Holiday Prep and Birthday Shopping.

The GAFA - also known as the Great Australian Fuck All, is now frantically beckoning. Our Big Adventure starts on Friday, cos we are over-nighting in Brisvegas so we can make the silly o'clock flight to Alice Springs.

The last couple of weeks has seen stories of propeller planes falling to bits in the air so when I say I am marginally nervous about getting on the smallish fella, read - fucking terrified. Still it's only for a couple of hours so unless BOTH propellers free fall off the thing we are probably gonna be ok.

Because it's Stevie's BIG birthday and he's not surrounded by all his London mates like he was for his less big birthday, I am trying to make it as bloody fabulous as possible. But the pressure is on. Like most fellas I suppose, he is a bit of a big kid about birthdays and parcels, and even though I reckon the trip of a lifetime has gotta count as the pressie, well, I know he wants a little something to unwrap on the day - don't be smutty, and anyway that unwrapping ain't what it used to be.

It needs to be special and small and weigh fuck all and NOT be something he has dashed out and bought himself in the last little while, and that's more than a bit tricky. But I think I managed it today.

In times gone, a day's shopping filled me with joy. Heading out without a clue, and waiting for inspiration to slap me around the fanny was fun and a test of creativity and staying power, but now I am pretty pooped a lot of the time so I need to have a bit of a plan and move with determination and purpose.

All those meandering tourists just need to look up and get outta the way.

Wednesdays often find me a little worse for wear after a big day in Brissie with the gorgeous kids, so it was no surprise to me that I trooped out today looking just a little, well OK, maybe a lot, under-done.

Yeh I could have been the poster girl for a DAG CITY campaign. But Ho Hum, needs must and all that.

It's interesting though, when a daggy old bird with 'just fucked' hair, and mismatched everything waddles in to a flash shop. The greetings from the staff are soo very much straight out of 'Pretty Woman'.

I was asked, not what I was looking for but what my budget might be. I was given the up down all around once over and then followed to make sure I didn't nick anything. When I asked where I might find the price on an item I was shown rather than allow me to have a look for myself. When I settled on an item the girl tried to talk me down to a cheap bit of tat instead. In another store, every time I touched something the woman nearly had a stroke cos I was leaving my grubby little paw marks an all her beautiful stuff, then I must admit that I touched stuff just for sport.

In any case, I came home loaded with lovely, small, some light, some not so light bits and bobs so the boy will have parcels to unwrap, and I am giving myself a big pat on the back for creativity and staying power and not having smacked anyone over the head with a shovel. Well Done!

Now tomorrow I need to make sure the house is not too much in need of a spring clean so Dibley Dog's babysitters can have a pleasant stay, and then pack a bag.

The Desert is calling, and it's telling me to bring a hat and a water bottle cos it's gonna be fucking hot and hugely exciting.

The Results are IN!

I am still collecting the poison bottles. I am not sure why?

It was an early start today. 5.50am up and at 'em cos I needed to wash my hair and make myself look presentable for my 8.45am appointment with my Haemo Dr, cos I was rather expecting to have to put my foot down and that's always easier to do if you are wearing a bit of lippy and you have your eyebrows on.

Since my last visit only 3 months ago, I have been worried cos he said if the numbers didn't improve, he was gonna have to change the meds. Bugger Bugger shit and fuck that. And it's been quite the 3 months, what with all the TMR roadworks shit and getting arrested and all. I am only imagining it, but I rather guess the mutants feed up on stress. I HAVE NO MEDICAL REASON FOR THINKING THIS.

Anyway, Friday saw me sneak off to Dr Jane about some other usual bullshit, but mostly I wanted to get a heads' up on my scores.

0.14% of little mutant fuckers!

That's the exact same number as last time.

That'd be one hell of a job huh? Sitting around all day, eye glued to the microscope, counting mutants. I can only imagine how pissed I'd be if someone interrupted me or if I needed to pee or scratch an uncontrollable itch, and I looked up and then lost my place. Bugger indeed!

So I have been wondering since Friday how I was gonna put my argument to Dr Greg. He was pretty insistent last time about changing the meds, to a twice a day jobbie which needs to be taken 2 hours after food and 2 hours before food.

And I know there are lots of folk who manage this and I reckon more power to 'em, but for me this sounds like shit. Cos I do like to eat, the size of my arse is testament to that. I hate the idea of doing maths all day just to see if it's OK to have a sneaky biscuit or a bit of cheese. I don't want to set an alarm for some silly o'clock and shovel in a pill so that everyday starts with a reminder that I am unwell. Yeh I like to kid myself for even just a few minutes a day that all is good.

