Canberra is burning. The sky is black, orange in places, choked with smoke. I live in the CBD but my friends are further out amongst it. It's scary. Getting really worried. 200 homes feared gone. SUNDAY MORNING: 380 homes gone. Last I heard the kids were safe, I will probably pester them again soon. Worry worry. SUNDAY NIGHT: Still burning. It's hard to comprehend the extent of the devastation. But the Canberra bloggers you know and love and want to shag are doing okay. I took The Americans to Parliament House today, it looked so eerie shrouded in smoke. My bloody bra set off the metal detectors again. The security dude had to do the whole wand-waving woo woo thing. Why doesn't it go off for anyone else? I'm not the only one who's underwired. Clearly these twin towers are a threat to national security. This line in the CNN story cracked me up: Smoke blanketed the capital, home to 300,000 people, including hundreds of diplomats. MONDAY MORNING: Here at work, people have some pretty grim stories. They're talking about watching fireballs race up their street, how it moved so quickly they didn't have time to get in the car and get the hell out of there. Crikey! Many people are too scared to come in. Can you blame them? They've forecasted high temperatures and unpredictable winds. Meanwhile, talk has already started that the ACT Government were inadequately prepared for the event. WEDNESDAY: 11 freckled ducks, 99 red and grey kangaroos, 20 koalas — more fire victims.
Category Archives: Living In Australia
Dry
99% of New South Wales has been declared drought affected. I would like to know where the unaffected 1% is. Is there a snobby little cloud that chooses to rain exclusively upon this 1%? And beneath that cloud, is there a bunch of people in a big swimming pool, surrounded by lush green gardens and fountains, laughing it up while the rest of the state dries up? Out in the sticks last weekend, the sheep looked like shrivelled prunes on legs. Just bones and rumpled wool wandering around the bare paddocks. The heat was unbearably dry, the kind that fires up your skin like a hotplate; you keep waiting for it to just crack and fall off. Meanwhile, I see Mr and Mrs Joe Fuckwit wasting water out in the suburbs. Drowning the geraniums in the middle of the afternoon, plonking soaker hoses down on the turf. I drive past and wind down my window to boo and hiss. I want to string them up in the trees and smack them with a spiky sprinkler head until they see sense. We had a huge dust storm here in Canberra a couple of weeks ago. All the precious public servant 4WD's were speckled red, the queues at the car wash stretched out onto the street. A friend of mine saw his neighbour standing on her roof in the middle of the day, hosing the dust off the Colourbond! Why the hell do you think we had a dust storm in the first place? In the drought of 1983, our water tank ran dry. I discovered it was possible to bathe, water a flock of sheep and do three loads of laundry on just one thimble full of water. Ever since then, I go bezerk at the sight of a dripping tap or a midday sprinkler. I know it's easy to forget in urban areas that cows are roasting alive and the earth is cracking up out in the country. But come on people, as the Mothership would say, "Use your brain!"
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A Day In The Life
I get a few emails each week saying, "You don't update enough" or "Stop editing and deleting posts" or "I want to hear about your underpants", so it's your own fault you're getting a post full of tedious What I Did On My Weekend crud. Thankfully it's only Saturday night so you won't have to hear too much. If you don't like that kind of post get thee to the archives.
Friday night Rhi and I had Thai somewhere in Kingston. Whoever came up with putting spicy peanutty sauce over a pile of meat is a fucking genius. I wanted to pick up the plate and lick up the last dregs of the sauce but if I'd made a move for it I'm sure Rhi would have jumped in ahead of me.
This morning I woke at 8.30 and thought Hurrah I Shall Sleep Til Noon but then I rolled over and thought, what is that lumpy thing beneath me? Oh it's my fat arse. So I went to the gym instead. First an hour of glorious kicking and punching, made particularly glorious by one of the tracks being Destiny's Child.
Then we stayed another hour for Pump in which I nearly killed myself as I started sneezing in the middle of the squat track. If you start twitching in anticipation of a sneeze with a big loaded bar across your shoulders, the rear end starts to sway dangerously. It's quite disconcerting. Especially if your sister is laughing at you.
