While Not Working

When I was younger I caught up with family members at their weddings. Then I caught up with them at their children's weddings. Time marched on and I caught up with family at the funerals of the generation ahead of me: parents, uncles, aunts. Then a milestone happened and the first of my generation died after a protracted illness and in true (my) family tradition he didn't invite anyone to his funeral and instead invited us all to a celebration of life with instructions to tell many stories and the funnier the better. That was how I found myself in Brisbane for a couple of days, perusing public libraries and attending a wake where I caught up with cousins that I hadn't seen since they were in primary school. Both myself and the cousin whose life we celebrated were the second children born to our respective parents, part of the first trickle of what would become a torrent of cousins, and we spent quite a bit of time together at the family farm. Black and white photos show us ...

Baby teeth are unpredictable things, parting company with their owner at the most inconvenient times, especially if the owner wants to keep them. Inching along in an airport security queue, I watched a little girl, fiddling happily with her loose tooth, suddenly dislodge it altogether. There were tears, squeals of disgust from an older sibling, and a breathless rescue as the tooth slipped from little fingers and bounced across the airport floor.  A patient Dad tucked the ivory into a corner of his wallet and promised direct communication with the tooth fairy.  Everyone in the queue giggled and smiled and discussed the current market value of a used tooth which, I might add, is considerably higher than back when I was trying to convince weeping children that the tooth fairy would still honour swallowed teeth and we really didn't need to search for it at the other end. The weather was perfect for flying.  Perfect weather aside, Qantas/Alliance needed to upgrade their window...

 I joined the Bridgewater Adelaide Hills Walking Group, and off I went to find all sorts of places that I would never have found had I been walking by myself. An added bonus was having people to talk with while walking, including the company of a woman armed with binoculars for the purposes of koala spotting. She was good at koala spotting, too.  While I wandered along looking at trees and making new friends, she spotted koalas right, left, and centre.  Walk 1. Walk 2. Of course there was more to walking than spotting koalas.  Across the valley I spotted an old stone hut, once used for drying tobacco.  It was a very smokey morning, courtesy of bush fires in Victoria and an easterly breeze. We walked on steep little roads past vineyards where grapes were drying on the vines, "We don't do hills," the walk leader informed me happily. "Just the occasional gentle incline!" Yeah right. Just a slight incline.   At the bottom of another gentle incline I climbed a s...

After 8 months of rigorous exercise and an enthusiastic return to riding his bike, Roger raced out to rake the leaves in the gutter preparatory to leaving our sit with Long and Short, and hurt his back.  In as long as it took to say "Ouch!" he was flat on his back in bed, surfacing from a drug-and-pain-induced haze only to think of more things that needed to be done in the narrow overlap of time between starting one sit and ending another. And we thought we were so smart having them end and start on the same day: turns out it's better to have a buffer of a few days in between to accommodate such inconveniences as bad backs and one person having to do two person's work. I collected two weary house owners from the airport and delivered them to two rapturous dogs.  Then I collected my fragile husband and we drove up the hill to two dogs who were not at all rapturous to see us and had to be bribed with bones to stop them barking. As the evening came on they were easily co...

Enough of this paddling around West Lakes in the Tub: we had a brand new sea-worthy battery and a spiffy little electric motor and Roger was champing at the bit to try it all out in wider waters. He decided to take the whole lot down to Milang where we could go for a spin on the waters of Lake Alexandrina and then pack the Tub into our storage shed for the next week or two while we changed house sits again. Of course we forgot that it was Australia Day, and every man and his dog (and the kids, the BBW, the jet ski, the power boat and everything that gets pulled behind it, etc...) had all gone to Milang to revel in the cool breezes and benign shallows of the lake. A crowd of fishers, and I use that term loosely because I don't think they posed any threat to the local fish population, watched with breathless interest as we clipped the Tub together and readied it for sail paddle. They were fascinated by the pedal flippers, by the clipping of the boat together, by the battery and elec...

There I was, minding my own business on my bicycle, stopped at a T intersection and waiting to turn right.  Along came a 4WD and stopped behind me, waiting to turn right and minding his own business but, as it turned out, not taking much notice of what was in front of him.  Along came a gap in the traffic and out he rolled and bump! right into me. Well, that was a nice shot of adrenaline, wasn't it? There I was with the rear wheel of my bicycle jammed under the honking great bull bar of a 4WD and both me and the driver got such a shock that our teeth were chattering.  We unjammed my bicycle and retired to the footpath to swap phone numbers which was quite a challenge given both of us had the shakes. My pannier rack took most of the damage, and my beloved red taillight was quite removed from its moorings. I should have taken a picture when it was stuck to the 4WD.  I didn't think of that at the time.   "I can fix that for you," stuttered the driver.  "I'm a ...