Oh Miffy...

I think I’m opening the pages of Miffy’s final chapter. 

The cranky little kitten came to me in Goulburn back in 1995. Her feisty temperament wasn’t mellowed by a vicious dog attack in the first year of her life, and she grew into a cranky cat. She used to torment Spike, the cat next door, who wasn’t allowed outside, by wandering along outside his windows and pulling faces at him.

The pages of her life have been punctuated by hissy fits and tiger growls, and yet she showed great tenderness to a kitten she adopted for a while, grooming it, curling up with it, teaching it to hunt beetles in the back yard, and bopping it on the head when it was distracted by falling leaves or waving grass. She has slashed vets and frightened vet nurses. She hated Ollie the Wondercat and Oscar Bin Laden the Terrorkitty. The only human she has ever loved is Boomerang Boy. She survived a stroke last year, and is now a cranky, crazy old lady. It’s nearly time to close the book.

I keep holding off turning that final page, though. I watch her closely, to monitor changes in behaviour that might signal a decline in her quality of life. I keep thinking that I will somehow know when the time has come, but I don’t know what I am looking for.

Her appetite is bigger than ever. The dementia seems to have removed the ‘off’ switch. I leave food out for her in the evening, and by 2am she is yowling for more.  I leave the bath tap dripping so she can help herself to water from the tap, but it’s not enough. (Thank goodness the drought’s over, but oh God, my water bill!)

The nightly battles – mine, to sleep, and hers, to make me do whatever it is she thinks she wants (and sometimes she doesn’t know that herself) – have increased in number and intensity. Last night I fell asleep exhausted at 8.30, having been awake since 4am (thanks Miffy!) She woke me with desperate yowling at 10.30pm. And again at 12.30. And then again, finally, at 2.57am – and here I am, crying over my blog and desperate for some unbroken sleep. She is snoring next to me on the bed, and I am wondering how the hell I’m going to drag myself through 5 senior English classes today.

Her mournful  meowing sessions are loud enough for my neighbours to hear (I’ve asked) and they aren’t confined to the wee hours, either.  It’s driving me nuts.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that I don’t want to have to make that hard decision to end her life – and yet I don’t want to be a martyr to a demented cat either, living a zombie existence as she becomes more querulous and demanding, and less in control of her faculties, travelling through the days and nights in confused loops.

Why can’t her heart just give up? Why can’t she just die peacefully like Oscar did, curled up in a cosy armchair? I don’t want to think about her crying in the car on her last trip to the vet, or being afraid in the waiting room, or afraid of the bloke with the needle. I want her last moments to be, well, nice.  Dignified. Befitting a grand old lady who has been, in her youth,  a proud hunter of beetles, with a temper to terrify the toughest vet.

Most People Don't Suck

The summer  heat has become oppressive, and the whole of next week is going to be a scorcher – relentless heat in the mid to high 30s every day.  I thought yesterday was going to be my last chance to go for a decent ride in bearable weather for a little while, so headed out to lovely Wyangala Dam for a look at it in sunny weather. It was supposed to be an easy 450km round trip, just me and the Crow and the big wide world.

 
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I had a fabulous ride, cutting a swathe through clouds of white butterflies. The Crow handled beautifully, hugging the road like a best friend and chewing up the kilometres. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, the sky was blue, the landscape beautiful through a bit of heat haze. Life doesn’t get much better. 

The dam was awesome at 92% full. I was surprised by the number of people who, just like me, travel out there just to look  at the water levels and shake their heads in delighted disbelief. 

 

 Then I stopped to refuel at Cowra on the way home. Put $12 of fuel in the Crow. Took everything out of my tail-bag three times before having to admit MY WALLET WAS NOT THERE!

My heart fell through the bottom of my Rossi boots. My entire life was in that bloody wallet – credit card, drivers licence, Medicare card, a little cash, and membership cards galore – Health fund, Ulysses Club, Garden Club… . My brain raced faster than the Crow on a straight road and gave me a memory of carefully placing the wallet on top of the loo paper dispenser in the ladies loo at – get this – the massive, ludicrously busy Service Centre just outside Yass.  2 or 3 hours earlier.  Senior moment? Rank stupidity? Bloody disaster!

Just when you’re at that point in your life when the daily news is so depressing, so hate- and crime-filled, that your faith in human nature is approaching rock bottom, something like this happens. 

Pete, the bloke behind the counter at the Mobil servo in Cowra, went through a long and involved process to find the phone number of the Yass service centre (the Cowra phone directory doesn’t extend to Yass), and paid for my petrol out of his own pocket while I spoke to the people at Yass.

Pete, you’re a star – thank you!