After the class we were knackered. Limped home and crawled up the stairs. Ate the food, fell asleep. Later on this arvo I went to meet Amy, Goulburn blogger extraordinaire, who was in town for the day. As I was walking down to Civic I got a message from young Monkey who believed I was ignoring her and thought her a Stupid Jerk.
But I called her back and said, "No you are not a Stupid Jerk. How bout you and Mattay come meet some strangers from the internet with me?" Safety in numbers, that's what they taught me in kindergarten.
So I met Amy and her sidekick Andy by the merry-go-round. Don't you love alliterative couples? Andy and Amy, meet Monkey and Mattay. And Shauny. Shauny and… Single. Mwahaha.
Amy and Andy were both bloody great people, nice and funny and easy to talk to. Luckily Amy was nervous too so she could ramble instead of me. Hehe.
I didn't spill my drink or destroy anything. When I met the other guys for the first time I nervously shredded two beer coasters. I was really enjoying it. But all the while I am having a concurrent conversation with my brain:
– Hey brain, why is it that you only have like four topics of conversation? Dodgy Real Estate Agents, the gym, Crazy Shit Your Mother's Done…
– That's only three topics. And don't look at me. You're the body. You need to transport yourself towards something resembling an interesting life.
But it turns out the others were having similiar conversations with their brain. It's always a little weird at first, you get all paranoid about what kind of impression you're making and wonder if they think you're a Stupid Jerk. But then you just realise, these are nice people, not axe murderers, and if they think you're a Stupid Jerk they'll talk about you on the drive home and wouldn't tell you directly. So let's just drink our lattes or chocolate milkshakes and enjoy it, woohoo!
Does anyone else feel weird talking about online things offline? I always want to start giggling. We were briefly talking about Movable Type vs Greymatter and it felt so weird, it's like this whole thing exists entirely in my head and I forget that there's real people connected to it. Then Amy said the word "Bloggie" and I cracked up because it's just such a funny word out loud.
Anyway, I had a really good time! Thanks kiddies. Then I walked home. BECAUSE I CAN. Ahh, I love living so close to everything. I feel so urban and hip, until I remember it's Canberra.
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Weather Report
It's hottttttt it's hot it's soooo fucking hot today. Mmmmmmmmmphhbh.
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Everybody was kung fu voting
There are ways of dodging the How-To-Vote card mob. Just rock up to your local polling place fresh from your Body Combat class as my sister and I did today. Resplendent in sporty leggings that make the arse look as wide as this great brown country of ours, tomato red faces, dripping with sweat, practicing our hooks and jabs and elbows and roundhouse kicks as we approached them. We entered the church hall at Reid without a single piece of paper being thrust upon us and were able to cast our vote in peace. Kick ass.
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Let’s Get Trivial
Trivia gets me hot and bothered. I love Sale of the Century and Jeopardy! I have a nice collection of beer glasses won at Pub Trivia at the Oxford Tavern from the uni days. And nothing drives me wilder than a guy whispering in my ear, "Let's go back to my place for some Trivial Pursuit". I'm no intellectual heavyweight, I can't discuss politics and I haven't read Important Books, but I do know a shitload of Useless Information. When my new boss asked if I wanted to go to a Trivia Night for her child's pre-school on Saturday, I jumped at the chance.
The venue was suitably dodgy, the Belconnen Soccer Club dazzled us with brown decor and mirrors and violently-patterned carpet. There were chicken wings and mini-spring rolls and ham/cheese/tomato sandwiches and a bar. It was going to be a fun night.
Our team consisted of my boss, my sister and I, a South African couple and mid-30s geeky type. The boss abandoned us after Round One, apparently her project management skills were required at the Scoreboard. There's little difference between managing a whiteboard of quiz scores and running the Virtual Tallyroom for the upcoming Federal Election, I tells ya.
