What I really wanted to do when I started snooping around wordpress trying to find my password, which I did, eventually, which I’ve committed to the computer’s memory because it was something like: 6w$!3@3XX%6*$ was so I could post a comment on Club Troppo. About what? I have long fortgotten. Alas, I still cannot log into wordpress or Troppo’s version of wordpress, (how many of them are?) as it is apparently something ‘other’ to mine and although I continue vainly to try from time to time to log in and post a comment, I remain, alas, an ‘invalid user’ no matter how many times I hit the ‘return’ key or how hard. Oh well. It doesn’t matter.

The upshot of this failed endeavour was I created this, and the upshot of this is, I’m outta here. WordPress is just too slow. It allows no ‘third party functionality’ (as they say) and is very restrictive. The stats aren’t very interesting either. One can get lost in sitemeter for ages. Blogger allows me to be much more creative, if I so choose. I can change colours, fonts, enlarge fonts, shrink them and do pretty much whatever I like with its template, should I be so brave as to venture into exacting world of html, which I don’t, very often.

So, new blog is

here

‘linkus’ had been taken, as had ‘bless the weather’, but not one of the 112 million blogs out there had ever thought to combine the two. Funny ’bout that.

I won’t delete this one.

Tomorrow morning’s pre-dawn full moon will be (roughly) my five hundred and forty sixth. You’d have think the novelty would have worn off by now, and I guess it has a bit. Bloody great thing keeps me tossing and turning before it finally pops like a zit .

I read a good word today . . . otiose. You could say it about this post perhaps.

This made me smile to:

Where was I? I turn back the page: the war is raging. Raging is what they used to say, for wars, still do, for all I know. But on this page, a fresh, clean page, I will cause the war to end–I alone, with a stroke of my black plastic pen. All I have to do is write: 1918. November 11. Armstice Day.

Good huh? The pen be mightier than the swwoard.

Stop smiling! I can’t. I know! Why stop smiling? I dunno, it should be illegal to feel this good. I know. But it isn’t.
Man, we are so legal! We did it darling. I know. We did.

This image when I first saw it, produced in me a pang of envy and I am not really a jealous sort of person. Its a beautiful shot and I would love to feel the incredible satisfaction these two must surely have felt as they walked down Pennsylvania Avenue on that fateful day.

I probably should concede at this point, that it is somewhat unlikely I will ever be elected to the American presidency as the first African American president (or his wife). Especially as its already been done. Its not the glory I covet. I don’t think. Just those few seconds of feeling justified and having it acknowledged. Of seeing justice done, of being vindicated beyond your dreams. Of being so bloody satisfied its ridiculous.

All power to them. They are, as the mother of a friend of mine says, gorgeous in every sense of the word.

Here be just one way of the many ways of saying, Shove it up your arse matey. I am not that desperate that I need to work for someone who is going to be such a dickhead, so quickly.

Dear Tom,

It has taken me less than five minutes to confirm what I suspected, that it is illegal to expect an employee or even a prospective employee to work on a trial basis unpaid.

(link)

I am not at all happy about your assumption that I would be prepared to do this, or that you didn’t see fit or were honest enough to inform me before I did the work that you had no intention of paying me for it.

I do not work for free and I’m not entirely happy about driving into _____ for a shift of less than two hours.

This is terribly disappointing because I quite enjoy waitressing, I am very good at it and you have a nice restaurant. But if this is your expectation of your staff, I don’t think it is going to work out.

Yours sincerely,

Bugger. Oh well.

Only in Australia perhaps? Twenty kilometres east of Merriwa. The mind boggles. It was a sign.

You gotta wonder what happened here–exactly. It doesn’t sound as though there was just the one murder, but that the hut in the gully, was somewhere were murders occurred on a reasonably regular basis. I’d like Nick Cave to write a ballad about what happened there and help solve/create the mystery.

Had I not driven to Mt Blackheath in the last twenty-four hours, I would not have seen this sculpture (Cloud gate) which was featured on the cover of a weekend newspaper’s travel section titled, Obama’s Town. i.e, Chicago.

I had no idea such a thing existed! It is surely the coolest piece of public art . . . . ever. Really. Perfect for our times. One of these should be compulsory. . .

A truly ephemeral work it changes with the day. Click on the thumbnails to see the Chicago ‘ shiny bean’ in different lights.

As for Bleakheath, it was in its element. Fine, drizzly, misty and quite cool. The first of its beings I saw, was the resident ‘Futurist’, with lugubrious lips, who turned his head 90 degrees and quickly in the last second of our coming face to face in the doorway of the ULP petrol station as I was exiting. He is equally as recognisable and unmistakeable in profile as he is in front on. I guess he recognised me too.

Out at the end of the plateau, Oedipus and I slept in the hut, listening to the sounds of heavy drips on a low tin roof, from the pine trees.

We woke up, miles from home with nothing much to do other than return there and a day of more, grey, misty wet. ‘Reality’ was just off over stage left a ways and we could choose not to go there for another ten minutes.

Coffee, eggs and fava beans for breakfast and a visit from the neighbour (getting old) for a chat (we’re all getting old- er).

On my way out, I visited my favourite rocky cliff/outcrop to dare my demons (who didn’t show) although I did start to get a bit of vertigo and decided to do my deep breathing exercises a few feet back from the tippy top of a rather large drop. I sucked in a lot of oxygen as I traversed an ancient hanging swamp disturbing lots of wattles birds on my way back to the car. Drove home. And didn’t hit any roos.

The end.

