The human body is crap.

Well, poor Miss R is lying on the couch in front of the telly at home. I can't write an in depth reason as to why, but in short she has seriously damaged her ankle. It all happened last night when she was playing with the dogs in the backyard. All of a sudden I hear this thump and a scream. I run out to see what's wrong and she was in absolute agony. I'm sure everyone else in the neighborhood heard this as well. I have a feeling that there is some serious ligament or tendon damage that is not going to fix itself in any great hurry. I'm only saying this because Miss R is under the impression that, as I have mentioned before, I am a medical doctor. Oh my god the poor thing. Looks like we will have to resort to crutches after a trip to the doctor and possibly some x-rays. She had to end up sleeping on the couch with the dogs as there was no way she was going to get up the stairs to the bedroom. And you can imagine the quality of sleep she got as a result. A couple of Panadeine Fortes didn't help either. It got me thinking though. What if I get hit by a car whilst riding my bike to or from work? I only have like 8 days sick leave a year, so what would happen if I was out of action for like 6 months? How could we survive?? Maybe I should look into getting income protection insurance or something like that. Or maybe just sue the arse off whoever hits me. I am seriously of the opinion that the more expensive your car, the more you don't give a shit about anyone else on the road. Unless of course they are those old men who drive big old Kingswoods at 20kph in either the right, or left hand lane, or even both.

Do we all have OCD?

Owning two dogs who are free to come and go in and out of the house when they please has a couple of disadvantages. The one big one is that fact that they manage to bring in with them all sorts of crap under their paws. Grass cuttings, mud, fluff, hair, it's all there. Our couches also have duck feather stuffing which comes out between the weave and you end up with duck feathers all over the floors as well. The problem is I have one 'thing', and that 'thing' is maintaining a clean floor and dust free horizontal surfaces. Our floors are both tiled and have floating floor boards so even the smallest piece of dust shows up. It's a daily battle. If we had carpet maybe it wouldn't be so obvious, but as it is, I can't relax unless I pull out the vacuum cleaner and/or the mop and maintain the floor up to "House and Garden" magazine standard. Where does this kind of behaviour come from? I don't think I have any 'issues' stemming from dirty floors as a child, at least I don't think so. It is very nice having clean floors though. Then there is the dusty furniture. As soon as the dust is removed from the dining room table, it's back. If it wasn't done every second day then we'd soon have the amazon rainforest growing directly from the inch thick layer of dust. Where does it come from? Why do other people's houses always look so 'dust free'??

Summer is for sadists

As I have mentioned previously, I am not a fan of summer. Today proved my point. I stood outside, supervising trucks being loaded with contaminated soil. Normally I wouldn't mind doing something like this, however, today's temp got to 37C. Pretty horrible I have to say and I'm fricken exhausted as a result. So what kind of story did they run on tonight's news? Oh, how wonderful it was to be down at the beach and some absolute genius saying "Oh the beach is much cooler than sitting at home in the heat." Now, I used to live in Perth. Some of Australia's best beaches are in Perth, even though I'm not a beachy person. However, if someone told me that it was cooler down at the beach than sitting at home I would've seriously questioned their intelligence. Come on, I think I once saw the sand literally turn to glass one day it was so freekin hot. No, I am quite happy sitting at home on the couch in the air conditioning watching telly on days like this. The other funny thing is that the weather has just suddenly furnaced up. All last week the temp was a lovely 20C-24C. Very nice. But like it just goes bugger it and cranks it up to 37C! No in between, no nice get yourselves used to the heat gradual temp rise. When it gets this hot it reminds of how hot it can get which is something you forget over the winter.

Those who can't....

As mentioned previously I used to be a Primary School teacher. I did this job for 7 years, which in today's day and age is a fair acheivement. I had, pretty much, an iron clad job for life and I could've stayed in that position until the reaper came calling. As far as jobs go, it doesn't sound all that bad, especially with 12 weeks holiday a year and I was normally home by 4:45 in the afternoon. But it was what happened between 0830 and 1630 every working day that just wore me out and squeezed my life energy to below that of single celled amoeba. My first few years I was a classroom teacher. I had 25 young minds to help shape and send forth upon the world. All my old students would likely still remember me and I'm probably glad that I have had some influence on these young people's lives. You could probably say that these were my 'happy teaching' years. I have to admit, I did enjoy classroom teaching. Kids were always full of questions and when you see that lightbulb go on in their heads it gave me a real sense of satisfaction. Then I went to England and taught there. I'm not dissing the romantic idea of teaching in another country and soaking in its atmosphere, but I never met a happy teacher over there. You can read countless ads in newspapers calling for teachers to teach in the UK with these big pay cheques, which is great but they fail to mention that even though you might be earning quite a decent amount of cash, you end up spending it just through the cost of living alone. And then there are the kids. Badly behaved kids in Australia don't even come close to what I came across in England. The fact that I ended up crying on my way to work one day says it all really. I came back to Australia and took up my teaching post again, but honestly, the spark had gone. I was just going through the motions really I think. Then I took up the physical education position which was okay, but it just accelerated my fed-up-ness. teaching PE had its moments. But they became fewer and farther between, and the weather just got either hotter, windier, wetter or colder. My fatigue just got worse and I would get home and sleep for 12-14 hours a night. And the workload just didn't let up. My lunchtimes were taken up with sport training, any spare time I had was taken up with admin stuff, try-outs, getting equipment ready for lessons and so on to the detriment of actual proper lesson and curriculum planning. It's funny because I dropped in on the school last week and everyone there is dead jealous of the fact that I got out. I'm (apparently) looking much happier and relaxed. And my present boss doesn't believe me when I say that my current job is far less stressful than teaching.

