Plants: The pretty, the deadly and the simply dead

Originally posted on Feb 17, 2011 at http://www.blog.emmamayalldesigns.com.au/

I have been a bit busy this week and therefore written zip for this blog (not a good start, I admit). So for now I will do what editors/publishers/bloggers the world over do when they are short on words: fill the space with photos! Genius!
The reason for my lack of writing time is because I have been disciplined and made myself dedicate my free hours to a different project, which really should take priority. Specifically, building a website for a man who crafts some of the most beautiful bows you’re ever likely to see. He makes them by hand, out of timber.
Of course you can actually kill things with these bows. But I like to ignore that from time to time and just appreciate their beauty. They are surely works of art:
 

Bow and bow riser (below): Pretty, expensive things
for boys. Well, mainly boys.

As for other pictures, here is one of the lovely frangipani in our front yard:


The frangipani. At least I hope it’s a frangipani, or
I’m even worse at this gardening business
than I thought.



I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know this was a frangipani until it flowered. You’d think spending several years in the tropics would mean I’d know a frangipani when I saw one. But plants and gardeny stuff is not my strong point. As evidenced by the sad remains of this carnation, also in the front yard, which I seem to have succeeded in killing:

RIP pink carnation

It’s health wasn’t the best when we moved in in December but a bit of attention (i.e regular watering, in the form of rinsing out my coffee plunger on it each day) secured it’s revival. And then I sort of forgot to keep doing that when I stopped using the plunger. Oops.

Paradise lost? Not exactly

Today we headed out of town and took our two dogs for a bit of a frolic through a local nature area. It's one of the simple joys of life and we do it whenever we can.
This used to be our favourite place to take them:

And this is where we went today:

Alas, the first picture was taken when we lived in paradise. AKA tropical Far North Queensland. Sea and reef on one side of you, rainforest on the other.
We now live in Coolgardie, WA. Desert on one side of you. And - surprise! - more desert on the other side.
With the possible exception of Siberia, it would be hard to find a place more different from Cairns than the Coolgardie (I should point out it's in the Kalgoorlie region, because most people have never heard of Coolgardie. I know, how weird is that?).
Even the threats to life and limb differ. While at the beach we'd be on the lookout mainly for stinging sea creatures (of both the deadly and merely agonising-but-you'll-live variety) but also had to be wary of stepping on a crab or stonefish and, if near a river, of running into a crocodile.
Here, dangers include snakes, baits laid for wild dogs, falling down old mine shafts and the very real likelihood of choking to death on a fly or 20. People are not kidding, or even exaggerating, when they say WA is home to a schmillion billion flies, with all but about six of them looking to take up residence in your eyes and mouth.
Now, it's very easy to fall under the spell of tropical Queensland. I loved it more than I had loved any other place. But this little corner of WA I've now found myself in also has it's own beauty. It's there in the endless, captivatingly red dirt, the rich afternoon light and the big, wide sky.
And, for all the glaring differences between here and there, it seems the magic of each springs from the same source: the sense that neither landscape can really be tamed.
The sheer lushness and vitality of the tropic's rainforest simply over-runs any attempt at control that isn't sustained. Out here, the desert is silently defiant. Its harshness will, given time, overcome all but the most resolute efforts to make life softer.
Except for the flies. I doubt anything short of apocolypse could move them.

What do you love - or hate - about where you live?

Sun! Surf! Sand! Was mucho excitement on days like these.

Even here, there is still sun, sand (the red sort) and
great excitement.

From the archives: Blokes, it's your turn to make a bit of effort

You may have read about the report showing that women are getting better looking.
Now this was not just a bit of speculation - someone actually spent time and money finding proof. By studying families and kids and lots of beautiful women. Bet that was a tough day’s work for the male researchers.
In the end they concluded evolution has meant pretty women have more children than their beauty-challenged sisters, and a higher proportion of those children are girls.
I don’t doubt the results for an instant. I’ve spent time recently in an office dominated by women and EVERY ONE OF THEM IS GORGEOUS. Stunning. The sole man isn’t different simply because of gender - he’s the only one with unfortunate eyebrows and approaching baldness.
It’s enough to give anyone average-looking (ie, me) a complex.
The findings are good news for men who like the pretty ladies. Unfortunately it appears women are unable to enjoy the same phenomena. Because it seems men are actually getting worse looking.
In fact, to generalise just a lot, they’ve really let themselves go. For the same reasons we’ve become so familiar with: smaller demand for physical work, a taste for lard-laden fast food, too much driving/not enough walking, and so on.
I’ve seen plenty of old photos of working guys on the job - building the Sydney Harbour Bridge, ploughing paddocks, driving Chevs or whatever it was they did to ‘make a bob’. The majority of them shirtless or in singlets. And ranging from easy on the eye to oh-my-freaking-god-now-he-is-HOT. Even allowing for the bizarre hairstyles and facial hair obsessions of the day.
Walk past a workshop or building site today and you’re likely to feel inordinately cheated. Firstly, the OH&S-required throat-to-wrist safety wear means there’s nary a bronzed, bare shoulder in sight. But it really doesn’t matter. Because underneath the sea of fluoro you’re more likely to encounter beer guts and manboobs than washboard abs and muscle-bound forearms. It’s no different – possibly worse - in offices where the flab is instead under business shirts and ties.
No wonder older women so often have that sour set to their mouths and call it the ‘good old days’.