The idea of downing these new pills twice a day just doesn't sit well. It'd mean for me that all day everyday the only thing to think about is the fucking drugs that are designed to kill the mutants before they kill me, and I don't want to live like that. ANd I haven't even thought about googling the side effects of this other stuff, but I imagine it ain't no picnic either.

The once a day poison I shovel in is more than enough.

I am already more than aware of the mutants and if I wasn't, the side effects of the drugs would be a strong reminder. But there are whole half days that can drift by without me wondering about it, and that's just fine. One day last week I actually started planning for a London holiday next year for 3 months without once considering the ins and out of the drugs and stuff. That was pretty cool. I don't think I can go for 3 months, but it was cool to be so forgetful that I considered it for a while. Ah Lovely.

In any case, jolly old Dr G was pleased as punch with the numbers. I didn't have to make an argument at all. Last time there had been a little increase and I guess in his mind he was just preparing me for some change, if the increase continued.

But yippee to the status quo!

And the biggest vote of confidence altogether was that we are back to 6 monthly visits. I mean he's a pleasant enough sort of bloke for a numbers man but twice a year is more than enough.

Yippee!

Now to get sorted for packing to head off into the desert. Alice Springs temperature today is 40 fucking degrees!

Do you reckon anyone is gonna mind if I go naked except for a whalloping hat?

What do you call your computer?

My how times have changed.

Back in the early 1990s I was newly single, and working full time and raising my wonderful girl and clambering onto the roof with a pail of bituminous shit to cure leaks and my fear of heights. Teachers beavered away writing report cards by hand, and I can recall clearly one particularly shitful interim note which required every teacher of a kid to write a line on the same bit of paper and woe be tide anyone who made an error cos then EVERYONE then had to do it all over again. More than 200 times I held my breath and hoped it'd be OK and then I crossed my fingers that the other teachers were OK too. Of course there were some fuck ups - some of them mine. Oh Well!

Computers were new fangled things, and whilst we could all see the advantages of 'em we could not have even begun to imagine just how integral to our daily lives they would become.

In the beginning I just got excited cos it meant that the computer might be able to write my name and the date and the subject on every report card and with over 200 of the suckers to do, that was an enormous time saver for me.  If I happened to be teaching a whole year level for 1 lesson a week, I could have maybe 400 reports to do. I fucking hated writing all that repetitive shit. One year I got the kids to all head up their own Report Cards. Well why not huh? I filled in all the important stuff and wrote an individual progress comment. Yeh I got into trouble Oh Well.

I did not envisage a time where every room would have a smart board and the teachers would carry a computer under their arms or in their pockets and that anyone at any time would be able to pull up the lesson plan and goals and objectives for every minute of every day in every subject. How fucking organised is that! And if I am honest - how boring for the teacher? Everyone doing the same thing at the same time in the same way, I would rather have to go foraging for nits in school kids' hair and be paid by the egg. Yeh I have never been good at doing what I am told.

And if you think this is far fetched or Sci-Fi then think again. My girl and I trotted off to the Grandie's school this week for what we thought was gonna be a 'What the kids are allowed to do on their school computers' chat. Yep, every kid has a school computer - all exactly the same, for the princely sum of $750 rental for the year. But that's a whole other chat.

Instead, we were told that every lesson in every subject was outlined on the machine and that parents are meant to go through all this and then set tests and exams and revision all with the help of some whacko programme and it seems the kids are meant to knuckle down for hours at a time EVERY day after school.

And bugger me we still don't know if they are allowed to download M rated games on the school machines, and what about Facebook or Instagram,  which is why we went along, Fuck it!

I am not sure when teachers became computer technicians or when parents doubled up as teachers or when the school day was extended to infinity hours, but I don't think I like it.

My name for this machine would not be a genteel type of name. It wouldn't be Emma or Darcy or Heathcliff. It'd be Kardashian or Toe Jam or Mammogram Squeeze or Putin. It'd be harsh and hateful.

It's Health Insurance renewal time here in OZ and so we trooped into the Medibank Private office yesterday, cos the  time on hold on the phone was enough to make me want to pull out my own teeth.

They have JUST rolled out OSCAR.

OSCAR is a pain in the arse, cos OSCAR is not even capable of doing simple calculations like dividing a number by 12.