A day in the life.....

I haven't really talked much about what I do for a living, so I thought I would give some insight into what it is I do that helps pay the mortgage. I work in the contaminated land industry. I assess land and groundwater for contamination and ensure that it is fit for human habitation. All well and good, and it's probably a good thing that this industry has come to light as I have seen some pretty horrendous stuff. Service stations are the primary problem, especially old ones. People don't know this, but have you ever stopped to wonder why there are so many abandoned service stations around? It's because alot of them have corroded underground tanks and have leaked all sorts of nasties over the course of decades. So the big petroleum companies just leave the problem alone and write off the land rather than spend millions of dollars cleaning it up. By far the worst one I have seen was when I was out supervising some soil sampling when the excavator dug into what can only be described as a hidden oil dump. All this black ooze just started flowing into the pit and it stank, by god, all I could smell for days after that was oil. Then there are the clients to deal with. It's not our fault that there is contamination on their land, but they make out that it is. But we have a job to do and it's not something you want to sweep under the carpet. If a future resident contracts cancer, and it is somehow attributed to the soil, then it could cost alot more than the $10,000 soil clean up bill. Some clients are great though, and are happy to do what it takes. I spend most of my time in the office writing reports now, but I do get out and do field work occasionally. But we have juniors now who do the grunt work. The amount of work around is simply staggering and at the start of the year we had three people working at the firm, now we have seven. If the director wanted to, it would be easy enough to expand even further I would think. It's a good job and I enjoy it, more than I could say from when I was a primary school teacher, which I shall talk about another time.

track time!!

Well, it was about time we took Cleo to a trial track and see what this whippet is made of. We took both dogs down as it would be good to see how Merlin reacts to being on a race track again. Merlin got his chance first. It was just amazing and I'm still left a little bit speechless. He had no hesitation at all at going into the starting box. Looking at him from the front, his head was down and you could see that all his switches were 'on'. The Lure went past and the box opened and holy cow..... Look, he has had a run around in the paddock, and a couple of times at the off leash park, but nothing could prepare me for this flat out sprint that he just pulled out of nowhere. He covered the first 100m in 6.7sec and the 200m in 12.3sec (nearly 60kph) We didn't want to have him go flat out as we were scared that he would hurt himself. But seeing him go around the track was simply awesome. Needless to say he was wrecked afterwards and hasn't stood up since we got home. As for Cleo, well, she got a chance to have a run against a deer hound. For those of you unfamiliar with the breed, a deerhound is like a greyhound except even bigger and much hairier. The lure went past and well, Cleo, bless her, didn't know what to do. She kind of chased the deerhound for a bit, then she though that she would have more of a chance of catching the lure if she turned around and got it coming the other way. Too smart for her own good if you ask me. But the guy running the track reckons that she'll come good. We'll be training her up a bit more next year.

The world is full of Brain Surgeons!

