And everywhere, nothing

This is what it feels like to have nothing to say. You sit at the computer and stare at the screen, thinking, “I need to post something today.” Nothing occurs to you. You sit and stare at the screen, thinking, “I need to post something today.” Nothing occurs to you. You sit and stare at the screen, thinking, “I need to post something today.” Nothing occurs to you. You sit and stare at the screen. You sit and stare at the screen. You sit and stare at the screen.

Doing the farm thing: creek walk

The weather is cooling down now, so I'm hoping the snakes have gone far far away. I ventured to the creek over the weekend, and wasn't killed. Remarkable.


In the distance are the hills I mentioned in the last batch of photos. I like to pretend they're very much bigger, with higher ranges lined up behind them, all covered with snow. Try it if you want to: look hard... focus... See?


This is the neighbour's section of the creek, photo taken with a bit of zoom from halfway down the hill.


The grass and weeds are still long - that's Big Pup in the background - but soon there'll be cows in here again, and with the onset of winter all this growth will disappear.


This section of the creek always feels enchanted. Maybe it's due to all the dancing elves and choruses of angels, but I'm not sure.


The creek is overgrown for much of its length at the moment, but it's a tiny watercourse anyway, as you can see. Further along there's a pool which is big enough for the dogs to swim in (no chicks there at the moment, Bob) but here you can easily step from one side to the other. The water is running low, despite some recent rain.


Full moon rising...


... and a colourful sky to the west.
Time for another cup of tea.

ANZAC Day

Each year on the 25th April, countries including Australia, New Zealand, Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa and Tonga commemorate ANZAC Day ("ANZAC" meaning the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps). These days we reflect on all our military conflicts, but ANZAC Day initially began as the anniversary (this year the 90th) of the "first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War" - landing on the Gallipoli peninsular in present-day Turkey on 25 April 1915.

I wanted to say something about war and peace. I've thought about this for a while now but can't make sense of it. I can't usually make sense of numbers either, but here in visual form is what it means to say (at a conservative estimate) that 8,159 Australians died in the Gallipoli operation:

dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead - dead
[Edit 27-04-05: I've snipped most of this terrible list. The post was so damn long.]

Numbers of fatalities from other countries include:

New Zealand - 2,701
Britain - 21,255
France (estimated) - 10,000
India - 1,358
Newfoundland - 49
Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) - 86,692

HaloScan

Just a note for other new HaloScan users, or those wondering about signing up: unless you pay for the Premium service, all comments which are more than 4 months old are archived by HaloScan and you won't be able to access them. Also, once your comment count is over a certain number (200 for the non-Premium service, 800 for the Premium) the counter for old blog comments will show zero, even though the comments are still accessible.

Confession

You're aware that children grow up with theories about the world? And that these theories can often be quite stupid? And that, until confronted with the truth, they might not realise that:
(a) they have this theory, or that
(b) it's wrong?

I was at least 25 years old before someone confronted me with the fact that rats are not male mice.

Being skilful

Everybody has at least one area of life in which they are quite hopeless, and my area of supreme idiocy is sport. I don’t get it, I can’t do it, and if there’s no chance of winning, I don’t want to play it. Stomp stomp, hissy fit, no!

Also, I occasionally make really stupid decisions, and one of these was to do a Grad. Dip. in teaching. It was a one-year course which involved doing a lot of nothing-much for no particular reason. Sadly, it did not actually prepare any of us in the class for the nightmare of actual classroom teaching. I say it didn’t prepare us to teach, but it did introduce us to a nightmare: physical education classes. Bloody hell.

Picture this. The class of about 30 adults is lined up in the gymnasium. Today’s task is to learn how to teach gymnastics skills to primary school children by actually doing gymnastics skills. I don’t know how this is supposed to work; they’re completely different skills. However. Let us proceed.

I’m standing in a queue, and up ahead is one of those little trampolines you can jog on or use as a springboard. The task was simply to run up, jump onto the trampoline, and jump off. Simple, yes.

The people in the queue ahead of me run up, jump on, jump off. One by one, no problem. Run up, jump on, jump off. Next! Run up, jump on, jump off. Next! You get the picture? It’s such an easy task, why are we even bothering to do it?

