Winter

The weather has been cool and clear, so gorgeous you forget for a moment the monsoonal rains and plentiful mold of the other nine months. We decided to take our school work outside. Elle dragged out the swag, which needed a good scrub and airing to eliminate the powdery mildew build-up. We also took our morning tea out in an effort to stay warm.



After the lessons were done and the day warmed, the clothes came off and there was some brief unprotected high-ozone exposure. Lulu was even allowed to briefly share the towel...



...and when she thought no one was looking, she continued her sunbathing.




I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

-- Diogenes

Shut down

Tuesday’s flight was rescheduled for Wednesday. Wednesday’s rescheduled flight was set to go out at 11:00 AM. Then 2:00 PM. And then 7:00 PM. When I finally heard from Jorge, calling, I assumed, to say he had safely arrived at his destination, he was still at the airport. They were now estimating a 9:00 PM departure. He was going to forget it and head home. Two hours later, when he had not arrived, trying to discover whether or not they did indeed take off, I had to go through a ridiculous series of phone calls. The airline 800 number is only active Monday through Friday 8:30 - 5:00. No help there. A call to their reservation service, handled through another major airline, produced a drone who would not tell me whether or not the flight had actually left the airport due to “privacy policy,” despite this information being readily available online and I was stuck on the phone with her to ensure that at least, with only dial-up, I would hear the call waiting signal if Jorge tried to reach us. Another call to a slightly more helpful rep, who placed her own call to the actual desk agent at the airport, who in turn supposedly contacted the flight control tower, and relayed the information that they now expected the flight to depart the airport at midnight. Alas, four of their six aircraft were grounded for repairs, one was grounded due to inclement weather, and the only operable plane was coming in on a flat tire. We apologize for any inconvenience!

This morning, after 8:30 AM, I was told they flew out last night at 7:40 PM and the return flight, arriving at 2:00 PM today, was expected to be on time.

Right.

Meanwhile yesterday, the bus never arrived to pick up the girls in the morning for school, our local bank branch was closed because of staff shortages, the attorney was late coming back from lunch, other key airline employees were absent from work, and two of our favorite eateries were closed, all supposedly on account of the weather, yet Jorge and I were both able to navigate numerous landlslides, flooded areas, and road washouts, and Jorge reached the airport via time-consuming, labryinthine detours. Makes you wonder how much of our current weather crisis is legitimate and how much an excuse to shirk responsibility.

Phone and internet service are prohibitively expensive and internet service is still predicated on usage and contracts with heavy cancellation penalties. Even the fastest connections are not capable of keeping up with the rest of technologically advanced society.

It’s pretty third-world here, for a developed country. How do businesses manage to get work done?


Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

-- Benjamin Franklin

Currents

The girls and I got a little too excited this evening picking out electric dog training collars online. Elle romped around the living room until Grice’s command “Stop!” and a loud buzzing noise caused her to drop and writhe on the floor. We compared prices and features opting for the models with the longest range. A Rhodesian Ridgeback is nothing but fast and is quickly out of sight chasing kangaroos or your landlord as she zips by on her four-wheeler enroute to the horse paddocks.

Sarabelle played her first gig on the electric bass this past Friday. One of the area dads, a musician himself, put together a night to showcase our local junior talent. While the weekend edition of the big city paper had several stories about drunken teenage parties getting way out of control, here were our kids, and their families, having a terrific night out with soda, chips, and some surprisingly good live music. It may turn out to be a regular event. Sarabelle’s friend, who is also a boy, played in another band with his two brothers. They had groupies. Screaming girl fans. It was hilarious. But Sarabelle did not find my musings as to whether her American thighs were the inspiration for their cover of “You Shook Me All Night Long” nearly so funny.

Jorge has been here to finalize some real estate dealings and help us move and was able to catch Sarabelle’s performance. Tomorrow, provided the flight is operating, not like today when it was cancelled because “the plane was broken,” and he can even get to the airport in the first place given the huge amount of rain that has fallen in the past 24 hours, he flies over to a little outback town to manage some business interests and then will return to Cairns just in time to say a quick goodbye before heading back to Florida. The plan du jour is for the girls and I to stick it out here at least until July 23, when we can finally make our application for citizenship.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.
-- Marcus Aurelius

Little Johnny wants to play.

I remember when I was in high school how exciting it was to listen to the radio early in the morning waiting for the snow report.