The Service Gal was ripping out her hair. She could do the maths, Stevie had already done the maths and poor old OSCAR was just fucked. He couldn't work it out. Service Gal had to go in and override OSCAR -  twice! Oh dear. - poor thing I hope he didn't have a hissy fit and a melt down.

I was left wondering what OSCAR was short for:

Overhwhelmed
Seriously
Constipated
Awkward
Reprobate

Whatever it is, it surely is not anything pleasant, and that's a shame cos OSCAR does indeed sound like a cool helpful dude. I don't think I have ever taught an OSCAR I didn't like.

Take my money by force and then sucker punch me.

Nobody likes a smart arse, so I won't spend too long outlining why I believe I have more than a reasonably decent ability to comprehend the written word, at least words written in English  that is, cos if you shove a page written in Mandarin at me I might well want to frame it as a lovely example of modern art.

I wasn't a bad student. Oh sure I was a little subversive and I wagged quite a lot of days and I was fairly cheeky to the Nuns, and I didn't do anything I didn't want to do, but my results were more than OK. Yeh, Dad in his tough love way always managed to point out some small flaw in my report card, but I reckon he was secretly quite proud, him being a bit of a smart arse himself.

School led to Teachers' College where the study of semantics and syntax and linguistics were the extensions of your basic comprehension and grammar and punctuation and paragraph writing. Nah the science teachers didn't do all this and neither did the PE folk, but I wanted to teach high school English so this was what was necessary.

After 15 years studying the English language, I was more than proficient, and then I've subsequently 'top upped' over 30 years,  and even if age has slowed the old grey matter a little and the Chemo brain kicks in from time to time, I can still manage to make meaning of stuff. No I don't want to ply my way through an aero-space manual and learn how to build a rocket, and sometimes the details about blood test results are taxing, but I can read the newspaper and all manner of blogs and novels without having to sit side by side with a dictionary or keep asking someone, 'What does this mean?'

So imagine my surprise when I received the latest epistle from Alan Stone from Transport and Main Roads - TMR, Queensland, to find that I had to go through it para by para to see what it was all about.

12 whole paragraphs of Departmental gobbledigook, lucky me! It was like he was being paid per acronym and there was enough legal-ease committee double speak to choke a giraffe.

But in a nutshell, this is what he and his little group of committee minions had to say.

There are SECRET DOCUMENTS ( CMP and the NVMP ) that outline what the TMR have agreed to in terms of their contractor's process and noise allowances. No-one is allowed access to these SECRET DOCUMENTS. Hitler would be so proud.

But he, ALAN STONE has had a little look see at the SECRET DOCUMENTS and some SECRET DATA and now in his seemingly incontestable opinion, his workers have always been in complete compliance, with legislated noise allowances.

EXCEPT THAT IN PARAGRAPH 6 HE ADMITS THAT NOISE LEVELS HAVE BEEN EXCEEDED BUT THAT'S OK, BECAUSE THERE IS A LITTLE CODICIL IN THE SECRET AGREEMENT THAT ANY NOISE AT ALL IS ACTUALLY OK.

Are we in NAZI Germany or North Korea? Can the Government now just do any damn thing they like and keep us all in the dark? Are they allowed to make SECRET AGREEMENTS to the devastating detriment of the local people?

So today the Queensland Government is sanctioning SECRET DEALS that put at risk the health and well being of local people - and the irony is that these local folk are the self same people who are funding all this secrecy. Yep we are forking out for all this manipulation and lies and bullshit. We are paying the wages of the people who cannot or will not call a spade a spade - instead it's an ADD - an alternate digging device. We are paying their rent and clothing their children. They have their noses stuck so firmly in the trough of our money that they are now immune to rationality and reason.

It cannot be a big leap from this situation to the establishment of some Government sanctioned and funded secret dumping grounds for global nuclear waste, or secret compulsory medical testing on every second child born to families of mixed race parents. Yeh I know it sounds extreme and unlikely and the stuff of Sci-Fi, but so too does what is happening today - appalling and underhand.

TMR have secret deals and approvals in place which they believe allow work to be carried out which exceeds noise levels set down by the Environmental Protection Agency. They have effectively set themselves up as being above the law.  And they are funding all this by sticking their hands into the public purse.

It has taken me close to 3 months of writing and reading to unravel all the bullshit. Initially the noise drove me to donning my Sherlock cap, but I am way past the noise now. The mismanagement and the lies and deceit and the semantic plays on words used to justify ANY DAMN THING AT ALL, at our expense, just makes me see RED.