I'm only writing this now as I have had a good few days to cool down from the absurdity of some people's logic. This promises to be my most scathing post yet. So hold on to your seats peoples this will be epic. Let's set the scene shall we? Miss R's parent's place is set on about 5 acres of land. Not a great deal in the scheme of things out in the country. They have a rudimentary fence around some rudimentary paddocks, but then they don't have any animals to fence in so why bother. They do however have one paddock that we worked out we could let the dogs loose in without fear of them escaping. Next to this paddock are the neighbours. These people have upwards of 200 acres and numerous paddocks at their disposal. Logic to these people dictate that they live in what amounts to a lean-to against an old caravan 50m from Miss R's parent's house which was there some 7 years before these brainless dickheads turned up. Anyway, these morons decided to choose to put 3 donkeys and 5 horses in the paddock next to the one where we have been letting the dogs off. Needlesss to say, neither Merlin nor Cleo had seen these animals before and barked their collective arses off towards these animals through the fence. I would like to re-iterate here that these dickheads have 200 acres to choose from. So they bark a bit, and the donkeys stand their ground and whatever. No-one's getting hurt, but we chose to take the dogs away anyway. Then Mr Moron pipes up over the fence saying how you can't trust dogs, they'll get through the fence and find a way to get through. Mrs Moron chimes in saying how great their donkeys are and they will make a mess of our dogs if they get through. Then Mr Moron takes it upon himself to throw a SHOVEL AT MY DOG. Well, that was it thank you Mr Shovel Chucker. He just laughed it off saying how the dogs should see him as the baddy now. Excuse me? I think you're a fucking moron myself. Then Mrs Moron pipes in again with this, and I quote: "What if those dogs spooked these horses while my kids are in the paddock with them??" OH MY GOD! The world is going to end!!! The sky is falling the sky is falling!!!!! Okay, let's use some simple mathematics to gauge how likely this event will occur: Fraction of time dogs outside: 1 hour in 24 which equals 0.042 Fraction of time your shitty kids are in the paddock with the horses: 10 minutes in 24 hours: 0.007 0.042 X 0.007 = 0.0003 or a 3 in 10,000 chance of such an event happening!! Holy shit!! If you read one of my previous posts about risk assessment you actually have more of a chance of dying from eating 3 tablespoons of peanut butter! Oh my God, wrap your kids in cotton wool and send them to the pillow farm love. This crazy woman then proceeded to lambaste us about our dogs and how dare we have them blah blah blah. Again, I would like to re-iterate that they have 200 ACRES TO CHOOSE FROM!!! Here is a point by point summary of how much WE have had to put with from these brain surgeons: 1: THEIR stupid dog standing on our porch barking its head off at 6am. Did we complain? NO. 2: Their sheep getting out and eating all the rose bushes. Did we complain? NO. 3: Their stupid horses reaching over the fence and continuing to eat more of the roses. Did we complain? No. 4: Mr fucking rocket scientist riding his quad bike past our bedroom window CONTINUOUSLY from 6am. Did we complain? No. 5: Their stupid fricken kids staring into our loungroom window at all hours of the day. Again, I would like to point out that they have 200 acres to play in, and yet they chose to play metres away from us. Did we complain? NO. And yet they had the audacity to bitch and moan to us about our dogs barking at their stupid freakin animals!! Oh the humanity! It's such a shame I can't order a tactical air strike on their stupid lean-to. The satisfaction I would get from seeing footage like those pin point air strikes in Iraq where the bomb goes down the chimney, would be simply staggering. If you know these people, please kick them in the head, you'll be doing a community service quite frankly.

Someone turned the heating down.....

This weekend we are staying down in the country. It's great, really it is, although I don't think I could permanently do it. Thing is where we are staying is a mere 50km from the most southerly point on the Australian mainland. The views are spectacular. On the down side we just received the highest amount of rain in a 24 hour period since 2003. When I mean rain, I'm talking heavy, incessant rain that just kept going and going. This I wouldn't mind so much as we've been in drought for 10 years or so and every little bit helps, however, when you've got two dogs who sit at the back window and whinge and whine that they can't go outside, that makes it a little less enthralling. The temp didn't get above 10 degrees and it's nearly summer! The other bad thing is that the wood pile to keep the heater going was sadly depleted, so I have had to go all manly and start swinging the wood splitter around. I think much to Miss R's disappointment there was no shirt off action going on either, not in this weather anyway.

a weekend in the country

Currently Miss R and I and the dogs are down at her parent's holiday house in south gippsland. It truly is a lovely place to be with a fantastic view of Wilson's Prom and Bass Strait. This is the first time we have brought the dogs here and it is probably the first time that Merlin has has any free time off the lead. He really is fast, I'm talking 2nd fastest accelerating land animal fast. For such a large animal it is a sight to behold. Little Cleo tries to get away from him thinking no other dog can keep up with her....and she's sadly mistaken. The down side is that Cleo has found a way to get through the fence by turning her body sideways. Now this is both fascinating and really fricken annoying. The fact she persisted and got through is testament to a whippet's intelligence, but if she gets out and into the neighbors sheep paddock, well, there's no telling what she'll do. Today is Saturday as well and I have taken to buying a Tattslotto ticket every week. I never win of course, only a couple of 6th divisions. But there's that period of time after I go to bed on Saturday night until checking my numbers on Sunday morning where I dream about winning the big one. Right now I'm in that zone. Who knows, you could be reading the blog of a millionaire right now....but more than likely you're not.