We were performing pretty dismally in the early rounds. But there was alcohol so who cared? It was an interesting format, you could actually buy answers. $2 for 5 random answers plucked from a box. Inevitably you'd get 4 of the same answers or a really obvious one, but we noticed people around us starting to take the whole event very seriously, and they were buying up a storm. The team in front of us were winning, so they were particularly serious. They all sported the same Matter of Life and Death killer frowns, the kiddies, the mum and dad, the pregant teen, the uncle and aunt, and then the grandmother, Lord of the Team, resplendent in purple polyester and fake pearls. She perched on her chair, head darting back and forth like a magpie, double dipping into the Answer Box. She obviously was Up There with the pre-school staff, if she drew out an answer she already knew, she's put it back in and draw out another.
My sister and I were mortified. We launched into a bitchy routine of stage whispers:
"HEY! Why don't we put them back in the box and draw NEW ANSWERS until we get ALL OF THEM!"
"YES! Just like those CHEATING BASTARDS in front of us!"
"HOW DO THEY SLEEP AT NIGHT?"
When the quizmaster read out the answers, the old duck would twirl her pearls, nod smugly and wink at her teammates. "Yep, yep, that's right, I knew the answer was Rage Against The Machine. I am not a filthy cheat, I am just a particularly knowlegable old fart."
We started making a comeback around Round Six. If you scratch away at the brain long enough, the trivial crap spews forth. Caspian Sea largest inland body of water in the world. Patrick White won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature. And a four-point question, name all the members of The Corrs (Andrea, Sharon, Caroline and Jim. I wish I didn't know that).
Everyone knows there's proper procedure for answering questions at a Quiz Night. If you know who the won the Best Country Artist ARIA in 1998 or what the currency of Bolivia is called, you have to wriggle discreetly in your chair, or make fervent "Mmm mmm mmm!" noises, while waving your hands around. Then you silently write down the answer and shove it to the middle of the table, and raise an eyebrow for approval. If you're right, the rest of the table nods knowingly, gives the thumbs up, or goes, "Ahhhh!" or "Oh, I knew that, but you just said it first".
Then you sit around looking smug until the next question is asked. So you do NOT bellow at the top of your lungs in your thick South African accent, "OH I KNOW THE INSA NOW! ET'S THET CRICKET FELLOW! ET'S DON BREDMAN!". Rhiannon spent half the night hissing "Shut up! Shut up!" and pelting chicken bones at them.
By the last couple of rounds we were in with a chance. I was hot for the $60 Avon Basket and the Microsoft Encarta prize pack. It was time to get serious.
The question was, "Who was the Governor of New South Wales arrested in the Rum Rebellion". I was Pencil Nazi by then, and I scrawled down "William Bligh" without even consulting my teammates, most of whom were smashed by that time.
Geek Man seized the answer sheet from me. "Bligh? Bligh? Oh come on! It's not Bligh!"
"It's Bligh! Keep your voice down!"
"Bligh was the Mutiny on the Bounty guy!"
"Yeah but he was the Rum Rebellion guy too, I tell you!"
"Oh, so he was in two places at once?"
"One happened before the other, you fuckwit!"
"You're wrong!"
This is when I leapt from my chair and tackled Geek Man to the table. I pinned him down and repeatedly slapped him across the face. "Listen to me buddy, get a hold of yourself! I wasn't in the champion Western Region History Quiz Team for nothing. I know my crappy colonial history, and I am telling you it's BLIGH. Got it?".
Then I wedged a spring roll up his nose, sat down and wrote BLIGH in big bossy letters on the answer sheet.
Or
I meekly surrendered the sheet, muttering "Fine! Fine! You're the boss!" while he wrote down 'Macquarie'. Then lorded it over him for the remaining rounds when it turned out I was right.
Depsite our Bligh blunder, we romped home in 3rd place, tied with none other than the Cheating Bastards. Our booty included a dodgy bottle of white, a French cookbook, and a voucher for a men's haircut. My sister got a voucher for a massage (the sporting kind, not the Dodgy Adult Shop In Fyshwick kind of massage) and I got a $20 petrol voucher from Lyneham Mobil. Woohoo!
