So apparently it’s Mother’s Day this coming Sunday. It is a day that comes and goes without much fanfare in our house. My hubby often asks me why should I expect him to do anything for me for Mother’s Day, since I am not his mother? Point taken, but he doesn’t remember his own mother on Mother’s Day. I agree it is some weird commercialised celebration that we are pressured to adopt in order to keep the florists and chocolate shops in business. I don’t understand why we need a special day on which we hang all our hopes about being pampered. If I need chocolate, I don’t wait and yearn for someone to buy me a gift-wrapped box of assorted delights – I get it myself. And I’ll have you know that I usually buy dark chocolate, because It’s Medicinal. 

As an aside, I regret that fateful day when I found a little book in the Stanthorpe library that espoused the wonderful benefits of chocolate. The book was co-written by a doctor, John Ashton, and I blame him for my current addiction. I know eating sweets and fatty foods is not recommended as a staple part of the diet, but since being seduced by the good doctor’s claims I find it even harder to resist buying a choccie (or three) during my weekly shopping trip. After all, chocolate doesn’t make you put on weight the way other sweets do, and it allegedly is good for your emotional health. All I know is I have put on weight, and my sugar-rush highs and lows are not helping at all. Get thee behind me, Cadbury, thou evil pawn of the devil! (We all know Nestle is evil*, but now Cadbury is part of the cause of my angst.) But if you're going to consume chocolate, make sure it's Australian, like Darrell Lea, or organic/ fair trade, like Green & Blacks. 

Back to Mother’s Day. According to information in my local paper last week (if you believe everything you read in the paper, which I don’t – I mean, I can’t believe the TV guide for a start. Who can fathom the fact there is a whole channel devoted to infomercials? But anyway…) a survey conducted by Fantastic Furniture showed that ‘the majority of mums are tired, spend too much time on housework and miss out on special treats such as breakfast in bed and much needed ‘me time’.’

I don’t know about you, but the idea of breakfast in bed is a bit odd. I love sitting down to my cereal but I can’t imagine doing that in bed without milk sloshing out of the bowl and covering the sheets and me. Our family has a hard enough time keeping the milk within the bowl even when seated at a solid surface like the dining table. And again, I don’t know about you, but the first thing I need to do in the morning is to pay a visit to the smallest room in the house. If I got apprehended in the bedroom with a tray of brekkie to consume straight away, it might be more than milk wetting the sheets. It could be just me. Maybe I need to focus on my pelvic floor exercises a bit more.

The article summarised the survey results by saying ‘many mums miss out and end up being quite disappointed with their day’. I have a perfect solution to that – just lower your expectations! ‘Me time’ in our house is being able to go to the toilet or have a shower without a young child demanding your attention. Or being able to go to bed at the end of the day and have a good 6 or 7 hours sleep. That’s ‘me time’.

I dimly remember a period in my life when I could sleep in to such an extent that I woke up slowly and feeling relaxed – as opposed to waking up with a jolt and a headache, while the alarm bleets or a child screams in the darkness – and when I could watch a whole movie on tv, or even read a book for hours on end without interruption. I know that’s very selfish and not even the most noble of past-times to crave, but it’s the little achievements that I miss. And perhaps here I am still expecting too much. I look forward to the time when I can eat something nice without surrendering the last bite to a covetous small child. I would like to leave the house without having to check we have nappies, change of clothes and enough snack food to last through a minor famine. One day I actually hope to buy a new lounge room mat, but only when I know it will not run the risk of being stained with food, drink or baby bodily fluids.

I don’t need a massage, a bouquet of flowers or a bottle of bubbly. I just want my life back!

Hmmm… I guess after thinking about it, maybe I am being a trifle demanding and unrealistic. Maybe I should accept a consolation prize. Hand me those flowers.

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I am speechless… I am without speech!

This is what the character Elaine said on ‘Seinfeld’ after hearing a particularly unbelievable story from Jerry, proving the theory that even if you have nothing to say, there are always enough words to express just how deeply your lack of communication goes. (You can read more about Elaine and Jerry in the script here.)

I haven’t been writing much lately, for the sole reason that I have nothing to say. Well, not nothing at all, but not much. Sometimes I would have a thought come into my head while hanging out the washing and I’d play with some ideas of how to develop that idea, and explore what sort of point I am trying to make. But then the story would reach an impasse and I might get distracted by a biscuit in the cupboard and that’s where the planning would finish.

