In which Betty gets out and about in the bush, and finds POO!

Oh, communing with nature – there’s nothing like it. Well, perhaps there is. I suppose the inner-city hipster version is having a killer coffee in a café with a killer barista and great art on the walls. I suppose both of these take you out of your home-world to a degree, but I prefer mine - and it's caffeine-free! Look at this:

I wandered lonely as a cloud…

The sign on the main road said ‘Sandy Point 3km’. I drove my low-slung little Hyundai about 300m along the trail before I got a bit nervous, and found a spot to pull over.

The (at times) steepish trail was pretty ordinary, and after half an hour of trudging along and sweating in the autumnal semi-warmth, I must confess to muttering under my breath: ‘This’d better be worth it!’

Of course it was! This is Croajingalong National Park, after all.

 The view was amazing –and (surprise surprise!) Sandy Point had a gorgeous little sandy beach! It was (mostly) soooo quiet there – would love to take a tent and spend a night or two there in warmer weather. A houseboat across the lake proved to be the source of the incongruous raucous laughter – someone was clearly having a fab time over there.

The walk back is never as long as the walk there, I reckon, because you have a vague idea of how far your destination is. Therefore, I didn’t rush, and enjoyed the flora:

 

Not sure whether fungus counts as flora.... but anyway...

the fauna (I wasn’t quick enough on the draw with the camera, and the wallaby sharing the path hopped away, dammit!) I spent a lot of time scanning the treetops for koalas, but to no avail…

And then there was the poo. Yes, the poo.  I’m no expert on critter poop. Growing up in suburbia I’m all too-familiar with those disgusting doggie leavings on the nature strips of local streets. I’ve been a bird-poop victim on occasions, and I’m all too-familiar with the awful stuff that appears in the kitty litter on a regular basis.

I discovered some interesting poop today though. While I can’t be certain, I think it’s wombat poop. Here, have a look:

The thing is, this poop appeared every few metres along the trail, some of it fairly new, some old, and in various stages of breakdown. Oh, look – here’s another one!

 Are wombats so incontinent? Or is there perhaps a population explosion of wombats around Mallacoota? Are they just exhibitionists? (What the heck is so attractive about the track as a pooping place???) I noticed lots of potential wombat hideyholes by the sides of the track (although why ANYTHING with a bumhole big enough to produce monster turds like this would need a hideyhole, I’m not sure!) I am now intrigued, and plotting a way to find out who/what is producing these massive piles of poo that make Rottweiler poop look like icky brown tic-tacs.

I’m really loving this bushwalking lark. My feetses, in their fabulous Redback safety boots, were a little tired by the end of it all - and my horrid arthritic bits were whining at me (bloody nuisances!) but my spirit felt renewed and recharged, so *two finger salute to arthritis!* Wheeeeeeeeee!

Basil is GROUNDED!

I don’t know how he did it, the little shit, but he did. So now he’s grounded, pending the arrival of a collar with BELLS.

 I took the car into town to have the power steering belt fitted, and wandered about while I was waiting. Had some hot choc, did a bit of writing, got rained on, watched some birds, took some nice pics of the inlet under a very gloomy sky - you know, the sort of stuff you do when you’re waiting for your car to be fixed.

 Anyway – after a couple of hours I picked up my car and came home.  I opened my front door to find a feathered floor, and the sound of frantic flapping coming from the bathroom.

Basil, the little sod, had somehow caught what I think was a brush wattlebird (far too big to get through the palace’s ceiling mesh, I’d have thought) and had been having a right old game with it. I can only imagine its terror. There were feathers near the gate in the cat palace - is it possible he grabbed it and somehow dragged it in? I can't figure it out.

It was minus some tail feathers, not to mention quite a few other feathers, but it was full of fight when I finally managed to catch it and calm it down a little before liberating it. Birds 1, Basil nil, Betty cross. And Basil grounded. Grrrrr. Back to supervised walks on the lead until his bells arrive.

In the meantime, Georgie (pictured below) is keeping watch and hopefully discouraging the feathered beasties from getting too close. Georgie is made by a local lady who sells them at the hardware shop. Oaklands in Pambula also has them.

Dunnies are my currency

At Betka Beach just after first light. Stunning.

Sitting here in front of a roaring fire, kitten on my lap, Emma Kirkby singing Hildegard of Bingen’s greatest hits on the cd player, it’s hard to remember that times are a bit tough. I'm having far too much fun.

