Q&A Time ... neat!

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It was a lot of fun to to do an interview with Tina Heath-Burns for the "Freedom After 50" site, where I was featured as the first of the "Wednesday Warrior Women" -- being women who strike out into creativity and/or new lives after the Big 5-Oh has passed us by. 

The experience was also quite formative for me, inspiring me to define what motivates me, and where I think (hope) I might be going in future. In all honesty, I hadn't thought it through completely. I suppose one doesn't like to jinx it!

If you'd like to see the interview, find it here, and thanks for reading!

More from me soon ... fiction, a free-read, if nothing else. 😏

An overnight trip -- first time in five years, last time for a LONG time, I think...

Where does time go? Dave and I took two days away and stayed overnight in Milag, which we used to do regularly as "mini getaways," when we desperately needed a break from the 24/7 work of caring for Mom. By by 2016, she was so frail (and hospitalized so often) that we couldn't risk being away from the house for longer than a few hours at a time (when Mike would sit with her, to give us a small break). My mind is struggling to cope with the truth --

It's been five years since we stayed overnight at the Milang Lakes Motel ... photographed the sunset at Clayton Bay, and the dawn on Lake Alexandrina. Five years! To say that it doesn't seem possible is a dreadful understatement. But it's true.

This was also my first opportunity to take the Lumix out on a trip ... and I'm glad we did this trip, because it looks like being the last one for some time. Meaning, months or years. It's all about COVID-19, and how South Australia has gone from being the safest place in the world a few weeks ago, to being dodgy. Very dodgy. It's possible that the state government never expected up to 15,000 people to make a headlong dash for the border in the few days before SA sealed it. Perhaps they expected only five or ten percent as many? Whatever. The fact is, if overseas arrivals are capped at 50 per week, to facilitate tracking and tracing, then this tells us clearly how many cases can be properly handled. So ...

Here we are with something in the order of 13k - 15k newcomers from Victoria and NSW, who flooded west. Put it this way: the population of SA just increased by a very big wedge, the size of several suburbs. And just this morning Victoria is announcing a daily record spike in cases. 723 new cases yesterday ... and the next person you see on the street in SA could easily have been in the city of Melbourne last week??

Let that sink in. Uh huh.

Sooo ... as of this moment, smart South Aussies are expecting to see a rush of new cases, as the flood tide over the border inevitably carries the virus with it. In Victoria a week ago, random testing showed 20% of people testing positive. And up to 15k of these random souls have just just been invited into SA. Meaning, in the next 7 - 21 days, we can expect up to one in five of them to test positive?

Even if only half that many, 10%, were infected when they drove west, it adds up to a major cinema full of potential cases in South Australia, plus the inevitable explosion as it gets into the community. Add to this the statement by SAPOL that only 90% of incoming travelers from Victoria are honoring the self-isolation system -- the other ten percent don't care, or can't be bothered, or believe the virus is a hoax; and some only came to SA so they could go to the pub! We won't even talk about the "Border Bandits," those criminals "running the border," racing into SA and heading for -- yep, the nearest pub. It only took two young women to carry the virus back into Queensland and create mayhem. Say just 75 people who are newly arrived become contagious next week, and don't bother to isolate. Each one of them goes to the pub and infects five or ten more...

Fact: our hospital system can't cope with that. Nobody's can. Bottom line? We can be as badly off as Victoria ... or Florida, or England ... by mid-August.

So, what's the plan?

You don't go planning any trips. You self isolate at home. Dave is the only one of us who goes out, to shops, pharmacy ... and work. He wears the mask to shop, we trust his workplace to be safe, since he works in aged care and they are very, very careful...

Result? Just as our March trip to the Limestone Coast was cancelled, we have to look at the greater probability that our September Clare Valley trip will be cancelled. I have the strongest suspicion that SA will be locked down tight through late August and all of September. We'll be lucky to get out on day trips!

So we made the most of the two days in Milang, enjoyed the heck out of it, and are cherishing the memories. Last time SA locked down, you couldn't even drive into Belair NP! The rules were, you stayed in your own postcode. We did it. SA was COVID-free, and then ... this.

It would be fair to say that someone has dropped the ball ... from a great height. The blame is going to rest on Steven Marshall's shoulders. As State Premier, it was ultimately his decision to make, and he made it. But the rest of us will pay the price, with weeks of lockdown, sickness, unemployment, and a death toll that will hurt.

