Wishing everyone a brilliant, safe, prosperous and peaceful 2024 ... may there be peace in our time, to coin a phrase; let good health visit your home, and happiness infuse life for every one of us.
Happy New Year from South Australia, on this sunny afternoon, New Years Eve, 2023. Out with the old, in the the new!
(A Photoshop painting in honour of the occasion)
'Twas the night after Christmas and Whoville was rocking
With the kind of wild party that brings people flocking.
The noise and the booze, all the singing and dancing ...
The racket and rumpus, the shmoozing and prancing ...
Would drive to the point of starting a riot
Any poor fellow who just fancied quiet.
And you already know who was sane by an inch:
Poised on the brink was the poor old green Grinch.
By nine in the morning even Max was vibrating
With the jackhammer jollity; it’s not overstating
That not even Max could endure so much ‘cheer,’
No matter how snockered one became on Who beer.
And by two in the P.M., oh, Maxie was worried,
For the Grinch looked so manic; the beast who’d been buried
Beneath fudge and tinsel, and the charm of a child
Had clawed back to the surface ... and my, he was wild!
All the popping and bopping, the preening and prancing,
The swinging and zinging, and -- oh, the break-dancing!
Were more than the Grinch could guess how to endure ...
And then, all at once, he envisioned a cure,
For there by the Christmas tree, flat on the floor,
Was one lonely present. A forgotten chainsaw.
And the Grinch had no sooner set eyes on that tool
Then he said to himself, “Grinchie, you’ll been such a fool,
To think you could bear all this ruckus and humbug,
This rumpus and dumpus, this scampus and scumbug,
This noise, noise, noise, noise, that these Whofolk call ‘fun,’
While the stores are all closed and you can’t buy a gun --
There isn’t a fowling piece (nor even a pheasant),
But one of these idiots forgot his best present!”
For under the Christmas tree, left on the floor,
Wrapped up in red ribbons lay a brand new chainsaw:
All shiny and sharpy, all toothy and jagged --
Just begging for gasoline! So, out the Grinch swaggered
With a light, empty gascan and a bag full of quarters,
To the gas station downtown, with a brain full of slaughters ...
There wouldn’t be any Who left to make noise!
They’d be peacefully absent, the Who girls and boys.
The Who-guys and ladies would be quiet as the snow --
And Cindy-Lou Who’d be the first one to go.
For the Grinch could envisage the headlines tomorrow,
When no Who in Whoville survived to feel sorrow --
Here was a task to which the Grinch felt quite equal
(And MGM’s already contracted the sequel):
GRINCH II: WHOVILLE CHAINSAW MASSACRE.
(Written in 2011, on Boxing Day, when the neighbours' kids were going ballistic. After three hours of their screaming, one could empathize with the Grinch!)
Merry Christmas
to all,
Christmas Eve 2003
Hoping for a wonderful 2024, and --
Peace on Earth
"...and then I dropped my cup of tea, because something magical happened that hasn’t since I was a child, no older than Tommy is now. The living room faded away. Every light shone brighter, and snow began to fall gently, silently, around the tree. I’d promised him, if he was very quiet and still, and watched, and watched, it could happen — a ruse, to get Tommy to take a nap on Christmas Eve, while mom snatched an hour of rest where she could. He’d fallen asleep — always the plan … and I hadn’t believed in magic in so many years."
Well, it seemed like a great idea -- and it is -- but it also seemed like a simple idea that could be executed in no time at all. At that was the big mistake. A brand new gallery site for my art, photos and writing ... why not? And while I was building the template, oh yes, it was easy. No problem at all. Then came the task of feeding in the content, at which point I realized that every topic (such as Fantasy, Science Fiction, what have you) will have to be multiple pages, because images that are too large aggregate into massive downloads per page, which is ... not good. So...
...we soldier on through the project, but rather than it being simple and easy, it's turned into something of a nightmare. Not because the work is especially difficult (it isn't), but because there's so much of it, I could spend six or eight hours a day on it -- for weeks. In other words, yep, you bet, the gallery site is going to be brilliant. It just won't be happening as quickly as I'd thought it would. I simply underestimated the amount of time this monster was going to take! Still...
