing in an eccentric way. And, because I loved him, I willingly helped him with his job (which he hated) and well, let's acknowledge history, I wasn’t doing anything anyway.

Stuart was attractive in that “a little bit too religious and clean-cut, young Donny Osmond” way in the era of Punks and their mortal enemies the "John Travolta lookalike" disco dancing dudes.

Stuart would spend many hours away from his desk (for reasons I know not why) and, being his friend who also had nothing else to do, I would diligently answer his phone calls and, grateful for the opportunity to wile away the time, I would carefully write out messages for him.

Stuart would finally return from his unexplained adventures about the building and I would proudly hand over the bundle of messages. Stuart would eye them with contempt and toss them in the bin.

Eventually I saw the light and I would respond, “No. I won’t take a message because when I give messages to him he just throws them in the bin.”

Mostly the callers laughed.

Stuart’s aim in life was to leave the company and to live happily on his father’s (yet to be acquired) wealth.

One day he speculated on potential ways to bring about the early demise of his father. I listened dutifully but I wasn’t overly concerned because it was a slow day at the office and I sensed he was just being creative in a scary and "I wish he wasn’t telling me about this" way.

One morning he told me, excitedly, that he had been called up for potential jury duty. I was glad to hear that he had a new and immediate aim in life which was unrelated to acquiring his father's wealth.

He really wanted to be on a jury because it meant he wouldn’t be answering phone calls and he felt it could be extremely interesting if he came across a murder case.

The first morning that he was rejected at the court, he turned up to work most upset.

The next morning he was rejected, he came to work most dejected but with a plan.

“I’ll get a haircut.” he enthused to me.

The third day he was rejected, he came to work somewhat angry but, again, with a plan.

“I’ll wear a suit!”

On the fourth day I had to sympathise with a most distraught colleague.

He never did get selected for jury duty.

Looking back I now wonder if, on a slow morning waiting for selection, he had been overheard discussing plans with a fellow potential juror about how he could send his beloved Dad to an early entry to Heaven and leave the communications company.

So I am thinking that I may revise my advice to my sister.

“Hey sis, get a haircut, wear a suit and tell someone about your plans to off your wealthy father.”

Michelle ©

MUSSOLINI AND I

2006-05-18T12:29:00.000+10:00

It was Mussolini who confirmed that I had a knack for creative writing. How so, you ask. Well, it all has to do with my pursuit of a tertiary degree.

If you have a talent for creative writing but you haven’t got a plot then don’t despair. There is a way to practise your craft and be assured of having someone read it, albeit a readership of one. It is called undertaking tertiary study.

Now you will need to be careful when enrolling in a course. Obviously you must avoid courses that require a clear understanding and actual use of formulae, definitions and terminology. And steer clear of any course requiring a technical ability (either innate or acquired) beyond basic keyboard skills.

Those of you who possess the abovementioned talents need not read on. You have the tangible skills to get yourself a proper degree and, no doubt, you have already mapped out your career path and you are out there getting on with it. Indeed, you are probably constructing and practising mnemonics at this very moment in time.

For the rest of you, I recommend something under the heading of Arts or Humanities, that is, subjects that are assessed by written work (preferably long-winded essays).

I advise that you avoid any units that involve scientific reports (e.g. sociology and psychology). I know you will be tempted (hey, it’s only words and some numbers) but, be warned this type of writing will eventually crush your sensitive soul. It requires the restraint of a catwalk model at a smorgasbord and the imagination of a rock. The key words here are “precise” and “concise” – two words incompatible with the concept of creative writing.

Perhaps at this point I should introduce some “for examples” by sharing some of my experiences using creative writing to complete an Arts degree.

I knew I was on a winner during the second semester of the first year when I wandered up to the tutor’s room to collect an assignment. The title of the assignment was:

“Orwell’s style is more appropriate for reportage than for imaginative fiction. Contrast two essays from Inside the Whale with Keep the Aspidistra Flying.”

The tutor handed over my assignment saying, “This is beautifully written but it doesn’t say anything.”

Now I was not surprised to hear her comment that it didn’t “say” anything because I already knew that to be true. However, I was most surprised to find that I had received 14 out of 20.

Over time I began to notice a trend in the scribblings beside my marks. There were comments such as: “competently written essay”, “well structured”, “lively”, “clear and genuine”, and “a good and excellently written essay”.

