Cashing in - a rant

Yesterday a book came into the library where I work. It was a children's picture book by someone from Melbourne; a self-published, rather poorly-written, extremely trite tale, as it turned out, about a summer holiday in Mallacoota that goes all wrong when a bushfire arrives and inconveniences a tourist family by burning down the narrator's holiday accommodation. I felt like throwing it across the library and jumping up and down on its glossy pages. The visceral nature of my reaction surprised me.

Mallacoota's time in the spotlight goes on. And on. And on. Hardly a day goes by without Mallacoota popping up in this or that news program or newspaper. Our real estate market has gone a bit mental and our long-term rental market is pretty much non-existent. 

Some unscrupulous landlords (local and non-local) have made an absolute killing since the bushfire. The cash-grab has been quite an eye-opener.

It's embarrassing. It's changed the way I see the place where I live. It's changed the way I see catastrophe - it's become very evident that one person's catastrophe is another person's cash-cow.

At work we've had to put up signs asking tourists not to question staff (some of whom lost everything) about the fires. Insensitive comments and questions probe like pointy sticks into deep wounds. Some tourists seem surprised when they come here and find regrowth and rebuilding - "you'd hardly know there was a fire," they say, filming new houses and lush new greenery with something akin to disappointment. What were they expecting? Bodies in the street? The real scars of the fire, while still evident in some of the scenery, are inside the residents of this town, plodding along every day, rebuilding lives and minds and homes and businesses while looking after tourists.

Those real scars, it has to be said, are also inside the residents of towns up and down the east coast of Australia; towns that haven't received anywhere near the media attention, focus or financial help that picturesque Mallacoota has. Add guilt to the list of bad tastes in my mouth.

Oh dear, it would appear I have disaster-fatigue. I wonder whether other people feel the same way?

The Porch Project

 

Porch is a rather pretentious word for the smallish, tiled concrete slab outside my front door. The grey tiles that covered it have been cracking for years.  It looked rather tired, dreary and run-down (perhaps in keeping with the rest of this little house, to be honest. Or its owner...). When I first had the thought to try my hand at mosaics, it was the “porch” I actually had in mind, but it sat in the too-hard basket for two or so years while I dithered and dallied and did Other Things.

After the success of the Snake Mozake earlier this year, I felt ready to give it a go. Also, I had a huge bag of cement that needed using before it turned into a Scummo*  

My front yard is very much a green space, filled with fairly overgrown shrubs – many of them native – doing their own thing. These days there’s nothing very ordered or manicured about it, although it was very neat when I bought it 9 years ago. There’s also a gorgeous flowering gum, beloved of fruit bats, birds and bees – that has been known to house the odd feather-tailed glider. It showers the “lawn” with enormous gumnuts that regularly try to kill the lawnmower. I wanted the porch mosaic to have a bit of that untamed bush greenery feel – to be an extension of my unruly garden.

So I pulled up the old tiles and chalked a design on the underlying  surface.

In many ways this project was harder than the snake – the overall area was a little larger; I had to use proper tiles rather than smashed crockery, which often has a bit of a curve on the surface; the old tiles, some of which I left on the slab, and some which I broke up and reused, were much thicker than the new tiles. Aaaaand - I had to trust, despite serious misgivings during the construction process, that the grouting would pull it all together and give the design some form. The mosquitoes and wasps were bloody annoying, and once again, my back and knees were crying for mercy after about 3 hours.

On the plus side, the site was less exposed to the midday sun than the cat palace.

I wanted to try and capture the feel of looking up through the trees to a light, bright morning sky. Something like this: 

Here’s what I ended up with after about 2 or 3 weeks… An Australian Bush Morning.  What d’you reckon? I like it!

There’s still a LOT of cement powder in that 20kg bag… whatever shall I do next?

 *big, heavy lump of uselessness. Pure coincidence that it's the same as the nickname I use for a certain Australian politician...

The "Snake Mozake"

Because cleaning all the gravel and digging up all the pavers during lockdown wasn't back-breaking enough... 

When I finished all the gravel work and looked at the cat palace I thought it was a bit bland...that big expanse of boring (but clean!) gravel and those plain, boring old pavers. The layout of those boring pavers, however, suggested one thing to me (especially living in Mallacoota, where such things abound!) - the wriggle of a snake across the ground - so the plot was hatched. 

I know! I'll make a mosaic of a snake! 

Look at the way those pavers wiggle -
it couldn't be anything else, could it?

I rather liked the idea of a giant Red-bellied Black snake. While the living version is highly venomous, folk wisdom suggests they are the "good guys" of the Mallacoota snake population. They're certainly preferable to brown snakes or tiger snakes, at least.

But back to the mosaic...