My meditation on money the other day was a little unsettling, but I live in Paradise, and I guess that’s the trade-off. Traffic jams/stress/no time to think vs bliss/no money. A no-brainer really. So, to stop myself thinking in dollars and getting all agitated, I think in dunnies now, and that is far more fun and less scary. Here in the Republic of Betty, dunnies have become my currency, and of course that makes me giggle. 

***For non-Aussies, ‘dunny’ is a slang term for toilet, specifically the long-drop or can-type affair that stands in a vine-covered shed in old-style Aussie back yards, and hosts redback spiders beneath its seat. That’s not the sort of dunny I’m referring to here. My dunnies are more modern and less spiderous. Made of gleaming porcelain or ceramic goodness, my dunnies half-flush or full-flush. This is quite a relief, as I clean several of them each week.

A load of firewood is a 5 dunny expense, but will last almost half the winter if I’m careful. So really, a winter of glowing warmth is about a dozen dunnies’ worth. Not bad. A bottle of gas for cooking that will probably last a year? 5 dunnies.

A bottle of wine is around half a dunny, unless I go for the expensive full-dunny quality stuff (which I don’t). It’s still a kind of expensive purchase though.

A trip to the doctor is about 2 ½  dunnies, and Medicare refunds one of them. A kilo of chicken breast fillets will set me back about two-thirds of a dunny (i.e., I have to clean for about 40 minutes). 5-6 weeks worth of cat bickies for Basil is a 2 ½ dunny purchase. (Perhaps I could save on that if I let him catch his own dinner….. *slapping self*) A tank of petrol? Two dunnies, but it’ll last me for weeks around Mallacoota.

A not-too-flash entry-level DSLR camera with a couple of lenses is roughly a three dozen dunny purchase, and won’t be happening in the foreseeable future.  Why would I bother, though, when my humble phone (bought in the old currency when I was still a half-mad fulltime teacher) takes photos like these:

*sigh* I LOVE this place so so much!

My friend Deb was here over the Anzac weekend, and we went to Betka Beach for some beautiful free sunrise viewing. We arrived a little after first light and stayed a couple of hours, and played photographers with our phones. What fabulous dunny-free chicken soup for the soul it was!

Of course, with the amount of free time I have complementing my cleaning gigs, I probably have time to write a best-seller that will earn me mega-dunnies – in which case I’ll get one of those snazzy cameras to capture some really good pics of the birds around here.

Life is good.

In which Betty’s day swings like a pendulum

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A trip to Cann River turned into quite the adventure today. For those not in the know, Cann River is a tiny town (population 223) in north-eastern Victoria where there’s a big T-junction between two main roads – the one that comes south from Canberra and Bombala and the one that goes across Victoria from east to west.

I was going to meet the principal of the school to discuss relief teaching, and had some car issues about 20kms from Cann River when something under the bonnet seemed to come adrift and my steering suddenly became rather heavy. Great. So I limped it along to Cann River and the car repair workshop. But today the mechanic was elsewhere for the day. Great again. A quick look under the bonnet revealed this:

Broken power steering belt. Fantastic. Oh, and the repair shop didn’t have a spare one. The day just keeps getting better and better.

Not wanting to be late for my appointment at the school, I pressed on, beltless and a little disconcerted, (not to mention concerned about how much it was going to cost to fix it, and where the $$$ would come from!) but developing some Schwarzenegger biceps and deltoids every time I turned the car. I was not late, and oh, what a lovely little school it is, too. The entire student body from Prep to Year 12 is only about 50 kids.

Even better - in amongst those kids is an automotive class. Are you seeing lightbulbs yet? I bought some pantyhose from the General Store, which was an adventure in itself.…The shop lady showed me where their remaining stock of pantyhose was – half a dozen forlorn and dusty packs on a bottom shelf.

“What colour are you after?” she said.

“Doesn’t matter”, says I, “I won’t be wearing them! They’re to replace a belt in my car.”

She picked herself up off the floor, where she’d been rolling laughing, and handed me some nice black ones. “Best laugh I’ve had all day,” she said, chuckling away.

So the principal took me to the tiny (and I do mean TINY!) annexe school a couple of kilometres up the road, where – lo and behold – I will have two days’ work next week, in charge of SIX students from Year 1 to Year 5, and I can hardly wait! A whole new world, it’ll be.