...blah, blah, blah... (newscaster starts listing outlying areas, the ones people always name when you recognize that accent and ask where they're from and they say "Boston" and then you dig a little deeper and ask whereabouts, and they mention their town's name and then you both know that's most definitely not Boston, just some wussy, wannabe suburb) Boston... quiet now, here it comes... All Schools, No School! (newscaster continues listing insignificant bedroom communities as you either head back to bed or over to the cousins' to hang out)...

Well it was not exactly like that today. Except for the exciting part.

We were up, washed, dressed, fed, brushed, in the car and on our way to the bus. Wow! Look how high the water is! Oh my God! Spear [Creek] is right up the bridge! It's on the road! I wonder how high Rifle [Creek] is? Whoa! Amazing! What about Bushy...?

A few more twists and turns before a line of stopped cars with hazard lights flashing alerted us to the fact that Bushy had most assuredly "gone ovah." There was one loud groan from Sarabelle, who can't bear to miss school, two loud cheers from Grice and Bee (who had slept over), and a "Cool!" from Elle. We were 99% of the way there, we could see the principal's house at the elementary school where the bus stop is, but it was not meant to be. We watched someone tow a car off the bridge that had attempted a crossing and had been swept sideways; chatted with another high schooler about to enjoy a day off, caught up with his mother and debated whether or not our vehicles could make it through the .5 meter water and the accuracy of that roadside depth gauge; and took a wade a little way out onto the flooded bridge before turning the truck around and heading back toward the house.

If this had been South Florida, people would have been cursing out the Army Corps of Engineers or the water management district honchos or their local municipality's water and sewer crews or the DOT, wild because they can't get to where they have to go and wondering who is responsible for this fiasco?! But here? If you can't make it across you either sit tight and wait it out there, or turn around and wait it out somewhere else, preferably at the nearest pub.

After a day of errands in Cairns, accessible by another very wet but more navigable route, the water receded enough to get Bee across Bushy and back home. With more heavy rain expected this evening -- we're sitting beneath a huge monsoonal trough -- Sarabelle opted to stay overnight at Bee's house guaranteeing she does not miss another day of school tomorrow. Grice preferred to return home with me and Elle and take her chances.


Nature, time, and patience are the three great physicians.

-- H. G. Bohn

Come again another day

It rained last night.

I mean, it rained.

It rained so hard an inexplicable panic gripped me -- me, who has been through hurricanes, violent storms at sea, and even a blizzard. I don't really know what it was that worried me so. Was the roof going to collapse from the sheer volume of water pounding down on it? It sounded like it, but this house has been through a fair number of wet seasons. Was the water going to come up into the house? We're up too high living in a stilt house or what they call a high-set. Would we be stranded here on the property? I love solitude and there's enough food and books to last us a few days. Would we be stranded and lose power and phone service and a crazy old hermit crawl out of the bush and break into our house and try to kill us and then me, the kids, pets, and car would all be swept away in a flash flood as we tried to escape? Something like that...

So I sat up most of the night reading -- Deepak Chopra's fictionalized biography of Buddha, which, surprisingly offered zero comfort -- waiting for the rain to stop, working up the nerve to run out and pull my car back under the house where it belonged and hoping the windows were all rolled up tight.


Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

-- Buddha

Chilly

Check out that headline.



Going where the wind don't blow so strange, maybe off on some high cold mountain range.

-- Jerry Garcia

High Anxiety

Hon, we're evacuating the resort. A major earthquake in the Solomon Islands triggered a tsunami that's supposed to arrive in 25 minutes. I have to get all the guests out and I don't know if I'll even be able to get out of here or when I'll be able to call you again...

Grice was safe and sound at her school, along with Elle and me, up nice and high on the mountaintop, but Sarabelle was down there and it would take me 30 minutes to get to the high school if the roads were not jammed with hysterical drivers. And then what? We'd all be swept away in our car?

I called the high school not expecting to get through, but did, remarkably on the first try, and was advised that they were not under orders to evacuate yet, and that they were a regional evacuation center so they should be safe in any case (except, I thought, you're barely above sea level and situated on a major river) but parents were free to pick up their kids.

Jorge got through again and said he was going to get Sarabelle, with maybe a couple panicky Canadian women in tow -- they had asked another couple fleeing the resort if they could ride to higher ground with them in their car, a five-seater, and were told no, there wasn't enough room -- when I heard a news report on the one channel that had any news on about the situation, in between the regular morning show's fashion and cooking segments, that the threat had been downgraded. So we sat tight and waited.

