Easter

Like everyone else, we got out of the Burbs for the Easter break. Like everyone else, we packed up the Landcruiser and headed down souf. Camping was the accommodation of choice for the dogs and us this time. We looked in our little camping book, picked a spot on the beach, and hit the road… along with everyone else.

I love camping and I love getting away from where I live for a bit. I like being able to hang about in my play-clothes for a few days, and not having to wash my hair everyday. But getting away to go camping is a bit of a fag to be honest. Here is our small litany of ‘getting away for Easter disasters’.

• Other half wakes up at 5.00am – can’t sleep and starts doing some work (for those who know him- yes it is true – I too was shocked). I keep snoozing. I wake up around 7 – fired up about packing the Landcruiser full of shit and taking it ALLLL down souf with us. The BurberKing is still at work and I am peeved – its holiday time – work should be out the window. This ridiculous work thing ends about 10 and now we are behind schedule in the rush to GET AWAY…

• While packing, I tune into the ABC on the wireless. I love Aunty, but not today. The ABC is camped outside of Lake Clifton Roadhouse broadcasting horror stories of road deaths and the Easter Road Toll, and people speeding in their cars (presumably to GET AWAY). The radio people go on and on and on about everyone driving carefully and not speeding and the cops ‘ll get ya if ya do! My parents are also trying to get away and this radio show is freaking my mum out. I get a phone call from her, panicked about the likelihood that we are all going to DIIIIE as we drive down south to GET AWAY. I’m still packing, so am not as concerned as yet.

[I will note, though, that the people getting caught speeding and being killed in accidents over the Easter period were all locals of the country towns in which they were caught/killed. Residents of the Burbs were all tuned into the ABC and clearly aware of the dangers of GETTING AWAY. The locals were listening to their tape decks.]

• We’re packed! Dogs, all our shit, and us. Off we go. Get 20 minutes down the road and we’ve forgotten the towels, and the cooking gear. How are we? Now we have to stop at Target in Mandurah to get some new ones.
• No pictures to share with you, as we forgot the camera. It was sitting on top of the towels.
• Nothing to drink. Forgot the red wine bottles sitting very close to the towels and camera. (Obviously not a problem. Stocked up on half a dozen of Peter Lehman’s finest whilst hubby filled up the car)
• Back on the road. Tuned into the ABC again. By now this scare campaign is humorous and I cannot let it go.

• As the traffic starts to bank up, we turn left for the relative isolation of the Albany Highway. It’s a good trip down, not too busy, we’re cruising along, enjoying the talkback. We drive for 4 hours or so with barely a hold up in the traffic flow, until we get to the outskirts of Albany.

Has anyone else got an opinion on the sometimes questionable usefulness of the State Emergency Service volunteers? I have an opinion and it was reinforced by the traffic jam they caused outside of Albany. They successfully brought to a complete dead stop - along a stretch of highway with a speed limit of 110 kph - the migration of hundreds of Burbs residents and road train drivers so that they could put their hands into the windows of vehicles and deliver a little showbag telling everyone on the roads about the importance of road safety.
What were they on? Road safety indeed.

I wanted to deliver them a little pressie of my own…I can’t imagine what the truckies thought.

• Blah blah blah we find a camping spot. It’s brilliant. We set up in the dusk, have some dinner, and some wine. A little walk down to the beach in the full moon. We are AWAY.
  
• Next day. We fill the Landcruiser up with diesel. BurberKing goes to pay and has lost visa card. Must have left it at Target when buying the forgotten towels. Have to ring some poor bastard in a bank phone centre on Good Friday and report it lost.
  
• Saturday. Go surfing and fishing. This was our first time fishing. I kid you not. We bought a $30 all-in-one rod and reel and tackle fishing rod kit. We were fired up. You should have seen the other fishing rods along the beach. They were a bit larger than ours…We had to have a go at fishing, as we live by the beach and all. I didn’t hold out much hope of catch. But wonders never cease and the BurberKing reeled in a fantastic specimen. We were very excited, jumping up and down, now that we had successfully HUNTED and CAUGHT something. I didn’t see any other anglers on the beach raving about like we were, but maybe they were not as impressed by their occasional catches of tiny sand whiting as we were of ours. It was a little wee thing, and we sent it back to the sea. We threw the steaks we bought on the barbie instead.
  
