Catching up with with autumn -- in July. Ahem.

Is anyone else finding this winter way colder than usual? It's ... interesting. Trying to keep busy, I'm -- at last! -- unpacking the photos I took a couple of months ago (with the Lumix; this predates the Canon by months), and this little photo essay, I'll call "Wine Country Autumn." Poem and images are dated March 9, and this is July 3. Where did time go?!

Wine Country Autumn

Gold lies strewn to the horizon and beyond

As if some careless godling

Turned out the divine pockets and

Let the doubloons tumble where they may.

Fields of gold burn, lustrous in the westering sun

As evening settles ― but not for long.

In just a week or three, the next rapacious wind

Will gambol among these vines and loot the hoard

Till bare wood alone remains,

Enduring winter’s ire with never a hint

Of the transient splendour that was

These fields of gold.

 

...Dave and I were at Myponga the other day, and I field tested the 18-45mm lens on the new Canon. Nice. I have the images in Photoshop at this time. Its *not* that the photos look much (if any) better, just as they come out of the camera, than the shots I was getting from the Lumix, BUT -- when you come to enhance them, you find there is a zillion times more information in the Canon image than there would have been in the same picture off the FZ-80 Superzoom bridge. This means the image can be "driven" far, far further, and at the end of the process, the picture will have the characteristics you expect from a professional camera. Mmmm. It's all about a synergy between the camera and the software, and both elements have to be in place, to get the results. I Have a lot still to learn, but I'm getting there!

The Night After Christmas...

 

'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, 2003

 

Merry Christmas

to all,

Christmas Eve 2003

From, our house to yours ...

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." 

Welcome Rain!

Happy, happy! After some serious heat for several days, it's cool and damp this morning. A slow wind out of the west is bringing some welcome rain that'll put out the fire that's been blazing though a blue gum forest (okay, it's a plantation, but it is a forest) at Luicindale, in the southeast, between Naracoorte and Mount Gambier. Haven't been there in years, but we went there two or three times, on our way to and fro on the Limestone Coast. The thought of a major bushfire is always disspiriting, and every season brings another.

I couldn't resist taking the "flat camera" into the garden this morning, between showers, and a haiku came to mind, which says it all:

Silver morning sky,

Soft rain, cool upon my face ―

How the garden sings!

I'm very impressed with the "flat camera," which is obviously a phablet, not a camera, and certainly not a phone. Am just starting to get the hang of it, and for wide shots, macro and bokeh, it's exactly what I need. Good choice of birthday present, that one.

Nothing much is happening here, though I've recently started to write again. My muse is talking to me at last -- at least insistently enough that I've completed two short stories and am working on the end of a third, much longer "short."

Dave is working in full PPE, and I don't know how he does it. He's holding everything together, and the lure of a new bike brightens his world. It's on order; not sure when it'll arrive. For myself, "holding it together" has a lot to do with art. We still need to get this computer back to the workshop to have an HDMI socket replaced, so that I can get my graphics tablet, which was my Christmas pressie, installed! There's no hurry. Dave has the month of March off, free and clear, and it'll be a simple matter to get the work done then.

When I am old (and no, it's not about wearing purple!)

When I am old as old can be

And every year has passed me by,

I hope to sit beneath my tree,

This oak I grew; how times does fly!

            Once, it was young and I was young…

            But it will thrive long after me:

            When I am turned to earth beneath

            The roots it wove, and all you’ll see

Will be fresh blooms, the brighter grown

For growing there, where once I lay;

And high above my tree will stretch

Its branches to another day ―

            But long before I take my rest

            I hope to sit where shade falls deep.

            I’ll knit, read, sing, till memory

            Has ushered me to gentle sleep.

Thought of the Day

Here's the weirdest thing. When poetry comes to me (and it doesn't very often), it's usually while I'm under the shower, washing my hair, no chance to jot it down. By the time I get out of the shower, it's usually gone. Something unique to my brain structure, I suppose.

But this silly little ditty stayed with me for long enough to get it typed, LOL ... I said poetry.  I didn't say anything about it being spiritual, romantic or meaningful...

There's a daft old saying, "Life is just a bowl of cherries" -- it became a song (Lew Brown / Ray Henderson); Judy Garland recorded it in 1956, for a start! Doris Day sang it, about ten years later. Google it: I kid you not. But forget the song. Go back to the daft old saying which inspired it...

Life is just a bowl of cherries:

Twenty bucks per kilo.

