Horizons

I think the poem speaks for itself. And yeees, I'm feeling the "wear and tear" of the carer's life (bluntly: being nailed to the spot while not months but years go by, and one can't help but listen to the steady, relentless "tick-tock" of one's own life rushing by like over-wound clockwork). But we do what we must ... and sometimes we write poems. 

I also have a great fondness for Robert Service, which tends to come out in my poems now and then! Nothing wrong with liking Service, and Kipling, and Patterson, right? Right.

(The image is from one of those wallpaper sites where you slog through ten screens of commercials to get to the picture you want. I don't have a credit for it, but if anyone can provide it, I would be delighted to add it here.)

Hey, I did it!

Hey ... I actually did it. After all these years. Facebook. I mean, for me this is waaay out there. I've been able to see the sense of blogging for the better part of a decade, because it brings out the diarist in me. But social media has never really been "my thing," partly because I'm rather a private person, and partly because I lead a boring, boring life with very little to talk about.

Example:

What did I do today? Cleaned bathrooms. Repeatedly. Of necessity. I'm a care giver ... don't ask.

Facebook keeps asking, What's on your mind? You want the diplomatic handout or the truth? Okay, then, both. The diplomatic handout first: "The poems of James Elroy Flecker are on my mind --"

Night on the bloodstained snow: the wind is chill:

And there a thousand tombless warriors lie,

Grasping their swords, wild-featured. All are still.

Above them the black ravens wheel and cry.

A brilliant moon sends her cold light abroad:

Hialmar arises from the reddened slain,

Heavily leaning on his broken sword,

And bleeding from his side the battle-rain.

...and it would be true that this poem did rush through my mind two hours ago for about seven seconds, for some odd reason. But what's on my mind now as facebook poses the question, is, "I need to get a new toilet brush." 

Now, what kind of  facebook post do you call that? A toilet brush. Boring. Perhaps even mildly disillusioning. Yet, true, LOL.

Anyway: here's me on facebook. I finally did it!

Koala spotting

Glorious spring weather literally demands you get out there and enjoy it -- you know the feeling. Winter is fine, but one day the wind changes direction (you can "tell the difference between a hawk and a handsaw" -- if the ghost of Will Shakespeare will forgive me the reinterpretation) and you just have to get outside and ... do stuff. Have to. So --

I've been wanting to get back to Belair National Park for years now. Dave and I used to hang out there all the time, back in 2005-10-ish, but we haven't had the chance in a long while. Being a full-time care-giver (or carer, as we say downunder) is ... well, it's exactly that. 24/7, and as close to 365 as the carer can get and not go completely insane. It's very tough to get out of the house when the person you're caring for is unwell and there's a never-ending stream of problems to solve.

The good news is, Mom is actually doing much better lately. She has the cough from hell, but the GP promises it's "only" bronchitis, it hasn't gotten into the lung tissue itself -- we're not talking about pneumonia or pleurisy, and the fact is, she could still be hacking at Christmas, at this rate. So Dave and I took the opportunity for a four-hour getaway, while Mike was home to babysit, and went --

Koala spotting!

In fact, we saw about six, and one ... a teddy-bear sized female sitting up in a cherry tree that's just beginning to blossom ... had a little baby:

Mama and baby koala at Belair National Park, 2016

Awwww, so cute! They really are cute -- and they can get very large, much larger that this little girl, above, who really was teddy-bear-size, even though she has a quite well-grown cub. (What is a baby koala called??) This guy, below, was a lot bigger, and ... check out those claws:

They could do a lot of damage with claws like that, but fortunately most of what koalas do is snooze. What a life. Seriously. I was zoomed way in for a closeup on one of these fellows when the camera (Fuji HS50) surprised me: on one of its specialty menus it has a "Toy" setting -- a special pre-set suite of adjustments designed for photographing ... toys. Face recognition is also turned on, and the camera recognized the koala's face as a toy, and clicked itself automatically to Toy mode!

You gotta chuckle, because the fact is, koalas do look like cuddly soft toys. The truth is, they're not. But they're soooo cute. I do believe they still call them "Qantas bears" in Japan, after they featured in an airline commercial a long, long time ago. (In point of fact, they ain't bears at all.)

Along the way ... I think I was stalked and almost set upon by a bunyip ...