Some of my undeveloped ideas are: mother guilt, reverse tree clearing, buns of steel/ abs of lithium, and a choose-your-own-adventure-blog called ‘I am not a drug dealer’.*

It’s like those emails I write in my head to a friend and then never get the time to type them up. After several days or a week I think: it wasn’t that important… Sometimes I will tell her I have an email in my head for her, and she will respond in a similar manner. It’s the thought that counts.

I know a real writer just gets up in the morning and writes, regardless of motivation or the presence of plot. So I am forcing myself to write even if I don’t have much to say.

Like the committed journalists who don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story, I am resolving to keep writing even if I have nothing to say. I’m sure my readers would be so relieved. This, I hear, is the true spirit of blogging. 

 

 

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Let me say straight away, that my title is not about the time we had dinner at Dad’s place and the recently prepared cheesecake was in the fridge - not very set - but because I love cheesecake, I ate the sloppy mess and even went back for seconds. Strangely enough, nobody else was fighting me off for their share. Needless to say, the cheesecake wasn’t that hard.

But, no - this little story is about something completely different.

I was sitting in the Farley Street piazza last week, enjoying an afternoon nibble on some bakery items with my 6-year old and toddler. As we sat, the sparrows darted in amongst the camellia bushes behind our benches. The afternoon sun glinted on the ‘Dingle-Dangle Tree’, as we like to call it. (It is a sculpture of the Roll-up Tree that used to exist in that spot, where the locals rolled up to be involved in protests and listen to whatever soap-box spruiking was being done.)

Mister-Almost-2 went over to the water bubbler and as is his custom, threw his sausage roll on the ground so he could have both hands free to grab the edge of the metal stand. I got there in time to apply the 10-second rule (or the 10-hour rule, if we’re at home) and rescue the sausage roll in one hand while lifting him in the other hand. Such a talented mum I am, I pressed the button just so to direct the water up his nose. After Mister-Almost-2 had inhaled enough to sate his thirst, we wandered back over to the benches and completed our food.

It was then I noticed a woman carrying a variety of bags, while also pulling two wheeled suitcases. She lowered her load to the ground and stood erect, stretching and feeling the freedom of her released burden. I watched her finger the handles on her bags reluctantly as she stared off into the distance. I figured she had walked up from the bus depot and was heading for accommodation. I wondered what I could do to help. Would she need a lift? Did I have room in the car with the kids in their seats and a boot full of shopping as well? Probably.

There are many ways to load junk in our car, and we’ve tried most of them, including the day we had to deliver boxes of veges before heading off to the Stanthorpe Show. With the boot jam-packed, we had to stow a vital piece of child transportation – the pram – on the roof of our car. The Subaru doesn’t have roof-racks, so we just tied the pram down with occy straps and drove carefully. I don’t know if that’s legal, so let’s just say, we may or may not have been traveling on public roads.

Meanwhile, back at the Piazza, the tired-looking woman still stood, contemplating her journey. I went over to her and asked where she was headed.

“The Central Hotel,” she told me.

You’d think the Central Hotel would be in the centre of the main street, right near where Central Motors used to be – but no, as I peered through the branches of the tree on the footpath edge, I discovered we were across the road from the Country Club Hotel. Not being much of a drinker or clubber, I can’t reel the names and locations of the pubs off the tip of my tongue. And out of five pubs in town, why would three of them start with a C? Come on now, people, there are 26 letters in the alphabet you can use.

So by standing beside the woman and staring in the same direction I could make out the sign of the Central Hotel (one block past the Commercial). That didn’t seem too far… for me, without any luggage at all, that is.

“Would you like a hand?” I offered.

“Sure,” she responded. I called the kids over and wondered how this would work, me carrying some bags and not being able to hold the hands of my little ones. But like well-trained sheep, they trotted along beside us and we made our way up the two blocks to the hotel.

My new acquaintance told me where she’d come from and the circumstances of her arrival in Stanthorpe. I assured her she was fortunate she’d missed the Apple and Grape Festival the previous weekend, as all the accommodation would’ve been booked out for sure. Our mini convoy made it to the Central Hotel and I stayed long enough to see that this lady was welcomed and received by the staff at the hotel. What would happen after that, I didn’t know. I wished her luck.

So that was my meager attempt at being a Good Samaritan. I relate this story, not to have my friends pat me on the back or give me a Mickey Mouse badge. I think, though, that it made me wonder: Why don’t I do this more often? It really wasn’t that hard. It took maybe 10 minutes out of my clearly hectic schedule of eating apple turnovers in the Piazza. And there was virtually no risk. But still, there were those seconds of doubt.

The seconds when I watched the woman and debated in my mind whether I had the resources to help. The seconds when I assessed her, based on appearances. Would she reject my offer of help? Did she need my help?