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Phoney Spring
The Phoney Spring continues here in Canberra. Mid-September you get this brief tease of sunshine, some blossoms, a bit of pollen up your nose, just enough to tantalise and make you rip off flanny sheets and put away winter woolies and realise how horribly pale you are. Then it all disappears in a burst of storm and chilly days. Mother Nature is such a nasty bitch, she waits and watches then makes it go cold precisely on the day you' decided to wear summery shoes and short sleeves for the first time, everyone else at work is all rugged up and random strangers announce that they can see your nipples.
And it rains a lot in the Phoney Spring. Not nice warm spring rain but mean, icy rain that turns our yard into a mud bath. I take Harry out for a walk and his fur is filthy and clumped together like an old fluffy dressing gown. It sounds like rain outside but it's hard to tell if it's an actual shower or if it's stopped and the trees are wringing themselves dry. They always seem to wait until you're right under them to squeeze out a big, messy glob on top of your head. It's that Mother Nature again, you see, she really has it in for me.
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Hello, Death
I first became acquainted with death around the age of six during the big nasty mouse plague of 1984. My little school was sandwiched between a wheat crop and a pig farm, so the playground was inevitably shared by a few furry friends. My mum worked in town at the time so had to drop us off pretty early. If we didn't hide in the trees or atop the monkeybars, the teacher would hunt us out and make us do jobs. Like weeding gardens, sweeping footpaths, or emptying the mouse traps.
I wasn't scared of a dead mouse, in fact I felt a little sorry for them. Instead I was terrified of getting my fingers snapped in the trap when I released the deceased. I'd run over to the edge of the playground, stand on tip-toe to avoid the barbed wire on top of the fence, gingerly holding the trap out into the wheat paddock.
"I'm sorry mousie, but this is where I have to leave you!"
"Ah, don't worry about it," the dead mouse would look back at me, its stiff little claws lifted into a shrug. "C'est la vie."
Then I'd shake him free and run squealing back to the classroom, "Urrrrrrghhhhhhh!"
My stellar experience with the mice led to me being put in charge of disposing of the school goldfish when it died. We staked out a nice spot in the playground and spent a few lunchtimes designing his resting place, digging the grave with a teaspoon, finding pebbles for a pretty border around it, constructing a cross out of two twigs and string. By the time we finally mummified him in toilet paper and laid him to rest, he was looking a little crusty. But we wrote him a nice poem and I'm sure he appreciated the trouble we went to.
I learned that death could be brutal, but fascinating in its brutality. It was a brown snake, four or five feet long, probably smaller than it seemed to my little eyes at the time, and it was swishing its way along the hopscotch lines on the playground.
"Snaaaaaaaaaake!" somebody screamed, "Snaaaaaaaaake!"
Big whoop, I thought, but dutifully trotted into the classroom where we were told to wait while the teacher Dealt With It. Noone cared about conservation then, and the Crocodile Hunter hadn't been invented yet, so all snakes were disposed of with a swift chop of the shovel.
All 27 of us students in the school were plastered to the windows, oohing and ahhing as the snaked swerved wildly. The teacher brought the shovel down. WHOOSH! Chopped in half. CHOP CHOP! And in half again! Soon there were half a dozen browny bits twitching along the concrete. From the head with the tongue still out right down to the tip of the tail, the diced snake jerked and shimmied like an over-zealous cheerleader. It seemed a full five minutes before the nerves were reduced to a slow shuffle. It was truly enthralling. The teacher scraped up the bits into a dust pan and dumped it over the fence into the wheat paddock to be with the mice.
Later on, I learned that sometimes people wish death onto other people. I witnessed pure evil in action. We had been left unsupervised watching Behind The News, a current affairs show made specifically for school kids. Every child in Australia knows about BTN and the horrid worksheets that followed. Nobody liked BTN. Or if you secretly looked forward to it in a nerdy little way you kept quiet about it, or else get clobbered at recess. It was impossible to concentrate on the stories, but you knew you had to because there'd be questions after it.