I don't know if you have the cash,

Or even how you feel; oh,

If I had the price of cherries

Every day, to munch ...

Life would be a perfect breeze.

And I'd be out to lunch.

Sorry for that. But I'd surely like to have the $140 a week. I wonder how much cherries cost, in 1956?

Can we say "Climate Change" yet?

Any way you slice it, the place is just ... getting hotter. And dryer. Yesterday, Adelaide was the hottest capital city on the planet Earth, and according to the SMH, the top fifteen hottest sites in the world were all in Australia. There's just no answer to that ...

...this was right outside the back door. It's a struggle to keep the garden alive, but during the past few years there's been a process of elimination, and any plants that can't tolerate pretty extreme temperatures have gradually died off, leaving just the hardy ones. So we do have a garden...

Those were captured just an hour ago -- in the "cool" (hahahaha) of the morning, before the sun burns off the overcast. The sky isn't clear, so we're simmering under clouds that look more or less tropical. A snapshot from the backyard makes it look like it ought to be quite cool (wrong!) or that there's a change in the weather happening (ditto) --

Nope. The truth of what's going on, weather-wise, in this country is actually this:

Uh huh. By 8:30am, you want to be done with whatever you were doing outside, get back in and get the a/c running. Just don't even think about the power bill. Even Zolie was ready to come in by half after eight --

-- which is saying a lot, because this cat seems to be solar powered. She'll usually lie on the pavers, soaking up the sun, in a heavy fur coat, until she's physically lassoed and brought in. Hunh.

Anyway ... we survive. I couldn't help noticing the comments on the SMH site. There must be "professional disinformation spreaders" out there -- probably in the pay of the power companies, or maybe that Clive Palmer idiot, who wants to mine coal and run the coal-burning power stations, which caused the problem in the first place.

If you want a liberal dose of stupid, daft enough to make you glaze right over, try this: "Earth's temperatures are primarily regulated by the amount of sulfur dioxide aerosol emissions in the atmosphere. If a high pressure condition stalls over an area, these emissions quickly settle out of the atmosphere , the air becomes cleaner, and temperatures soar. You Australians have been shutting down your fossil fueled power plants, so you are not replacing the needed cooling SO2 aerosol emissions. A quick fix would be to start up some of your plants, with any SO2 scrubbers turned off. Or pray for a large volcanic eruption to spew some SO2 aerosols into the stratosphere." Uh huh. He actually said that. Some lunatic calling himself Burl Henry, who probably gets paid for chiming in, in the comments on climate feature articles and hosing this idiocy around in the hopes of conning the daft or the unwary. Sigh.

We survive. What can you say? It's too hot to write or even mess about with much art, but my brain keeps ticking over:

There was a young dude from Dee Why,
Whose favorite was spicy-hot Thai.
Some fell off his fork
And before he could squawk
It'd burned a large hole through his thigh.

And

A biologist type from Madrid
Had a blazing affair with a squid.
The result of his sins
Was octuplets, not twins...
-- And a three-year research grant, full government funding --
To find out how he did what he did.

Okay, call it heatstroke. But, you gotta laugh. I'm outta here: cool tea coming up.

The cat and the Christmas Tree. It's THAT time of year again...

What more can you say? The poem says it all, so I'll call it good and post this...

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.)

Happy New Year (The Christmas Tree Down Ditty)

This marked my first New Year on facebook, which was an experience: being part of a community that longed to physically assault a time period was ... interesting, to say the least! 2016 was the year that stole so many celebrities from us, from David Bowie to Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds at the top-end of the scale where the mega-celebrities are recognized, to Jon English, Liz Smith and James Stacy at the lower end of the same scale, where lesser-known artists have always belonged in the hearts of somewhat smaller armies of fans.

So many people say 2016 stunk, not merely because of the inordinate number of celebrities who passed away, but because stuff just went wrong, or failed to happen at all. It was a year when a great deal of work went unrewarded and everything seemed to five times the fight one normally has to put up, just to stay in the same place! So --

"Good riddance to bad rubbish," as the old saying goes ... and here's to 2017. May it be a much better year for us all.

It's January 3 already on this side of the dateline. The Christmas tree just came down, inspiring this:

The Christmas Tree Down Ditty

Oh Christmas tree,

Oh Christmas tree,

So ends another year --

Back into the loft goes all

The loveliness you were...

But sure as winter follows fall

And summer follows spring --

November 30: back down comes...

Your MONSTER pile of bling!