Apart from the heat and the flies and the ouchiness of the granite gravel, I didn't realise how hard on the body it would be. I've never made a mosaic before. I completely underestimated the amount of work it would entail. 

"Oh, it's just a few pavers", said I. Eight, to be exact. I discovered, during the clearing of the cat palace, that each paver weighed around 16kgs, so I decided to leave them in situ, and found myself  a piece of board and a foam kneeler to kneel on as I grovelled in the gravel at all sorts of weird angles.

 

Sooooo..... Eight 40 x 40cm pavers. Laid end to end that's 3.2m long, and 1.28 square metres. or, in the old currency, 13.7 square feet of back-breaking, knee-bruising, plate-smashing, tile-nipping hard labour.

I've smashed more plates than a guest at a Greek wedding. I've endured insect bites and arthritic aches, sunburn and broken fingernails. Oh, and twice I got so engrossed that I was almost late for work, and had to dash to the library, unshowered and with cement under my fingernails - but it's done and it was soooooo worth it! The Snake Mozake is now a beautiful colourful reality, and I love it!

Here's a closer look at each individual section

And - in case you're wondering about the cost of making this - 

Pavers: nothing - they were already there.

Cement: $30 - silly me, I bought a 20kg bag when 5kgs would've been plenty. Live and learn, (Not to worry though - now I have lots left over for any future projects - I have my eye on the front porch...

Grout: $22. I used just under 2 x 1kg boxes

Tiles: $12  The tile shop in Pambula sells small (95x95mm) tiles for mosaic artists @ $1 each. I used about a dozen

Plates: $20 old crockery from Vinnies, the Salvos and the Mallacoota op shop was $1-2 per plate, and I reckon I used about a dozen (and also scavenged a couple of old chipped ones from my kitchen cupboard.

Little round glass marbles - about $2 from the "bling" shop in Eden.

Total cost - somewhere around $85, and that includes plenty of leftover material, so you could probably knock at least $20 off the total.  Say, $65...

Doctor's bills and Painkillers: (just kidding!)

Time: About 35 hours, spread over a couple of weeks and with time off during a heatwave and wet weather.

Verdict: Challenging, fun, worth doing, will do again once I've recovered, ha ha ha! Oh, and I'm hoping it's the only Red-bellied black snake (Pseudechis porphyriacus) that I ever see in my cat palace!

What I Did During Lockdown

 It's tempting to say "2020 - what a WASTE of a year!"  but that would be very lazy thinking - not to mention completely untrue. 

That's what today's post is all about - I realise, looking back, that I can stop beating myself up over this "wasted" year - it hasn't been wasted at all, and I'm really amazed at what I've achieved. Instead of focussing on all the things I DIDN'T do - (I had no heart for painting or making a calendar this year, not knowing whether I'd ever recover the original outlay if lockdown went on and on and on) I've gone through the photos on my phone and looked at all the things I HAVE done. And I'm quite surprised!

Over the course of the 2 lockdowns this year I've:

Learned to give myself a passable home haircut - just don't look too closely!

Baked banana bread (hasn't everybody? Delicious, but I got over it pretty quickly - the old Covid waistline just keeps on keeping on, I'm afraid.)

Written and delivered an 11-part children's radio series (complete with weekly craft activities and a Facebook presence) called Elvis the Lockdown Dog. Nearly killed me, and I was pretty relieved to see the end of Lockdown #1, and to make sure Elvis "left the building".

Done "wildlife tours for myself" around my yard, photographing large and small visitors of all kinds.

Hung a screen door all by myself.

...and the biggie... weeded and re-landscaped a huge section of my yard totalling over 120 square metres. It could only have been done during lockdown. The thought of cleaning 120 square metres of gravel, armed only with a cheap peg basket and a couple of buckets, while "having a life", is a bit daunting, and should not be attempted by anybody intending to hang onto their sanity. Hot weather, wet weather and work gave me an excuse to stop now and then, and rest my shrieking muscles.

In reality, it was quite an hypnotic task. Gravel starts to "dance" in a sort of wave pattern as you shake it in your little improvised sieve, so you forget your aching back and the trickles of sweat that drip from the tip of your nose and chin. I listened to podcasts as I shovelled and sieved and cleaned and/or replaced the weed-mat as well. Anyway - enough talk - the before and after photos speak for themselves.

First - the Tibbs Memorial Garden (I had help from Tibbs the Literary Chicken for this one, so it's only fair, after her demise during lockdown, that she is memorialised in the space she helped create.

 

Next - the gravel patch between the woodshed (far end of Tibbs Memorial Garden), washing line and the cat palace.

And finally, the most difficult bit - the cat palace itself, where the weed-infested pavers had to be dug out, piled up and subsequently relaid. Of course, I ran out of gravel after having pinched it for Tibbs' garden -  and couldn't get the matching river gravel, so had to resort to granite chips. Harder on the cats' paws, not to mention a different colour (vive la difference???) so I've created a little cat-friendly network of stepping stones as well by relocating those 16kg pavers. Ugh, my hands are trashed, not to mention my shoulders.