And waited.

And when it became clear we were not going to be subjected to a disaster, I wondered, if the earthquake struck at 6:40 AM (our time) and 15 minutes later the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii issued a warning that is sent out immediately to public safety officials around the world, and we were expecting to feel the effects by 9:55 AM, why were the buses still picking up the children and depositing them at school, why school, which starts at 9:00 AM, had not been cancelled or at least had the buses drive the students back home or evacuated to a safer location, and why was there only one television station intermittently broadcasting the news?


In all things it is better to hope than to despair.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Wetter Than Wet

Cyclone Nelson is headed our way. We haven't paid much attention to it until now since we no longer live on the coast, but it looks like we'll be feeling the effects of it by this evening. The stores are out of everything, they already were this past weekend when high water made many deliveries impossible, so there's no point going out to stock up. We'll just sit tight and see what happens.


Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

-- Oscar Wilde

The Wet

The weather is now full-on. Bridges under water, creek crossings impassable, mold and mildew in great supply, mud everywhere, and four-wheel drive necessary to get up our driveway (which, if it were a ski slope, would be a good blue run.) We have had two major infestations of bugs escaping the rain outside, wasps and flying ants. Both times our landlord scoffed, they wouldn’t be living inside the house, they only swarm outside this time of year and are drawn to the light, maybe you left a door open, but after two bug bombs up in the attic, a whole can of insecticide up under the eaves, and lots of sweeping and vacuuming, they are gone. Next will be the snakes. They also prefer dry spots this time of year.

On the positive side:

It’s very green.

The rain comes down mostly in a steady soft fall, or at least a persistent drizzle, with an occasional downpour and rarely any lightning or thunder; it’s very peaceful. Nice weather for curling up with a book, or watching the pages in your book curl.

Temperatures are comfortable, not hot and humid, and not cold and damp, somewhere in the middle, so that if you are caught outside without rain gear or an umbrella -- which is always, kids play in it, people shop in it, there's no avoiding it -- it’s not unpleasant. You will eventually dry out. Possibly in May.

We can hear the waterfall on the property and one of these days we’ll go take a look.


Stones are hollowed out by the constant dropping of water.

-- Ovid

Funky

As The Wet gets underway I am noticing some new things, particularly the way things smell. There is a peculiar scent I now associate with The Wet: Body Funk, a condition that borrows its appellation from an ineptly named piercing and tattoo shop down in trendy Port.

I noticed it immediately when we moved into the first house. A subtle whiff of putrefaction, nothing as obvious as a dead animal though nearly as gagging; one not easily identified or located, but one which punches you in the face when you finally discover its font of nastiness. An appalling, wandering, ghastly smell; heavier, cheesier than any standard mold or mildew stank you’ll ever come across. It turned out to be the fabric shower curtain the owners had left behind, the source pinpointed after I had the misfortune of taking too close a sniff. The second instance of the creeping crud was detected while viewing a property for sale up near Cooktown. This time it was our tour guide. The realization that this stench could manifest itself in human form was truly frightening. Good God, could I ever possibly smell like that? But granted, this guy was a hermit who lived in an open shed, a roof and no walls, out in the bush, whose hygiene appeared to be slightly lacking to begin with. Recently we looked at another property for sale, a charmingly ramshackle Queenslander on five acres, a bargain, that we might have snapped up were it not for the odiferous emanations wafting out of the bath house. The termite damage, the bedroom that was nothing more than an open porch, none of that that fazed us, but, put it this way, our own family’s body funk we might be able to tolerate, but we are not going to spend money for someone else’s. A few days ago I again crossed paths with the noxious scent. My friend, who is generally clean and well kempt, opened her car door and it blasted me. Was it her or her vehicle? I’m not going to get close enough again to find out, but if she could stink like that…

I showered before bed last night and woke this morning smelling like someone’s grandfather. Maybe I should reconsider my mother’s Christmas offer of a new bottle of Chanel No. 5.

Like lice, apparently body funk is just another inconvenience of life in the tropics.