But as I get closer to the start of the queue, I’m getting just a little bit nervous. I don’t like to run in front of people. I don’t like to walk in front of people. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to run up and jump on a stupid little trampoline in front of people. And now, Next! It’s my turn! I start the run-up. In my head I’m going through what I need to do, deciding where to stop the run and start the jump. I’m bounding along the gym floor, the rest of the class watching from the sidelines. Yes I feel stupid, yes I look silly, yes I’m at the take-off area, yes I stop running and jump... ah, but hang on, do I? Do I jump?

Why, no! Despite the good example of all those fine folk before me, and despite my better judgement (sadly and suddenly extinct), I get to the take-off zone, stop running... and fall into the trampoline!

Oh... my... God...

All I had to do was jump on and jump off! How hard can that be?? I can’t even remember what happened next, my humiliation was so complete. Oh ... my... God...

The memory of this now sends me into hysterics, I’m happy to say. And I now have a peculiar feeling of pride in being possibly the only human EVER to fail this most basic gymnastics skill. Not everyone can do that, you know. No.

Doing the farm thing: going for a wander

A little farm tour for you, Grannyp! :)


Looking over neighbouring properties towards some rain coming in from the coast. One of the trees in the foreground is a favourite perch for a family of wedge-tailed eagles who fly around this valley from time to time. Last time they were here I took some photos, but couldn't get close enough - they looked like tiny smudges in the distance.


Rain on the way, and a rainbow on the right-hand side (difficult to see, sorry).


Standing under an umbrella and looking over what we call "The Back Hill" (one end of the farm). The creek is down there in the trees, but the long grass and weeds are still too scary to get through. At this point, you're halfway down the hill.


The head of the aforementioned creek. This is a neighbouring property that's been left to itself for about 30 years or so. At the moment it's covered by camphor laurels (a weed tree) but now some other species are pushing up through the canopy. On a clear day you can see mountains in the distance (or what passes for mountains around here; I've got a good imagination) and the forests saved for eternity by those smelly good-for-nothing hippies. (Do I need to say I'm joking? And grateful?)


Here I've strayed into another neighbouring property, but until recently it was part of this farm, and it still feels like mine. The new owners don't live here yet, so what they don't know won't hurt them, or me. Legally-speaking, none of the farm is mine - it's my parents' place. I moved back here several years ago and they promptly up and left... (Well, yes, to get away from me, obviously.) I'm living here as some sort of useless caretaker or something. It's not supposed to be permanent, but for one reason or another I'm still here. Lucky me, though. I'm not complaining.


These trees are part of a stand left by some earlier farmers (we presume) as a tiny forest, in the days before fences were common. Dairy farmers had two paddocks - one for day, and one for night, and there was a clump of trees in each for shade. This is my father's theory, anyway. It seems reasonable. This is the only such clump on the farm; the rest of the place was cleared, apart from shade trees along the creek and road.


The long and winding track to nowhere in particular.


Big Pup in the foreground; Little Pup beyond. They like to sit in the breeze and smell the air. I mentioned somewhere that we might be headed for another drought year. Looking at this grass, you'll find it hard to believe. But from about May to late October we'll get barely any rain at all. In most years we would've had a lot of rain from about February to April - often it floods during this time - which fills dams and creeks and (presumably, I don't know how they work) aquifers in preparation for the dry months ahead. It hasn't happened that way this year. We're lucky here, being close to the coast - rain is more plentiful. But go just a bit further west and it's very dry already.


The end of our tour, and time for a cup of tea. Cheers.

Comments

Lately some strange things have been happening with this blog’s comments. Specifically, there have been a lot of them.

First I need to tell you that my habitual reaction to good things happening is this: Why? How? Huh? Then I run away and cry. So recently, when lots of comments were coming in, and new commenters were appearing out of the blue, I chucked a wobbly. This might be an Australian or even a local or family term (not sure), but it means I got frightened and upset and wanted to hide somewhere. (Comments are my only indication that you’re out there; I don’t have a site meter - just don’t like the idea of them - and have no idea who or how many are reading this.) I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to do anything. Where were these people coming from? What did they want?

