Wallowing - a Story in Pictures

So... the wading pool stayed in its box over the cold wet Christmas. We felt so - so cheated, somehow.

Today, though, was hot and dry, and the perfect day for a bit of wallowing in the wading pool (the Poobah & I call it 'Hippo-ing'.)

The Poobah, however, was nowhere to be seen when the pool needed to be inflated. Meh - she's asthmatic anyway. Besides, I have a hand pump.

Which doesn't appear to be working. Uh-oh...

Holy crap - thank goodness I'm not a smoker!
Oscar (lurking, stage left) : WTF are you doing?

Here Mum, now you've blown up the bottom half, I'll do the top one.

This is harder than it looks. I'll just, er, go and look for - for a pump. Or something.

No worries Boomerang Boy - these middle-aged lungs are in tip top shape! Wow, these head-spins are pure 1970s! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!


Ha HA! I feel so STRONG and CAPABLE.... and light-headed...

Once the hard work had been done and Betty had regained consciousness, the Poobah turned up with the makings of strawberry daiquiris, and Betty got to sit in the pool first, to enjoy the fruits of her labour.

Boomerang Boy attended to the sausage sizzle and kept himself cool with a spray bottle of ice water...

And eventually we ALL got to do some hippo-ing! YAY! What a lovely way to spend a roasting afternoon in Canberra!

Playing in the Dirt

64mm of rain has softened the ground a little, so yesterday, in very light rain, I exhausted myself digging a new flowerbed where some overgrown shrubs used to be. I've reduced the 'lawn' area a little more - although the November heatwave pretty much killed off any alleged green stuff that once masqueraded as 'lawn'.

Before - about a year ago. What is that green stuff on the ground?

After - yesterday's marathon effort - a new garden bed!

A long soak in L'Occitane's Delicious Almond foaming bath was supposed to forestall any aches and pains after wielding mattock and shovel for three hours, but I was all bent up like a paper clip when I woke up this morning. Aaaargh! Still, the best thing for sore muscles is to stretch and work them, so today, with a half-formed idea in my head, I decided to avoid the post-Christmas sales and go to the garden shop at my local Bunnings.

I found the standard rose I was looking for – a gorgeous, delicate pale cream flower (and there don't seem to be any thorns, which is a bonus! I don't like plants that bite!) and half a dozen small lavender plants. That will sort the far end of the new garden bed.

Not having a car to call my own, all my garden shopping is done on the bike, using a Ventura bag and a selection of Ocky-straps. You'd be surprised what you can carry home on a motorcycle. The SV seemed to be sprouting a rose bush....

A Bunnings man was wandering the car park while I was loading things up, and he cracked up.

'Now there's something I've never seen...'

'If it survives the ride home,' say I, 'it will survive anything. Besides, with this precious cargo I'll be going pretty slowly.'

He chuckled, and wandered off shaking his head and muttering. 'That's made my day, that has.'

It was a slow ride home, and I got some very peculiar looks - but we made it, with only two snapped stems and the loss of two buds. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!

A couple of back-breaking, neck-burning hours later, the rose and its little surrounding circle of lavender are safely installed in their new home - manured, mulched and watered. So now we just wait and see...

It's official - after playing in the dirt today, sans hat, I'm a real redneck - ouch! Note to self: you can still get sunburned on the cloudiest day.

The Best Laid Plans - Christmas 09

Some people love Christmas. I'm not one of them. For lots of reasons I haven't been a fan of Christmas for years. I've Bah Humbugged my way through more than I can count. This year the Poobah (my daughter) and I decided to have 'Unchristmas'.

We had one last year at her little flat in Woden. We stayed in our pyjamas all day, drinking strawberry daiquiris, eating un-Christmassy food and watching un-Christmassy videos. It was great fun.

