The Adrenaline-full Adventures of Term 2
Jul. 16th, 2021 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capn_n_pyeNo matter how dark or cold or long Term 2 is, at least this year we could be continually glad that it was not (completely) the same as 2020!
Once upon a time, Belrog and Jenski learned of Anne Drysdale and Caroline Newcomb, two of Geelong’s foundinginvaders white settlers when the Age ran this story. So when Jenski spotted an event at Newcomb library involving a local historian giving a talk on Caroline Newcomb, of course we were in like Flynn. The little old lady was a good researcher (although heaven knows that doesn’t translate to a good speaker) and gave a thorough, if somewhat disjointed account of an interesting life. She resolutely refused to discuss anything relating to Anne Drysdale which was weird, given how interconnected their lives were (it was like doing a talk on Robin but refusing to talk about Batman because it's not about him - WHERE IS THE CONTEXT?!), and, like many historians, stubbornly insisted that they probably weren’t gay (cos nothing says ‘gals just being pals’ like spending your lives together and getting buried together, too). The audience consisted of elderly people who were clearly regulars at these sort of events, English-language students dutifully attending to practice their skills, and us. As the Q&A session drew to an end, it became clear that both the speaker and the library liaison were desperately curious as to why the heck we were there. The speaker was like, “… are you uni students…?” (bless you, you rambling old lady – not for many moons). The bit that made it obvious was when the librarian broke and blurted out, “Why are you here??” and we were just like, “TO SEE IF YOU’D MAKE IT GAY, YOU COWARDS #YOLO” which probably just confused them more lol.
Anyhoo, one cannot attend a talk in Newcomb about Caroline Newcomb and not pop down the road to visit her and Anne’s grave, so off we went. The cemetery has QR codes on notable graves so you can find out about the inmates - guess what, they weren’t afraid to let it be gay! Here is our impression of what we assume Lady Squatters looked like.
In their honour, we found some Fanny!
Back at work, student shenanigans continued apace. One day Stinky was busy describing Bali’s caste system, explaining how priests and royals are highest ranked, with farmers down at the bottom. The girls got very angry, exclaiming, “But farmers provide the food that supports all of society, they should be the most important!!!”
And that’s how Stinky’s Year 7s accidentally reinvented Marxism.
A couple of Pye’s Year 7s found wearing masks in class while jammed in with 25 little germ bags who can’t cover a goddamn sneeze just very difficult. To add insult to injury, they also insisted that wearing a mask gives you pimples.
“Ah,” said Pye, “... so you can’t think of anything else that’s different in your lil 12-year-old world that could be causing changes in your body?”
“No!” they avowed, it could not be puberty giving them zits, only mask wearing. Just think how flabbergasted they will be when masks go on to give them pubes and boobs!
At the even younger end of the scale, Adele and Carlo’s eldest had an interesting perspective on Magellan…
And this Year 11 gave us a new verb!
What is one to do, we had to go and dick up the street! We had done a dick-n-balls walk before, but had some thoughts on how to improve it…
An added bonus was the route we took to get there – we would have totally done this on purpose if we had’ve thought of it!
Later, Stinky discovered that the mum of one of her students had spotted us wandering back and forth doing the hairs on the lower ball – they were curious as to what we were doing, ah ha ha oh no. Thank goodness for the limited attention span of Year 10s who can ask a question and then forget to listen out for an answer!
But let’s not give thanks to year 9 students. One asked Stinky to teach her swears and Stinky was like "No, cos you'll use them like the sister school kids in Lombok used the C-bomb, liberally and indiscriminately!"
And the kid looked at Stinky.
She looked at Stinky.
She smiled. She understood.
And she said "oh, CUNT."
Speaking of rude and disgusting things being rude and disgusting, Moose had his birthday again! The venerable 23 year old was very happy with his new garden-friend, even if he didn’t appreciate the idea of having to clean up after himself.
