From now on Peter would like to have a walk/run on this oval about once every two weeks. On Thursday he managed ten rounds on this grassy oval. Each round is 400 meters! Of course he wore his toe-shoes again. He likes to wear them on grass. This time the grass was not wet for it was well cut short. It was nearly nine o’clock by the time we got there, this meant any morning dew that may have been there, had already dried off. It was a clear sunny morning with a little bit of a breeze.
I occupied myself exploring the surroundings and taking pictures.
Christmas cheer had eluded me when I walked into the tinsel festooned Lismore pharmacy. In fact I’d been feeling dispirited for some time. Isolation on a steep bush block, distance from friends, lack of city buzz, and a bad case of writer’s block had got to me. My lifelong desire to find myself at the pulse of a literary cultural life, or by this time any cultural life at all, had taken on a Quixotic quality without the romance of that eternal dreamer tilting at windmills from his wobbly horse. I was over grappling with heat and floods and weeds and reading about hugely successful writers in the weekend newspaper supplements.
The vista of Christmas glitz; the press of the sick, the anxious and depressed milling about at the prescriptions-out counter and the clamour of carols billowed towards me. The service number slip I’d been holding so optimistically seemed to…
If you are interested in well written conversations and in theatre,  please go to the above link! I reckon the story you find there  is a real treat! It was published one year ago. I only found it today and could not resist trying to reblog it.
Dr Maria Simms is a published novelist and short story writer who has worked as an academic for many years. Her crime novel, The Dead House, won the New Holland Genre Fiction Award. Maria has been a general editor; lecturer in creative and academic writing; head of a large university academic study centre; and director of university continuing education programs. In an earlier incarnation she worked in theatre and graphic design. Her interests include creative and academic writing, textual and cultural theory and Australian history with an emphasis on the place of women in the narrative of Australia. She loves a good yarn and hearing about the lives of people she meets.
Maria is the managing director of WordCraft Consulting, a company specialising in academic, business and creative writing. She can be contacted at: maria.simms@bigpond.com
It’s unarguable that Prime Minister Tony Abbott has set his sights on the ABC.
Abbott claims the ABC displays what he terms “lack of affection for the home team” in its reporting of events such as the Indonesian spy scandal, allegations by asylum seekers that Australian navy personnel caused them to suffer burns (earlier described as “sledging the navy” by Immigration Minister Scott Morrison) and, perhaps most heinously, “advertising” the work of whistleblower Edward Snowden whose disclosures led to so much trouble in the first place.
The Prime Minister would like it much better if we were all kept mushroom-like in the dark and showered with LNP shit, rather than informed by the national broadcaster of what our government is actually doing.
Somehow, the inanities, incompetencies and illegalities of the Abbott government are not the problem. The problem is the ABC reporting them!! Who would have thought!!
On Monday, which was part of the Australia Day Weekend, we had ice-cream in Enmore, an inner suburb of Sydney. We went to the Cow and the Moon. They make terrific ice-cream. For $ 6,50 you can have three different flavours. And they give you a very generous helping of each flavour in a little plastic cup.
The yeast cake that daughter Caroline had baked for our visit, was very good. She had put fresh plums and crumbles on top and served it with beautiful fresh whipped cream. She baked such a big tray full. Lots was left over and so she packed up a few pieces for us to take home, which we did eat pretty quickly. It was so good! Yummy, yummy. Not so good for our intentions of not putting on extra weight, though! Matthew made us lovely cups of coffee to go with the cake.
Today is the middle of the week, Wednesday. For this afternoon I have an appointment with Scott again. He is the guy who’s helping me to have a pain free New Year! He is a FINCH THERAPY therapist. He makes me do a lot of exercises at home. I think my mobility is getting better. I don’t get puffed out so easily anymore. And this FINCH THERAPY is supposed to help when you have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. So I thought I give it a try. My right hand is much better now after the operation. However I feel that my wrist needs strengthening a bit more. I am very happy that I can do with my right hand so many more things now that I could not do before the operation. (I can pour hot water into cups as long as the water jug is not filled up too much to make it too heavy for me! I can tie my shoe-laces, I can even fasten the hooks at the back of my bra and I can cut my toe-nails!)