There were also comments such as: “limited point of view”, “more could have been said”, “doesn’t come to grips with the deeper levels”, and “a little light on detailed analysis”.

I began to realise that content was a necessary but not an essential ingredient. The medium was getting me a grade point average of a credit despite the message.

By the first semester of the third year, I was full of confidence and taking on history units which is another subject which lends itself to creative writing.

One memorable unit was taught by a lecturer who was not big on having to mark papers and therefore he wasn't too keen on setting too many assignments or having to organise an actual examination. All we had to submit was just the one 5,000 word assignment for our chance to pass the unit. He was also very vague about the topic and he basically left that up to us. His only requirement was that it had something to do with his unit which was called "Modern History since WWI”.

My choice was Mussolini who was not a complex person (his hobbies being sex and megalomania) and therefore his autobiography (fortunately translated into English) was easy to read.

I learnt that from an early age Mussolini exhibited the prerequisite "conduct disorder" personality traits of a dictator-in-training. When only a young boy, Mussolini stabbed a fellow schoolmate in the back. I mentioned this fact in the assignment and stated, most dramatically, that he went on to figuratively stab the Allies in the back whilst he scurried about arranging various peace treaties in an effort to enhance his status as an influential world leader.

Needless to say the assignment was “lively” and I finally scored my first high distinction.

Now I know you will ask, “What happens when you finish the course?” A valid question. Well, you have been honing your writing skills for three years and if you attended a couple of lectures, read a couple of books or listened to gossip in the refectory, then you may have collected some ideas for writing a play, book, short story or an episode for a TV soap opera. Failing that, there is always a postgraduate course.

Me? Well, I did take on a postgraduate course. It is a bit of a challenge though as “beautifully written” doesn’t seem to be enough at this level and I had to try to keep up with the other students who could write assignments which actually “say something”.

But I do harbour literary ambitions. I fully intend to write a screenplay based on my Mussolini assignment. And I will, real soon. It’s just that I have a bit of laundry to do today and then there is the newspaper to read, and later I want to watch “The Bold and the Beautiful”.

Guess I’ll have to pencil it in for later this week.

Michelle ©

OPRAH AND I

2006-05-05T13:24:00.000+10:00

I used to watch the Oprah Winfrey show without fail. However recently I read a scholarly article that said that people who watch afternoon television are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. I think they were talking about women of a certain age like me for instance.

Of course, one doesn’t need to be a research scientist to see a flaw in their hypothesis. Perhaps those people who are watching soap operas and talk shows on TV already have the beginnings of the disease and they simply can’t follow complicated movie plots.

All that aside, I like Oprah. Oprah is like a best friend. She can be chatty and giggly and she can also be really empathic and weepy.

I used to think that she and I were a lot alike. We are both woman, we are the same age, she is on TV and I watch TV.

Well it didn’t take me long to see the flaw in my reasoning and to admit to myself that we are nothing alike.

She is a black American, I am a white Australian. She is a little on the plump side but very fit and healthy whilst I am comparatively scrawny and the only exercise I get is walking from the car park to attend medical appointments for my chronic illness. She is single with dogs, I am married with children. She has been on the cover of Vogue magazine and I can’t afford to buy Vogue. She has billions of dollars and I have billions of (let me think here), ah yes, dust mites. I am sure you get the picture.

Yes, I admire Oprah but I was beginning to worry about the direction she was taking the show and her audience. She started to rattle on about “change your life” TV.

It’s all a bit scary. She has these guests come on her show to counsel those elegantly dressed people in the studio and those tracksuit wearing, potato crisp eating people (too much about me there) who make up her TV audience.

In the olden days these guests would have been called “snake oil salesmen”.

These “guests” drag people from the audience and put them up on stage and try to change their lives. These victims look like frightened hares trapped by car headlights. They have to spew out their deepest secrets, bare their fragile souls and they must cry otherwise they don’t get help with whatever life problems they are currently experiencing. These problems can be marital disagreements and infidelities, addictions to drugs, sex, gambling etc., huge financial debts, and various psychological disorders.

Of course these saviours all have books that they wish to flog to the audience. The titles vary according to the problem. Titles such as: "Stop whinging and live your wildest dreams", "Cleanse and liberate your soul in 14 days (or was that your liver?)", "The best ever eat whatever you want especially if it is only cottage cheese diet" and "10 steps to financial independence".

