Friday, July 31, 2015

Blue

Blue moon. The moon. It's a Blue Moon today. Not blue in colour but the name is stuck and it comes around less frequently than my bad luck... Blue.... Moon... It's the second moon in the month!

It's just so beautiful. The great waters flow and do not stagnate while the moon looks down on the earth... Great silvery weight in the sky shall not fall, not to ground or at all but to cast your cool light on paths late at night... moon, friend when we travel and loved by the night walkers by your light we shall see.


Frenetic Dry Season antics

(An old post left in draft for 18 months)

Not sure where to start with this post. I'm so out of practice with writing, reflecting etc....

Maybe a follow up from the previous one... now that the dust of the past week at work begins to settle.

I haven't calculated hours worked yet but it's well into triple time! What a buzz! I am certainly not complaining, nobody makes me do it, I actually like these crazy extremes! For one week a year the mob I work for holds it's AGM, actually I work for a religious institution so they give it another name. My official employment description is Administration Officer... although I have been given the title Office Manager, but to be honest a more accurate description of my role is Man Friday. (There are actually two of us) We arrange travel for about 40 people from all over remote areas in the NT, S.A and the Kimberley of W.A, after innumerable re-scheduling of tickets etc... if we've done our job well we have achieved 80% success in getting people to Darwin for the meeting of the year. This year we had extras, most of them made it. Exactly what we do can't be defined but people coming from remote communities have a lot of needs, family to visit, medical appointments etc... At the end of meeting time each day our real work begins! Up at 6am we head to the dining room to eat and receive orders for the day, tea breaks and lunch time are opportunities to get to the bank, shops, hospital etc... back and forth we go, frantically trying to get people back into the the meetings, rounding up strays assisting those who have mobility issues and so on. After dinner there's a mass exodus as people try to catch up with family all over town, we usually get back to camp at around midnight, linger for a little while and then head home... sometimes it's later. On the final day my mate and I started at 4:30am transporting people to the airport for the early flight to Gove, having hit the sack at 1:30am that morning, by the time I returned the bus to it's owners I'd hit the wall.



Certificate in Theology Graduants

The meetings ended a week ago but people have been lingering and my work is still not complete.

Darwin is an Australian City which lies well within the tropic of Capricorn. The first people know many seasons... I think there are eight... most non indigenous people know three. 'The Wet', 'The Dry' and 'The Buildup'.

July is bang smack in the middle of the Dry Season. The Dry Season sees Darwin turned from a sweltering tropical city into a crazy tourist haven full endless days of sunshine and festivals etc... It's exciting but it's frigging crazy! By now there have already been so many events that most peoples heads are spinning. As I sit here physically and emotionally exhausted, yet again, a dripping nose and head numb with hay-fever I won't bother listing every activity we've engaged, there's been plenty and some quite unusual.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Settling in

Still not much closer to reaching equilibrium but the dry season is always like that, too much happening, routines all messed up.

Thought I'd post a few more photos from the space I'm in until I'm able to write.

 A mate left town to start a new life in Alice Springs and needed to unload some of his hoarded treasures so I inherited among a few other things, a fantastic 1970s (or 80s) family tent! It has now become my new bike stable! I doubt it will survive a wet season but makes a cozy work space in the dry.

Since we moved in I've managed to semi-restore this old trike for the kids. I'm surprised how stable it is, they've had a great time riding it round our new, enormous back yard.

Trike, tent.... and the aged pooch.

Finally a quiet place to sit and work on my bikes!

Mint

We've also done some extensive planting, both in the garden and pots. It's so great to have space to grow things... food garden on it's way!

Monday, July 13, 2015

A new Home

Damnit! I missed a whole month (more) of blogging.
Too busy, working and moving and working and moving and working.... literally...

A week of logistical management, cooking, cleaning, driving, booking flights and all that... followed by a couple of weeks of trying to shift 17 years worth of life into another house, consoling wife and kids along the way.... followed by another week and a half of 15 hours or more per day of the same kind of logistical stuff I do for a living, followed by, what I thought would be a break but turned out to be a combination of helping a friend move house and sorting out logistical crap unexpectedly for work again... There were some ordinary moments in amongst it which I owed my family since I'd accrued a serious time debt...

And now here I am somewhere down the line in the middle of July and finally get a chance to sit at my computer and I'm so stuffed all I can post is a picture of a blue winged kookaburra on the clothes line of my new place... and the Double barred finch who's eggs he stole!