Also a star is the very honest stranger who found my wallet where I left it and handed it in at the counter in Yass. Thank you so much! My battered faith in human nature is now restored – it’s true that some people suck, but most people just don’t. Most people are lovely, and that is easily forgotten in the day-to-day bad news world we live in. Thank goodness for the occasional reminder, cunningly disguised as a disaster.

I made an unscheduled trip back to Cowra today to pay Pete back and to thank him again for having helped me out.  My mate, Mrs Humble, accompanied me as far as Boorowa, and we rode home together as well, in 35 degree heat, pouring huge volumes of cold water inside our jackets, only to have the home-made ‘evaporative cooling’ system evaporate within ten kilometres. Crikey, it was hot! It’s a sad fact of motorcycling that one simply cannot get cool, riding at the speed limit – so we arrived back at my house exhausted and dry-roasted in our bike gear.

What a day. I think I need a little nap.

Girly Road Trip

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The girly road trip has been in the pipeline for a while, ever since my friend Lucy & I put our heads together to plot a day trip for her mum’s visit from the frozen UK.

We picked a stinking hot day to drive to a hot country town in NSW for our adventure, just to make sure Ann got an authentic Australian experience, and an opportunity to thaw out.

Here they are: three generations, ready for adventure. 

Only Lucy & I knew the destination (and even we weren’t 100% sure how to get there, although we knew the general direction!

Our first stop was the lovely town of Harden for coffee, then, inevitably, a wee at Wallendbeen.  Back in the car again, we headed through Cootamundra to Junee, with Jenna earbashing us all the way. I swear that girl could talk underwater!

At the Golden Grove licorice & chocolate factory at Junee, we signed up for the Freckle-making tour. A freckle is a chocolate disc coated with hundreds and thousands, and full of about a million calories. Yum.  They made us wear these incredibly glamorous hairnets in the freckle-making room, coz after all, nobody wants a hairy freckle. (I can’t believe I said that!)

 

 Jenna, multi-tasking: pouring chocolate, licking fingers AND talking!

Freckles duly made, and hardening in the coolroom, Jenna was quiet while we listened to the talk where they explain the history of the factory, and played a game called licorice bowling. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear… This is how is works (in theory):

You chuck a big lump of hard licorice up into the top of a flour bag chute and see how many skittles it knocks over when it comes out the bottom, and you make a proper goose of yourself by trying to catch the skittles as they fly out the bottom. Perfectly sane grown-ups engage in this embarrassing pursuit, in the quest for a free bag of licorice. Ann had a lovely time chucking the licorice ball up in the air, again and again, over-arm, under-arm, sending it everywhere except where it was supposed to go. We did not win the bag of licorice.

Onwards and upwards, Jenna talked all the way to Junee’s other main tourist attraction – Monte Cristo, Australia’s most haunted homestead.   

 

 Even during daylight (I suppose ghosts don’t sleep) this beautifully restored home has spots that make the hairs on the back of your neck prickle. The temperature had nudged up past 30C by this time, proving that ghosts aren’t affected by the heat either.

Jenna was still talking, so we went back into town for lunch to find a sandwich. Opposite the RSL there’s an Historical Society café/museum, which was air-conditioned and perfect.  The grown-ups finally got a word in while Jenna ate her toasted sandwich.

The whole trip was a big loop, nearly 500kms long, and the return drive took us along some picturesque country roads, through the tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town of Nangus and into Gundagai, where of course we had to visit that Aussie icon, the dog on the tuckerbox.

Jenna dozed off for about twenty silent seconds, then woke up and resumed her chatter. We had realised by this time that as long as she was awake, she would never stop talking, so we adopted the ‘if you can’t beat em, join em’ approach. The silliest game of ‘I Spy’ followed,  (Lucy – KNEES does not begin with an ‘N’!) and brought us almost all the way back to Canberra, laughing our heads off.

A glass of chilled white wine awaited us back at my house, then Ann and Lucy took chatterbox Jenna home, and I sat in my silent house, blinds down to keep out the baking evening sun. What a great day - thanks, ladies!

The Veteran Vintage & Classic Motorcycle Club of ACT - Annual Rally - what a blast!

Note: this is being written in a David Attenborough nature documentary semi-whisper, so you need to read it the same way.

1914 Monarch - yes, it goes! Magnificent!

In the genus  Motorcyclista there  exists a somewhat peculiar species of enthusiast known as the motorcyclo aficionado superretro.  Often (but not always) characterised by grey hair and an ingenious emergency toolkit, individuals of this species are solitary creatures, often spending months – even years - secreted in large backyard sheds and garages with their ancient machines, performing fascinating rituals with spanners and oxy-torches, paints and polishes,  and pistons, plugs and points, or scouring eBay for spare parts. 