I will never ever EVER attempt to do such a thing again - but I'm really glad I did it just this once.

The rehabilitation of about 50m of weed-infested gravel driveway should be the next project, but at the moment I'm a bit over gravel. Maybe I'll try my hand at mosaic, and give those pavers a pop of colour...

Pollywobble has given my work in the cat palace her stamp of approval. Basil, of course, is being his usual curmudgeonly self, and declined to comment.

EVENING UPDATE: BASIL RELENTS, GIVES GRUDGING APPROVAL. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Random Ramblings and not-quite-a-rant - Masks

                                     

I pondered this earlier today as I hauled gravel and rocks and pulled out weeds in the cat palace - garden work provides wonderful opportunities for contemplation - did learning to wear underpants cause as much complaint as being asked to wear a mask? People happily keep their sweaty bits entrapped in undies without whingeing. When we had the bushfires and could SEE the enemy (smoke) we couldn't get enough of those tight, hot and heavy masks. People wear a dust mask when weed-spraying/installing insulation. Surgeons wear them when they cut people open. Why the widespread whingeing over this precautionary measure against the spread of a deadly and invisible enemy? (And don't get me started on the politicisation of masks!)

Here’s another thought – people appear to be quite happy to follow the dictates of fashion (those heels are SO last year, dahling!) or interior design (remember Mission Brown trim?) or the way your food appears on your plate at a restaurant – who can forget the deconstructed cheesecakes of 2019, piles of ingredients served on breadboards or in slippers or some such bullshit?)  As long as a vapid, vacuous celebrity tells you to do it, it’s ok. And yet – and yet – when epidemiologists and public health experts outline measures that should be taken for your own safety and the safety of those around you – people want to whinge and bleat and sook about rights and freedom and sovereignty. Why is that? It's been something I've pondered for months now. 

This awful pandemic has exposed a lot of ugliness and inconsistency in the people we share the world with. I haven't forgotten the callous calls, early in the pandemic, to lock down oldies because "only oldies die from this" (and then the irony, in the Victorian experience, at least, of those oldies in aged care being sitting ducks because of the casual workers who unwittingly took Covid to several workplaces where those vulnerable oldies were living.)  I wonder whether the mask-refusers are the same “lock down the oldies” people, or whether they’re a whole different group of selfish jerks?

It’d be nice to be able to rely on people to do the sensible thing – but we apparently all have different definitions of “sensible”. Unfortunately, this means the government has had to make a bunch of rules to try and stop the spread of Covid, and to keep us as safe as possible – and it’s using the “one size fits all rule”.

Is there anything wrong with that, when you’re talking about a public health emergency? I don’t think so. Here in this far-flung outpost of regional Victoria, we are expected to observe the mask rule, despite having had zero cases of Covid since the pandemic began. Fair enough. Making exceptions for every self-interested group is fiddly – and also leaves the government open to charges of unfairness.

Think about this: one rule for all means people don't (or shouldn't, at least!) moan about being left out or singled out. Yay, we’re all equal! Rich, poor, young, old blah blah blah blah. Isn’t that a good thing?

I'm having a lovely time, as I weed the garden, thinking about "what-ifs"... What if the government had said that everyone over (insert arbitrary age here) must wear a mask and everyone under that age had to take their chances? What if only those in "essential occupations" were allowed to wear masks? (Remember the early shortage of PPE, when the general public was advised that health care workers needed the masks more than we did? Bit of ill-feeling erupted over that.) What if only the employed were issued masks? What if only casual workers were allowed them, because they couldn't afford to take time off work? I'm still thinking of the loophole-seeking by some of those so-called journalists at Dan Andrews press conferences. (Everybody's special. Everybody has a compelling reason to argue and be non-compliant. Oh. please!)

If people were denied masks, I suspect they would suddenly all insist on having them! Perhaps a bit of reverse psychology could’ve been employed, tee hee - humans are such contrarians. We want what we can't have. We want what other people have (in fact, we want MORE – and we’re prepared to fight people in the toilet paper aisle to ensure we get it!) When we're told we must all have masks, we don't want them because we won't be told what to do. Our first response to so many problems in society is "The government should ___" but on this very important matter of public health and the common good, we want to ignore the government and make our own rules, because theirs make us uncomfortable. Boo hoo. (Personally, I’d rather wear a mask than a ventilator, but anyway…)

As we in this part of the world talk about opening up, easing restrictions and so on, those in other countries are starting to mask up, lock down – and far too many are dying.

Humans. Endlessly fascinating and so so frustrating, don't you reckon?