That smell…that smelly smell that smells smelly…

-- Mr. Krabs

Bringing you up to (really slow dial-up) speed

Why, hello again! Let’s see, what has been going on since iWeb imploded…

HEALTH AND SAFETY

Jorge had a head-on in Mrs. Troopie. A “smash-up” they call it. He’s okay, the other driver was okay, but Mrs. Troopie, well, we’ll be keeping her for spare parts. Jorge has decided that she is the Best Vehicle Ever and one day we’ll get another one. For now, he’s got the 4 Runner and I’m home playing the role of farm wife, modern farm wife with her MacBook Pro, keeping myself warm cooking up huge meals for the family’s tea time. (Your main early evening meal, or dinner, is “tea,” which may or may not include that particular beverage; a light bite later in the evening is “supper.” Tea may be had anytime but is referred to as “a cuppa.” On the job Jorge gets a 30-minute “smoko,” a midmorning break originally named in the old days for a cigarette break but smoking is not permitted anywhere these days, and not lunch but a 15-minute “sit down.” Got it?)

I thought we were living in Australia, but apparently we’ve made a wrong turn and ended up in Scotland or Ireland or the Pacific Northwest or some other lovely, green, wet, cold place. The locals are freaked out by the weather. The paper has already run their special pull-out pictorial supplement titled, “The Big Wet,” chronicling the unusually high rain falls, flooding, and ferocious cyclones. I suppose everyone thought that meant it should be over by now, like Bush’s, “Mission Accomplished,” but, no, it continues to drizzle and I am forced to cook to justify turning on the gas stove, our only source of heat. We are all adapting, resigning ourselves to constant sogginess and bad hair lives, but I am wondering what the lack of sunshine will eventually do me. Will I need a sunlamp? Vitamin D supplements? Antidepressants?

Hornblower…?!

PROPERTY

For nearly the same price (check currency conversion rates here) we can choose one of the following, all in the same neighborhood – the same super wet, green neighborhood henceforth known as Green Acres -- all available as lease/purchases or with extended closings:

A) The house we are in now – 6.5 acres, seasonal creek, concrete block house in need of major renovations, too close to highway. $360,000 AUD

B) Beautiful custom built house, 3.5 acres, small but enlargeable pond, well back off road. ASKING $360,000 AUD

C) 40 acres, two clean permanent creeks, liveable stable for use during construction of a house or easily convertible to a house, well off the road. Owner has maintained old logging and mining trails through this and his adjoining 160+ acres for fabulous walking/horseback riding. ASKING $360,000 AUD

Do I even need to tell you which one has us most excited?

Another really tempting one is:

-- 119 acres with a five bedroom house, granny flat (2 bedroom apartment downstairs), inground pool, great raised bed vegetable gardens, pastures, ranch hand quarters, numerous other outbuildings (barns and such) four dams (ponds), one kilometer of river frontage bordering the property with a side branch of the river running through the property, and all the necessary equipment, fences and squeezers etc., for running a few head of cattle. Just outside the rainforest, much drier with more sun and less rainfall. One end of the property is located at a major crossroads (some highway noise) which makes for good development potential (ability to subdivide a few riverfront acres that would essentially pay for the place), and the other end is "downtown," referring to the center of a village with 225 people in it. This one is $550,000 AUD and would pretty much take all we’ve got but is a bargain for the price.

I think I’ve seen every inch of property in the Green Acres surrounds; I should be a real estate agent. Oh, wait, I am, though I only seem to spend money.

SCOOL

The girls started their first full week today (Monday, July 17). Grice and Elle go off barefoot (though I make them carry their Crocs in their backpacks because the thought of using the school toilets without shoes on makes me gag) and Elle wears her uniform hat from the moment she goes out the door until she comes home, looking like Corporal Agarn on F-Troop.

