Galahs before Breakfast.

Strange Days Indeed!

Sue called from the breakfast table.

"There are galahs on the beach" she said. Not believing her for a second, I grabbed the camera and quietly slid open the door. There were indeed galahs on the beach, two of them, a long way from home. The strangest thing of all though, was the shadows that fell. We have had fewer sunless skies thus far this summer it seems, than a typical London winter, and if it weren't for the family and perhaps the temperature we'd almost be asking ourselves why we came back to this.

But then if we hadn't, we'd have missed the galahs, and we'd be really, really cold and lonely about now, so there's not really any reason to ask the question!

Test Pattern

In days of old, when there wasn't much to show us on the tele, they'd show a test pattern and play endless loops of Richard Clayderman music which made one feel for all the world as though one's living room had somehow become an elevator.

Summer radio on the ABC is a bit like that, endless repeats of interviews held during the year, music that was never quite in vogue but repeated for good measure anyway yet I dare not find another station for fear that I would be deserting an old friend very much in need of company. Occasionally something interesting and new and fresh arrives for my listening pleasure, but it always coincides with the exact point in time when some massively noisy machine needs using or I am called away beyond listening range and therefore the good bits always go unheard.

The projects are something of a test pattern themselves, perpetually comprising little sticks that never actually move or multiply.  No matter how much work goes on, they never seem to form any completed or useful object.

Even the frangipani outside the workshop seems to run in sort of half-cycles, never quite deciduous in our presence, always flowering, yet never in full bloom.   

Perhaps we are part of a test pattern called life.

Or maybe the Matrix is real!

Our Street

Each year for at least a decade, there's been a Christmas party right there in the cul-de-sac and everyone's turned up with steaks and snags for the barbecue and eskys and chairs to sit on. The party starts in the dark and finishes before morning and everyone spends their time catching up with the news of the year as if somehow they weren't aware of it as it happened.

This year things have changed.  Some of the old crew have gone, their houses vacant and like ours, owned by the people of Queensland or tenanted by people who have thus far managed to remain invisible.

It wasn't going to be the same without them and we wondered if, like the community that once we shared, the annual gathering would pass into history.

The end of the street sits in the rain, silent and empty.  At the other end, where once there had been bush there is now a friendly three metre high barrier, kindly erected by the developers of the new estate.

Someone suggested we take the mountain to Mohammad, or in this case to Don and Shirley. Don has always been in our eyes at least, the mayor of our street, or at least was the one who owned the mower and assumed responsibility for all our lawns.  As the dark cloud hovered over us all through the resumption process, they were the last to be contracted and eventually resettled seventy kilometres away, closer to family but leaving our yards to go to ruin.

It may not have been the same cloud, but it was certainly an indifferent if not ominous sky that hung above all day as we joined the convoy heading south in the drizzle, to spend the afternoon revelling in their joy as they showed us the ins and outs of their new surrounds.

We took our places around the monster table which they'd bought "just in case we all turned up at once". They had suffered more trauma than most during the resumption process, losing a son, two dogs and waging a war against Shirley's illness, yet we'd never seen them happier.

The cloud under which we had lived was after all, lined with silver.

Weather Report

Rain, rain go away come again another day.

I've got places to go, things to do and a new shirt that seems to get wet every time I wear it.

It would be wise to leave the shirt at home I thought as in the late afternoon snuck down to Beerwah to do a repair job in what appeared to be without doubt, clearing weather.  I managed nearly an hour's work too, and the sun came out briefly and quite fiercely for a time, but when it did the steam rising from the ground was so great that I ended up just as wet as if I'd been in the rain anyway.

If the rain hadn't returned I may have finished the job too.

Rooned

"If we don't get three inches, man,
Or four to break this drought,
We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"Before the year is out."

In God's good time down came the rain;
And all the afternoon
On iron roof and window-pane
It drummed a homely tune.

And through the night it pattered still,
And lightsome, gladsome elves
On dripping spout and window-sill
Kept talking to themselves.

It pelted, pelted all day long,
A-singing at its work,
Till every heart took up the song
Way out to Back-o'-Bourke.

And every creek a banker ran,
And dams filled overtop;
"We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"If this rain doesn't stop."

John O'Brien

I think I'm tending to agree with Hanrahan.

Bonjour Mr Four

"Bonjour Mr Four" I heard in the background as the grandmother spoke to her eldest grandson on the telephone.

"Bonjour Jojo" came the not-unexpected reply.

"Ça va?"

"Ça va" came the reply, whereupon, having plumbed the absolute depths of their respective foreign vocabularies, the conversation switched to news of the day.

"Are you going to kindy today?"

"Yes, but I'm not going to play with Bradley.

Bradley doesn't speak French."

Reminders

It's a continuing theme I know, but the list continues to grow as if by magic.

It would be good to get the seal coat on the painting I thought, so I proceeded to pull down the framing/layout table, except that I remembered one of the boys had borrowed it, and it would be a lot easier to make a new one than to retrieve it. Well I could do that at the same time as making a frame for it which reminded me that I'd promised the router table to Steve and it's going in the next few weeks, so there'd be no time like now to build a new one, which reminded me that we really won't want to take all that timber when we move, which prompted me to start laminating a couple of bench tops, which reminded me that I can't finish those unless I rejig the table saw enclosure.

After all this reminding going on, I started to tire so it seemed entirely appropriate to mow the lawn while there was a break in the weather, which reminded me we don't actually own a mower.

So I borrowed the mower, and cut the grass, and their grass, and the footpaths, and our neighbours footpaths, and got all sweaty and itchy and raced to finish before dark or the next storm's arrival and it was touch and go which would come first.

All of which reminded me why I don't actually like mowing.