I’m not being such an idiot any more. I like your comments. They’re gifts. You’re sharing bits of yourself with the rest of us, and that’s something amazing.

The thing I’m having trouble with, though, is that comment counters, here and elsewhere, don’t make any sense. My favourite blogs are, some of them, getting very few comments at all. These are brainy, artistic, good-value blogs, but they're not being acknowledged by commenters. (NB. I’m not suggesting that comments are the purpose of blogging. All blogs are different. Maybe some bloggers don’t care for interaction with readers, and comments are of no interest to them.)

Why is this blog getting comments, while others are not? Obviously it has nothing to do with merit, or those meritorious blogs would be inundated. Perhaps it has something to do with a commenter feeling safe to contribute, knowing they’ll be acknowledged? (This is me being kind to myself; this is what I hope to offer you. I’m still trying to reign in my smartarse tendencies when responding to comments, but that’s a work in progress). Or maybe there’s been some sort of Cosmic Convergence of Kind Commenters, willing to offer something just because they can, and this blog is sitting mid-centre, being damn lucky? Those things are possibilities, of course. But I think the real answer to why people comment here is this: it’s cos I’m beautiful.**

Okay. I have no idea why you’re here, and now I really don’t want to know. It’s none of my business. I don’t care why you’re here. I’m just glad you are.

---

**A joke for my sister, J. Welcome back, darl.

Rock song

John Muir*, getting lyrical about an earthquake in what is now (thanks in large part to him) Yosemite National Park:

At half-past two o'clock of a moonlit morning in March, I was awakened by a tremendous earthquake, and though I had never before enjoyed a storm of this sort, the strange thrilling motion could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, both glad and frightened, shouting, "A noble earthquake! A noble earthquake!" feeling sure I was going to learn something. [...]

I was now convinced before a single boulder had fallen that earthquakes were the talus-makers and positive proof soon came. It was a calm moonlight night, and no sound was heard for the first minute or so, save low, muffled, underground, bubbling rumblings, and the whispering and rustling of the agitated trees, as if Nature were holding her breath. Then, suddenly, out of the strange silence and strange motion there came a tremendous roar. The Eagle Rock on the south wall, about a half a mile up the Valley, gave way and I saw it falling in thousands of the great boulders I had so long been studying, pouring to the Valley floor in a free curve luminous from friction, making a terribly sublime spectacle--an arc of glowing, passionate fire, fifteen hundred feet span, as true in form and as serene in beauty as a rainbow in the midst of the stupendous, roaring rock-storm. The sound was so tremendously deep and broad and earnest, the whole earth like a living creature seemed to have at last found a voice and to be calling to her sister planets.

- John Muir, The Yosemite (e-book** from Project Gutenberg)

* In 1892, John Muir and other supporters formed the Sierra Club "to make the mountains glad." Got to love him, hmm?

**If reading online, Firefox shows a page which is difficult to read, the text being too wide (on my screen, anyway). Internet Explorer gives a better view.

Blah blah / Et cetera

The thing is this, Reader: I want some comments, but haven’t got anything to post. Nothing. Empty space between the ears. So here’s my plan: I’ll pretend to write something (ie. this), then you’ll pretend to send a comment. Except that you really will send a comment.

I didn’t say it was a fair and equitable plan, of course. (Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that.)

What do you think, anyway? Is it going to work?

Go there & see

Jen at Frog and Toad's Wild Ride has posted a series of postcards, sent from around the world, all using collage techniques. It's a reminder, if ever we need one, that given the same basic materials (postcard, glue, life, etc.) we can each of us come up with something unique. Go humans. Yay for us!

Gravatar a-go-go

Just testing the Gravatar comments thing for a while to see what it looks like.

A gravatar, or globally recognised avatar, is quite simply an 80x80 [in this case 40x40] pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites.

Singing in the rain

It's raining! It's really raining - pelting down! And I'm fiddling with the template colours. Life is good. I just wanted to tell someone.

(What a dag, yes. I don't care though. Best wishes.)