But really, does it matter? It often doesn’t hurt to ask, and yet so often, because we don’t have a written invitation to step into someone’s lives for a brief moment, we wonder if we are interfering. If it is any of our business.

Surely, there are very few instances when it would be offensive to offer someone help. Like when you might say, “Excuse me, but I think your comb-over is flapping in the breeze. Would you like me to pat it down for you?” Or, “I see you have a couple of bats in the cave, if you get my drift. Would you like a tissue, or…” And you know what they say – You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose. (So remember that.)

There’s a story that gets shared at times like these. And thanks to the beauty of the internet, it gets copied and changed and plagiarized and I really don’t know what the origin of the piece is. In one telling, there’s a young boy and an old man, in another, it is someone who meets an American Indian elder. I’m not sure, but there’s probably also a version that includes an old clown and his youthful but ambitious understudy.

Basically, it goes like this:

While walking along a beach, Person A (a man/boy/ambitious clown understudy) saw someone in the distance leaning down, picking something up and throwing it into the ocean.

As he came closer, he saw thousands of starfish the tide had thrown onto the beach.  Unable to return to the ocean during low tide, the starfish were dying.  He observed Person B (a young man/old clown/wizened Indian elder) picking up the starfish one by one and throwing them back into the water.

After watching the seemingly futile effort, the observer said, “There must be thousands of starfish on this beach.  It would be impossible for you to get rid of all of them.  There are simply too many.  You can’t possibly save enough to make a difference.”

Person B smiled as he continued to pick up another starfish and toss it back into the ocean.

“It made a difference to that one,” he replied.

 

It’s heart-warming, touching and yet does not descend to mindless sentimentality. The message affirms that each day I can find simple ways to make a difference, and as I discovered the other day, it’s just not that hard.

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We were driving back from Brisbane on the weekend and watching the creeks that had recently been swollen from a heavy downpour.

“There’s been a gully-raker up at the head somewhere,” my hubby observed.

“A what?” I asked, wondering if I’d stepped into a parallel universe where everyone spoke code.

“A gully-raker,” hubby repeated as if I were indeed from another planet.

No explanation followed but I guessed it meant the rain was so heavy it cleared out all the debris from the gully as the torrent flowed.

As we got closer to home I saw one of our local causeways bubbling with stormwater. “There’s some fresh under there,” hubby observed.

“What?” I asked again, showing my intimate knowledge of Australian idiom.

“You know, fresh flow of water,” he replied. He looked at my puzzled face. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard these words before.”

“Well, no, I haven’t. And I’m just wondering if you’ve suddenly decided to make stuff up in an attempt to sound like an Aussie bush bloke.”

“Nonsense!” he laughed. “You know I don’t need to do that.”

Well, just because the guy has spent the past 40-odd years within a 60km radius of one small country town, riding motor bikes on dirt tracks, mustering cattle on horseback, driving tractors, learning about irrigation, cell-grazing, weeds and soils, and the habits of wild dogs, keeping up to date with native vegetation laws and catchment management plans, knowing how to swing a chain saw / axe / hammer / crow bar to chop wood/ build fences/ dig drains and postholes… yeah, maybe he is an Aussie bloke without having to prove it by his vernacular. Maybe.

I just didn’t know that he had more strange turns of phrase up his sleeve.

When I first met my hubby his favourite exclamation was “Snappin’ ducks!” This sounded so cute I often couldn’t take him seriously. It was a bit like my mum who would complain about other drivers on the road, then call them ‘Mugwomps’. Now there’s an accusation to make you tremble.

One of hubby’s expressions after a hard day’s work was to say he was ‘knocked up’. Now, I guess I must have watched too much American TV because in my understanding, being knocked up meant you were pregnant, and when I married Bruce, I kind of expected getting knocked up was one of my tasks. I’m all for equal rights, but some things can get taken too far.

Bruce also told me about the habit of saying ‘wheelbarrow’ when you read a tricky book. I had no clue this was a habit of people, being such a well-read person myself (I grew up on Enid Blyton, then Trixie Belden and the Sweet Valley High series of books, so as you’d understand, I had quite a high-end literary vocabulary). But apparently other people would come to a word they wouldn’t recognise, so in their head, say ‘wheelbarrow’ to fill the gap, then continue on.

Now that I have been exposed to this Aussie practice, I realise my teenaged daughter has been doing this all along with the many tomes she’s brought home from the library. Perhaps every third word was wheelbarrow in her stories, because she didn’t seem to pick up an extensive understanding of the English language. But at least she has a good knowledge of garden appliances. Her contributions to the weekly shopping list are still a bit of a mystery.

