Lockdown 6: can we please can the protests?

I just finished watching a frustrated wedding business owner from Melbourne expressing his support for the anti-lockdown protest after yesterday’s announcement that Victoria would lock down again (Lockdown #6.)

 

His complete lack of logic destroyed any scrap of sympathy I may have had for him. 

 

A year and a half into this pandemic there are still people doubting its existence and treating mitigation/suppression measures as a human rights issue rather than a public health issue.

 

FARK! I’m losing patience with the media giving air-time to every single person who wants to have a whinge about their dreadful business prospects during this global pandemic.

 

We get it. We know times are tough. We know.

 

WE KNOW!

 

In case people hadn’t noticed, we’re ALL going through it. Everybody’s family life has been disrupted. Our bank balances & mental health have been affected. Our lives have changed. Some of us, sadly, are dead. Some are in hospital on ventilators, and we all find ourselves unable to plan ahead. 

 

ALL. OF. US. 

 

Does anybody really believe that having a whinge on the telly, protesting in a city street, punching a horse or chucking ink on a policeman will change anything for the better for ANY of us?

 

Perhaps Mr COVID-19 Virus, Esq., is sitting at home in front of the TV with the missus. Perhaps he’s hearing the sob stories, seeing the frustration and anger of the people acted out in public. Perhaps he’ll have a change of his little viral heart and will turn to Mrs Virus with tears in his little viral eyes.

 

“Geez, love, I didn’t think this through, did I? I didn’t realise I was being such a thoughtless bastard. I think it’s time we packed up and left. I just wanted to make a connection, but nobody likes us. This was a bad idea.”  No?

 

Well maybe this virus really is a truly Evil Overlord. If so, it must be delighted by all this chaotic protest! It’s probably turning to the missus right now with a giant

Muwahahahahahahahaha! 

Sweet! Look at those dumbarses suffering! This is great!!! What can we do to make things worse? Outdoor transmission? Check. Short transmission time? Check. ” No, I don’t think that’s any closer to the truth either.

 

Mr and Mrs Virus aren’t saying either of those things because guess what? COVID-19 is a VIRUS. It has no brain. No feelings. It’s not alive. It’s not a plot to steal human freedoms. It doesn’t vote Labor or Liberal or anything else. It doesn’t give a shit about your business or our economy or whether we’re happy, or even whether we live or die. 

 

IT’S A VIRUS, FFS!

 

We human geniuses have become so comfortable, so complacent, so much the centre of our own universe that we demand governments fix every little thing that goes wrong – even a virus. When they DO try to fix things, we argue, we whinge, we tell them it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable and hurting us and “not fair”. We want things fixed at zero cost to ourselves and we aren’t prepared to put ourselves out one iota.

 

Grow up, people.

I’ve made some lists - first, here’s a list of protests that MIGHT make a difference.

Protests against governments that cut medicare, that imprison children, that tax the poor and give the rich a free ride, that ignore climate change, that cut welfare, that love coal. Protests against government corruption and systemic discrimination.

 

And here’s a list of things that it’s just plain dumb to think you’ll solve with protests:

Bad weather, brittle fingernails, onions, a lumpy mattress, pineapple on pizzas, your cat waking you up at 4am, hangovers, the word “moist”, blisters and oily skin. 

 

And COVID-19.

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!