He was happy to welcome a visit from his favourite crew members (not for his birthday, but according to Moose everything is about him, so he assumes they only wanted to see him). We hit up the Wool Museum, because we’d been told that their How Cities Work exhibition was pretty good. It was all right, but we made it better!
The second-most exciting thing about the term was when Stinky accidently chose not to walk home through a bank heist - she went straight at the lights rather than taking a left. The poor dude wasn’t able to get a whole lot of stash - he got some money bags of coins, and then footed it down Pakington St - it’s surprising Stinky didn’t run into him at the post office.
Less exciting was a funeral that Stinky attended. You’ve never seen a crowd turn faster than when we turned on the overly-earnest lady preacher who kicked off proceedings - but if you don’t want us to turn, I would recommend getting the deceased’s name right...
The third-most exciting thing about the term was we were finally able to get in on the COVID vaccine – about goddamn time. Pfizer me up baby – ooh we're halfway there!
Woah oh, sitting on a chair!
When we got our second dose Stinky said to her jab lady that she probably wouldn't notice if she had a reaction cos it's the same as a hangover. The lady advised getting maggoted because it was worthwhile making sure you had fun before the symptoms. She was right too - for about three days after the jab, we both felt really tired and achey. It wasn’t bad enough not to go to work, though, and Stinky surveyed her colleagues on their reactions. All the men in the same boat took at least one day off work, while all the women were like, "Yeah I feel like shit, but this is nothing worse than day two of a savage period!" and just kept keeping on. IT'S LIKE WE'VE BEEN TRAINING FOR THIS ALL OUR LIVES!
One day we hope everyone gets to find out for themselves how their bodies will react. Here’s another sign of hope – check out this out-of-control morning rainbow that D’admiral spotted!
More rainbow than ever rainbowed before! Having been cruelly robbed of the opportunity to visit rainbow-land on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend (damn Melbourne lockdowns), we weren’t missing out again once the holidays arrived. We’d decided to take the ferry over, grabbing a spot of lunch at the terminal café. As we pulled up into the waiting lane, it was immediately obvious that no one was ever going to grab anything there again! Good thing we really enjoy watching machinery eat buildings up!
The Cabin Girl and Powder Monkey had been keeping D’admiral and Chuckles company for a few days, almost like a normal holiday! Stinky co-opted the Powder Monkey and Pye to decorate a retirement stapler for one of her colleagues…
And definitely no one was a bad influence on any one else…
The Powder Monkey has a favourite game called Trust Me, I’m a Doctor which involves players pitching cures for a myriad of ye olde ailments. You’re normally supposed to just have one thing wrong with you, but these three described Moose so accurately that we had to play them all at the same time. Stinky won that round by correctly diagnosing that Moose wasn’t looking to be cured of any of the ‘ailments’.
Speaking of uncannily accurate, what are the odds that Stinky would have got this particular yellow card in Cards Against Humanity??
Despite days and days of dark and rain being forecast, the sun bravely shone through enough to allow us to go and peer at Hastings’ beleaguered submarine, the HMAS Otama while also pretending to be in a Christian rock band
Hats off to the clever clogs who made this rather snazzy shelter for Camel to pop a squat in!
That beach is just down the road from the HMAS Cerberus naval base, which has a neat little cemetery. D’admiral and Chuckles had taken the Cabin Girl and Powder Monkey to see it before we arrived, but we forced them to take us too because we’d never been there before and it sounded well worth a look. Charles Everhard Dick Dyke would surely agree!
But how do you accidentally kill your blacksmith? Sounds very careless.
The cemetery is split into two tidy lawns, with Catholics on the right and Protestants on the left (ooh they have both kinds!), and everyone gets a standard white cross to line up (the monument can be changed for different religions, but do you know that it’s never come up?). So anyway, they’re all lined up with neat, naval precision.
Everyone, that is, except for HUGH FORTESCUE CURRY
We can’t find any good reason why he is the only one facing the wrong way! Pye suggested that the clue might be in his name - Hugh Fortescue/askew Curry - but that just pissed everyone off and she had to go and wait in the car.