Here it is in a nutshell:

TMR - a Queensland Government Department has signed CMP / NVMP  documents with their contractors. These documents cover practice and noise level compliance. These documents are secret and contain clauses which allow the contractors carte blanche to work however and whenever they choose even when the noise generated is well in excess of EPA legislated levels. The data collected and used to test compliance is secret, and in any case is moot as TMR have agreed to allow the contractor to do whatever they want.

I am surely not the only person, amazed and appalled. I feel especially violated when I consider that the Queensland Government and TMR are grabbing my cash in one hand and sucker punching me with the other.

How very fucking dare they?

No NOAH Needed

Rainy skies over Broadbeach surf.

The big green eyed monster has been nipping away at me all summer and NO the bastard has not nipped off any kilos, it's just snapped off tiny pieces of my sanity day after day, and we all know that I don't have much of that stuff to spare.

All summer long I have read of people's irritation caused by the wet drizzle at their place, too often while I am out in the yard slurping out hundreds of litres of H2O onto my grass or trees or flowers, salty sweat pools forming in my thongs and my even temper simply dashing out of the building.

It has been a long hot hot hot, fucking hot DRY summer.

The pool has been topped up more often than a young person's pay-as-you-go phone especially if mum's paying for it, and the grass has just swung from brown to crunchie to wet as a shag cos I left the damn sprinkler on all night. You'd think that I'd remember cos the pressure in the shower is reduced to a dribble, so smart folk would turn off the garden tap prior to trying to soap off the sweat of the day. Maybe I can blame heat stroke for my lunacy and general forgetfulness, I hope so.

The road works has filled the house with sandy dust because they almost never wet anything down and the fishy girls must have wondered if they were gonna die a quick suffocating death as their moist environment rapidly evapourated away.

But NOW IT'S RAINING.

Yippee!

The pool is full to overflowing and while the grass is not green, it is not crunchie either, and the girls are swimming with renewed vigour.

Dog is less pleased, but then she will just have to suck it up and remember that she actually enjoys playing cubby houses under the bed.

I love the grey skies. Sure, the brilliant blue days are pretty fab too, but the rainy grey seems to happen so rarely that just the novelty of it is wonderful.

It's been raining for a few days now and NO I am not yet sick of it.

Sure, I'd be happier if it was cooler, maybe 20 degrees instead of 30 degrees, and that certainly would make sleep a whole lot easier to manage, but as the water continues to tip out of the clouds, I am not gonna whinge too loudly about the heat.

I'm hoping it is not finished yet.

'Let it rain doooowwwwn on me' apologies to Phil Collins.

This Quiet is Making Me Nervous.

'These pretzels are making me thirsty' Thank you Sienfeld.

I don't know why this jumped into my head, but that's how I am rolling today. It seems the more I think about it the more I feel like Elaine going mad in an Ophelia way.

Yep I am mixing up the references and now just one more for good measure, cos I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Yeh that might be it.

It's been quiet for more than a week now and the notices seem to indicate that the night work will be on the bridge further south and it is due to only go on til about midnight. So whilst that must be shitful for some folk, it is not too bad in all honesty at our place.

But that doesn't mean that we are calm. Nah, we are still jumping up and legging it out to perv over the fence if we hear a truck or a backing up BEEP BEEP BEEP. And of course we do this because TMR are staffed by such a bunch of lying toe rags that if they told me that it was going to e a fine hot day, I would automatically reach for a coat and an umbrella, and maybe a rain coat and take out rain damage insurance on my shoes and make a hair appointment to calm the frizz.

One of their dickhead workers was paying too little attention this week, or maybe he was fiddling with his bits or maybe he was trying to put a call into the police to report a possible demonstration cos someone got off the bus and walked in his general direction, in any case he was so distracted that the stationary Power Pole - yeh the ones that are maybe 10 metres high and thicker than my thighs around, became an obstacle too insignificant to notice, and he backed his fucking great truck up over the top of it. Yep he knocked the fucking thing flat, ripping electrical supply wires from the fronts of houses and of course causing general havoc. No-one was harmed thankfully and surprisingly. No power, no phone, no internet, no access to the road, and I am not sure but I rather imagine no apology. Fucking idiot. 4 hours where locals were not able to drive out of their street, to collect children from school, or make dinner, or watch tellie, or make a land line call to find out how long all this shit was going to go on for.

Just more shit. Ho Hum.

