Autumn comes to SA ... normality returns at home!

It would be fair and accurate to say that normality has been restored literally as I write this. Dave is fully fit, healed, well, after the crash; his long pre-booked March holiday is up today, and he's on his way in for his first shift back after seven weeks. So life returns to normal; now, if I can only find my equilibrium, and somehow track down my errant muse, find out where she's disappeared to, and get back to what we'll -- smilingly -- call work. (Occasionally I get paid; in fact, I do believe I'm overdue for a pay check.)

So I thought, why not start with photos? We covered a lot of ground in March, though the much mooted road trip to Mount Gambier wasn't going to happen. The truth is, by halfway through the month, Dave actually could have handled it, but --

-- by the mid-point of March, the impact of the appalling war in Ukraine was starting to bite hard even in SA. The price of fuel was waaay past the point where a driving holiday looked realistic. It wouldn't even have been tasteful, with so many people putting away the car and taking the bus! On top of which, there's always the risk of Covid.

Now, we're all triple-vaccinated -- but. Even triple vaxed, you can catch Omicron; about forty thousand people a day do, nationally. And even though the chances of actually perishing with it are vanishingly small for triple-vaxed people who're not yet entirely geriatric (ouch), the risk of Long Covid is rather alarming. Averaged across the population as a whole, Long Covid attacks about 10% of people; but in certain age groups, the percentage is far higher. Wouldn't you know it? No one in this house is young enough to laugh off the threat. Truth? Long Covid would finish me off, and I've only just begun to clamber back to my feet! So --

Soooo ... we stuck close to home, stayed out of hotels, kept to the outdoor dining areas on the occasions when we went to cafes as diverse as Long Shot at Old Noarlunga, Flower Cellar at McLaren Vale, and The Aldinga Aerodrome. We did just two day trips, using less than a tank of fuel each time -- budgeted for, at over $2 a litre (which will sounds absurd to my ears, though I've seen the news from Western Sydney, where they're paying $2.30, and from the Top End of this poor country, where they're paying well over $3). 

In fact, it's been a great month. Barossa in the rain, the Coorong, the Adelaide Hills, parks and gardens, a few nice cafes, a lot of quality time spent chilling and relaxing. I read some good books, binged some great TV, and come home with a lot of very good photos. Going through them will be fun. I'll post more in the coming days and weeks.

Now, what the heck happened to my muse? Why can't I seem to put fingers to keyboard and actually write something ... like a story, or even a poem? I don't even seem to be able to glimpse an image that inspires me to create art. So, for a while let's blog, play with photographs, and see what happens.

Life goes on. One watches the stories of war with disbelief; one worries about the future of this country, and its people, who're struggling in the teeth of an economy gone bonkers. The 2022/23 budget was handed down last night, at Federal level ... to my eyes it looks like a lousy joke. The kind of budget that will bankrupt small business, land thousands of families on the street, with nary a rental available anywhere ... mind you, the country apparently can afford about sixty billion for defence spending, while the mega-rich don't appear to pay tax at all. Argh. The plight of people in Ukraine is haunting; our own east coast is being blitzed by Mother Nature; and Covid is on the rampage. Sigh.

In light of all this, when I look at our own lives -- living where we do, as safe as we are -- it occurs to me that one needs to take stock a little, count one's blessings, just settle down and wait this situation out. Because nothing is as sure as the fact this will end. Even the Second World War ended, though its death throes didn't come one day sooner through grumbling, complaining, or impatience.

So here I am, settling down, courting patience and setting out on a quest to find my muse. Autumn has come to South Australia, and Dave ... is off to work! 

Vacation Week 2020!

For a week when we has to dodge showers and dress for winter, we did an amazing amount. The forecast had been for rain and unseasonable cold, and this didn't tell the half of it ... snow fell in South Australia on Friday, -- it was lucky we'd done our day trip into the Flinders Ranges on Thursday, because the storm which brought the snow was coming in just as we drove south! We might have been lucky once or twice ... in retrospect, if the heavy weather had arrived even 12 hours earlier, we could have been caught out in the wilderness when the "floodways" started to run, unable to get back to civilization! I guess Dave's guardian angel was looking out for us, because we didn't get caught, and we did have a fantastic time...