Okay, I made some of them up.

But that last one is a doozy and now I am thinking of writing my own book about steps to financial freedom. It will be called “Two Steps to Wealth” which means that it will be quite thin and therefore quick to read.

Step One involves writing a book about getting rich. I’ll just make something up that sounds like financial advice because, frankly, Step One is not important.

Step Two is the tough one. Step Two involves getting yourself on the Oprah Show to flog your book to her audience. I am certain, once everything falls into place, it will become a best seller.

Does anyone out there have Oprah’s private number?

Michelle ©

I HAVE WORMS

2006-04-28T07:07:00.000+10:00

“I have worms.” I announced, a little too loudly, at the supermarket checkout.

All activity ceased as people, within earshot, turned their attention upon me.

“Compost worms!” I elaborated, with emphasis.

Interest waned.

My announcement had been in response to a query about how I would recycle the outer leaves of the very large lettuce I was about to purchase.

My friend had assumed that, because I lived on a farm, I kept chooks.

Alas, my chook-keeping days are over. I adore chooks but I refuse to go through yet another heartbreaking attempt to keep them in an area filled with feral foxes.

The last time they massacred my latest batch of girls I swore to God, through angry tears and choking sobs, that I would not offer up any more sacrifices to those murdering mongrels.

I miss my girls dearly but I have found that my composting worms are an excellent alternative to chooks when it comes to recycling kitchen scraps.

Worms not only gobble up kitchen scraps but they will consume newspaper, cardboard pizza boxes, the contents of my vacuum cleaner and anything that once was alive – including toenail clippings.

They don’t require the expense of a chook-pen with the style of fencing only found in maximum security prisons. Also, they don’t need expensive laying pellets or the disruptive and often injurious presence of a cranky rooster.

Once you set up your worm farm, your worms will quietly get on with producing fertiliser and reproducing themselves. They will multiply their population within the limits of the food you provide. What you get in return is odour free worm poo which is very good fertilizer.

I love my worms.

Ok, I’ll admit, worms don’t produce eggs but I simply refuse to clean up after another frenzied fox attack on my beloved chooks.

By the way, is there anyone reading this who has contacts within the English gentry? If so, would you please tell them to bring their hounds, horns, horses and haughtiness to our farm ASAP.

I can assure them that there will be no anti-foxhunting placards or protests here. They are welcome to slaughter all the offspring from the foxes their ancestors inflicted upon this country. In fact, I would be happy to pay money to see them gallop amongst the gum trees, dodging wallabies and wombats and leaping over deadly snakes.

Indeed, I can envisage PBL and FoxSports fighting over the rights to telecast their foxhunting exploits in the Australian bush. But, bear in mind media conglomerates, it was my idea and I demand royalties.

I digress!

Now I have worms instead of chooks I have to buy eggs. I will be off now as I have to feed some egg cartons to my worms.

Michelle ©

SPIDERS ARE OUR FRIENDS

2006-04-20T09:58:00.000+10:00

My mother was terrified of spiders. I wasn’t told of this fear until I was much older as she did not want to pass on her phobia.

She must have been very successful at masking her anxiety as, over the years, I had become merely wary of spiders. It seems that, only in hindsight, do we have the opportunity to comprehend just how heroic our parents have been.

Over time, I developed the policy that as long as spiders carried out their role at a reasonable distance from me I was prepared to live and let live.

When I had children, I became acutely aware that I had to remain calm in times of crisis in order to develop their sense of security. Living in the Australian bush can offer many incidences of crisis. Snakes, wasps, bees, mice, unbelievably large rats, feral cats, feral pigs, feral foxex and the like are always arriving in and around our home and they have to be dealt with swiftly and confidently. So spiders, even red backs, were the least of my worries.

I became determined to maintain my “live and let live” spider policy with an additional pledge to avoid poisons. If they became a problem inside the house, I would deal with them on a one-to-one basis using the vacuum cleaner, a fly swat or simply capture them and relocate them.

Oddly enough my pacific approach was a phenomenal success in the garage. Apparently, the Daddy Long-Leg Spiders (Pholcus phalangioides) and Black House Spiders (Badumna insignis) control the more dangerous and highly venomous Red-back Spider (Latrodectus hasseltii) population and, although they were prevalent, we rarely find them now.