I chased up some legal advice this week about what to do with my INFRINGEMENT NOTICE after my little ARREST / UNARREST tour in the Paddy Wagon. I followed the advice and fired off a letter to the Officer in Charge and now we will see how serious the police are.

Did you know that if you opt to go to court to challenge an infringement notice, that it costs you 70 bucks for the summons that the court needs to generate, and then if you are found guilty by the magistrate then you are fined $110 along with the original ticket fee. So if I go to court to question my ticket 'for crossing the road too slowly' it could cost $228 and perhaps a little more if I need to pay for a witness to attend. The Legal Eagle seemed to think that that probably wouldn't happen, but who really knows.

All this road works has been such an education. I have learned so much, and if I wind up in court I suppose my education will continue. Chasing JUSTICE was always second on my list of vocations. That could explain why I so enjoy a John Grisham story.

Anyway I have always said that any sort of education is worthwhile. You just never know when you might need it.

So bring it on I guess.

Pop Up Pissoirs and Talking Toilets

It seems that the Gold Coast Council in it's wisdom and 'It's someone else's money' attitude approved the erection of some Pop Up Pissoir in Surfers Paradise. Yeh that's literally our Council Rates money flowing right down the shitter, or the pisser, or quite possibly both.

So apparently this is the way forward, because men it seems can't be relied upon to piss in the normal facilities. Now we need to provide some stinking pop-up in public, so they can whip it out and flash it all about when they are pissed as maggots, and this needs to be right out in the street, in the middle of the Glitter Strip, that is Surfers Paradise. Like dogs they can be, going for the longest smelliest up the wall the furtherest piss. Nice huh? Classy? I suppose we can all now stop pretending Surfers Paradise streets are paved with gold and breath a sigh of relief that beer soaked piss will no longer be splashed liberally over the paving, unless of course you are walking more than a few metres away from the new stainless erection.

Yeh it's a sign of the times. But where's the equality? Why not a pop up loo for the ladies? And if women want to don a pair of thick rubber gloves, like the ones you might use to clean other folks' bogs and exercise some great core muscle strength, then are they allowed to drop 'em and just perch on the trough, or do they need to use those new fangled pee directors which are out now so 'women can piss like a man'?

In any case, I don't fancy wandering into the piss zone for a look see and a sniff anytime soon.

Nah, instead I'll take the roadie about an hour south to Byron Bay and have a little scout around there for the morning. I don't think they have pop-up dunnies, even though it is a well worn hang out for youngsters on the drink and on the pull.

Our flags on the pontoon are faded and frayed - yeh I know, what a First World problem and we usually head to Byron for replacements, cos we know they always have 'em, so yesterday was the Flag Day.

So there was the all sorts rubbing along together, the $1000 ripped up to the whatsit designer shorts swinging the innocuous brown bag from some other designer shop, wandering passed the junkies squatting in the gutter having a quick bite to eat before they head home to bed. It's an interesting place that I have written about before. I like it but I don't want to live there.

Yesterday was not a good day meds wise. I should have known something was afoot or elsewhere as I had spent the early morning popping into the loo, but it's remarkable what you can ignore when you have a plan.

Our arrival saw me directing Stevie up the main street in search of a loo. I didn't have time to scope out a pub or a cafe, it need to be out and proud, like a Mardi Gras marcher. And there it was in all it's Mission Brown ordinariness next to the Bus Stop dumping off and picking up young folk from all around the world.

Only it wasn't ordinary at all.

The doors were electronic, and if the wee room was empty, then the doors stop open. Welcome to Byron Bay huh? And so I popped inside and read the instructions about the lock and pushed a button and bugger me if the loo didn't start up a conversation. It told me I had 10 minutes to do my business and that it would give me a warning chat when I only had one minute left and if I was still there pants slopping up the liquid all over the floor when time was up, it'd show me, by flinging open the door leaving me red faced and bare arsed.

I was quick, as quick as I could be at any rate.

And not much later, I was back there again. Bugger Bugger and shit.

I did not feel well.

I sat feeling a bit sorry for myself, I might have even had a little eye wash.

When all of a sudden the fucking loo started talking to me again.  'No Movement has been detected' What? Well that was wrong, Plenty had been going on. And then it said something about thinking that something might have malfunctioned and I thought, 'You are right about that', and then it said that if there was anyone in there they should move around a bit.