When we were finished, we got back in our little cars and headed for home. D’admiral needed to pop to the supermarket, so we assumed that the rest of the crew would just meet us back at the house, but they ended up following us to Balnarring. As D’admiral and Pye went inside (and Andru popped off to buy beer), the rascally lil Stinky and Powder Monkey concocted a devious plan - she buggered off home with her sister-in-law, leaving him quietly sitting in her seat. Get ready for an absolutely classic double take!
We had a lot of holiday activities to fit in within a short period of time, so having sat in Frankston Hoyts’ marvellous seats to watch a mediocre film (how did Cruella think that you can do a villain redemption story as a prequel to the part of the story where she goes full evil??), the other big box to tick was a Kmart Run. The Powder Monkey did not buy any Lego, which makes us fear he has been replaced by an alien. Kmart Runs also come hand in hand with seeing if the Reject Shop has anything for us to impulse buy - or at least write low level swears...
We were pretty upset that we couldn’t write fart or bum or wees, though :’(
A fairly major fly in the ointment, however, was that Stinky had shared with everyone John Mulaney’s story about playing ‘What’s New Pussycat’ 21 times in a row.
It’s a terrific story but the problem came when Stinky was in charge of the radio in the car, because she did exactly what you would expect a nasty little degenerate troll to do. Coming back from Frankston we were forced to listen to it at least six times in a row, which was frankly terrible - Pye started trying to decide if she should choose a tree to aim for, or just stop the car, open the door and walk away. Stinky was just bopping along like this:
...cheerfully ignoring that everyone else in the car was ready to fling themselves out.
In the light of this poor behaviour, Stinky’s DJ rights were revoked, and the Powder Monkey was given control of the bluetooth for the Kmart Run. He blasted an excellent array of Horrible Histories bops and an excellent time was had by all. As we were within spitting distance of home, Pye took an unnecessary detour to allow time for another song to finish - she was pretty sure the Gilbert and Sullivan tribute Blackbeard song was coming up soon.
Nope. WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT, WOAH OH OAH OH OHHH came blasting out, and the Powder Monkey chortled like an evil mastermind for the rest of the day.
There are ways to be a good influence and then there are ways to be a bad influence.
In an effort to be an educational good influence, we made everyone watch a Canadian YouTuber’s Indonesian sinetron (soap opera) parody. It also comes with fake yet authentic Indonesian ads - now if we ever get to go to Indonesia again the not so small ones can shout ‘MASIH TERSEDIA WARNA DAGING AYAM!’ at people (translation: ‘Still available in raw chicken colour’. Yeah nah, if you want more context than that, you have to go watch the sinetron).
Speaking of ayam, when we were watching The Unusual Suspects, we noticed that the Filipino characters kept saying things that were very similar to Indonesian but NQR. That’s how we learned what an ayam is...
...and how to be polite to stingrays.
Lol, languages are rascally scamps!
The crew abandoned ship before long, and we (or rather, Stinky) got to do things like finish sewing everything on to our second epic leftover yarn blankie. You will notice that the first blanket had careful attention to the size of the squares:
While this one has a careless hand-wave and a giant sneeze of random sizes. It’s disgusting and we love it.
Speaking of observing things, have you noticed that this ABC journalist appears to be chained to her desk?
She has a wrist shackle, then two more on her elbows - she must be extremely dangerous!!
We had some nice winter walks, and even found some new Undies!
But then we looked too closely at them and they were pretty gross and it stopped being fun. Oh woe!
Walking in the rain is supposed to be terrible, but if it comes with rainbows, that is fun! Yay!
You probably can’t tell, but in this one there is a pair of rainbow lorikeets sitting on the goal posts under the rainbow. Were it not for the refracted light, they would have just been boring normal lorikeets!
That D’admiral was not to be outdone, though - here is (roughly) the same rainbow from about two kilometres away!
