An Oriental reorganisation

On a recent bleak and windy wet season day I was curled up in front of the log fire leafing wide-eyed through a magazine containing full-page colour pictures of……..oh dear, I seem to have forgotten….when you get over fifty, memory is the first thing to go you know…..maybe wildlife.

My quiet reverie was however rudely interrupted firstly by Mrs GOF causing loud scraping noises to be emitted from the bedroom, which were then closely followed by the hup-two-three-four sound of pounding cockroach feet, as an entire platoon of them, with survival possessions in tow on the desiccated upturned carcase shells of their dead ancestors, migrated across the border into the relative safety of GOF’s “Boy’s Room”.

Several large spiders, long term residents behind the wardrobe, were wailing inconsolably at the sight of their staple diet fleeing from the forces of destruction to begin life anew in some distant part of their cosmos.

Q.  “What are you doing Mrs GOF, love of my life, provider of
sustenance (and some other things) and mother of my Globet?”

A.  “GOF, inquisitive interruptor of a woman’s never-ending work
schedule, I am re-arranging the bedroom to establish the best
feng shui.”

Feng Shui?   Right.

There are three circumstances in any marriage when a man should know that it is best to shut up and ask no more questions.
1. When he knows nothing about the subject matter.
2. When he is flabbergasted.
3. When there is a chance that, as a result, he might get roped into
some avoidable physical labour.

In this case, all three applied.

The bedroom was chocka-block full of 30 years worth of  hoarded crap lovingly collected essential furnishings.
Any attempt to “reorganise”  it all was probably going to require, at a minimum,  heavy machinery and explosives.

GOF, setting a splendid example for all the considerate men in the world, did what any thoughtful husband should do in the circumstances.

He disappeared until after the project was completed.

.

.

After a month in exile spent mainly down in the garden shed, it is apparently now safe for me to come back inside Mrs GOF’s Orientally spruced-up house (with conditions attached)……so….. where’s my spray can of Bugkiller?

I’ll just go freshen up the atmosphere for the refugees who invaded my room while I was gone.

.

And ….for a change…. some truth and nothing but the truth.
The front fence is finished.

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Travel documentary….Part 2 of 2

OR more accurately;

The day GOF became temporarily uncertain of his geographic location.

Well it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Mrs GOF, let’s take a scenic detour down this little dirt road.”

Sixty kilometres and three hours later, having crawled our 4WD way through unpopulated, unsignposted, rocky, harsh, mostly waterless country from which tin miners somehow once scratched a living, we stumbled upon a road maintenance crew working near the top of the appropriately named Mount Misery.

“Busy day today” the foreman mumbled through his nicotine stained whiskers.  “You’re the second vehicle that’s passed by”.

I’ve suddenly become disenchanted with the concept of scenic detours, but at least I returned with some photographs of parts of our unique Australian landscape which have not yet been trampled to death by busloads of tourists. (landscape, not the photographs trampled to death, if you get my drift)

We returned home thankful for our greenery, and fertile soil, and for being reminded that excessive rainfall is far more preferable to not enough.

And now Mrs GOF has some posts to put in the holes she is about to dig.

Termite mounds

Grass trees

Unusual savannah vegetation

Silver valley road

One of the scarce waterholes

Harsh country in foothills of Mount Misery

Mother nature's sculpture

Watsonville windmill in the middle of the road

Atherton Tablelands; almost home again

Some of Mrs GOF's posts

And if they look like toothpicks in the picture, they weigh at least 50 kilograms each.  Trust me, they do.

Another GOF travel documentary

Part One;

Atherton Tablelands to Mount Garnet

fence n    a barrier that encloses an area such as a garden or field.

We used to have one.

A 500 metre long front fence made out of 4 strands of barbed wire, complete with a painted gate which effortlessly swung inwards on beautifully lubricated hinges.

Twenty seven years later we don’t have one.

The gate, in it’s dotage, sick of repetitively scribing a perfect arc in the soft soil beneath it by having it’s increasingly sagging posterior dragged across it, simply dropped off it’s rusted supports in protest.

In sympathy, the fence suddenly decided it too no longer wanted to be a fence, and prostrated itself into mouldering metal strands on the ground.  The wire was neither elevated following death to some heavenly foundry, nor immediately consigned to the blast furnaces of barbed wire hell.

It just lay there.

In the long grass,

Mouldering.

Waiting for me to roll up the remains.  Major undertaking.

Mrs GOF and I are now faced with the callus-inducing, hand-shredding task of building a new fence.

There is no finer post hole digger on the planet than Mrs GOF.

Her operation of a crowbar and post-hole shovel is poetry in motion and it rivals her previously acknowledged artistic prowess when partnering her push-mower around our half acre of lawn.

Who can forget the moment in 2008 when she and her machine pirouetted at the bottom of the garden for a return swathe with such exquisite grace and degree of difficulty that she was awarded a perfect 10.

Firstly however we need to buy some large wooden posts from one of the few remaining post and railway-sleeper cutters near the small township of Mount Garnet, 140 kilometres to our west.

It is like travelling to another world.  A two hour drive from wet tropical rainforest into some very harsh, dry and rocky savannah country.

This is what you can see along the way;

(On Sunday I will post details of the return journey which will prove that the notion of “Wisdom comes with age” does not necessarily apply in all instances.)

Rural mailboxes

Very big cows

Road trains

Innot Hot Springs pub is for sale.

Innot Hot springs