:)

Stray thought: 2

There's something weird about expressing thoughts in writing. I wonder whether any culture has a problem with it, the way some do with photos. Writing catches thoughts which are momentary and makes them permanent. It stops them moving on, the way they do in your head or in a conversation. I don't know whether it's quite right. Maybe thoughts are supposed to flutter about like butterflies. Maybe they turn into dead things when you pin them down.

FYI

Some handy links:

Australian Network for Promotion, Prevention and Early Intervention for Mental Health (Auseinet)
- mental health/illness factsheets
- suicide prevention factsheets

beyondblue

depressioNet

Lifeline
- "Beating the Blues"
- "Carers of People with a Mental Illness"

MoodGYM - online course in cognitive behaviour therapy

SANE Australia - factsheets

Through Eiseley eyes

I’ve been running my own little Loren Eiseley festival this afternoon, though from the outside it looked like I was just reading a book. Eiseley was an American anthropologist, and he could write. His work made "the ideas and findings of his fields not only radiantly comprehensible but almost spiritually meaningful to readers whose knowledge of science is slight".

I first stumbled across an essay of his in an encyclopedia, while searching for something else. (And isn't that always the way? Serendipity or something.)

You are a changeling. You are linked by a genetic chain to all the vertebrates. The thing that is you bears the still aching wounds of evolution in body and in brain. Your hands are made-over fins, your lungs come from a creature gasping in a swamp, your femur has been twisted upright. Your foot is a reworked climbing pad. You are a rag doll resewn from the skins of extinct animals. Long ago, 2,000,000 years perhaps, you were smaller, your brain was not so large. We are not confident that you could speak. Seventy million years before that you were an even smaller climbing creature known as a tupaiid. You were the size of a rat. You ate insects. Now you fly to the Moon. [...]

Life is indefinite departure. That is why we are all orphans. That is why you must find your own way. Life is not stable. Everything alive is slipping through cracks and crevices in time, changing as it goes.

- Loren Eiseley, “Introduction to Part Four: The Cosmic Orphan”, in a multi-volume encyclopedia with a red? cover, pp139-141. (Sorry... No excuse.)

Now, finally, I’m reading one of his books, and another is on its way.

The evening was perfect. The light was just fading on the faces of the company, and the perfectly clipped lawns and hedges fell away before us on the terrace as only the very rich and the very powerful can afford to have them. My friend held a mint julep in his hand and gestured toward me.

"Man," he said, "will turn the whole earth into a garden for his own enjoyment. It is just a question of time. I admit the obstacles you have mentioned, but I have
tremendous faith in man. He will win through. I drink to him."

He poised his glass and said other happy and felicitous things to which the company present raised their glasses. Even my own glass - and I am a weak and doubting character - was somewhat dubiously being lifted, when I saw an incredible and revolting sight. There, under my friend’s white canvas chair, and outlined against the stuccoed wall at his back, a thin, greasy, wet-backed rat upreared himself and twitched his whiskers with a cynical contempt for all that white-gowned, well-clothed company.

I say he addressed himself to me, for I have never seen anything so peculiarly appropriate. He had obviously emerged from a drain a bit farther on in the wall, perhaps a little prematurely, along with the rising tide of evening. I stared in unbelief and waited for the ladies to scream. I wanted to lift my glass. I wanted to set it down. I waited for my novelist friend to come to his senses and spring away from that bewhiskered mocking animal that crouched beneath him. The novelist made no move. He spoke on as eloquently as always, while the rat sniffed his shoe and listened, stretching up to his full height. I felt for an uneasy moment that the creature might ironically applaud. He looked across at me, and it seemed best not to warn the company. Anyway, it was unlikely that I could warn them sufficiently.

For that this was a message I felt certain. I alone saw him and I never spoke. He listened a while with great attentiveness to our voices, and then he went back into the rising darkness and the drain pipe swallowed him up.

- Loren Eiseley, The Night Country (Lincoln, Nebraska USA: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 / copyright 1971) ISBN: 0803267355, pp34-5.

And in an unheralded sudden change of topic: it took me about three hours to write this post, and the only parts I needed to actually compose were the introductions. I need to get faster at this. I don't know how. This constant write and rewrite and rewrite aggravation: it will not let me go.

:(