The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was a traditional Peninsula Lunch. Pt Leo Estate has a sculpture park attached to it, and although D’admiral and Chuckles had been before, we had never patronised it before (tbh we’d tried once, but booked Port Phillip Estate by accident because lol). We got the right place this time!
Cheers!
We were so sure that it would be pouring with rain by the time we were ready to harass the art, but the gods were on our side. Step on out into the sculpture park!
True to form, Chuckles and Stinky were instantly and irrationally angry with this stupid tree...
They were forced to turn their backs to it and use the landscape, sky and art to calm themselves down.
Art often imitates life, but we see no reason why life should not imitate art…
Although if life were to continue to imitate art, we would not like for actual dead sheep to feature…
Can you spot the Stinky here?
Who can you spy in the labyrinth’s reflections?
We had neglected to bring Moose along, which is probably for the best because we would have been hard pressed not to poke his rascally little face through strategic holes in this sculpture…
Or plunge his snout into the cotton-tail bum on this hare…
...and we don’t really know how he would have felt about whatever the heck is going on here...
Thank goodness that we left him behind to think about what he’s done (or thought about doing).
We also got lucky when it stopped raining enough for some wanderings, such as picking our way through a carnage of fallen trees to see the very modest beginnings of Merricks Creek. Majestical!
Yep, there it is, right there!
On the subject of things majestical, we’ve decided that Julia is named for the daughter of Caesar Augustus/Octavian the first Roman emperor. If we’re going for being named after royalty, Caroline could be named for George IV’s wife. Why that one? Well, you see, in his diary, Malmesbury recorded his reservations about Caroline's suitability as a bride for the prince: she lacked judgement, decorum and tact, spoke her mind too readily, acted indiscreetly, and often neglected to wash, or change her dirty clothes. If you don’t believe in nominative determinism, how do you explain Stinky, then?
Anyway, the holidays slipped away really quickly and before you could say “COVID outbreak in NSW”, we were back to school. The mask-wearing requirements were lifted, and all Victorians commenced feeling really smug as other states who had been mean about us before found out how THEY like it. And then there were a whole lot of new Victorian cases (including in one of Pye’s school’s major feeder primary schools) and before the first week back was up, we were back in lockdown. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that school holidays + big sporting events + no more masks = outbreaks???
And this is why we’re not finishing this epistle with tales of Bendigo visits and sheep shows, but with a whimper (like the receptionist at the Bendigo hotel when Stinky cancelled the booking - the poor thing was like THE PLACE IS PACKED WITH ALL THE STALLHOLDERS AND SHEEP PEOPLE AND WE NEED TO GET THEM THE HECK OUT THEY HAVE TO BE HOME BY MIDNIGHT AHHH). All that’s left is to...
Once upon a time, Belrog and Jenski learned of Anne Drysdale and Caroline Newcomb, two of Geelong’s founding
Anyhoo, one cannot attend a talk in Newcomb about Caroline Newcomb and not pop down the road to visit her and Anne’s grave, so off we went. The cemetery has QR codes on notable graves so you can find out about the inmates - guess what, they weren’t afraid to let it be gay! Here is our impression of what we assume Lady Squatters looked like.
In their honour, we found some Fanny!
Back at work, student shenanigans continued apace. One day Stinky was busy describing Bali’s caste system, explaining how priests and royals are highest ranked, with farmers down at the bottom. The girls got very angry, exclaiming, “But farmers provide the food that supports all of society, they should be the most important!!!”
And that’s how Stinky’s Year 7s accidentally reinvented Marxism.
A couple of Pye’s Year 7s found wearing masks in class while jammed in with 25 little germ bags who can’t cover a goddamn sneeze just very difficult. To add insult to injury, they also insisted that wearing a mask gives you pimples.
“Ah,” said Pye, “... so you can’t think of anything else that’s different in your lil 12-year-old world that could be causing changes in your body?”
“No!” they avowed, it could not be puberty giving them zits, only mask wearing. Just think how flabbergasted they will be when masks go on to give them pubes and boobs!