However, the outside of the house seemed to be permanently festooned with spider webs. The Golden orb-weaver Spiders (Nephila edulis) seem to thrive in our yard. Visitors from the city are often alarmed at the size of some of the older specimens dangling about the house and I have often been left with feelings of shame. Spider webs are apparently a measure of poor housekeeping.

I did feel vindicated the day my daughter arrived home from school with a junior reading book for her homework. It was titled “Spiders” and the text encouraged the reader to view spiders as friends and asked that they be allowed to carry out their job of cleaning up the insects in our homes.

But I must admit that there have been times when conditions can be too good for spiders and it can become too much even for me. One such time saw nearly every part of the house, fence and yard trees connected by the strong invisible silk. After being trapped a number of times, I decided that I didn’t need quite so many “friends”.

I am happy to report though that the solution to my spider problem came to me in a surprising form.

One afternoon I was hanging out the washing when a bird landed on the railing around the back stairs. I turned to look at it, careful not to make any sudden moves as it was only a metre or so away from me. It wasn’t the Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen) I had expected to see but it was black and white and, not only was it unafraid of me, it appeared to be smiling at me. We watched each other for a while until I decided that I couldn’t keep still any longer so I returned to hanging out the washing. The bird remained upon the railing watching me and, shortly after, began to swoop about the windows.

It wasn’t until my husband told me that it was a Butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis) that I realised it had come to solve my excess spider problem. I was relieved to find that Nature had found a way to solve my spider problems and I didn’t need to resort to poisons.

Although my children have never shown any disproportionate fear of spiders, there were times when I had wondered if the fear of spiders was innate and that the children just might develop a phobia despite my modelling.

The answer came one day when I found my four year old daughter resting on her bed, her eyes transfixed on an enormous spider residing outside her window. Had she been watching its every move and was she beginning to fear that the window pane was not enough of a buffer zone?

I calmly asked her what she was doing, expecting to hear an anxious complaint about her neighbour. Her attention turned to me and her little face lit up with delight as she told me that she had been watching the spider weaving its web and, with great earnest, she tried to retrace the pattern of its movements with the index finger of her right hand.

The legacy of my "live and let live" approach to spiders continued as she grew older because, after one episode of cleaning her room, she become annoyed with me when she had found that I had vacuumed up a Daddy Long-Leg Spider from the corner of her bedroom ceiling which she had considered it to be her pet.

Looking back, I feel such pride in knowing that I have been able to continue a tradition of peaceful coexistence with these creatures thanks to my mother’s heroism.

Michelle ©

FISH KEEPING RELAXING? WHAT A SCAM!

2006-04-19T07:25:00.000+10:00

I recently acquired three foster goldfish, although to be precise, only one of them is entirely gold and the others have a motley complexion.

Now, prior to becoming a foster parent, the only thing I knew about keeping fish involved a plastic bag and a freezer.

However, not one to be defeated by a lack of knowledge, I took the opportunity to learn about fishkeeping and to study the intricacies of a day in the life of a fish. The exercise has left me deeply distressed.

At some time in the history of the human race a myth arose that watching fish swimming in a glass enclosure was relaxing. No doubt this scam has been maintained enthusiastically by people who make a living from selling fishkeeping equipment. I feel it is my duty to expose this myth for the sick practical joke that it is.

It only takes a few minutes observing these wee creatures to realise that, far from leaving you relaxed, you soon find yourself searching the telephone book for the number of your local animal liberation group and a qualified therapist.

You see, once you make eye contact with fish it becomes apparent that they never blink and the reason they do not blink is that they have no eyelids to speak of. After this fact sinks in, you begin to reason that if they cannot close their eyes then they cannot sleep, ergo, they must stay awake their entire life!

Just as you come to terms with the torment of sleeplessness you begin to notice something even more disturbing. Fish are never still. They are allowed no such luxury as a little floating about on their backs on the surface of the water or a nice lie down on the ornamental rocks at the base of the tank.

Indeed, if they were discovered actually “being still” it could lead to an early entry into fish heaven by being flushed down the toilet. “Still fish” are considered to be dead fish.

And, if you can bear to continue your observation, it becomes unnervingly apparent that for fish to refrain from “being still”, some part of their little bodies must maintain the constant movement. As you survey their anatomy you notice that the fine feathery-like fins below the body are forever a flap and the flimsy little tail keeps a vigil, awaiting the call to propel the body forward at a moments notice. You watch. You worry. You yell, “Keep Moving”. You become transfixed. You become exhausted.