Hard nosed photojournalist that I am (ahem). I took the photo before I saved the sheep. To the right of what’s left of the dam is small piece of lattice I used to stand on while I hauled the sheep out, as this had become an all too common occurrance back in the days when I was a rouseabout/p.a./housekeeper/chauffer. (You may recall?)

Originally I was instructed to wear gum boots for this exercise,  but I quickly discovered that the harder one pulled on the sheep, the further one sunk in the mud and once sunk over the gumboot line it became difficult to get oneself out. So I devised the lattice method, which worked pretty well.

On the first outing to check the dams, with the boss, this dam in particular had no less than ten sheep bogged around its edges. They had pretty much given up the ghost but as soon as they saw us heinous humans come over the hill they all start wiggling feverishly in unison. It was quite an amusing sight, especially as they were all ok or would be as soon as I’d pulled them all out. Were it up to me, I would fence off the dam and set up a water trough nearby. But bugger that its never bloody well up to me!

The reason I’m blogging these photos is because I’m going to enter a competition. The images must be black and white and the theme is water in the environment. I’m not sure which ones to enter. So was hoping that someone out there might volunteer their opinion as to which one they’d vote for? I can never decide and usually decide wrongly.

“You can never conquer me, ‘cos I’m not here and you’re not there”

One of the more difficult astrological transits I have going for me at the moment, is that of outer planet and hence very slow moving, ruler of Pisces—King of the Deep, Old man three prong Neptune. Neptune if you didn’t already know is currently transiting Aquarius and has been doing so for, gee, about sixty trillion million years. He (and he’s definitely a he), is now at 26 degrees of Aquarius and is, as of Friday going into reverse motion. Although Neptune in the sky as far as we are aware is not actually going backwards or forwards or up or down. He’s probably not going anywhere very much at all, other than to spin around a bit in his own particular orbital reality, and perhaps as the universe expands, thin ever so slightly and imperceptibly.

The latest theory as I’m sure you are well aware is that the universe is expanding. Which might lead one to imagine that those bodies ‘contained’ within it are getting ever so slightly less dense. But who can be sure and indeed I somehow doubt that the laws of gravity and physics of our particular material based reality, bear much relevance out in the deep dark and cold realms of a Neptunian world.

Famous and clever astrologer Robert Hand says of Neptune conjunct Saturn: “This is a difficult transit of Neptune because it can be very confusing as well as rather depressing and desperate. He goes on to use phrases like ‘dark night of the soul’ and suggest things to look out for, such as slowly developing and difficult to diagnose illnesses. In my natal chart, the Sun and Mars sit atop one another a few degrees away from Saturn, so after Neptune has left me confused, desperate, depressed and ill he will go on to attempt to annihilate my ego, render me more compassionate, sensitive and much more likely to subordinate my needs to that of some other person. Simultaneously he will be giving my Mars a confusing time of it. Mr Hand counsels I am ill-advised to strike out on my own as I will have difficulty succeeding in anything I do, as unseen enemies will be waiting in the wings to trip me up at every turn, and besides, I probably will be feeling too bloody exhausted to put up any kind of good fight. I should, he helpfully suggests, detach myself from my energies, (que?) Which undoubtedly is much much easier to say than do. It all sounds grande eh? I’m hoping that jolly Jupiter who is large and visible and to my way of thinking much more real than the nebulous Neptune, and also transiting Aquarius, will go some way to alleviating the carnival of suffering I am apparently about to undergo. Heh!

But what really got up my nose about all this doom and gloom, was the suggestion by the erstwhile and usually sage Mr Hand, in relation to the transiting Neptune atop my Sun was that my ideals be firmly rooted in reality.

Reality you say? He wouldn’t be the first person to bandy about the word reality as if the bandier thereof had the first fucking idea what reality actually was.

A friend of mine has a propensity to give lectures about reality. Her reality is the one of earning enough money to pay off the mortgage and being resigned to this fate rather miserably. She would like everybody else to be similarly resigned to what I perceive to be a rather dull and limiting ‘reality’. And, as I don’t actually have a mort-gage I find this particular take on reality rather irrelevant. Various realities seem often to compete with and be at odds with one another, don’t you think? There is the political reality, Mr Speaker a complete crock as we all well know. And then there is teh media reality another completely bogus affair. There is the reality that at present I have a couple of thousands bogons trying to get into the house. There is the reality that we live on a planet that is made up of things which cannot be said to be anything much other than a simulcrum, a fantasy world we have concocted by the act of clapping our eyes upon them–or so some would have us believe. There is the reality of relativity. In my life I seem big and important, my world radiates out from me. To the bogon moth I am nothing more than a moving blob behind the glass and I actually doubt that the bogon moth perceives of me to be anything at all, save as some sort of object, er. .. I said that already didn’t I?

I was first struck by this question of reality once when on holiday somewhere and a couple who were staying in the same house as we, as they left one morning, announced, clearly dreary about the prospect of returning to the ‘real world’. The real world is the world of work and misery I suppose? Of earning not quite enough money to pay the rent, mortgage, school fees, grocery bills, car expenses, etcetera, etcetera, and of feeling largely unfulfilled and unhappy about it. Versus, the unreal world of being happy to be on holidays.

I am of course, as you might have guessed not going to begin to attempt to unravel the mysteries of what reality is, for I know not. But I am going to state a very firm objection to people who suggest I should be rooted in their limited earthbound, and miserable version of what they have deemed to be reality.

Oooh update: I just had a thought. Laughter is a reality and crying is another. But I think I’ll stop right there.