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?

Stand down, Tofu - your services are no longer required

 Tibbs has left the building.

My life as a chicken-substitute is over. No more chooking in the woodshed on cold days with Tibbs the Literary Chicken, who liked anything by Ernest Henningway, but was particularly fond of The Crows of Kilimanjaro and A Farewell to Farms.

I’m heartbroken.

As a tribute to my little feathered friend, who was helped from this world by the vet today, let me show you the last garden project that we worked on together.

Before the new fence was built last year, there was a dead space along one side of the house, bounded by a gate and the woodshed and populated by a couple of straggly dead trees. some rocks and hundreds of fleabane weeds. My spare room looked out upon a brand new 6-foot fence and a bleak and cheerless wasteland, so Tibbs and I decided to revamp it a bit.

So.... first of all we dug out the rocks (and ate worms).

Step Two: we pulled out the remaining weeds and patchy grass (and ate more worms)

Tibbs posing: “All my own work”. What? No it wasn’t! (although she DID eat all the worms.)

She temporarily lost interest when I put down weedmat, but was happy when I got the gravel down. 

She was even happier to see the birdbath and rocks appear, some potted plants, and the new coat of paint that transformed the woodshed. 

In the photo below she is inspecting the new space - admittedly, still a work in progress, but vastly improved - and giving it her seal of approval.

On Sunday she started making strange noises now and then, a bit like a sneeze. This morning she had her beak open to breathe, was wheezing, and wouldn’t come out of the nest box.

Coincidentally, the wonderful vet from Orbost was making a house call to vaccinate the cats today, so I asked him to take a look at Tibbs while he was here. I told him about her recent oviduct infection, and my home vetting treatment – and he said I’d absolutely done the right thing. What was ailing her today was a respiratory infection of some sort – and with the recent outbreak of Avian Flu near Bairnsdale, he thought it prudent to euthanase her, notify the Ag dept and take her remains for testing. I cried buckets, sniffling inside my mask and thanking her for her company and her great help in the garden. I stroked her feathers as her eyes slowly closed and her consciousness ebbed away. 

Poor Tiblet the Giblet doesn’t even get to rest in the chook cemetery, here at home with her old buddies. Sigh. She always was the Outsider of the flock. I think it's appropriate, then, to rename her final project the Tibbs Memorial Garden.

Bye, my Tibby, and thank you for everything you taught me about digging in the dirt, enjoying simple things like a little sit in the woodshed - and the joy of hanging out in the yard with a feathery friend.

No such thing as a dumb question?

  

Actually, there is. Tune into Daniel Andrews’ daily press conference and you’ll hear plenty of them, usually from Rachel Baxendale – an obnoxious “journalist” for The Australian who sits starry-eyed at the knee of Peta Credlin to deliver breathless revelations on SkyNews about the Eviltude of Dictator Dan in the fight against the Victorian Covid-19 outbreak.

I was a high school teacher for about 2 decades. When I say that the behaviour of some of the “journalists” at Daniel Andrews’ press conferences gives me flashbacks to some of my worst Year 9 classes, believe it. Year 9s can be really obnoxious.

The particular breed of obnoxious Year 9 student that morphs into a Baxendale-style “journalist” at an Andrews presser  knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are smarter than the teacher. They know that every smart-arsed comment is a mark of their genius. Their main aim in the classroom is to impress their peers by scoring points against the teacher in pointless petty argument, and to waste as much of a lesson as possible.

No teacher has ever heard the sort of excuses or clever questions they can come up with and no teacher can fail to be impressed by their cleverness and ultimately cowed into submission by it.

Like a dripping tap, such students are relentless in the quest to wear down the teacher, badgering and haranguing until they achieve their goal,  the bell goes, or the teacher snaps. AND – they think they’re the only one ever to do it.

Is it any wonder teachers become jaded? I am flabbergasted to see Daniel Andrews show up day after day after day to answer the increasingly ridiculous questions respectfully and with seemingly infinite patience. I’d have sent the little shits to the Principal’s office by now, or slapped an after-school detention on them.

This morning in a Twitter thread about the repetitive, ignorant and time-wasting questions posed by Rachel Baxendale, somebody responded to one of my tweets with “It’s always ok to question things”.

So I questioned her – “Have you always been so disingenuous?”

She got a bit annoyed – “It’s a fair question. I was raised to be polite, think for myself, and ask questions where i needed clarification. It’s perfectly ok to do that. You don’t need to blindly accept everything and anything. That’s dogmatic. I was polite to you, leave it now.”

Sigh.

Here’s the thing, If you’re still asking the same questions over and over, many months into a pandemic – questions that have been answered several times already – you haven’t been paying attention. You don’t really want an answer. Your intention is to disrupt and distract and be a general pain in the arse.

Off to the Principal’s office with you.

 

Just call me Tofu

The formidable Sybil

One half of the dynamic duo, (my pair of Kikuyu-pulling garden patrol buddies), is no more. Boss chook Sybil departed this life last Friday, leaving Tibbs, her partner in crime, all alone in the world.

Feisty Sybil (named for Sybil Fawlty, in case you were wondering), with the top part of her beak shorter than the bottom, had a sort of bulldog look to her that went well with her bossy personality. She sometimes mounted the other chooks, just to let them know who was boss, and once she even attempted to crow.

One by one her loyal subjects dropped off the perch until only Tibbs, the outsider – the Omega chook – was left to keep her company.

When I discovered the dearly-departed Sybil and prepared her for interment in the chook cemetery, Tibbs came up close, uttering quiet respectful clucks and chitters that brought me undone. I didn’t think she cared, but if a chook has ever looked concerned, it was bottom-of-the-pecking-order Tibbs.

Chooks are sociable creatures who enjoy the company of their own kind, and don’t take kindly to being alone, so I made the decision to rehome her as soon as possible (after determining her good health). The last thing I need is a psychotic chicken who’s been driven mad by loneliness. I think my chook-keeping days are at an end.

Until such time as she is rehomed, though, I feel obliged to keep her company.  The day after Sybil’s demise, Tibbs wouldn’t come out of the nest box. She wanted to stay and mope. Uh-oh.

I put a mirror in the nest box (a strategy that really helped when Sybil was grieving the demise of her best friend, Manuela the Jumping Chicken) and she perked up a bit. Spending the long lonely days free-ranging in that big garden, however, was a step too far for poor Tiblet the Giblet. She relocated to the woodshed and wouldn’t come out. Sigh.

Soooo.... guess who’s been spending a lot of time in the yard with her since then, making inane conversation and making chicken noises? Evidently my Chookish is understandable as she’s started following me everywhere and talking back. She even lets me pat her (unheard of for this skittish girl!)

Chooking with my girl Tibbs

We are continuing the excavations she and Sybil (and the others, before they shuffled off this mortal coil) began, and are currently shifting about half a tonne of dirt back to where it once was in what may one day, in a chook-free household, be a vegie patch again. Tibbs and I have bonded over Kikuyu-pulling and weeding – activities now known as “chooking”, as we work together companionably in the yard until my hands and back can take no more. Tibbs is, I fear, far better equipped for chooking than I am – but I’ll give it my best shot for my poor lonely girl.

So - for now, just call me “Tofu” – a well-meaning but not-very-effective chicken substitute.

RIP Sybil.

Tibbs