While Not Working

 Ending a house sit creates a day or two of tedious work: cleaning, packing, returning everything to how it was when we arrived, raking endless leaves that winter splatters over the lawn... "Hey look at this," said Roger, leaning on his rake. "We can go on a tour of the old Quarantine Station on Torrens Island and then use the same ticket for the Maritime Museum."   All of which happened to be on the day when we should be cleaning, packing, returning etc... but who cared?  Not us! I'll start raking any time now...   The old Quarantine Station sat on the far end of Torrens Island at the mouth of the Port River, suitably close to the port but easy to isolate internees (quarantinees?) as long as they didn't try to escape back to the mainland via the parts of the river which, at low tide, allowed one to (almost) walk across the mud flats to the river bank.   In 1962 a bridge was built to the island, not for the convenience of the quarantine station but to...

On a cold morning Lake Alexandrina generated its own heavy fog.  The fog oozed over Milang, driven by a little breeze that nibbled at exposed skin and chilled the metal picnic benches in the park, causing me to stand while I drank my thermos coffee. A fisherman huddled on the Milang jetty, three fat fish flapping on the wooden planks behind him while a pelican narrowly missed hitting a lamp post due to watching the fish. "They're European Carp ," the fisherman said, jiggling himself up and down to stay warm.  Unlike me in my cosy puffer jacket, he wore just a garden variety tracksuit although he had pulled the hood up as a nod to the cold weather. "They're a pest.  They drive out the native fish.  And they taste muddy."  He considered this statement a bit.  "Although when I was young I had a European girlfriend and her grandfather made carp fishcakes.  They were beautiful." I don't think he asked for Grandpa's recipe and the girlfriend was ...

Before my flight back from Roma to the big smoke aka Brisbane I put an embarrassing amount of time and energy into selecting my seat and ended up neatly between two windows with no view at all and no future career as an aeroplane seat selector.  The itty bitty plane was chockablock with FIFO workers, all loud and merry on their way home.  The fellow beside me put a movie on his laptop and promptly went to sleep, so in the absence of a window I watched his movie instead.  He had headphones on so I couldn't hear a thing, but the movie involved lots of running around, blowing things up, and shooting people so it kept me entertained while he slowly slumped further and further into the aisle and snored all the way to Brisbane. Ambling out to the plane on a chilly Roma morning. In Brisbane world I sat in a windowless room learning things, which was both interesting and excessively tedious although I was quite excited to find out that all the faces I'd seen on video for the las...

 Colleague went off to spend a weekend doing  epic things with kitchens and Sister arrived to keep me out of mischief in my weekend in Roma.  Sister had wheels which released me from the necessity to walk everywhere and allowed me to buy heavy groceries which believe me is something you take for granted until you have to carry them home up Hospital hill with an altitude of (gasp!) all of 12 vertical metres. The Sister weekend started at the Mitchell Spa, where I made up for the tragic disappointment endured at the Cunnamulla Spa.  The Mitchell Spa had regular opening hours and was full of Grey Nomads gently poaching themselves in the waters. In theory one poaches oneself until approaching spontaneous combustion, and then cools off with a dip in the cool (not hot from the Artesian Basin) pool.  In reality the cool pool is usually empty because it's cold and nobody came here to sit in a cold pool, did they? Behind the pool the old Booringa Shire Work Shed, now hou...

Back in 1967 nothing much happened in Eulo, and the denizens of Eulo thought that this ought to change so they put their head together and came up with a plan to put Eulo on the map.  Thus was born the World Lizard Racing championships which continue to this day as part of the Cunnamulla-Eulo Festival of Opals which obviously has nothing to do with lizards but that doesn't really matter.  Up to 5000 people have been known to attend Eulo for this event, which is a pretty big deal for a town where the population is flat out reaching 100 and that's only when everyone's grandma comes to visit. See?  I'm not joking.  A large, slightly dilapidated lizard of questionable species overlooks the race track and guards a memorial to Destructo, the greatest lizard to ever race at the Eulo track.  Except he was a cockroach, not a lizard, and I cannot find an answer to the burning question of why a cockroach was racing in a lizard race in the first place but nevertheless it is...

Well, I've been far too busy gallivanting around southwest Qld to attend to mundane matters like writing blogs.  It's been quite the trip down memory lane, visiting the tiny towns, walking the little river walks, and remembering what it's like to work in an office with hordes of noisy people having conversations and making phone calls. I got out of the office as quick as I could and off we went, my colleague and I, to the wild west. There were lots of pubs in the wild west.  Although this one was a once-was pub.  There were plenty of right-now pubs, but they weren't as nice to look at. That was in Roma.  There was another pub (or two) in Charleville. This one wasn't as pretty, but it was a right-now pub.  Which is a good thing if you're a pub person. Of course we had to work, but we squeezed in a few things around the edges of the days, like going for a walk along the river where a man sat fishing on a log while smoke curled lazily from a fire lit to keep him wa...