At the even younger end of the scale, Adele and Carlo’s eldest had an interesting perspective on Magellan…
And this Year 11 gave us a new verb!
What is one to do, we had to go and dick up the street! We had done a dick-n-balls walk before, but had some thoughts on how to improve it…
An added bonus was the route we took to get there – we would have totally done this on purpose if we had’ve thought of it!
Later, Stinky discovered that the mum of one of her students had spotted us wandering back and forth doing the hairs on the lower ball – they were curious as to what we were doing, ah ha ha oh no. Thank goodness for the limited attention span of Year 10s who can ask a question and then forget to listen out for an answer!
But let’s not give thanks to year 9 students. One asked Stinky to teach her swears and Stinky was like "No, cos you'll use them like the sister school kids in Lombok used the C-bomb, liberally and indiscriminately!"
And the kid looked at Stinky.
She looked at Stinky.
She smiled. She understood.
And she said "oh, CUNT."
Speaking of rude and disgusting things being rude and disgusting, Moose had his birthday again! The venerable 23 year old was very happy with his new garden-friend, even if he didn’t appreciate the idea of having to clean up after himself.
He was happy to welcome a visit from his favourite crew members (not for his birthday, but according to Moose everything is about him, so he assumes they only wanted to see him). We hit up the Wool Museum, because we’d been told that their How Cities Work exhibition was pretty good. It was all right, but we made it better!
The second-most exciting thing about the term was when Stinky accidently chose not to walk home through a bank heist - she went straight at the lights rather than taking a left. The poor dude wasn’t able to get a whole lot of stash - he got some money bags of coins, and then footed it down Pakington St - it’s surprising Stinky didn’t run into him at the post office.
Less exciting was a funeral that Stinky attended. You’ve never seen a crowd turn faster than when we turned on the overly-earnest lady preacher who kicked off proceedings - but if you don’t want us to turn, I would recommend getting the deceased’s name right...
The third-most exciting thing about the term was we were finally able to get in on the COVID vaccine – about goddamn time. Pfizer me up baby – ooh we're halfway there!
Woah oh, sitting on a chair!
When we got our second dose Stinky said to her jab lady that she probably wouldn't notice if she had a reaction cos it's the same as a hangover. The lady advised getting maggoted because it was worthwhile making sure you had fun before the symptoms. She was right too - for about three days after the jab, we both felt really tired and achey. It wasn’t bad enough not to go to work, though, and Stinky surveyed her colleagues on their reactions. All the men in the same boat took at least one day off work, while all the women were like, "Yeah I feel like shit, but this is nothing worse than day two of a savage period!" and just kept keeping on. IT'S LIKE WE'VE BEEN TRAINING FOR THIS ALL OUR LIVES!
One day we hope everyone gets to find out for themselves how their bodies will react. Here’s another sign of hope – check out this out-of-control morning rainbow that D’admiral spotted!
More rainbow than ever rainbowed before! Having been cruelly robbed of the opportunity to visit rainbow-land on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend (damn Melbourne lockdowns), we weren’t missing out again once the holidays arrived. We’d decided to take the ferry over, grabbing a spot of lunch at the terminal café. As we pulled up into the waiting lane, it was immediately obvious that no one was ever going to grab anything there again! Good thing we really enjoy watching machinery eat buildings up!
The Cabin Girl and Powder Monkey had been keeping D’admiral and Chuckles company for a few days, almost like a normal holiday! Stinky co-opted the Powder Monkey and Pye to decorate a retirement stapler for one of her colleagues…
And definitely no one was a bad influence on any one else…
The Powder Monkey has a favourite game called Trust Me, I’m a Doctor which involves players pitching cures for a myriad of ye olde ailments. You’re normally supposed to just have one thing wrong with you, but these three described Moose so accurately that we had to play them all at the same time. Stinky won that round by correctly diagnosing that Moose wasn’t looking to be cured of any of the ‘ailments’.