Remembering Mom, on what would have been her 94th birthday. This is her 65th birthday photo ... she was actually younger in this picture than I am now, and still enjoying life. I could wish things had been different, but ... what will be, will be.
I'm a couple of days late posting this (sorry Mom -- but from your vantage point, you know why).
Her actual birthday was the first day of the two-day thunderstorm, when everything was turned off because of the lightning and the high chance of EMP, and then the power went out for eight hours ... and yesterday was the second day of a migraine so bad, by early evening, I almost went to the emergency room
Happy Birthday, Mom, wherever you are... I miss you.
But this isn't winter. This is tickling the middle of December, two weeks from the height of the Christmas season. And after a cool, muggy, wet spring, we're now having a wet, stormy -- and intermittently bloody hot -- summer, which is far from what we expected when El Nino was announced, following three La Nina years.
But ... well, apparently, this is the first time there's been a positive (or is it negative??) Indian Ocean Dipole at the same time. The Indian and Pacific Oceans are both warm (too warm!) at the same time, there's no place for the usual heat exchange to take place -- which is what causes the hot dry, burning conditions of the normal El Nino summer. And according to what I've read lately, no one really knows how this will play out in the real world, in real time.
Can we say "Climate change" yet? So...
In 1972, the weather settled in and it rained, and rained, and the rained some more. We were living at Glenelg at the time, and I recall slogging to and from school in endless drizzle and occasional downpours, right through the school year, which ended just as the Christmas season began. So, let's immortalize this moment ...
Just as well, because this isn't the weather to be going anywhere! And as for the tree -- pretty as always. But we might get a new one next year...
Kinchina is a CP, or Conservation Park, not far from Murray Bridge -- in fact, it's adjacent to the Mobilong facility. Dave and I went there to spot birds (no joy: barely even heard any, and saw just one ... no photos worth sharing). But instead, we saw something we have NEVER seen before. And although I was thrilled and privileged to see this incredible animal, I actually hope not to see another like him. I'll call him Thunderfoot, because --
And then Dave spotted the male. The one who made that heavy, dense, soft thuddd every time he took a step. When you weigh about 200 kilos, this is what it's going to sound like -- and this weight estimation is based on observation and cold, hard logic. A horse easily weighs more, but it sounds comparatively loud because all that weight is falling on a small area, the hoof: a horse walks on its middle toe, right? Now, consider an animal which is not called a macropod, or big-foot, for no reason. His feet are immense. To hear that same "shire horse cantering" type of thuddd sound, you'll need an utterly enormous weight spread out over that huge foot.
The size of him ...
Those are trees, not shrubs, around him. That's a boulder, not a little rock, just left of centre of this frame. Now, look at the foliage on the foreground tree: mark the scale of it ... but this animal is standing at least eight meters, probably closer to ten, behind that foliage!!
Think of the biggest male roo you've ever seen at Belair NP, or Onkaparinga Gorge, or wherever, and -- literally double it.
It was like looking at a shire horse, and when he moved, that's what it sounded like, back among the trees.
I've never before felt that frisson of "Oh, oh ..." when coming across a roo in the wild. Never saw one that concerned me, much less made the breath shorten and the hair rise on the back of the neck.
Very carefully, I doubled back around to get a line-of-sight on him without trees in the foreground...
A bull that has seen you, is looking right at you, and you're in his territory, and his female is only twenty meters away. For all we knew, there could have been a joey (his baby) in the area, which makes any wild animal protective. He was intent on me, likely for good reason. No way in any world would this animal be leery of a puny little human, but where his joey is concerned...
I popped a couple of quick frames, then very carefully turned around. To be safe, you walk at right-angles to a big, wild roo: you don't make eye contact, and you do not move like you're slinking or sneaking. Slinky walking, eye contact and walking directly toward them emulates the stalking characteristics of the only predator evolution ever threw at animals this big. There haven't been wild dingoes in this part of South Australia for many years -- I don't even know if they're even still wild up in the state's north. But the programming of evolution isn't going to change, not in another million years.