This post was originally written in 2009 and is getting some air again for Weekend Rewind at Life In A Pink Fibro.

Selective hearing: a fine art

Image source: http://www.dreamchild.com/

Sometimes there is a fine line between disability and ability. For instance, consider the following commonly agreed-upon definitions:
Hearing loss - a disability, a defect.
Selective hearing loss - a talent.
It is selective hearing loss, also knows as selective deafness, that I want to discuss today.
This trait is reportedly most apparent in teenagers and husbands.
What is interesting however is how this ability evolves post-adolescence.
Because as human teens mature into adults - where maturity is gauged by level of responsibilities, not necessarily age - the sexes develop markedly differently. At about the same time that the adult (heterosexual) human male is honing his ability to spot a female going bra-less at 100 paces, he is also sharpening his selective deafness. To the point where it enables him to hear every syllable of a football or cricket telecast but not repeated instructions from his wife to fetch his own fecking beer or a toddler screeching for an icy pole. Most impressively, the male can hear the former and not the latter EVEN WHEN THEY'RE BEING SPOKEN AT THE SAME TIME.
The truly talented are those who are also deaf to their own utterings. Announcements like "if I just buy this gadget/car/fishing rod/some other boy toy I will not need to spend a dime again for a long, long time". Or "yes I will get the washing in before it rains". Or "yes I'll skip golf this weekend and watch the kids so you can go to the movies with your girlfriends". Declarations that are later dismissed because he claims he didn't hear himself make them.
In the adult human female no such deafness development occurs. Indeed, the selective deafness female teenagers morphs into, or maybe is replaced by (the research remains unclear*) a trait called guilt. By the time the female is at a stage where she can spot a sale** at 100 paces, she will hear everything.
And if she doesn't respond immediately and appropriately, her sense of guilt kicks in. Ergo, screeching toddlers elicit not ignorance but guilt and subsequent attention. The sound of a husband asking if there's any milk left in the house prompts frustration certainly, but also guilt and, most likely, a subsequent trip to the shop (possibly by the husband, who realises there are times when it's wiserto give the selective deafness a rest).

Do you exhibit selective deafness? Or do you live with someone who does?

* where research means my opinion.
** I'm not being stereotypical and limiting women to fashion sales here. We can be equally excited about sales at Bunnings, Dick Smith and Beaurepaires. (At least I think some weird sensible people get excited about Beaurepaires).