Speaking of uncannily accurate, what are the odds that Stinky would have got this particular yellow card in Cards Against Humanity??
Despite days and days of dark and rain being forecast, the sun bravely shone through enough to allow us to go and peer at Hastings’ beleaguered submarine, the HMAS Otama while also pretending to be in a Christian rock band
Hats off to the clever clogs who made this rather snazzy shelter for Camel to pop a squat in!
That beach is just down the road from the HMAS Cerberus naval base, which has a neat little cemetery. D’admiral and Chuckles had taken the Cabin Girl and Powder Monkey to see it before we arrived, but we forced them to take us too because we’d never been there before and it sounded well worth a look. Charles Everhard Dick Dyke would surely agree!
But how do you accidentally kill your blacksmith? Sounds very careless.
The cemetery is split into two tidy lawns, with Catholics on the right and Protestants on the left (ooh they have both kinds!), and everyone gets a standard white cross to line up (the monument can be changed for different religions, but do you know that it’s never come up?). So anyway, they’re all lined up with neat, naval precision.
Everyone, that is, except for HUGH FORTESCUE CURRY
We can’t find any good reason why he is the only one facing the wrong way! Pye suggested that the clue might be in his name - Hugh Fortescue/askew Curry - but that just pissed everyone off and she had to go and wait in the car.
When we were finished, we got back in our little cars and headed for home. D’admiral needed to pop to the supermarket, so we assumed that the rest of the crew would just meet us back at the house, but they ended up following us to Balnarring. As D’admiral and Pye went inside (and Andru popped off to buy beer), the rascally lil Stinky and Powder Monkey concocted a devious plan - she buggered off home with her sister-in-law, leaving him quietly sitting in her seat. Get ready for an absolutely classic double take!
We had a lot of holiday activities to fit in within a short period of time, so having sat in Frankston Hoyts’ marvellous seats to watch a mediocre film (how did Cruella think that you can do a villain redemption story as a prequel to the part of the story where she goes full evil??), the other big box to tick was a Kmart Run. The Powder Monkey did not buy any Lego, which makes us fear he has been replaced by an alien. Kmart Runs also come hand in hand with seeing if the Reject Shop has anything for us to impulse buy - or at least write low level swears...
We were pretty upset that we couldn’t write fart or bum or wees, though :’(
A fairly major fly in the ointment, however, was that Stinky had shared with everyone John Mulaney’s story about playing ‘What’s New Pussycat’ 21 times in a row.
It’s a terrific story but the problem came when Stinky was in charge of the radio in the car, because she did exactly what you would expect a nasty little degenerate troll to do. Coming back from Frankston we were forced to listen to it at least six times in a row, which was frankly terrible - Pye started trying to decide if she should choose a tree to aim for, or just stop the car, open the door and walk away. Stinky was just bopping along like this:
...cheerfully ignoring that everyone else in the car was ready to fling themselves out.
In the light of this poor behaviour, Stinky’s DJ rights were revoked, and the Powder Monkey was given control of the bluetooth for the Kmart Run. He blasted an excellent array of Horrible Histories bops and an excellent time was had by all. As we were within spitting distance of home, Pye took an unnecessary detour to allow time for another song to finish - she was pretty sure the Gilbert and Sullivan tribute Blackbeard song was coming up soon.
Nope. WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT, WOAH OH OAH OH OHHH came blasting out, and the Powder Monkey chortled like an evil mastermind for the rest of the day.
There are ways to be a good influence and then there are ways to be a bad influence.
In an effort to be an educational good influence, we made everyone watch a Canadian YouTuber’s Indonesian sinetron (soap opera) parody. It also comes with fake yet authentic Indonesian ads - now if we ever get to go to Indonesia again the not so small ones can shout ‘MASIH TERSEDIA WARNA DAGING AYAM!’ at people (translation: ‘Still available in raw chicken colour’. Yeah nah, if you want more context than that, you have to go watch the sinetron).