Once a year, at the height of summer, the individuals heed a mysterious visceral Call to Assembly with others of the species, and Nature pulls them inexorably to a meeting place like the Carotel motel in Canberra. They come from all over, and in large numbers, in cars or vans, towing trailers loaded with precious cargo. A hardy few even risk riding their lovingly-restored motorcycles - if they don’t have to go too far.

Once there, they indulge in time-honoured rituals like beer-drinking and bike-judging, and they tell restoration sagas and breakdown stories in the lost and lyrical language of imperial measurement. Iconic names trip from their tongues - Rudge, BSA, Ariel, Indian, Vincent, AJS Matchless, Triumph, Harley Davidson, Ducati...

 

 

 

They go for short rides that culminate in magnificent morning teas. (A keen eye can identify their feeding places by the spots of engine oil that speckle the car parks where they have congregated).

They have a Presentation Dinner that honours the most perfect and noble among their number.

Individuals of the species trailerus breakdownii  exist in happy symbiosis with the aficionado superretros, and can often be seen retrieving those unfortunate superretros whose ancient machines have broken down in ways that will not be remedied easily by the roadside. Nobody sneers or scoffs. Instead, they applaud the pluckiness of the individual and the bike, and thank the Powers That Be that it wasn't them.

On our journey this weekend, one fortunate BSA devotee had his sidestand returned to him from whence it had fallen off on the Cotter Road, but the owner of the lost Triumph footpeg cover remained elusive, as Triumph devotees often do. 

 

1923 Rudge - the King of the Rally.

 

Yes, that is carpet on the footboards - carpet your great gran would be proud of!

 

Thank you to the VVCMCC for a lovely weekend. Great bunch of people, a great event. I had a lovely time tagging along on my brand new Suzuki SV650S,  and nobody made me feel like a fraud, ha ha! Here’s their website – enjoy!

Think about Ink: a cautionary tale

It isn’t true that we regret our tattoos – well, not all of them, anyway. I'm very fond of the tasteful one on my left arm, but the big one on my right arm was a mistake. I think I knew it several years ago - on the day I got it, in fact.

About 10cm long, a Celtic design in which a dog and a bird entwine, it was originally all in black, but the lines leached into each other after a couple of years, and it became an unsightly black blob. The solution? Oh, add some more ink to it, of course! Some glorious living colour! Silly cow, that was Mistake #2!** (see below)

And the result? A muddy, multi-coloured blob. Bugger. Even worse, a muddy, multi-coloured blob that I would carry with me forever.  I could kiss sleeveless shirts goodbye at work. Teaching is a fairly conservative profession, us being role models and all for the yoof of today. Young, hip, tattooed bloke teachers seem to get away with it. Middle-aged ex-Navy men get away with it. Middle-aged lady teachers - even 'big bad biker' ones - raise eyebrows, and, I suspect, sympathy levels. The fact that I wasn't middle-aged when I got it is now completely irrelevant.

Every trip to buy something nice to wear to a special occasion involves a certain amount of embarrassment as shop ladies, especially those under 25, look askance at my upper arm - sometimes horrified, sometimes curious, sometimes smugly superior. I can hear their thoughts:

What the hell is THAT supposed to be? 

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear...

I've tried to make myself feel better by telling myself no woman over 50 should wear sleeveless things anyway. I shouldn’t inflict my bingo wings, nanna flaps, tuckshop arms (and my personal favourite, although I couldn’t find its spelling anywhere- fladoobidas) – on anybody. 

And then I had an epiphany, and used my friend Google to find Laser X Tattoo Removals. They come down to Canberra every month –and there’s no shortage of people keen to remove bits of ink from their flesh.

My journey began yesterday. Realistically, with one treatment every 8 weeks, it could take a couple of years. I may be seriously old before it's gone. So, is it worth it? It remains to be seen, but I'll give it a go. If there's no appreciable difference in 6 months, I may abandon the idea.

It hurt my hip pocket - it's going to cost about 10 times what the original work did. It also hurt my arm more than the original tattooing. The laser makes a crackly noise, and stings like mad, but there's no smell of singed flesh or anything horrible like that, and it's really quick. One treatment took less than about 3 minutes. The swelling will take a few days to go down, and the area still feels hot, 18 hours later.

**On the downside - if you can possibly consider pain, swelling and potential bankruptcy an 'up'side, that is - there’s no guarantee that the blues and greens will actually come out. Red and black respond well to the laser, but blues and greens don't - something about colour wavelength. Anyway, watch this space… Perhaps they'll develop a new laser that can get those tricky blues and greens out one day. In the meantime, if the best I can hope for is something faded enough to cover easily with that make-up people use on birthmarks, well...