Back soon with the recipe for Devil's Trifle, which we make (and eat) at New Year. It never lasts more than a day, for some reason ... how strange!

The Cat and the Christmas Tree

The tree was tall and prideful of its lights.

The cat was small and mindful of her rights…

A cat is she: to rip and shred and claw

Is what cats do and should do. Wait, there’s more!

When claws and lights and trees and cats combine

A cat (whose lifetimes previously numbered nine)

Becomes the Mighty Hunter. And the tree

Would shed those lights and garlands all, and flee,

Save for the fact it’s plugged in.Curse those lights!

What of the cat? She stands upon her rights:

Up, up the tree, defeat the tinsel snake --

For such delicious mayhem, felines make.

Jen Downes, Christmas 2016

The 4:00am perspective

Migraine at 4:00am changes your perspective on ... everything. The world seems to change shape and color; nothing looks the same. It can be very surreal indeed, and the strangest thoughts flitter through your malfunctioning brain. I don't often write poetry these days (used to!) but this came to me:

Hmm. That's not bad. I also popped it onto facebook...

Note to self: write more poetry. Not necessarily after migraine.

Apologies to any who might be following this blog: we took a few weeks out in October for a long-awaited and much-needed vacation. A lot less has been posted here lately than would normally have been, since you tend to arrive home late, tired out and just wanting an easy meal and an hour or two's drool in front of the tv.  (And I still have to sort the photos from that vacation!)

But one at least I'd like to share here:

The lens flare is gorgeous in this ... and the shot was captured after the lens was thoroughly cleaned. I love the colors this flare has adopted. (Am signing off on any images I upload to facebook every time I remember to, since I was told facebook can actually heist your pictures for their own use. O...kay. If they're going to do that, let's make sure there's a credit on the pictures, right? Right.)

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!

Yes ... but is it poetry?

Dave ... just being Dave, in a selfie taken on today's bike ride. Somewhere in McLaren Vale, 2016...

There was a young lady of Niger

Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;

They returned from the ride

With the lady inside,

And the smile on the face of the tiger.

I couldn't help thinking of the above when Dave put on his cycling kit this morning, to go out for an early ride on a chilly morning (or what we call chilly ... it isn't really. If I told you what we call cold in South Australia you'd only laugh).

In fact, I was giggling at this scrap of verse when I was six years old, and always assumed it was by the legendary poet Anon, like most limericks. Imagine my surprise to find it's been attributed to William Cosmo Monkhouse ... more likely Bob Monkhouse, I should think. Having read some of William Cosmo's verses, I just can't see this limerick issuing from the same pen as the author of The Dream of the World Without Death, just to mention one.

Anyway, the verse remains just as funny -- and hilariously apropos as Dave heads out on one of his chilly morning rides, kitted out as dragon or wolf or tiger. Yes, he gets a lot of "likes" from other cyclists and pedestrians. And you can't buy this kind of cycling kit in the stores, which makes it doubly cool.

Remembering Bagheera

Bagheera
31.10.2000 - 29.07.2014

Like all cats, he was exceptional...

He was a black panther -- hence the name, Bagheera.

King of his particular jungle...

Lord of his domain...

Above: stalking green parrots on the big lawn. He never caught one, but when he was 12 years old he caught an enormous rat, and pridefully laid it out as a trophy. He was a fighting cat -- the stories of his battles would fill pages. He loved to curl up in a printer-paper box ... or in the beanbag, especially at Christmas, when he'd wrestle with the tinsel monster. And win.Below: He was a blackberry kitten -- born at Halloween, at the Millennium. His kittenhood was just a little too early for digital photography, so we have only a couple of snapshots. This one, below, makes him look exactly as he was when he was five or six months. In fact, he was five-ish.

Goodness, what big eyes you have...

Mellow, in the jungle...

The tinsel monster! Christmas, 2004

Paper box. Best cat bed ever.

Below: helping (!) to make Sushi ... rolling on the pavers ... stretching with all claws unsheathed, by the glass door to the upstairs deck ... "helping" to unpack boxes...

 

Streeeetch ... yaaaawn ... naptime.

Dream on in peace, little boy --
Or is it time for the next adventure? Go for it.

Two years since he left us. Ye gods, how time flies. The next year will go just as fast, and I'll be back with another swag of pictures ... and a few tears. (To answer a question -- the poem, Ode to a Black Cat, is one of mine. I wrote it about eight or ten years ago ... in another lifetime, as it sometimes seems.)