Speaking of ayam, when we were watching The Unusual Suspects, we noticed that the Filipino characters kept saying things that were very similar to Indonesian but NQR. That’s how we learned what an ayam is...
...and how to be polite to stingrays.
Lol, languages are rascally scamps!
The crew abandoned ship before long, and we (or rather, Stinky) got to do things like finish sewing everything on to our second epic leftover yarn blankie. You will notice that the first blanket had careful attention to the size of the squares:
While this one has a careless hand-wave and a giant sneeze of random sizes. It’s disgusting and we love it.
Speaking of observing things, have you noticed that this ABC journalist appears to be chained to her desk?
She has a wrist shackle, then two more on her elbows - she must be extremely dangerous!!
We had some nice winter walks, and even found some new Undies!
But then we looked too closely at them and they were pretty gross and it stopped being fun. Oh woe!
Walking in the rain is supposed to be terrible, but if it comes with rainbows, that is fun! Yay!
You probably can’t tell, but in this one there is a pair of rainbow lorikeets sitting on the goal posts under the rainbow. Were it not for the refracted light, they would have just been boring normal lorikeets!
That D’admiral was not to be outdone, though - here is (roughly) the same rainbow from about two kilometres away!
The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was a traditional Peninsula Lunch. Pt Leo Estate has a sculpture park attached to it, and although D’admiral and Chuckles had been before, we had never patronised it before (tbh we’d tried once, but booked Port Phillip Estate by accident because lol). We got the right place this time!
Cheers!
We were so sure that it would be pouring with rain by the time we were ready to harass the art, but the gods were on our side. Step on out into the sculpture park!
True to form, Chuckles and Stinky were instantly and irrationally angry with this stupid tree...
They were forced to turn their backs to it and use the landscape, sky and art to calm themselves down.
Art often imitates life, but we see no reason why life should not imitate art…
Although if life were to continue to imitate art, we would not like for actual dead sheep to feature…
Can you spot the Stinky here?
Who can you spy in the labyrinth’s reflections?
We had neglected to bring Moose along, which is probably for the best because we would have been hard pressed not to poke his rascally little face through strategic holes in this sculpture…
Or plunge his snout into the cotton-tail bum on this hare…
...and we don’t really know how he would have felt about whatever the heck is going on here...
Thank goodness that we left him behind to think about what he’s done (or thought about doing).
We also got lucky when it stopped raining enough for some wanderings, such as picking our way through a carnage of fallen trees to see the very modest beginnings of Merricks Creek. Majestical!
Yep, there it is, right there!
On the subject of things majestical, we’ve decided that Julia is named for the daughter of Caesar Augustus/Octavian the first Roman emperor. If we’re going for being named after royalty, Caroline could be named for George IV’s wife. Why that one? Well, you see, in his diary, Malmesbury recorded his reservations about Caroline's suitability as a bride for the prince: she lacked judgement, decorum and tact, spoke her mind too readily, acted indiscreetly, and often neglected to wash, or change her dirty clothes. If you don’t believe in nominative determinism, how do you explain Stinky, then?
Anyway, the holidays slipped away really quickly and before you could say “COVID outbreak in NSW”, we were back to school. The mask-wearing requirements were lifted, and all Victorians commenced feeling really smug as other states who had been mean about us before found out how THEY like it. And then there were a whole lot of new Victorian cases (including in one of Pye’s school’s major feeder primary schools) and before the first week back was up, we were back in lockdown. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that school holidays + big sporting events + no more masks = outbreaks???
And this is why we’re not finishing this epistle with tales of Bendigo visits and sheep shows, but with a whimper (like the receptionist at the Bendigo hotel when Stinky cancelled the booking - the poor thing was like THE PLACE IS PACKED WITH ALL THE STALLHOLDERS AND SHEEP PEOPLE AND WE NEED TO GET THEM THE HECK OUT THEY HAVE TO BE HOME BY MIDNIGHT AHHH). All that’s left is to...