Meanwhile, the pantyhose were handed over to the automotive class and they played bush mechanics for a while. I got my car back to beautiful Mallacoota without incident and found no proper power steering belt here either. I never EVER thought I'd say this (and nor did you, I'm sure), but Thank goodness for pantyhose, ha ha ha. From now on I shall carry them in the car with me, along with the kitty litter, spare oil, cleaning products, cat-cage - all those other essentials.

Oh what a fabulous day it’s been!

Crunching the numbers

Ok, so I decided to look at the numbers yesterday, and they weren’t pretty. I discovered that my gross earnings over the last 8 weeks are approximately 60% of my fortnightly take-home (i.e., AFTER TAX) income in my last job. In fact, each week now I earn less than half of what I used to pay in tax each week.

Now – I know that money’s not everything, but I also know that’s a statement that’s usually made by people who have enough of it, ha ha. So I won’t be saying it any more. I’ll be too busy trying to stay one-step ahead of Centrelink, on whose tender mercies I do not want to fling myself. Here’s why.

Yesterday I thought to see if I would be eligible for a low-income health care card. Hell yes, I most certainly am, seeing as I earn very little income now. So – how do I get one? Well, I can go to the local tele-centre and use their special Centrelink phone, sit in a ghastly empty room that’s painted bright orange to make you feel better about the fact that you’re needy enough to be checking out Social Security options. I can talk to a bright recorded voice who tells me which buttons to press on the phone just so that I can be registered to talk to someone real. Yep, you don’t even get to talk to a real human being.

Or, if I get tired of that, or just too damned demoralised to continue going round and round in telephone circles, I can go home, get on my own computer and use up all my printer ink printing out an application form for a health care card. Get this: for a Low-Income Health Care Card, which is valid for EIGHT weeks, and based on your previous EIGHT weeks’ gross earnings, you have to sell your soul and fill out a TWENTY-EIGHT PAGE application (which would probably take another EIGHT weeks!) give Centrelink details of your drivers licence, medicare card, surrender your passport, give them your first-born child blah blah blah (ok, I exaggerate just a teensy bit.) No bloody thanks – and if you have to fill out a 28-page application form just to get 8 weeks of cheaper prescriptions and bulk-billing at the doctor, I shudder to think of the hoops you have to jump through to actually get the dole! Amazing! Negotiating the bureaucratic labyrinth and filling out all the ghastly paperwork would waste valuable dunny-cleaning time, and involve a whole lot more shit than dunny-cleaning does as well!

So – while I’ve paid my taxes all my working life, it looks like I won’t be getting any of them back from Centrelink anytime soon. I can access my superannuation when I’m 55, so I just need to hang in there for 15 months. Oh, I can get my super early – I checked – but I’d have to give back 21% of it to the government in tax. Um…. Didn’t I already pay tax on the salary from whence my super contributions came??? I don’t get it. The government bean-counters are working their white man magic and keeping this little bunny under-the-thumb-in-the-dark-at-their- mercy.

Don’t mind me letting off steam. I’m feeling like I’ve been the butt of a big governmental joke right now. “Work hard, pay your taxes and the country will look after you.” No it bloody won’t! (and this is a country with allegedly fabulous social security provisions…but I suppose that's all relative, isn't it, and a topic for another time. This post is All About Me Me Me ;-) )

I suppose I’m feeling a bit sorry for myself – that itchy monstrosity on my back turned out to be shingles, and I feel like crap. I have bugger-all energy, my arm hurts, my head hurts, and the last thing I want to think about is how to stay one step ahead of Centrelink and still pay my bills.

Ok, so Betty’s thinking-cap is firmly squashed onto her little round head. When Basil smacked me in the head at 4am, these were the thoughts I came up with:

1. Bugger off Basil – we don’t get up until 6am.
2. Hassle the school for work now that the Vic school hols are over – be the squeaky wheel.
3. Put up signs around town advertising my services as a brilliant tutor.
4. Contact Cann River School to follow up re casual work there (70kms away).
5. Contact Marshmead (MLC’s outdoor ed campus on the other side of the inlet, accessible only by boat – wheeeeeee!) re creative writing workshops each term.
6. Try to get more cleaning work (I think I’m about to add a fifth cleaning gig to my list, but now that tourist season is over, I suspect there won’t be much work to be had in the holiday accommodation area for a while now.)
7. Buy a lottery ticket.
8. Sell the Harley. WHAT? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
9. You’re clearly delirious/deranged. Go back to sleep. It’s only 4.30am
10. Ok.