• Easter Sunday. This day starts well, listening to Macca in the morning on the ABC, with the rain heading in and BurberKing’s stepmother is on national radio wishing everyone well. That was surreal. Go driving for the day. Discover one of the dogs has a tick, no – two, no - three ticks. There are ticks all over the beast. Panic. Have heard ticks send small dogs into paralysis. Much like the time I had pityriasis rosea just before my wedding, I take on board all the rumour and non-fact based comment about the affects of ticks on a small dog. This caused quite a trauma as I thought ‘mon bon chien’ was going to become paralysed and die. (thats French for ‘my good dog’ and is also the name of a boloungerie in Paris that bakes and sells canine biscotti– a dog bakery. Paris is mint. Fin Review 5.5.6) Even BurberKing noticed the dog looked a little tired…After 4 frantic calls to Emergency Vet numbers that never answered and didn’t return my calls, a call to a friend on a farm that had a veterinary dictionary (was waiting for the instruction to shoot the poor thing) and a quick squiz on the internet, we concluded that the dog would not be dying from the ticks that had nibbled into him. Phew. Drama at an end. Waste of a day worrying and running about. Went back to camp and got pissed.
  
• Easter Sunday night. Wrote letter to Macca in the Morning. Laughed ourselves silly at our attempts to imitate the oh-so-Aussie tone of the program. Stay tuned and I’ll post that little beauty.
  
• Monday – pack up and go home. That’s a whole day. Shave the dogs to weed out any last ticks.

• Take Tuesday off exhausted from traumatic getting away.
  

Toys

I do like young people. People younger than me. I like their ingenuity. I admire their strength.
Especially the ingenuity and strength of the young people that deposited this playground toy on the lake shore. Have you seen the springs on these things? They are massive! It would have taken whoever did this a substantial amount of effort and persistence. Much more effort and persistence than I would apply to such a task now. I might have given it a whirl fifteen years ago (I just changed that from 10- Even 10 years ago I was over it). Conceivably, I might consider such a task now, but I would have to be quite, quite drunk or otherwise impaired and with the encouragement of equally drunk associates.
But back to the kids. Good for them. I bet they were pretty thrilled when that spring broke. I can picture the spring pinging off and the looks of ‘what the f*k do we do with this now?’


I have made some assumptions here. I have assumed young people did this and that there was a group. I don't think there is any getting away from the need for youthful vigour to get one of these things out of its moorings. And the thought of anyone acting alone in this regard is preposterous…

Progress

I live in an old part of an old suburb. My parents live in an older part of the same suburb; and they have a much nicer view than us. If you were of a mind to chat to him, my dad would tell you how when he first bought his block there was no mains electricity or water. Even I remember when the water tank tower was taken down. The neighbours used to have a windmill. Now they have air-conditioning and one of those electric powered chairs that climbs up the stairs.

Just near to where I live, some developers are putting in a new suburb. It’s called an ‘estate’. Here are some pictures of it. There is not much to say really. You could say ‘wasteland’. Or you could say, as they do in Porpoise Spit, ‘You can’t stop progress’.

John

Here is a funny thing my brother sent me recently.

Doesn’t the PM look a little, well… little? Or maybe its my brother’s big hat and Howard’s shining chrome dome that are deceiving me.

I reckon my brother is a bit left of centre in his political leanings, so I am assuming this is a bit of a piss-take.

The guy in the blue shirt behind them certainly seems to think so.













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Not in The Burbs

I heard a funny thing on the AM breakfast radio this morning. A Bangladeshi man that suffers severe mental illness and diabetes has been kept in an Australian immigration detention centre for over 6 years. Medical opinion is that his mental illness results partly from the 6 years of detention and that he should be released so he can get the medical help he requires. If medical opinion is anything like my opinion, I suspect they also believe the man should be released because 6 years is too damn long.

When asked about the fate of this man, the Minister for Immigration, Amanda Vanstone, said that she will ‘make a decision on the case soon’.