This year we thought to have it at my house, and add a new dimension to it - these southern hemisphere Christmasses are usually sweltering, so last weekend I bought - tadaaaaaaaaa - The Wading Pool. Here it is, ocky-strapped to the back of the bike. The plan was to spend the day wallowing in the water ('hippo-ing', we call it), sipping strawberry daiquiris and having a BBQ, before watching the (now) traditional un-Christmassy videos.

But - after a week of hideous temperatures well up in the 30s,
we woke to 10mm of rain in the gauge, and a steady fall that would continue all day and all night.

The best laid plans... oh well. Forget the wading pool. There would be no hippo-ing this Unchristmas. We still did the strawberry daiquiris, though, heh heh.



And the BBQ, cooked by the very talented Boomerang Boy and his lovely assistant, Oscar bin Laden, once Boomerang Boy (who had a big Christmas Eve) had recovered enough to don the BBQ hat and pick up the tongs.

If I help, can I have the leftovers?

Good BBQ - high five, little dude!

And the rain continued... 30mm and counting!

And we did watch Mrs Henderson Presents and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. And also The History Boys. And there was much laughter as well as a few cinematically-induced tears - and a good day was had by all.

And the daiquiris kept coming, and eventually the old chook nodded off, and her lovely children couldn't help themselves. Actually, they could - and they did. They helped themselves to her camera and look what she found on it when she woke up this morning. At least they hadn't drawn a penis on her forehead (something the Poobah has been known to do in the past. Just ask her friend Leanne!)

And the rain did (still!) fall.



Yes, that is just under 50mm in the rain gauge. The ground should be nice and soft for all the digging I have planned for the next week. For now, though, from all at Chez Betty - Merry (Un)Christmas!

The Brisbane or Bust Adventure - heading home Part 2

That 5am thunderstorm was a whopper that rocked the motel on its foundations! It looked like another day of crap weather ahead, although Resourceful Pete, the mad dirt-biker from Cairns, said he'd checked the radar and the way south looked ok. His own route, back to Cairns, looked less pleasant - storms, storms and more storms. Erk.

After days of weather that felt a bit Old Testament - fires one day, floods the next - I was expecting locusts and plague any second - I wondered what the day would throw at me. So much of this ride has put me well outside my comfort zone. I didn't realise just HOW far outside my comfort zone I'd been till I was on the familiar road between Sydney and Canberra - but I'm getting ahead of myself.

My gloves and boots were still all squelchy from the previous day's deluge - eeeeew, it's nasty to put your feet into wet boots - but everything else had dried overnight, thank goodness. The road crews left early to lay their bitumen and I farewelled my dirt-rider friend and the sleepy little town of Guyra (although I doubt that anybody could still have been asleep after that 5am storm!) to head towards Sydney.

Thunderbolt's Way was interesting again - plenty of thick fog along the way. At first I wasn't sure if it was fog or bushfire smoke because there'd been quite a few fires burning out of control around there for several days. I could see patches of burnt earth all the way to the edge of the road at times, but there didn't appear to be anything alight (phew!)

In the day-to-day course of things, I don't speak to strange men as a general rule, but the rules change when you have a motorcycle - it's so weird! When I got to Gloucester for a wee stop and a leg stretch, I parked outside a pub and dragged a can of Red Bull out of my bag. Almost instantly, Peter, a Vietnam vet, came up and started chatting. We were soon joined by another slightly older fellow, John - both Triumph riders from way back who just wanted to talk about bikes. I love that stuff. We had a pleasant half hour just chatting.

Heading on down the road I met up with Pisshead for lunch at the twin servos near Wyong, and arrived in Sydney at around 3.30. My old neighbours made this weary traveller very welcome, and we stayed up as late as we could (given that it was a weeknight and most people (not me!) had to get to work the next morning!)

Oh, and what a glorious morning it was on Wednesday. It was the perfect weather that I really should've had for the whole trip! Not too hot - although it warmed up later - no rain/fire/flood/hail/fog - just a shitload of very ugly Sydney traffic for the first hour. How on earth do they stand it? I forget...