Other issues worry me. Imagine having to exist in an environment that is also your drinking water, your toilet, your kitchen table and your bath. Or worse, actually having to share such an environment with strangers. And what about the privacy issue? No amount of miniature sunken ships or toy deep-sea divers could compensate for the lack of a room of one’s own where you can escape the prying eyes and fellow inmates.

Now I know that I will be accused of being anthropomorphic, but, when the little dears frantically swim towards me, eyes bulging and mouths gulping as if to mime an urgent message to me, I become anxious. No dry lecture about short attention spans and appropriate metabolisms can stop me from empathising with their plight. It is no consolation to me that they are designed to endure such a claustrophobic existence.

My foster fish are soon to be returned to the bosom of their family of origin. I will miss them but I remain traumatised.

Fish watching relaxing? What a scam!

For those of you who wish to sit in front of a glass enclosure and watch something moving slowly to and fro, I have a safe substitution. If you wish to dull your senses I suggest that your watch test cricket on TV (re-run old tapes if necessary). A warning though, to avoid the irritation from the voice overs, engage the mute button when ex-cricketers (particularly those with the initials of “Tony Greig”) are commentating.

Michelle ©

IS IT ME OR DOES MY CAT HAVE AN EATING DISORDER?

2006-04-18T09:01:00.000+10:00

There is a lot of discussion about eating disorders and who has one and who is suspected of having one. It is a malicious pastime and I am no better than the next reader of gossip magazines. My latest victim is my cat - more on his condition later.

I will not attempt to define anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa at this point. But I will discuss “restrained eating” which is another eating disorder where deception rules.

It is fairly easy to detect a devotee of restrained eating. It will be the cadaverous person at your lunch table who sighs heavily at the prospect of eating lunch and then ostentatiously unpacks a thin slice of melon, a tub of some off-white product that has been curdled by enzymes and a couple of those bread-substitute biscuit things.

Yes, these people DO eat. They will even eat in front of you. And they will talk a lot about food. But they will only eat enough kilojoules to stave off starvation.

Now, as I constantly tell my children, the body is just like a motor vehicle. If you don’t put fuel in it, it won’t go. If you put the wrong type of fuel in it, it will breakdown. And if you only put a tiny bit of fuel in it, then don’t expect it to take you very far.

I witnessed one devotee - an older, frail and rather genteel lady - at a wedding breakfast recently. She gasped at the size of the meal being distributed and advised the bewildered young waiter that she and her equally frail, elderly mother would require only half portions of the meal. Her downtrodden mother made one weak bid to get a full portion but without success.

I felt for mother as she watched the free world devour their generous portions of three different roast meats and generous servings of baked vegies and gravy. But, like all of us in the first world, I didn’t let my outrage at seeing third world deprivation interfere with my appetite.

So what has this to do with my cat? Well, he is an Oriental with one of those lean muscular bodies that never fattens and he has an intimidating manner. Until recently he was constantly hungry, meowing incessantly and weaving in and out of my legs whenever I entered the kitchen. I am sure that if he could speak English, he would have reared up on his hind legs and poked me menacingly with his pussy paws demanding: “I want food, preferably raw kangaroo meat, and I want it NOW!”

I was worried and confused. I felt inadequate in my role as primary caregiver. I would put food in his dish and he would gulp it down and then look me in the eye and ask for more.

It was a terrifying flashback to those ‘new-born baby’ days. They don’t come with a user’s manual either.

I began to wonder if I was the problem. Primary caregivers do that. Was I like that genteel lady? Was I bullying my cat into living the life of a restrained eater?

I decided to carry out an experiment. First, I gave him a dose of worming paste to eliminate a plausible alternative cause. Then after a day or two I piled food, in Mt. Everest proportions, into his dish, shoved his bossy little nose into it and locked him up in solitary confinement.

It is here that my experiment begins to lose validity. There is also a possibility that I may have violated a couple of ethical principles regarding research with animal subjects.

I decided that there were two likely outcomes. He would either stop eating or he would explode. If he exploded then he was suffering from some bio-eco-psycho-socio-somethingo-logical eating disorder. If he stopped eating and walked away leaving food in the dish then my primary care-giving role was, indeed at fault. HE STOPPED EATING!! I am currently taking a long hard look at my own eating patterns.

Michelle ©