A Journey of a Thousand kilometres...

The Old Hume Cafe, Gunning

Well, it took a while - four weeks, in fact! It was a struggle, but I managed to clock up that 1000kms – just. 1007, actually.

It finally stopped raining and snowing[1] long enough for me to get out on some of the local roads yesterday – Canberra to Sutton-Gundaroo-Gunning, for a start. I stopped at the Old Hume Cafe for a Gunning Lamb Burger, which was yummo. Your lamb patty is served on a bun with lettuce, tomato, Spanish onion, AND a big whack of mint jelly and Greek yoghurt! Seriously delicious!

I headed back towards Canberra via Murrumbateman and the Nanima Road. Nothing to report, apart from a cranky bird of prey whose roadkill bunny-feast I interrupted. It rose in the air with much cranky flapping, and hovered above its lunch at a respectable distance until I had passed.

Recent rain has made a bit of a mess of the roads – potholes everywhere - some of them big enough to lose your bike in - and plenty of gravel and assorted debris washed onto the roads. I'm seeing water where I've never seen water before – I had no idea there were so many ponds and dams on local properties – and now they're all full!

So anyway, after this very pleasant ride, I'd still only managed to crank up a bit over 900kms. I strapped a box of beer to the Ventura rack and ventured out to Dahlitz Motorcycles with it. They've always looked after me out there – and it is Christmas. Oh gawd – Christmas!

[1] Yes, snowing (not exactly in Canberra, but not far off.) In December. This has been the weirdest wettest coldest summer ever, and there was snow on the Brindabellas on Monday! Imagine that - a taste of winter, with soup and flannie jammies and everything!

Meet the Crow

Last time I bought a new bike, back in April 2008, I picked it up from Dahlitz Motorcycles on the Friday and booked it in for its 1000km service – for the following Monday.

It hasn't been so easy this time. Getting the all-important 1000km service next week is essential, before Bruce's Motorcycle Repairs closes down for a well-earned Christmas holiday.

I've been wanting to write about my NEW new bike, but it's been shut in the shed for the last three weeks, and has hardly come out. Record-breaking rain in the wettest December I've ever seen in Canberra, and the presence of the Yak (my car), have turned me into (I can hardly bring myself to say it) a fairweather rider! Nooooooooooo!

In more than three weeks I've only managed to put 700kms on it (and 200 of those were today). Last week I went from home (Marked A on the map) to the Kippax shops (marked E) via Gungahlin and Watson, turning an 8km round trip into a desperate 40km one, just to warm up the tyres and blow some cobwebs out of my head!


View Larger Map

It's no wonder my mood's been somewhere between “a bit down” and “subterranean”.

But – today – the Crow got a proper airing. Here he is.

He's a 2010 SV650S (the Bomber was the 2008 model). He's called the Crow, or Crowie, because of his glossy blackness. Also because when he goes fast, I will make one of the famous crow-calls that got Graham Kennedy taken off TV back in the 70s (remember those?)

F a a a a a a a a a a r k !

Handsome beastie, isn't he?

Today we (the Crow and I) went to Yass to get fuel, and continued to Boorowa before coming home – a little over 200kms altogether. I was very tempted to keep going to Wyangala Dam, to see what it looks like at 89% of capacity (wow! In the drought it got down to about 6%!) Note to self: that might be a nice ride between Christmas and New Year...

The Crow handles better than the poor old Bomber did. Maybe the Bomber had had too many mishaps. Maybe, after 68,000kms, his steering head bearings were tired. Who knows? The Crow, though, tips neatly and effortlessly into turns, and the front end seems to hug the road better. From the very beginning with the Bomber I thought he felt a bit strange, and put it down to the change in bikes from the trusty, solid GS500F to the nimbler, more waspish SV. After the Unaugural splat back in May of this year, though, I never felt particularly safe when cornering – but I put that down to me being a chickenshit, and having lost confidence... I'm starting to think it was the bike, because there's none of that feeling on the Crow. It's a nice bike!

I see adventures ahead! And now that the school holidays are here, what am I waiting for? Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!

The Rise of the Tyrant Miffy

It's 4am. I am wide awake. Why am I awake, and why have I given up on the idea of getting back to sleep?

[Dramatic music]

The Tyrant Miffy is on the warpath. I am blogging in order to resist doing her evil bidding at this ungodly hour, and also to avoid strangling her.

I know now why the dear, late Oscar Bin Laden used to wallop her, every chance he got. And I always thought he was picking on her. (Sorry, Oscar I misunderstood. Mea culpa.) He was merely keeping her in line.

Miffy, it has emerged, doesn't have an OFF switch when it comes to food. And she can't tell the time. She also gets stuck in petulant, querulous geriatric mode, yowling at odd and unreasonable hours of the night, like 3.27am. Like this morning.