...but when I turned around, of course Dave, my knight in shining armor, had chased it away. He was standing there, innocent and heroic, after chasing off this beast which everyone thinks is purely mythical. And after saving my life from the creature he kindly posed for a portrait in the Grand Manner...

Dave, having rescued me from the bunyip. I think.

LOL, anyway -- we survived. We were at the redwoods grove, which is so deep in Belair NP, you actually run into the fence where the park ends. It was gorgeous, with spring coming in and blossom everywhere. In about another two weeks the chestnut trees will be "out," and we must see if we can get back. I'd love to photograph them in flower. The calla lilies -- which grow wild here -- are just beginning their season ...

Calla lilies in the wild ... Belair NP, September 2016

...and the air was sweet with blossom and heavy with the drone of bees. I could have stayed there for a week. Or three. "Gone to hide in woods," as Dave and I like to say. You can see wallabies, emus and echidnas in the park on any ordinary day, but the only other critters we saw yesterday were the usual rabbits, and -- for the first time ever, a southern brown bandicoot ... which I did manage to photograph, but he looks like a dark brown furry bump, so there's nothing dramatic to upload. Too bad, because they're so rare these days. Never seen one in the wild before.

This was interesting:

The park was moving in a number of enormous rainwater tanks -- probably for fire water, I'd say. We watched them moving the first one in, when we were on the trail out to the redwoods, and a couple of hours later -- on another trail entirely, on the way up to Amphitheater Rocks -- we had to step off the asphalt (into somewhat boggy grass) and make way for another tank coming down from Waverly Gate. Interesting, how they move them. The work truck, which you'd assume would move the tank, just follows on. Shows you which vehicle has the oomph -- especially since these tanks are going out to a very steep fire track, from the top of which they'll provide a good supply for fire fighters, in the event (gods forbid) a fire gets into the park. Neat.

When the tank had gone by we continued on to Amphitheater Rocks: the trail has been cleared, you can actually get through now. In other years it's been fortified by bramble bushes, which provide a fantastic habitat for fairy wrens and such, but literally lock out humans. Here's the top of the gorge:

Amphitheatre Rocks at Belair National Park

Rain cascades off the top, after a shower ... and it really does look like a giant, or a troll, lives inside. Reminds me of the Giant's Cave at Morialta. (Must do a blog post about Morialta -- over on the other blog.)

So there you have it: a day's escape into the woods, making the most of this glorious weather, and a very good time indeed was had by all. Even managed to get a selfie that looks pretty decent, so here I am: enjoying the heck out of the day, and (looking at the pic) starting to wonder seriously about putting some color into my hair. I used to be a redhead. Honest! I've got the snapshots to prove it. Born that way: Scots-Irish. Mother Nature had other ideas, starting when I was about 24, and lately I've been letting her get the bit between her teeth and run. Hmmm. Redhead. Food for thought.

You never notice it till it's not there. Or, thank gods laptops have batteries!

Electricity. Love it or hate it, you can't live without it. You might think you can, but the truth will jump up and bite you. We're heading out on another fascinating trip ... to the local hardware store. For a couple or three new powerstrips.

I could wish houses built in the early/mid 1990s had been designed with gadgets in mind, but the truth is, when this house was built, the most you had to think about was a TV, (with a cathode ray tube burning hot and bright in he middle of huge box), a single computer in the home (probably cost as much as the car parked on the drive), and a microwave and blender having a fight over the powerpoint in the kitchen.

These days, it's at least ten gadgets per room, including the bedroom, and every house Dave and I ever lived in was literally rewired on the fly with extension cables and four- or six-socket powerboards to accommodate every conceivably gizmo. Uh huh. Problem is, they don't last forever, and when you get a duff board, you start to blow breakers.

Brill, Utterly brill. So here we go on the yearly pilgrimage to Mitre 10 for a new one or two. Dave asks, "How many of these are we going to replace?" I'm thinking, at least two. How about getting a spare, for the next time we start popping breakers?

Such excitement!

