While Not Working

The sun rose on a millpond sea, barely a breath of wind, little wavelets curling happily onto the low tide's wide expanse of white sand.   Armed with the official Wallaroo Tourist Drive map I pedaled along the foreshore toward town. The good things about living at North Beach (stunning view, perfect position for ship/ferry supervision, sunsets, rock foreshore preventing pesky 4wds from roaring up and down the beach) was offset by the extra 8km I had to pedal to get to town before going anywhere else. Which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. The North Beach foreshore had minimal traffic and a stunning view out  to the jetty where a bulk carrier was taking on grain.   Further along North Beach my bicycle worked to advantage, allowing me to zip along the path through the sand dune conservation area while all the cars had to take the long way past the salt lake. The path popped out at the North Beach Kitchen which in theory could serve me breakfast but didn't seem to pay to...

Early in the morning I locked my bicycle to the racks at the front of Wallaroo's supermarket and, with great trepedation, left it to the tender mercies of the passers-by in order that I would have a way to get the 8km home from Wallaroo to the Cat Manor when I arrived home on the bus from Adelaide.  Not that I particularly wanted to go to Adelaide but a) a post-operative sinus vacuum was calling (and that was every bit as nasty as it sounds) and b) Roger needed the car so he could get his own self up to Wallaroo once Big Fluff's owners got home from long golf and gallivanting. The drive across the top of the Yorke featured wide open paddocks of ripe wheat and a stunning view out over the top of the Gulf St Vincent as I came down from the hills and headed toward Port Wakefield. In true South Australian style there was nowhere to pull over to look at the view. I made the best of whatever photo opportunities presented themselves.    In Port Wakefield I discovered to my horro...

Back in Adelaide Roger and Big Fluff have taken responsibility for a small fluffy animal which is allegedly a dog but suffers from the persistent delusion that it is a cat.  Big Fluff tolerates the quasi-cat because he must, and the quasi-cat lives in a land of lollipops and rainbows and does not in the least understand by Big Fluff is now served dinner on the office desk, out of reach of small fluffy dogs animals. I don't have a lot of time for the animal shenanigans taking place back in Adelaide because I've got animal shenanigans of my own going on.  I'm wrangling three cats who are all not impressed that their people have hopped on a cruise ship on the other side of the world and left them with some stranger who doesn't do things the right way. Let me introduce you to the Cat Crew. This is Grandma. Grandma is a very old cat, and boss of all she surveys.  She knows how things should be run.  Her hearing and sight is uncertain and her old brain doesn't always wor...

Clouds trailed mid-morning streamers of rain over Adelaide as I drove north.  Adelaide receded in the rear vision mirror and the salt flats of Bolivar came and went.  Greenhouses huddled in windbreaks beside the road, some trailing long streamers of shredded plastic in the wind.  Groves of olives gave way to wheat waiting to be harvested or wide paddocks of stubble dotted with round hay bales. Clouds trailed streamers of rain.  The highway went from wet, to dry, to wet again. Wind tugged fiercely at the bike, rocking the car from side to side.  Some hardy caravanners braved the wild cross-wind, bouncing their erratic way up the highway with all other travellers giving them a wide berth lest we be caught up in a wind-related caravan disaster.  Pelicans soared in the clouds and black kites tumbled exuberantly in the updrafts. I stopped in Dublin to peruse the brand new amenities. Barely 60 km outside of Adelaide, Dublin was arid and stony with graveled nature...

Summer in South Australia arrived as a drip feed, one day's worth of hot wind at a time.  Roger, attempting to banish his memories of winter cold, pumped as much hot air into the house as he could on the assumption that a death of heat exhaustion would at least confirm that he was no longer cold. "We have to heat up the house!" he cried. "It's going to be freezing cold next week!"   Along with the hot weather a surprisingly agile blue-tongue lizard appeared in the house, necessitating some reptile-herding combined with keeping Big Fluff at bay.  Big Fluff wasn't quite sure what to do with a blue tongue lizard but all his predatory cat senses went on high alert and he was, should he be allowed to do so, willing to have a solid try at doing whatever his cat senses were telling him to do. We locked him inside as we escorted the lizard into the garden and decided not to think about the fact that where a blue-tongue lizard can gain entry a snake could d...