I'm hoping to be probed wrong. If I knew how to pray, and believed in anything to pray to, yes, I'd be praying right now ... not that it would do any good. Why should prayer work in SA, when it failed in Victoria, and NSW is currently erupting with new cases, and the lines for testing in Queensland go out the door, down the street and around the block? So -- I can hope to be proved wrong in what I;ve said here, but if had a thousand bucks to wager, I'd bet I'm not.

Back into isolation, then, for the duration ...

And it could be a bloody long lockdown. Not happy. In fact ... angry. Very, very angry, but what can you do? What's done is done, and it's too late now. All we can do at this point is wait and see how this plays out. If I'm wrong, I'll either edit this, or blog again, or both. Fingers, toes and eyes crossed. Sigh.

Memories of the black cat -- and us, too, in the mists of time

Remembering Bagheera ... in fact, remembering "the way we were," for that matter. I was going to do a post solely about the Dark Prince, but while I was looking at very, very old pictures (some dating from 2002-2004, it was inevitable that I'd come across photos of Dave and Mike and myself, as we were in the mists of time!

Bagheera was a large part of this domestic world, so ... here's "The way we were," 16 - 18 years ago. And yes, particularly, remembering Bagheera, who left us six years ago. I miss him. I always will. 

I can only find twp photos of myself. I'm usually the one taking the pics, remember; and this was before cameras were designed around selfies, and long before phones took good pictures. Mike is channeling Brian May, and Dave was still in his athletic phase, pre Master Chef Downes, who became the Grandee of Gravel in the fullness and time.

Remembering Bagheera

2000 - 2014

Tales of a garden long, long ago...

A couple of days ago Dave called in the evening to tell me he'd be working later than expected, covering for a teammate who wasn't well. Given time to kill, I got to rummaging through the old hard drives, looking at pictures from years ago ... and stumbled over rafts of them, which I'd either lost or simply forgotten. Treasure trove! What are memories worth?!

I have literally thousands of photos from 2007 - 2012, the years when we were at Miller Street. Those were the years when we had the bird feeder, and the back garden was always brimming with parrots ... when Bagheera was in his prime, and ruled his domain. Memory is odd. One simply begins to forget, and it's a source of enormous pleasure to stumble over archives of photos!

The camera I'd have been using for these shots would have been either the Fuji Finepix 6500 or the  HS10. The resolution is higher than the 5MP of the 5600, certainly, but I didn't get the HS50 till Christmas 2015 (that was the one which didn't last very long before it began to malfunction and physically fall apart). I'm agreeably surprised by the pictures -- the camera also recorded color brilliantly. Some of these photos have hardly been enhanced at all; they're just brilliant, straight out of the box! I also have lots of videos from these years, but those are not so good. Video was very low rez at the time, so we'll just bypass those ... except to remember the ducks in the swimming pool!

The bird feeder was so much fun ... I'd forgotten how much. Although we're currently living much further out of town than Miller Street, so you'd assume there's have to be more birds in the garden here, actually the reverse is true. Very few birds come down into the garden, and those that do don't stay for long (a few New Holland honeyeaters, the very occasion sparrow, a blackbird or two; the rest fly over). At Miller Street, the bird feeder attracted them by the flocks, and they became so accustomed to the place, they'd spend summer evenings in the trees, chattering and grooming. Lorikeets, cockatoos, galahs, crested pigeons, turtledoves, sparrows, wattlebirds, and once, a sparrowhawk, looking to try its luck. It didn't stay long; other birds mobbed it till it departed. And ducks in the pool!

The garden we have now didn't have much in the way of flowers before the self-seeding stock got in. It was almost all pavers and pebbles, hardly attractive to birds. We've let the flowers take over, so it's a great garden for bees, but I could wish there were more birds.

Each house is different, with its own character and personality. We were at Miller Street for five and a half years, and we've already been here for seven and a half! Time flies. In fact, after over 35 years of the gypsy life, moving from house to house on what is smilingly referred to as "the rental roundabout," a large part of my brain is wondering, "Where next?" We've been here so long, subconsciously, I'm always wondering about "the move" as if it's inevitable.

It just occurs to me, as I write that, how sad a statement this actually is. Dang.