Soon?

The man has been held captive in the detention centre for over 6 years by the Australian Government and the Minister responsible says she will make a decision on the case 'soon'.

Nice one, Mandy.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200603/s1604415.htm

Tomatoes

Late in 2005, I planted a number of tomato plants. I had grown tomatoes before. When I lived on a small Island of the coast of France (NB: exotic place) I bought some plants off a secretary at work. They came bagged and staked. I don’t think I ever got the plants out of the plastic bags. Still, tomatoes are resilient plants, and they survived this mistreatment to render approximately 5 tomatoes. It was not all my fault. The weather on the Island was crap.

I have moved on from this. In my present foray into agriculture, I invested in 4 punnets of eight tomato plants. And two trailer loads of mushroom potting mix. That’s what the bloke told me it was. I also bought a load of stakes, but only after this become the obvious and only thing to do as the 32 seedlings I had planted were mysteriously replaced overnight by 32 giant vines bearing hundreds of small red fruit.

It is possible that I have overdone it. I bought the 32 seedlings on the basis of my likelihood to fail. I overestimated my incompetence in relation to growing tomatoes but, on the bright side, overestimating one’s own incompetence in any field of endeavour is a most pleasant surprise.

Now the tomato vines are a faded shadow of the wonder that was there before. Only this morning I had to beg my mother to come over and pick the remaining tomatoes as I could no longer face going into the vegetable patch. Tomato overload. There is still a bowl and a colander full of the things in my fridge.

I couldn’t stand to post a picture of the sad tomato vines but I do have a picture here of my fridge. How good is it? I can tell you it was a bright new day in our household when that monster arrived.
You can see that the dogs love it.

I do not have kids. I do have dogs. Here is a picture of my (our) two dogs and my mum and dad’s dog, Ned. Ned is the big one looking at a bone in the distance, and not at the camera. As you can see, my dogs have an eye for the lens.

Ned is dead. Before Ned was dead, he was a great dog. My husband called him a ‘great big mong’. Which he was. Ned was also like Lazarus. My parents had written him off several times, as had I, thinking he was on the verge of heart failure. But every time (nearly), he came back from a little attack of ‘Nearly Dead Ned’ as right as rain.

Of course, one time he didn’t come back, and the local vet had to do that horrible task. Due to other fibs my mother has told family members about the ultimate resting place of the family pets, I asked if she had brought the big mong back from the vets that day. At first she said : ‘Yes! And your father has dug a hole in the front yard for him!’ Seconds later she says ‘Well, no. Ned was a bit too big so he was left at the vets’. Well, of course he was.

Gee, I hope the young ones in family don’t read this and piece together where Max is…

We miss old Ned.

The Burbs around here need more dogs like Ned and less dog-whingers.

Why The Burbs?
I have a lot of friends living in exotic places and doing exciting things. I don’t live in an exotic place and rarely do exciting things. Although last night, I did go fishing with some friends. We didn’t catch anything. I did not even hold a fishing rod. I sat on the beach with a beer minding the dogs while the men folk did the hunting. They aren’t very good hunters. We had toasted sandwiches for dinner (sans poissons).

But back to The Burbs. These friends, those that live in exotic places and are doing exciting things, have set up web logs and web pages so that I can see what exciting things they do in these exotic places. I am not the only person not living in an exciting place and not doing exotic things (although I did have a mojito recently). It is time our story was told. The story of The Burbs.

I must be honest. I did once live in a semi exotic place and I did do exciting things. I can prove it from the photo around here somewhere of me and my husband at the top of a mountain we walked up in France (we got the ski lift down. Phew). The grass is always greener. When I was away, sometimes, all I wanted was to sit on the beach at home. Like in the other photo of me with my sister. Now I can sit on this beach every day, I am a little bit over it and jealous of friends living in exotic places and doing exciting things. But for now, I am in the Burbs, and I do like it. I love my garden and my tomato plants. And last night, (notwithstanding the utter lack of fish), the beach was beautiful.
So for those of us that don’t live in exotic places and don’t do exciting things, The Burbs is the antidote. Read it and weep.