But I digress. Australian slang seems to have so many different dialects, for example, in Queensland we say we go swimming in our togs and take our books to school in a port. But further south they go swimming in their bathers and use school bags. It all sounds so much more dignified, as if the New South Welshman and Victorians are looking down their noses at us.

My hubby has said lots of things to me in the course of a daily conversation that I had never heard before (and I’m not talking about anything rude, although that’s a whole other story perhaps saved for a smaller audience). I thought I had heard all the slang from my dad, but no - I was sadly mistaken. Dad came over from England in the 1960’s and like many new Australians glad to be adopted into a far better climate and culture, he learned the Aussie ways with gusto. Just like Colin Buchanan, Rolf Harris and Olivia Newton-John, his fondness for all things Aussie made you think surely he must have been a fourth-generation Australian. I guess he gladly shed his staid English ways and found the roundabout way of saying things quite amusing.

Dad could recite a swag of similes in one sentence: “Stone the crows! He was off like prawns in the sun, but he was mad as a cut snake, bald as a coot, thick as two planks and couldn’t organise a drink in a pub, so he was flat out like a lizard drinking.” He also liked to throw in a couple of Joh Bjelke-Peterson words: “I, I, you, you, I know… you, well, let that be a lesson to you!”

Dad loved comedian Graeme Bond’s show “Aunty Jack” and although I was too young to have seen the show, Dad still used the sayings from that, such as “If you don’t eat your dinner, I’ll rip your bleedin’ arms orf!” Dad thought it was hilarious, but as a child, I had no idea this was from a comedy routine. I just thought Dad was expressing something from his sadistic past in an English orphanage, and I was just a teensy bit worried about what might happen next.

Of course, Dad learned his Aussie slang from travelling around the country in the 60’s but it’s possible he just remembered the more obvious sayings. As I lived and attended school in Brisbane for almost 10 years, it seemed we had no more input into our Strine, but were being Americanised like all the rest of the country as we received more and more TV shows and songs from the US.

Dad railed at the idea of us calling people ‘guys’. “We’re not in America!” he’d point out. I must ask him what he thinks now, to see what has happened to Dough Nuts, Drive Through, and peanut paste being called peanut butter, jogging shoes being called ‘trainers’ and having to order chips at McDonalds by asking for “fries”. (I guess that’s the punishment for entering McDonalds – you have to talk in a different language then you receive something that doesn’t quite qualify as food in our country anyway.)

But the expressions my hubby and dad use are not the exhaustive list of Australian sayings. There are heaps of words with their origin in indigenous language also. Eating tucker and doing some hard yakka come from Aboriginal words, as are many names we use to describe our native flora and fauna (such as waratah, bettong, koala, geebung, wallaby and potoroo.)

There’s a funny story about how we got the word Kangaroo. In an exploratory voyage in 1770, Joseph Banks and Captain James Cook had been sailing a bit too close to the reefs of North Queensland when they needed to go ashore to make ship repairs. During their 7-week stay on the beaches of what is now known as Cooktown, the men studied the local wildlife, and also made contact with the local Aborigines. They discovered that a grey or black marsupial there was known as ‘kangooroo, or kanguru’. The description of the strange new animal was shared back home in England and became a well-known animal within the next decade.

Joseph Banks compiled a dictionary of the “New Holland Language” (mainly from words collected from the Guugu Yimidhirr people of North Queensland), which he then gave to Governor Phillip before the First Fleet set sail. Not being aware that there were about 700 different Aboriginal languages and dialects, the sailors thought the words in that dictionary would apply to their new settlement in the Sydney area. The book Australian Aboriginal Words in English explains:

Members of the First Fleet employed the word kangaroo in talking to the local Aborigines, and must have used it in connection with a variety of marsupials. The Iora people thought they were being taught the English word for ‘edible animal’; when cattle were unloaded the Aborigines enquired whether they were kangaroo. The story doesn’t end there. When Europeans settled along the Darling River, the English word kangaroo (an original loan from Guugu Yimidhirr) was taken over into the Baaganndji language (with the form gaangurru) as the name for the introduced animal ‘horse’.

Talk about Chinese whispers!

In addition to traditional Aboriginal words used in our language today, there are more generic words used in slang such as ‘womba’ for crazy, ‘migaloo’ for white person, or ‘gubba’ (from ‘government’ man) which could mean policeman or white person. Aborigines are Murris in Queensland, Kooris in New South Wales, and Noongars in Western Australia. My friend Bonnie talked about her fan being ‘gammon’ when it didn’t work properly but you could also say ‘only gammon!’ when you were teasing someone.