Oh fuck! I was sitting there having a little weep amid a terrible stink, but I started waving my arms around like a maniac in case the fucking loo decided to open the doors and all those folk just off the bus got a glimpse of more than they expected. And then I wondered how long I had left. As if things weren't bad enough, now I could feel a panic attack coming on. I had to get outta there. Farkkkkk.

It was a blessed relief to stop at the MaccieDs loos near the Crematorium just south of Tweed Heads. Clean and new and normal.

Why mess with a classic I say.

Are YOU an Organiser?

We caught up with friends for dinner on Friday. This is quite a regular thing. We go to the same place at the same time, same table, and yeh we eat different food, and I can see that it could all be considered boring and sedentary, but we are more interested in the catching up than shoveling in calories.

We glanced quickly at the menu, made a selection, grabbed some drinks and got down to swapping stories.

They knew all about my arrest and the bullshit road works, and really, whilst it makes for a pretty funny cartoon of a yarn, I was more interested in their latest antics.

This woman is amazing. Oh don't get me wrong, he's impressive too, between the 2 of them they have organised a 3 day event next weekend for 500 people. 500 PEOPLE!

Now that's what I really call AN EVENT.

Too often these days there is a TV event, or a summer event at the beach, or people stop to watch a dog peeing in the gutter and that becomes an event cos another dog joins in. It doesn't take much for something to be termed an EVENT, and too often it's just banal bullshit, bigged up by some twat trying to big note themselves or sell some advertising space.

But when someone has organised food and accommodation and drink and entertainment and let's not forget the toilet facilities as well as the insurance and security for 500 people, well that's worth a round of applause and quite possibly a week's respite in a care home when it's all done and dusted.

Loot bags have been stuffed and lanyards strung for everyone and even though the troops are arriving on Friday, she is gonna set herself up on Tuesday.

THEY ARE CAMPING! And they need to be on site to take delivery of all the Glamping tents and the food vans and more stuff than I can even think about, cos I am still back at the CAMPING.

They are taking their very own brand new never been erected before tent. I asked twice if they had put it up before and I think the answer was NO. And so then I reckon I could have missed some of the details cos I was still back at the TENT erection.

The scale of the event overwhelmed me. And their attention to every detail was nothing short of bloody amazing. Good on 'em I reckon.

And now that the bulk of the 'thinking' jobs are done, they are giving thought to the actual days of fun.

The forecast for next weekend is torrential rain.

I just fucking hope that this is typically wrong and that folk do not have to break out the galoshes.

She is staying an extra night after the revelers have all gone and plans to sink into a little bottle of something cold, cos she is realistic and recognises that she might be pulled from Arthur to Martha like a crazy woman over the weekend and so is planning a quiet relax and a pat on her own back when it's all over.

I am in awe of this sort of organisation. I hate the common use of AWESOME, cos that too often refers to something average and I don't like it when average is promoted in this way, but sorting this event is an awesome feat.

I wish 'em so much good weather and fun, and smooth sailing even though that's not the travel mode of choice for this crew, and a calm, head banging good time.

As for me I am pleased when I can organise myself a cheese sanga and a cold bevvie for lunch. Baby steps as my girl is always telling me. Oh Well.

Does Pinocchio have a wooden dick?

I am wondering just how many ways there are to call someone a liar.

And I guess that depends on a number of things:

The nature of the lie.
The perpetrator of the lie.
Your relationship with the perpetrator of the lie.
And of course if it's the first lie or if your patience has been whittled away by a series of whallopers.

As a relatively polite person - nah don't fall about laughing and snorting back your friday bevvie, I try hard to keep my blood pressure on a an even keel and so go slowly into rude escalations.

So if I am doubtful about the veracity of someone's yarn, then I might say something like, 'Really?...Really...I wouldn't have guessed that.' Because if I have no solid firm evidence to the contrary I don't like to start up a big angry argument, but I am unlikely to pretend that I believe every part of every syllable that was uttered either.

And of course we are all pretty patient with kids we are fond of who have clearly been kissing the blarney stone, so if My Darling Grandie is spinning some unimportant crap I will just raise an eyebrow and change the subject.

But I don't like it when people lie, mostly cos I reckon people who tell lies do it cos they figure they are smarter than everyone else, or everyone else is stupid. They figure that their lies are OK cos they won't get called out on 'em.

I have fallen out with people over their lies. Sometimes 'Goodbye' is preceded by a heated conversation and a theatrical storm out and sometimes I just float away without explanation cos it would take more energy than it'd be worth.

So here might be a reasonable escalation.