Image source: http://www.ihasahotdog.com/

Going west: This is what we did. Part I

Image credit: http://www.startwelllivewell.com/

 For the past three months the husband, Paul, and I have been working and living in a town that I did not know even existed until about a fortnight before I arrived.
Our arrival was preceded by a bit of adventure involving the chucking in of old jobs, packing up our worldly possessions, and travelling across the country.
The plan behind this all began, in earnest anyway, when my grandmother died almost a year ago. An awful time, naturally, on which I won't dwell here. But it essentially made us decide that we would one day have to live closer to our families. Made me decide, that is. Paul was itching to leave Far North Queensland, sire a couple of sons and shack up down south.
To backtrack a little, we had been living in Cairns since 2005. As most of my family as well as his were still in central NSW, moving ourselves a few hours south, say to Mackay, wasn't going to cut it.
So, we moved to Western Australia.
From tropical paradise (effing humid, sticky, economic black hole toilet of a place – Paul’s input. Thank you, Paul) to woop-woop desert. And, yes, I am aware it is further from central NSW.
But there was method in our madness.
Our dream, as the Americans say, is to one day have a little patch of land in the NSW countryside. Where we can live among the birds and sit on the verandah and watch the rain come in. While drinking coffee from the whizz-bang espresso machine I'll have then, which also features heavily in this dream.
To fund all this we looked to the resources boom. Firstly, Queensland's mining industry. But it didn't want us - it kept demanding inconvenient things like 'experience' and a list of tickets as long as a Tony Abbott silence.
So we turned to WA, which was apparently a bit more desperate. But not fond of people who still wanted to live in Queensland. There was nothing for it but to move - much to my mother's "you're going to go and leave us!?" disappointment. A disappointment that allowed her to overlook the fact that our current home was 2200km away.
Subsequent research indicated that my best hope for employment in WA would be as a haul truck driver. For which you needed a HR (heavy rigid) licence. So I took myself off to truck school, which thankfully resulted in nil damage to persons or property, and one shiny new HR licence (bearing a photo of me with a crazed grin as I couldn't believe I'd passed the driving test at all, let alone on my first attempt and was hence maniacally relieved/overjoyed).
Paul only has an MR licence, so was a tad (a lot) smug at trumping him for once. The smile was quickly wiped off my face, however, when I learned how much the removalists were going to cost.
I'd warned myself it wasn't going to be cheap, but when the quotes arrived it was still a nasty surprise. "How freaking much!" echoed around my head for some time.
I felt like declaring "you know I could drive the bloody truck myself rather than paying you lot of extortionists". Well, I could. Because, if you didn’t know, I HAVE A HR LICENCE! But it transpired we needed a bigger truck than I could manage, and I wasn’t all that in love with the idea anyway, so had no choice but to hand over a soul-sucking amount of our savings to the extortionists lovely removalist company people.
To be honest, the entire removalist experience was not the best. Having only had two, that would be our 2005 move from Dubbo to Cairns. It could have been far worse, I am all too aware, but I will not easily forget the agent's numerous paperwork mix-ups, discovering that our TV was not even packed in box but just perched in the shipping container, and assorted other dramas.
Nevertheless, after much sorting, packing, fee-paying, organising and farewelling (sniff) it was our departure week - late August - and we drove off. And landed in Mutchilba (approximately 80km from Cairns).

To be continued...

Note: I realise I haven’t actually mentioned where this adventure took us. We are now in Coolgardie, Western Australia. Home to about 800. And, yes, it is every bit as sleepy as that figure makes it sound. Delightfully so. It is in the goldfields of WA. No surprise then that my new job is at a gold milling site. In what is called ‘the gold room’. And, no, that is not as glamorous as it sounds. Paul also works there; he is a fitter on the maintenance crew.

The mysterious case of the missing bodies

Does anyone else find themselves harrumphing and becoming ticked off while at the supermarket checkout? And not because you're asked to fork out an amount roughly equivalent to 23 per cent of NZ's GDP for a tray of chops and litre of milk, or because you're here again while your husband is at home watching season 4 of Dexter. That is probably just me.

But rather because of the daft magazines on display, lined up in a smorgasbord of nonsense. And their increasingly ridiculous coverlines. “Jen's tears”, for instance. Followed three days later by “Jen's joy”. Or “Kim's plastic surgery shame”. Since when are reality stars are ashamed of anything, besides failing to capitalise on a photo op?
And among my favourites: How I Got My Body Back. Usually accompanied by a beaming beauty (thanks genes, and Photoshop) in a bikini. Where exactly did the body in question go? On a weekend break? Blown away by Cyclone Yasi? Run off with another woman - perhaps one that had a greater appreciation of it and its capabilities?
Oh, that’s right. It went to the forbidden land of ‘fat’.
It's not the celebrities I ultimately take issue with. Unfortunately, their industry demands they be as thin as possible. If they've complied they likely feel entitled to crow about it.
What I detest is the blatant passing on – for which magazines serve as an important vehicle - of this body obsession to normal women, which in turn prompts many of us to avidly consume these stories.
I would like to think - indeed, have tried to think - that women are not besotted with the minutiae of celebrity waistlines, diets and fitness. That such stories are flicked over in a moment of boredom and forgotten.
But the abundance of the articles, and sales figures of publications containing them, sadly proves otherwise. And to further convince me of the depth of this fixation was my unfortunate discovery of 'The Skinny Website'. Yes, that is what it's called. In big, bright letters.
I refuse to provide the link because the fewer visits it gets the better. Suffice to say it is the creation of one fan with celebrity-weight mania and recounts every bit of gossip on the topic.
I also won't go into a dissection here of how women becoming obsessed with both their own figures and those of the stars stems from society's expectations, delivered via almost every media format. Or who benefits from this system and therefore perpetuates the stereotype. We've heard it before and I'll likely say it again later.
But I will indulge in a bit of wishful thinking: that our preoccupation with appearance dies a hasty death (ok, extremely wishful thinking). And that, in the meantime, publications have a stab at some semi-intelligent and worthwhile content and headlines.

I am over here now!

If you have somehow stumbled across this blog you may have noticed it is a bit inactive. Well, dead, really. This is because I now blog here: http://www.blog.emmamayalldesigns.com.au/
Please come and take a look!