Still, we had a marvelous Saturday. Grabbing the chance to get away from care-giver duties for an afternoon, we headed south to Second Valley and Cape Jervis. The spring-like weather continues ... technically we're still two weeks off the beginning of Spring, but you'd never believe it was winter ... and we took a walk from Leonard's Mill to the old port of Second Valley and back before driving on south to the point where the Sealink car ferry takes on passengers and vehicles for Kangaroo Island. So --

Here's Dave at Leonard's Mill with the just-delivered coffee -- the deliberate wide shot shows you we're on a mezzanine, with the foyer of the cafe-restaurant down below:

And here's Jen at the Cape Jervis lighthouse, a few hours later ... neat lens flare:

Getting away from carer duties even for short sprints into the fresh air and sunshine is not important; it's vital. Chore by chore, hour by hour, caring is usually dead easy. It's just stuff you do. But it goes on and on, it never stops. The routine is mind-numbing, the work is mostly only one step above sheer drudgery; and if you're not careful, the care-giver's whole life (and brain) will slow down to the pace of the patient. You can find yourself literally crawling along at the speed of the disabled 86-year-old. If you happen to harbor any secret dream of "getting your life back afterwards,"  it's a killer.

I haven't chucked the towel in yet; not 100%, anyway. I do want to have a life after caring, and one of the things I desperately need to do now is CHALLENGE MY BRAIN. Wake it up, Get it into gear. Make it work properly again. Lately, I've been wondering seriously about (don't laugh) writing. I used to write a lot, but it's been years. How's about if I just put the hands on the keyboard and started to write stories? See what it'll do for this old brain, which is -- seriously -- idling along in neutral with infrequent, brief, difficult kicks-up into bottom gear!

Writing, then. O...kay. Actually, blogging helps. Makes me focus on a thought for long enough to finish it and get something "down on paper." Is it just me, or is blogging become something of a lost art lately, since facebook ran away with everyone?

The earlybird catches the best pictures

Dawn on July 19, 2016, photographed over the Old Reynella skyline from
the backyard...with the phone. Ain't technology grand?

One good thing about having an alarm set for 6:30am or so: you get to see the sun rise, and some days it's spectacular. I have to be up early because Mom is so frail now, she needs help early. If there's going to be a crisis, I deal with it better if I'm wide awake and have had a cup of tea before it happens. Best way to make sure I'm firing on at least six out of eight cylinders is to wake earlier ... and then enjoy some of the perks of being an earlybird.

Sunrise in Old Reynella, over the neighbors' roof. We have a little altitude
here, and the building line is only single level, so our skies look large. 
Phone photo, by the new Sumi Rome "phablet."

Living in Old Reynella is almost like being in a village. After five and a half years down in Sturt -- one of Adelaide's southern suburbs -- it's a welcome change; and even after getting-on-for-four years here the novelty hasn't yet worn off.

As per the "camera" ... well, these are phone pictures. I'd forgotten I'd taken the smart card out of my Fuji HS50, so I just grabbed the handiest imaging gadget. We love our gadgets, and I'm very impressed with the pictures from the new Sumi Rome "phablet" (so called because it has a 5.5" screen and a very fast processor. Right now, the phone is behaving like a tablet -- far faster than any computer I possess. Meanwhile, the laptop upon which I'm writing this has become sloooower than the netbook; and we won't even talk about the tablets, which are so slow ... yawn. We all tend to get creaky in our old age. Tell me about it).

The only downside to phone pictures is getting an enormous cache of them OFF the phone's smartcard and into the computer. Turns out, you can't just plug this phone into the computer and have the PC read the card, because the "Camera" folder is utterly invisible, no matter how clever you get with your Windows "show hidden folders" settings. Means you have to physically take the card out of the phone and put it in a card reader ... whereupon, shazam! The computer reads it perfectly.

And as for grabbing  pictures in challenging lighting conditions --

Vines on Rifle Range Road, McLaren Vale

Above is a white-sky afternoon at McLaren Vale ... gnarly, ancient vines, looking like something from Fangorn Forest. They're really in a nice, civilized vineyard off one side of Rifle Range Road. Dave and I took two hours and went for a walk -- just to get out of the house, get some fresh air and exercise. 

Being a full-time, 24/7/365 care-giver can and will eventually take a heavy toll. You need to grab "me time" whenever you can get the chance. If it's safe to get out and walk, breathe, see something different for an hour or two, grab your opportunity and run for it. We're lucky in that we live in the wine country, literally cuddled up against the Accolade Vineyards, while in the other direction is the sea --

A storm breaks over the mouth of the Onkaparinga River

Very low light conditions on a cold, stormy afternoon, last Sunday. Mom was in the hospital and Dave, Mike and I needed to get OUT for a couple of hours. Dave took us on a spin down the coast to the outfall of the Onkaparinga River, which you see here under a rain-heavy sky; then we went over to the town of McLaren Vale for coffee at a favorite cafe, the Vintage Bean.