FEED ME.

No, Miffy, I will not feed you. You were fed at 5pm. You will be fed again at 5am. You already look like a small planet.

Besides, I know that after she has had a few nibbles of breakfast, she will stalk down the hallway and sit in the bathroom doorway. She will yowl loudly and angrily and repeatedly. And, being in the bathroom, it will have a bit of an echo.

GET ME A DRINK.

This means “Turn on the tap in the bath so I can haul my arthritic arse in there and drink the tastiest water in the house, even though there's a bowl of fresh water right next to my food bowl. Do it, and DO IT NOW, MINION!”

See, it isn't about water. It's about power. Miffy is absolutely relishing her 'only child' status since the demise of poor Oscar. She's loving it. After 16 years of 'Omega Cat' status, she is in the Power Seat. I am the new Omega Cat.

After the water will come the most humiliating (for me) flexing of her feline muscle. She will yowl in the middle of the hallway, loudly and querulously. And non-stop. Her pointy little nose will point meaningfully in the direction of the armchair in the corner of the living room. Behind that chair is the litter tray I hurriedly bought because a certain geriatric cat had decided it was a good place to pee, rather than outdoors where she had spent a lifetime peeing.

She will be saying, very clearly,

CLEAN OUT MY LITTER TRAY, BIATCH!

After I move the armchair out of the way and haul my arthritic arse into the small space behind it, and scratch about in the kitty litter with my trusty pooper scooper, she will mosey on over, inspect the tray, then smugly wander off.

It's no wonder Oscar used to bash her.

And it's why I'm blogging at 4am.

It's happened! (Actually, it happened a couple of weeks ago, but I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to blog it, so let me try and drum up an air of spontaneity anyway, ok?)

It's happened – wheeeeeeeeeee! I have a new job! (It's not strictly a new job, coz it's where I worked for 8 years before I took a break from teaching – but it's sort of new, so let me pretend, ok?)

My return to teaching has been a bit of a mixed bag. The biggest change has been trying to get used to the ACT college system, and while it certainly has its good points, things like the BSSS website have done my head in.

Canberra is a Public Service city, and the BSSS is a kick-in-the-guts reminder of that. The bureaucracy that underpins the college system, and the website that is its government-to-teacher interface, is the most user-unfriendly, totally unintuitive, faceless, soulless juggernaut in the whole of the National Capital.

The school where I currently teach began as a small community school. It's now a lot bigger than that, but it still has a warm fuzzy small-community-school feel that is at odds with the hard-edged bureaucratic bullshit that it has to work within. (sorry – “within which it has to work”.) Its clientele isn't sure whether it wants to be 'small-town' or 'big city' – but, trust me, the two make uncomfortable bedfellows.

So I'm moving on. Or rather, moving back. Going back to the place where I taught for eight years. Back to a system I know and feel comfortable with (with which I feel comfortable. I know proper grammar lol).

Am I going round in circles? Is it ever really possible to 'go back'? Well - I'm about to find out, and I'm quite excited in a sort of bittersweet way. One of my lovely students gave me choccies and a card yesterday. It read "Thank you for being such an awesome, down to earth, friendly teacher. I will miss you heaps but I wish you the very best in your new school."

Watch this space.

Fifteen...

“A high school student who shot himself after taking his teacher and classmates hostage has died of his wounds at a Wisconsin hospital, authorities said.

“Samuel Hengel, 15, held 24 students and a teacher for nearly five hours at a high school in Marinette on Monday night (local time) before shooting himself as police were rushing into the classroom.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/01/3081754.htm

WTF? A 15 year-old kid? What on earth makes a 15 year old kid think that taking his class hostage is a sensible or viable thing to do? Why on earth would he do it? What was going through his head? At that age, with his life in front of him, what was awful enough to make him (a) create the hostage situation in the first place, and (b) decide that shooting himself was a good way out of it? Or what kind of weird-arse computer game, where nobody ever truly DIES, despite rivers of gore, did he think he was in the middle of?

I'm trying to come up with possible answers, and drawing a total blank. Obviously I'm thinking with a grown-up brain, and a relatively stable one at that.I keep asking myself the sort of questions that the news report hasn't answered:

Was he a good student? Was he failing? (because of course, most people would shoot up their school, their teacher, their classmates on the strength of a Fail grade, right?)
Was he bullied at school? At home?
What was his family like? (And how must they be suffering now?)
What did he do in his spare time?
What made him fucked up enough to do what he did? Because, make no mistake, he WAS fucked up. But so are lots of people. They don't all become potential mass-murderers though.

FIFTEEN years old... barely started on the Big Road of Life. Not old enough to vote, drink legally, have sex, have a driver's licence (well, not sure about Wisconsin...) but in any case - legally, still a child. A CHILD.

Jebus...