I wouldn't have believed you could do this in a day ... Flinders Ranges, out and back, between 6:00am and 9:30pm, including a storm?! It had to be a joke. But no -- it turned out to be perfectly doable, and this was Thursday! Previously, we'd stayed in our own neck of the woods, getting as far afield as the Laratinga Wetlands on the other side of Mount Barker, and Mannum (it rained), via Mount Pleasant (so cold, I had to drink hot chocolate to get back to life); and on Saturday -- I traded Dave for Friday: he did his bike ride a day early, and we hit the road again on Saturday instead -- we headed south and stumbled over the Ferries McDonald Conservation Park, where the wildflowers and orchids are in full bloom. That was a tremendous pleasure, but I'll post those photos -- also the Fairy Wren pictures from Laratinga -- another time.

So ... Flinders Ranges in a day! Breakfast at Locheal, with its pink lake, north of Port Wakefield, and then lunch at Quorn, followed by three hours of tarryhooting on wilderness roads where the views are beyond amazing, before we turned for home at 4:00, with a four-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of us, returning by a different rout ... Willmington, Gladstone, Laura, Clare, Gawler, at which point you connect with the northern expressway and you'll be home in less than an hour. 

The trip had one last amazement in store for us:

As I mentioned before, the weather was due to change, big time, though we hadn't realized quite how violently it would change. In fact, in about twelve hours this storm front would be dumping snow on the Flinders Ranges! We drove right into it, at a time when it was all about torrential trail. The kind of rain where your wipers can barely keep pace. Spectacular -- also a wake-up call, to be a little more careful and plan a bit more assiduously next time! Because we'll definitely be going back; the only questions are when and how! 

How to Neglect a Blog, Part One: have something better to do...

The first thing you need, if you're going to blog assiduously, is plenty of time to devote to it ... and not much else to do. Or, perhaps, nothing better to do with the time. As soon as you get busy, though there's a lot more to blog about, you don't have the time to put into it -- and you lose the urge to sit in front of the computer for hours on end!

Still, I want to keep up with this blog, because if nothing else it's a kind of journal. In ten years I'll be able to touch down here and see what I was doing at this point in my life. 

So ... what have I been doing for the last month and a half, if I haven't been blogging? To begin with -- writing and editing. Dark is the Valley is now finished and edited. All I have to do is lop about 700 words out of the manuscript to bring it down under 150k, to fall into line with publishers' requirements; and this is the work of a few days. Then we can put this one on the shelf and say, "Another one done!" 

This is enough work to bump blogging onto the back burner, even before I mention photography. 

And the truth is, in these last months, since I got my hands on the Lumix (in February), life has been about photography. It's given me a reason to be out and doing, hiking, being active, getting the fresh air and exercise one needs to hang onto sanity, if not vitality. And that's one thing you can't say for sitting behind a computer, working six hours a day! Photography has put the zest back into life...

We've visited many places that lie within "accessible South Australia," and I've had more fun than I'd have believed possible with this tiny little camera. Next week is our "vacation week," Dave booked the time off work months ago. The weather is going to be awful, unfortunately; and even more unfortunately, I've thrown my back out, right on cue. 

I have a full-blown case of lumbago, so how much hiking around I'll be able to do, I don't know. Certainly, the weather won't be conducive to "pitching camp" in the woods all afternoon at Belair; it's going to be cool here, which means cold in the national park; it's going to rain more or less all week, which means dull conditions, not so good for photography; and if you add in the lumbago, right now I don't know what we'll be able to make out of next week! But we'll try. 

The plan had originally been to take off for the Clare Valley for the week, but the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic made us cautious. It would have been a very expensive trip, with accommodation to be booked long in advance, involving a 50% deposit, all of which was forfeit in the event travel restrictions were reimposed. We got burned that way in March and lost a few hundred bucks ... didn't want to run the risk again, so we decided on day trips.

So the next plan was -- orchid hunting at Belair on Monday ... well, not with this spine! Then Cleland on Tuesday ... in the rain?! And so on. And on. We will play it by ear and see what's possible on the day. Right now, I'm nursing a back that feels like it was caught in a car crusher, while the covid-delayed TDF plays out, due to end on Sunday, and I chisel away at the novel to get the length down under one of the major publishers' benchmarks. 

This, and photography, are life at the moment. So -- if I were to turn this blog into a photo blog? Hmm. That's not a bad idea... 

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.