I used the word gammon only a couple of weeks ago when talking about something that was no good, to my hubby. He looked at me in confusion as if I’d started speaking Klingon. On second thoughts, judging by his Thursday night viewing habits, he probably would have understood it a whole lot better if I had spoken in Klingon.

Kind of like if I were to ask him if I could have the TV remote. A bewildered look would come across his face, trying to decipher the meaning. “Wha? You… want me… to give you… the remote control?!” Snappin’ ducks! 

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I’ve been doing some number crunching lately; not like ab crunches which give you strong muscles, but a more exhausting exercise that leaves you feeling tired, drained and a bit like throwing yourself off a bridge. Yes, it’s that time again – the quarterly Business Activity Statement (BAS) deadline is looming. With all good intentions, I started preparing for it around Christmas time. Since the ATO smiles on us with mercy over Christmas and gives us an extra month to file the BAS, I thought I would not be irresponsible and wait until the last minute. Only problem is, this past quarter has brought new accounting challenges and it has taken me months to get my head around it.

You see, we are part of a group of organic growers in the Granite Belt who combine to sell our produce at a sizeable market in Brisbane, the Northey Street Organic Markets. Members of our group take turns to drive the van loaded with boxes to Brisbane, to set up, man the stall and bring us a reasonable profit. Since we have stepped in to take our turn on the roster this season, we’ve also been taking on the responsibility of handling the money for the group’s sales and then divvying that out. Not a problem – we have a spreadsheet with everyone’s produce and we do the tally at the end of the day of what sold and who is owed what. But to actually record this on the computer so that the accountant and the taxman are happy – well, that’s a whole other basket of organic fruit.

Money coming in from another grower’s sales can’t really be recorded as income since it is not ours – we are just passing it on, and money paid to the growers via an EFT from our account isn’t really a business expense, nor is it a private drawing. Then there’s GST on the commission, which means we have to record how much money the other grower makes, how much of that we take for commission, how much the ATO takes for GST and then how much is spent on lollies on the way home.

So on Christmas day I took my laptop to lunch at the in-laws and asked my sister-in-law (an accountant) how to enter in all the details. After a while of looking at the figures she agreed it would take some more in-depth study. After a week of contemplation she got back to me with a Plan. This Plan was Cunning; this Plan was Foolproof, and was going to work. I followed her instructions and miracle of miracles - it did work. Now to copy the formula and apply to all the other days we did the markets.

To cut a long story short, I spend no less than 8 hours across two separate days trying to get one entry to balance. You may think that I am completely stoopid and perhaps my hubby did too…. He came home the other day to find me bald from where I was tearing my hair out. “Hey, that’s not fair!” he said. “There’s only one baldy allowed in this household.” When I told him my troubles he made a sensitive empathising sound that somehow came out like a derisive snort. (I know he means well.) “How hard can it be?” he asked.

I started to narrate a sonnet entitled, “How Hard Can it Be? Let me Count the Ways…” but he interrupted and took over the computer. He used the calculator, scribbled on paper, negotiated his way around MYOB (in a world-shattering first, at which point I really should have taken a photo) and announced after an hour of deliberations, “This doesn’t make sense.” Then I made my empathising sounds, and barely stopped short of saying, “I told you so.”

The problem was, we didn’t have a figure to start with, having used the cash to buy lollies, or some other business expense. Normally we would bank the money so then we have the bank statement to verify what came in and what we did with all the transfers. Not this time. It was like those mathematical problems where you think of a number between 1 and 10, add your birthdate, multiply by 4, subtract today’s date, add the rego number from your car, and then you end up with the number written on the back of your bankcard. A bit of science and magic thrown in together, and I was starting to think our account-keeping was a bit the same. Perhaps I should just think of a number between 1 and 100 and that would give me a more accurate figure to work with.

To cut another long story short, we came to the decision that there was something innately Wrong and even Stoopid with the figures from that particular market day. We used the Cunning Plan template on all the other market days and found we could balance the figures on the computer, but this one ominous day refused to be balanced. Perhaps there was an interplanetary misalignment and something disturbing in the earth’s atmosphere that caused the glitch. Whatever it was, we decided to let MYOB balance the entry itself  - computers are good that way, thinking they know best - and found it gave us a number a hundred dollars more than it should have been, but at least we could close the stupid program down and get on to more important things with the computer, like facebooking and checking out the weather forecast.

So now my records are almost ready to lodge the BAS – only problem is, it’s just 6 weeks until the end of this quarter, and I’ll have to start thinking about it all over again. 

Oh dear…..

(To sum up how I feel, I’ve included a gem of wisdom from Gary Larson, creator of “The Far Side” cartoon.)

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