Again, I'm quite impressed by what the Sumi Rome phablet can do. Very nice pictures indeed.

And as for Mom ... well, ten days after the emergency she's just beginning to recover from the pneumonia, and the major problem at the moment is -- swallowing problems. She has to take something northwards of 20 pills a day (!) and is choking on one in three of them ... which means she's almost certain to inhale particles of [whatever] into her lungs and get pneumonia again. It's a miserable way to live, and there is zip, zero, nada, a care-giver can do, save offer sympathy and a warm drink. *sigh*

...and the wind howled like a banshee!

Sunday afternoon, and even the most diligent carer (care-giver, as our American cousins say) needs a break, if only for a couple of hours. With Mom just out of the hospital and still suffering with pneumonia, the level of care provided in-home is very intensive ... which tends to wear out the support crew. So, when she takes half an Ativan (Lorazepam) pill with lunch and settles down for a nap, time to leave Mike to hold down the fort, and run.

Objective: a walk in the fresh air, plus coffee.

Destination: Range Road West, top of the ridge above Willunga.

Mission Status: Accomplished! It was only a walk of about two miles, but a lot of it was uphill, the wind was cranking at about thirty miles per hour, and the wind chill dropped the temperature well below zero, so it felt like it was a lot further.

Dave the explorer braves the wind to get phone shots for facebook.

Conditions were mostly dull, overcast, but occasionally the sun broke through. Dave got some great phone shots, swiftly uploaded to his facebook page, and I was busy with the big camera --

Range Road Westis a well-packed dirt road through farmland
above the lovely town of Willunga.

-- while we hiked a hilly mile or so (and the same mile or so coming back) of Range Road West. You had to brace yourself against the buffeting of the wind, which howled like a banshee. It was actually very exhilarating. And when the sun broke through...

Dramatic skies, Irish-green hills, and a view of Willunga from up top.

...the view of Willunga "under the hill" was just beautiful. Got some very nice photos, and some striking memories of a big black bull on the hillside, at the edge of his territory: trumpeting into the wind -- either marking that territory by shouting over it, or "Calling all lady bovines!" What a din ... before he put his nose down and went back to his lunch.

After which, we headed down to Willunga for a quick coffee at the Golden Fleece before making tracks for home. Mom's alarm would be going off just as we got back.

Mission accomplished. One more Sunday afternoon in the life of a care-giver.

Caring ... because I do actually care

Image of the day: a courtyard under the wines in the Barossa Valley. Why this image?
Because of the peace and tranquility of it ... and the good memories associated with the day I took it.

I've been a carer (or "care giver," as our American cousins say) for a very long time, and I've done the job full time for around twelve years now. Sometimes it seems longer. Other times it seems like just yesterday I was a kid myself, and the frail aged mother for whom I'm now caring was young and vital. But as you go on and on as a carer, and the person for whom you're caring grows ever older and more feeble, the old memories -- the good ones -- begin to fade.

Even now I'm doing the job; I do it to the best of my ability, and I do it every day. I'll do it to The End, however long it takes, because ... well, she's my mother. But I've come to nurse one fear.

The end of this particular trail can't be very far away now, because too much is physically wrong with Mom for there to be a lot of time left. The caring has become a full time job which has overflowed from occupying all my time and brainpower, and is now making deep inroads on Dave's and Mike's time too. Between the three of us we're coping, and we have  great family GP who's as supportive as a family GP can possibly be.

My fear? Simply this: that by the time we reach the end of the trail, the good old memories of Mom as she used to be, in another world -- or is it another dimension? -- known as "The Past" will have been buried so thoroughly under the ocean of more recent memories of pain, mess, exhaustion, that they'll become inaccessible. Lost.

Sometimes when I sit down to meditate I try to open the gateway to the past. It's supposed to be stored in indelible memory and redundant detail, somewhere in this biological miracle, the specific human brain belonging to me.  But I can't seem to find the keys to the gateway. It's closed to me now, and I'd dearly love to be able to jimmy it open.

Strange thoughts to be thrashing out in a blog post, I know; but I have to wonder how many carers are in the same situation.

What I wouldn't give for a Tardis right now!

So Dave and I grabbed a couple of hours while Mike was available to sit with her, and went for a walk among the McLaren Vale vineyards. I'd wanted to "walk a country lane," and Dave made it happen for me. Wonderful.