So we walked on, and heard Thunderfoot and his enormous missus boom off into the bushland. It was thrilling, a little bit scary -- like almost but not quite blundering into a grizzly bear in bush Alaska. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything, yet at the same time, I hope not to repeat it! I honestly did not know that roos grew this big -- and yes, I know exactly what the official documentation says! But I also know what Dave and I experienced. We're savvy people, and entirely used to Clydesdale horses, wild bull moose in Kincaid Park, camels ... those taxidermed bears in the big glass cases at Anchorage Airport! We know what we saw.
And I won't be diving through the bush with quite the abandon that I used to! Radar on, wits about you, and make enough noise that wildlife can hear you coming! Because it's bigger that you are. A lot bigger. And it has eight-inch talons! It's very fortunate indeed that roos, even humongous ones, are such peaceable herbivores: they absolutely will not attack you ... unless you give them a justifiable reason, like startling them by running right into them, which would make any animal come up swinging.
So -- don't given them a reason!
Once, I would have said, "So much to do, so little time!" Now I would have to say, "So much to do, so little energy!" There's never any shortage of work waiting for me, and plenty of time to do it in, but no energy do it with. The bottom line is that I haven't recovered from whatever the virus was back in September, much less from the covid in October. I'm thoroughly messed up this time, and I think ... I think, I think ... I have to start cutting myself some slack and awarding points for trying.
I'll keep up with this blog, for the same reason John Watson was advised to blog: it's therapeutic. Also, looking back on this as a journal helps to put dates to things that have begun to blur out with the passage of time. (This brain ain't getting any younger!)
Add to this, the camera chose this moment to die, and the car had major breakdowns again. And all this was right on top of my birthday -- a real milestone birthday, to boot! -- so that everything that had been planned was cancelled. Vacation, trip, the lot. The whole experience was huge fun ... argh.
So for me, it's been about art lately. I'm not going to bang on too much, here, about the sheer rottenness of what's been going on. Most people would tell you that their lives are full of the same kind of twaddle (I could use stronger language!), and when you contrast this nonsense with what's going on in the Mid East right now, well ... yeah. So --
...and the birthday card says it all Another year has flown by, and here we are ... nine!
Just a comparative handful of pictures this time, because her year, and her world, are pretty much the same as always. She had loads of fun at Christmas, when she got a new copra-type mat to tear into, with our blessing ... she's had fun wit boxes, with kitchen paper ... she loves to "help" make the bed, and as for for the Christmas tree -- oh, boy!
So, this was Zolie's year, not counting vast amounts of time spent in her personal jungle (the garden), which, for some odd reason, we didn't seem to photograph this time around...
Feeling sad ... sigh. The wind-and-rain storm came through here like an express train last night, and when I went out for a breath of fresh air, in a break in this incessant cold rain ... Charles de Gaulle is down. I'm kicking myself now, because in ten years I never troubled to photograph it properly. It was always just ... there. It was the old rose tree Zolie loved to climb -- which is why the only longshots of it are ones in which she's perched.
It was always outrageously difficult to photograph its huge, mop-head flowers, because almost as soon as they opened, they began to spoil; and, fair to say, the place it was planted had a fence in the background in one direction, plus the neighbour's shed, and from t'other side it was lost in the background clutter of the lemon tree. So I put off and put off photographing it, even when it was in full bloom, with a dozen or twenty huge flowers. Then suddenly, it's too late.
Soooo ... the plan right now is to take several cuttings off it, while the plant is still viable (tomorrow morning), and it's also possible that one or more of its numerous runners might be nurtured into a new shrub off the old root mass. But at the moment ... there it is, sheared right off at the base and lying flat in the area Dave calls "the plum pit," because it's a sunken garden where the old plum tree lives. Sigh.
And yes, I shed a tear. In fact, I shed a lot.