Oh Really? I don't think so.
Oh Really? That is very hard to believe.
No, that just doesn't make sense.
That's neither reasonable nor rational.
That seems extremely unlikely.
That's a load of old tosh.
That's a lie.
What a load of crap.
That's just utter bullshit.
You're a fucking LIAR.

The question for the afternoon is where do you reckon I am along this continuum in my dealings with Transport and Main Roads Queensland?

It has taken a good while to get my head around their 'bullshit dispensing', cos I mean really who readily can believe that public servants would deceive and bend the truth rather than be honest and who can believe that they do this knowingly because they are party to departmental processes. Yep I reckon they are told to be deceptive. They are told how to be deceptive. They are given the language to be deceptive, and the bounce around the department is designed to confuse and exhaust. Yeh it takes a while to believe that this is the reality of people chewing up tax payers dollars,

Yeh I started politely, 'I find it hard to believe', and 2 months later, today I finally made it to, 'That's a load of old tosh, that's a lie. I don't believe you.' I am pleased to say that swearing has to date been avoided, but just because I haven't written the bad bad words down, it doesn't mean I haven't said some pretty blue sentences out loud to about anyone who will listen.

Well that won't surprise anyone who knows me even a little.

Yep it's been a long week.
TMR is full of utter BULLSHIT! and the people I am in contact with via email are FUCKING LIARS.

There it's out there! And I suppose if they fancy suing me for defamation, they would have to spend sometime proving that they tell the truth, but I reckon they would be pensioned out long before that could happen.

I have lots of evidence of their lies and misrepresentations. Bring it on I reckon.

Married at First Sight and Women's Day

Rosie Batty - such a courageous dignified person.

My guilty little secret is that I have been recording Married at First Sight and then sneaking a speedy look through while Stevie is busy doing some other stuff, sometimes 'blokey' shit and sometimes just playing cards on his computer.

I think apart from the scripting and the audience positioning and the careful editing and the usual reality bullshit, well I think it's an interesting proposition. Can psych studies match up folk? And I figure that they are probably as effective as the old tried and true method of getting pissed in the pub and falling over each other then wanting to chew off your arm to escape in the morning.

But last night's episode which I watched this afternoon, made me sad. All the tired old, 'Boys will be boys' excuses to explain away just plain meanness to women, well one woman in particular, was like I had been teleported back to the 50s or maybe even long before that. Maybe the cave men dragging their chattels around by the hair had similar conversations on thier boys' nights out. Surely modern fellas don't carry on like this any more? And even though a couple of the blokes did in private think that the chatter was demeaning they didn't jump in to shut it down and I wondered why that was.

Blokes don't lack courage. Oh sure some of 'em are not keen to go to the doctor for fear of bad news and not all of  'em are rushing in to rid the world of snakes or spiders, but generally men don't lack courage.

Or do they?

Courage might be as rare as hens' teeth.

It's Women's day and I have long wondered what actually is the benefit to women to having this day. I mean really  what change occurs because middle class women get decked out in green and purple and chat about women's rights in third world countries? It seems like it is all just noise.

Blokey banter and girlie gossip.

When even one person shows courage, change is possible. When Sean from MAFS said the banter was bullshit, it allowed other fellas to join the conversation. It's a shame that they didn't speak up straight away but that is the nature of courage. One person's courage can snowball into something impressive. When Rosie Batty speaks about domestic violence I feel inspired and chilled to bone in equal measure.

Women of substance, women of spectacular courage, don't need A DAY. They are hard at it, EVERY DAY.

Rosie Batty and her ilk  never stop talking and I reckon if they had watched that dickhead Andrew be so appalling they would have had serious words to say to him. In fact I would pay very good money to see that, unscripted, unrehearsed. I'd like to think that he'd crawl up his own bum, but I fear that more than likely he would make some hormone / whore moan, remark and consider himself all very funny and man of the world.

I reckon women and men have courage in equal doses. It just is sad to me that the percentage of folk tucking into the medicine cup of courage is so small.

BBQs

We are up to BBQ number 3.

Our first was a baby weber. It sat on the balcony at the wee flat in Main Beach and then we brought it over to the big house and it stayed on the back deck until one day, while I was at work and Steve was on a UK jolly, some fucker legged it over the fence and walked out with it. Bloody thing was that I wasn't sure when it happened cos I don't EVER use it and it wasn't until a gaggle of girlies came for a drinkie-poo that I even noticed that it was gone. BUGGER!

It was a good'un.