The host of the show at the time, Richard Morecroft, looked so smug and sadistic that I wanted to cry. But Melissa truly HATED Richard Morecroft. She took the opportunity of a teacherless room to let him have it. She stood on top of her orange plastic chair and hurled her pens and pencils at the screen. "I hate BTN!" she screamed, pegging a big yellow marker his nose. "And I hate you Richard Morecroft! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU AND I WANT YOU TO DIE!"
Gasp!
The next Tuesday when the dinky BTN theme started and the credits rolled and there was no Richard Morecroft. He was GONE! Just like that! I was briefly horrified, thinking that she had really somehow killed the man. But we all cheered and crowded, no more BTN, hurrah!
Unfortunately he was replaced, by some guy with a moustache who's name escapes me and who was a hundred more times annoying. And awhile later Richard Morecroft appeared as the new anchor on ABC News.
I guess that's when I learned about reincarnation.
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Northbourne Dream Run
There's this glorious thing called a Dream Run™, where you manage to coast through a bunch of successive traffic lights and it stays green the whole time. None of that stop/start business. It's smooth and fluid and uninterrupted by crimson or crumbly dames in Toyota Crowns.
To get to the gym or work or Macca's (the Sundae Run) we have to cruise through four sets of lights. Inevitably when it's 8.59 on a Monday morning you're going to get all the red lights. Nightmare Run. But sometimes you're lucky, and your chances of success are increased if you start chanting "Dreamrundreamrundreamruuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnn!". Even more effective if your passengers chant too.
It's timing, it's skill on the gas pedal, it's pure luck, it's "amber means speed up", it's "I wonder if there's a red light camera on this intersection?". When it all comes together it's poetry, exhilaration, my sister madly cackling into the night, "AAAAAAAaaaaaaahahahhahah DREAM RUN, BABY!".
And let's not forget the Ultimate Dream Run. That is when you can come off the Big Mother Roundabout at the top of Northbourne Avenue and manage to cruise down to the very end of it (it's a few kilometres, I think) without a single red light. In peak hour. That's right, PEAK HOUR. Gallumphing along on a Sunday afternoon or in the middle of the night doesn't count. Bonus points if it's a Friday. At the start of a long weekend.
If you can do pull off the Ultimate Dream Run, you know you'll have fabulous sex tonight, or win some money, or your boss will be eaten by aliens. It's that good.
Needless to say, I've never made it. But I came ohhhh so close. Heading out to see the folks after a crappy week at work, we were sailing through in a sparkly shower of green. It was a miracle! The last intersection was beckoning.
"Dream ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuun!" we croaked. "Dream ruuuuuuuuuun!"
The light blinked into amber.
"Bugger!" I screamed.
"Don't worry! There's still time!" cheered Rhiannon. "It's a hoon in that Gemini in front, there's no way they'll stop on an orange!"
But they did stop. Fortunately, my brakes are good. Turns out it was a little old lady in the Gemini.
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MIA Bin
Someone stole our garbage bin. Bastards. Languishing on the nature strip one moment, cruelly snatched from us the next. Last spotted in Canberra city, approximately three feet tall, cack green, really stinky with a big number 6 painted on it.
My sister thinks the little old ladies next door nicked it, to Teach Us A Lesson for not bringing our bin back in as soon as the garbo leaves. He swings by Tuesday morning, we usually don't drag it back in til the weekend. But I'm not quite sure the old ducks could have done it without putting their back out or breaking a hip.
My theory is it's the same bastards that stole my bin in Bathurst. They've followed me here and they've got my Canberra bin and my Bathurst bin sitting cosy in their living room and they're laughing it up at my expense!
I'm not sure what the process is here, but back in Bathurst, I actually had to report my bin missing to the police before the council would give me a new one. Then we had to go to the station to make a statement.
"Can you give me a description of the bin?"
"Are you kidding?"
"I am not kidding, Miss."
"Green, smelly, wheels on the bottom?"
"When did you last see the missing bin?"
"Ummmmmmm…" Six weeks had actually passed since the bin disappeared, we'd be putting our rubbish in the neighbours bin.
"Umm. Yesterday. Went missing yesterday."
"Right then, sign here please Miss, and we'll see what we can do."
It's so reassuring that the police are focused on the big crimes out there.