I love to wear my toe shoes for a walk on the grass in Lakelands Park. The grass gets cut regularly by the council workers. Last week it was pretty short. In the meantime it has grown again a lot. At seven o’clock in the morning Peter and I went there for a walk. We both had put our toe shoes on. Peter had warned me that the grass might still be wet this early in the morning. But I pointed out that the sun had already been up for a while, that it hadn’t rained for several days and that the sun would soon get very hot. But Peter was right: There was a real lot of morning dew! We felt like walking through a wetland and our shoes became very, very wet. Peter did not enjoy this at all. After a while he became very grumpy. He blamed me for making us leave this early in the morning to walk over the grass. He said that never, never again was he going to do this. He felt just terrible. On top of it his knee started aching, and he couldn’t walk properly anymore. Poor Peter!
Coming back home, we noticed our shoes were full of grass bits. We brushed these off and left our shoes outside to dry. Peter rushed to the toilet and I made some coffee and toast for us. Peter soon felt happy again. I think next time when I see the grass being this wet I won’t go out on it but wait till it dries off a bit. Sorry, Peter, for making you walk on it today.
This picture was taken about a month ago. The grass was much shorter then.
Extreme heatwave conditions can be difficult to cope with. It is all explained here.
This is how the explanation starts:
“For the first time, the Bureau of Meteorology has provided a national definition of a heatwave.
Many Australians have kicked off the new year in sweltering heatwave conditions, with the mercury soaring to record-breaking temperatures in several states.
The bureau says heatwaves have taken more Australian lives than any other natural hazard in the past 200 years, but until now it had not given a national definition of just what constitutes a heatwave.li
A heatwave is now defined by three or more days of unusually high maximum and minimum temperatures in any area.”
To read more, please find the link under ‘here’ at the top of this page.
Sunday night Peter and I saw the Australian movie MYSTERY ROAD on ABC TV. Here is the story-line (written by Anonymous):
“In an outback town, Jay Swan, an Indigenous cowboy detective, returns home to solve the murder of a teenage Indigenous girl whose body is found under the highway trucking route out of town. Jay is alienated from both the white-dominated police force and the Indigenous community, including his teenage daughter, whom he discovers is connected to the murdered girl. Starring Aaron Pedersen, Hugo Weaving, Jack Thompson, Ryan Kwanten, and Tasma Wilson, MYSTERY ROAD is a gripping murder mystery with a cultural perspective. Written by Anonymous.”
I’d say this is too right that it is “a gripping murder mystery with a cultural perspective”. Peter and I had already many discussions about this movie. This movie has an outstanding cast including all the indigenous actors. Aaron Pedersen was great as the “indigenous cowboy detective”!
This movie reminds me of all the American Wild West Movies. It is a gripping movie that makes you think about the present day drug culture and how some people are left behind with no hope to better themselves.
The recent events on the high sea, with border incursions by Australian Navy vessels, called assets, into Indonesian territory, led me to rethink as to what had happened at the outbreak of WW II on the 1. September 1939.
As we all know Adolf “the friend of all people” Hitler was deeply disturbed when he heard, that German tanks, oops, border control assets, were found out to have  inadvertently crossed into Polish territory. German units were only at the border training for the eventuality that Polish cavalry units could attack Germany.
The training exercise became  necessary as it was Germany’s intention to stop the flow of future asylum seeker boats that might come across the river Vistula.  While  Adolf „the Great“ bluntly reaffirmed  his policy it  immediately prompted a diplomatic response from Poland.Â
The Führer said Germany was entitled to protect its borders and would continue to do so, irrespective of Polish concerns over…
Edit February 06 2014: Since I wrote this on January 23 I have added links at the end of the article to later media reports. Today a new report has been published which casts further shadows on the whole debacle.
Details aside, though, his account has been consistent from the first. He says he has no doubt that what he saw at close quarters on about January 3 was three people’s hands being deliberately held to a hot exhaust pipe by Australian naval personnel to punish them for protesting, and to deter others from doing one simple thing: going to the toilet too often.
As an Australian I still want to believe our Navy personnel, however now, two weeks after I wrote this original article, I am no clearer on what happened, despite the pressure put on the ABC to apologise for the initial reports.
AuntyUta 