Then for Chrissie that year I pushed the boat and bought Stevie a BEEFEATER. It was bloody enormous. It came with all the bells and whistles and was very pretty. And NO I didn't used it either.

We rented out the Big House to some dero drop kicks while we flitted back to Blighty and when we returned the house was a disaster and the BBQ was fucked. It had not been even casually cleaned, and parts of it were rusted through and rings were burnt out. We replaced just about the whole fucking thing in bits, had some parts made cos they weren't replaceable and cracked on with using it.

But it died a death and last chrissie we bought ourselves anothery. Well as I don't use it, Santa delivered it to Stevie. What a jolly little fat fella that bloke is.

And Stevie has taught himself to cook his Sunday roast in the BBQ and all is good with the world.

My darling girl got a BBQ for chrissie too.

And so here's the dilemma.

To wash or not to wash your BBQ

Stevie is more than a little anal about the scrub up. In just a couple of months he has worn out 2 of the specially designed weber scrubber metal things and the grill plates do look brand new.

But my darling girl is using the Aussie method of leaving all the fat and grease on the grill to save it rusting up and falling to bits.

Of course both methods have merit, and just as an aside, if you are using one of those communal BBQs in a park then for god's sake give it a wash down with a bit of water or a splash of beer when you are finished cos otherwise, oooooh yikky.

So do you clean or do you rust protect?

ARRESTED AGAIN - this could get old.

Police cars bred like rabbits except they are illegal in Queensland

Industrial noise all day.

Night fell and the rain came and there was blessed silence outside.

Celebrations were premature.

At about 8.30pm the 2 dollar sucky sucky started up.

We went out.

They were at it again, digging a hole on the footpath with the sucky truck actually parked off the road so it could clearly have been done during the day.

All the sucky sucky behind the barrier = day work.

What do you call a group of people standing around earning top dollar doing fuck all? 

Yeh I don't know either, but it probably isn't complementary.

Another couple joined us.

A bloke in his 4WD, clearly with the shits up about the noise rammed a number of the bollards and parked his truck up to stop the work.

The noise stopped.

More local people were driven out of their homes and joined us on the street.

The supervisor rang the police and gave them my name.

I got a call from Policeman Paul telling me to get off the Refuge Island or he'd send a wagon and arrest me / us.

The Police came and then they called for backup, because a dozen or so 40-60 year olds were gonna be so dangerous, what with their bellies and sagging boobs - me not them, most of the others are fine figures of folk.

We were standing on the central reservation, the refuge island, a traffic island, so to get the best look at the progress without going into the WORK ZONE.

And then there it was the old MOVE ON ORDER.

Another local and I stood our ground.

We were arrested and had our phones taken and were frisk searched - not as sexy as it sounds, and put in the paddy wagon.

Stevie leapt in with us. Coppers didn't know what to do about that cos they hadn't arrested him. He finally had to get out cos he wasn't allowed to be in the wagon cos did you know wagons are single sex only.

Seriously one could not make this shit up.

Did you know that there are no seat belts in the back of a paddy wagon?  So I wedged myself between the 2 low seats with one leg and used my left hand as a brace on the ceiling and my right hand was shoved hard onto the front barrier thing. My partner in crime, taped up bad back and all, hung on for dear life.

It's interesting that we were arrested under the guise of police protecting us from ourselves but there we were rolling around in the wagon. Just saying.

We were driven to the police station.

I couldn't make it out of the paddy because of limited knee bend so I had to piggy back onto the copper and slide down. Yeh the irony was not lost on me either.

We all trooped into the station house.

The coppers waxed on about now NOT ARRESTING us anymore and instead issued us both an INFRINGEMENT NOTICE, code 2185 - taking too long to cross the road or maybe it's bullshit, I can't find it, but I've only had 2 hours sleep so my research skills are not up to par.

This is the same sort of INFRINGEMENT NOTICE one might be given for speeding or some other traffic offence, but I haven't ever heard of someone being chucked in a police car and taken off to the station house to get a speeding ticket have you?

We were put out on the street at around midnight.

2 women, no wallets, no lazy fifty tucked into my knickers, one dead phone, one operational, in the pissing rain, and told to make our own way home.

Yep we walked to the cab rank and it cost us 20 bucks to get our tickets.

Appalling noise went on until passed 4am.

Then even though no such sign was necessary in the dark pissing rain, some fucker gleefully threw a metal sign up right under my bedroom window at 6.30am,

Ta very much.

Am I the only one who thinks this 6.30am sign is superfluous?