Sarabelle went off to her first day of high school last week adamantly refusing to make any friends because that would make it that much easier to return to her old friends in the States, and because we’ve seen Mean Girls, and came home that afternoon excitedly telling tales of all the nice girls she had met. She’s already volunteered to be a buddy to the Japanese students coming in a few weeks and has asked her Japanese teacher for all the lessons she missed from the first half of the year so she can communicate better with the visitors. Sarabelle ended up in Grade 8, a recommendation by the Deputy Principal, so that she will be with same aged peers –- something she assured me is “quite important at this age” -- and because Grade 8 students sample all the electives before choosing their classes in Grade 9. Sarabelle thinks school is pathetically easy, for example her homework assignment was six pages of coloring in fractions, so is certain she will have straight A’s on her first report card. For an assignment to write twenty historic events – we used our Greek timeline and threw in major events in American history i.e. the Declaration of Independence, creation of the Constitution, Civil War – the teacher commented, “We don’t care much about American history, we’ve got our own.” Sara and I had a laugh about it, because we know ours is so much more exciting and interesting being based on revolution and rebellion… What have they got? Convict settlements. Take that Mrs. Stick-up-yer-arse. You can despise American culture all you want, I do, just don’t disrespect my Founding Fathers, got it? She’s also been penalized (penalised?) by another teacher for her American spelling. It’s “artefact” not “artifact” and “civilisation” not “civilization,” but again we had a laugh because Sarabelle, Miss Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee Participant, had one whole week to study and learn the new, correct Australian spelling. She’s got Hippocratic Writings and Archimedes and the Door of Science tucked under her bed, and both she and Grace eagerly agreed to work on at least one lesson from their Saxon Math every weekend. I’m not worried.

Grice is now halfway through Grade 6 and Elle halfway through Grade 1 though they just finished Grade 5 and Kindergarten, respectively, back in Florida. Grice received the sweetest card her second day from a little girl, a classmate, who lives across the street, stating that she would like to be Grice’s friend and eventually have her over after school. Elle received a journal to record her nightly reading and in the space reserved for comments on her very first assignment wrote, “I liked it but next time I need a harder book.”

So, they’re doing just fine, thank you.

A relatively new development in Queensland education has been the inclusion of religious lessons in the curriculum. In order to please everybody, or most anyway, families are given a choice of Catholic, general Christian (Protestant), Baha'i, or Non-religious training for their once-a-week class. I speculated the Non-religious class may be basically a free period and was told, oh, no, the children may silently read or work on their homework. Yeah, that's what I thought. I initially chose the Baha'i instruction, which teaches there is one god that all major religions worship and that all prophets of various beliefs are mouthpieces for this one being, though there are differences in the interpretations. The class examines the commonalities between all religions and focuses on values, specifically living The Golden Rule. My kids nearly had a stroke (as I’m sure my mother will when she reads this) and insisted they go for the Non-religious (free period) class, which also happens to be the class that 95% of the other students are in. Whatever.

WILDLIFE

We’ve got a pair of Little Kingfishers, brilliant blue and white birds, which according to our identification book are not often seen. These two are very visible here, perching on our garden fence and divebombing the minnows in the fishpond. The one we assume to be the male, the bigger of the two, crashes into our living room window at least 20 times a day. At first we thought he was attacking his reflection. We think he must be braindamaged. If he wasn’t before, he sure is now. We’ve got to find a way to scare him away from that window.

CURRENT EVENTS

What in the world is going on out there? Without cable television, a high-speed home internet connection*, NPR, or any factual, unbiased newspaper to read, I am in the dark about the goings-on in the rest of the world. Australian news is mostly national and then mostly sports related. Sunday evening dinner at a local pub gave us our first glimpse of the situation in Israel. As one patron said watching the cable broadcast of launching missiles, “Five minutes of the evening news can ruin your whole day.”

We sure hope Grice and Elle’s former Florida teachers have postponed their trip to Israel and that all their family is safe and sound.

* Two-year contracts with hefty penalties and expensive disconnect and reconnection fees are the norm here, so until we find our final destination we are still using the internet café in town. Now that we only have the one vehicle, trips into to town are few and far between.

The sun did not shine,
it was too wet to play,
so we sat in the house
all that cold, wet, wet day.

-- Theodore Geisel (Dr. Suess)

Cool

They say we’re in the tropics, but in the middle of the night, our first in the rental, I had to get up and put on one of my Irish knit sweaters then took the other to wrap around my feet. After a busy night of everyone swapping beds and climbing in with someone else in search of extra body heat or maybe in hopes of stealing another blanket, we finally got comfortable and slept in a lot later than usual. We were awakened by the crazed flapping of the birds above, Wampoo Fruit Doves, outside our window fighting over palm seeds. They have dove heads and parrot bodies, with brilliant plummy maroon chests.

We made a trip into town today and picked up some extra household supplies, a new shower curtain, scouring powder, disinfectant, and a scrub brush for the bathrooms, and extra blankets. Regardless, I’m tucked in tonight under my new wool blanket with my sweater and thermal socks on, just in case.


Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

-- Mark Twain