It was a lovely ride home. I re-entered the ACT on the dot of midday, and walked in my front door at about 12.20. Somebody had turned up the heat while I was away, but there was NO HUMIDITY! My washing dried in no time at all and I even got around to a bit of blogging.

A check of the bike showed me that the entire trip had taken me 2634kms (over 1600 miles). The company of family and friends was lovely, the people I met along the way were terrific and the "challenge" I'd been looking for ended up exceeding my expectations. Much of it was bloody hard work - harder than I'd thought it would be. (I'm trying soooo hard to resist the temptation to be all gloaty, and not succeeding very well. Oh, bugger it - I was proud of myself!) The airhawk seat was brilliant - after all those hours in the saddle, my bum wasn't even sore - and surprisingly, nor were my shoulders. My hands ached and the Helmet from Hell made my ear hurt, but apart from that I felt surprisingly good (just as well, coz the weather's too hot for soaking in a hot bath, ha ha!)

So - another adventure over, and Thursday will take me back to the Real World. Poop.

The Brisbane or Bust Adventure - heading home Part 1

I mentioned my new best friends Tinana and Scrabble, didn't I? Scrabble is a scruffy and fairly brainless but totally adorable little terrier of some sort, with the cutest personality. She has two expressions - awake and asleep - and I have never known a dog to contort herself so wildly to get patted.

After lengthy debate about whether she was an 'adorable love pumpkin' or an 'adorable love parsnip' (she is shaped more like a parsnip than a pumpkin, it's true) I almost got away with smuggling her into my tank bag for the trip home. That Michelle was too feisty though. She heard me encouraging the Love Parsnip to hop into my tank bag.

'Don't do it, Scrabble,' she hissed. 'She has CATS!' Sigh...

So, Scrabbleless, and with a loaded up bike, I followed Clem for a fab ride to Mount Glorious. Yeah, tough life, but the thought of riding the motorway back through Brissie during peak hour was too horrible, so we'd planned to head out of Brisbane the scenic way. Actually, it wasn't peak hour when we left. It was closer to midday, and the clouds that hung over Brissie were black and evil-looking.

They didn't get any better. The first enormous blobs of rain splashed onto me just near Warwick, but they didn't last. Refuelling at Tenterfield, I asked the man at the servo if he knew what the weather ahead was like, and the report was all bad (and, as it turned out, very accurate!) Some ominous thundery rumbles made me put on the wet weather gear - well, the top half anyway - it was still way too warm to wear the entire sauna suit.

After the rain had been pelting down in non-stop sheets for half an hour I was actually feeling a little cool around the legs, not to mention squelchy in the toe region as my Rossi boots gave up all pretence of being waterproof.

I gave up when I could no longer see the road for the rain, and pulled over in a little place called Deepwater where, oddly enough, the water was very deep - rivers of it running down the sides of the main road. I abandoned my poor bike to rain and hail, and sheltered under an awning until the sky lightened a tiny bit. Could I make it to Glen Innes and a warm dry motel, I wondered?

I could. The rain sort of stopped - but when I got to Glen Innes there was hail piled so high by the sides of the road that it looked like a snowscape!

Press on, press on while the weather's tolerable, said the little voice in my head. You might even get as far as Armidale!

Not a hope. The sky split again just as I limped into Guyra, and I turned into the Guyra Park Motel. Lucky to get a room, I was - a road crew from just down the highway had scored some emergency accommodation to escape the wild weather. You can't lay bitumen in torrential rain, apparently.

So - even though the motel was full, the town was empty (it shuts on Monday nights) and if it hadn't been for a fellow traveller called Pete, I would've had nothing but a bag of chips for dinner. Resourceful Pete sourced some lasagne, and we chatted till quite late. He was heading home to Cairns on a KTM he'd just bought in Sydney (hope your trip's going well, Pete!)

After a late night I'd hoped to sleep till 6am, but thunder, lightning and an absolute deluge of Old Testament proportions woke me at 5 on Tuesday morning.

Uh oh.