The Reviewer's Burden...

I read a Dan Brown Novel.

I wish I hadn't.

Go and read the review, and bask in your good fortune at not having to read the book yourself.

Well. That Sucked.

I think I passed the grading, though I haven't formally been told yet. I can't say it went well. The uniform jacket I wear is a heavy, triple-ply judo-weight cotton with mid-length sleeves. Up until the day of the grading, daily temperatures had maxed to about 22C, with low humidity. On the day of the grading, it hit something like 28C with thunderstorms drifting around the place.

That's not good. But lets add this: the training hall is an old thing. It has no air-con. And it's in one of the slightly dodgier suburbs, so the windows are all grilled. And none of them -- not goddam one -- can be opened. Not an option.

So, obviously, I was a little sweaty. Yep.

But at the same time, I was still tailing off from the gastro of Wednesday night and Thursday. I thought I was pretty much okay, but apparently the sudden shift to heat, humidity and exertion thought otherwise. I made it through the waza -- the technical routines -- more or less all right, but running through the pattern of kamae, or stances, I got the unmistakeable signal from my belly that lunch was about to come back.

Somehow I kept things together, stumbled through the last couple of stances, bowed out, and beelined for the toilets whereupon yes: my nice, light, healthy lunch did indeed make a reappearance.

I felt a little better after that. Things might have gone okay, but the bossman from Adelaide decided that we junior sword-slingers weren't cutting properly, and he gave us all a nice, heavy stick and put us through an intensive exercise: kiri-oroshi cut (that's the big one, where the sword starts hanging down behind your head and arcs up and over, splitting your opponent to the belly-button), then pivot 180 degrees and kiri-oroshi again. And repeat. At high speed.

I'm not sure how long we did that. Long enough that my shoulders are still stiff today. But I do know I had to stop a little early and zip off for another appointment with Doctor Chunder.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Natalie's back issues went from bad to worse, apparently. I'd moved a mattress downstairs for her before I left, and she spent most of the day lying in the middle of the floor, watching Flight of the Conchords with the kids.

In the midst of all this, the Mau-Mau began to run a solid fever. Probably just a reaction to her 4-yr-old immunisations which she got on Friday -- but bad enough to lay her down and out. And of course, Natalie wasn't really in the best position to play nursemaid.

Not pretty. So: Sunday morning, I got up, orchestrated a Big House Cleanup, and then made some decisions.

It was still hot and sticky, and I wasn't feeling a whole lot better. The Mau-Mau wasn't looking too hot either, and Natalie was still doing her impression of a woman in the advanced stages of zombification. I really wanted to take some action, get some kind of heat/cold treatment going to try to help Natalie, but on a Sunday in Scottsdale, you can't just trot out and pick up the appropriate bits and pieces. So I zipped into Launceston, did the grocery shopping, put in an appearance with the sword folk long enough to deliver an apology for not being able to make the day, and headed home again.

Which is a pisser, because I've missed the formal cutting -- they brought over the proper straw mats which have been used in tameshigiri (test cutting, where you try your technique to see if you can actually cut through something that supplies roughly humanigrade blade resistance) for the last few centuries. I really wanted to get involved there, but the thought of Natalie on the floor on her mattress and the Mau-Mau shivering away with her fever was a bit too much.

Thus, when I returned home, I got to be nursemaid for the day. Lots of heat packs. Plenty of fluids for the Mau-Mau.

Oh well. Today the Mau-Mau is better. Natalie is still stiff and slow and sore, and says she has much the same pain - but in twenty years of martial arts, I've become quite good at watching people move. She's a good deal more free in her actions today: up and about for longer, taking less time to recover. This isn't going to resolve quickly, no. We'll probably be doing the heat-pack regime for a week or two at least. But I think she'll be able to function again, albeit painfully, in a day or so.

One small blessing: it's a public holiday today. I'd planned to fire up the lawnmower and the whipper-snipper, but it's been wet this morning. Looks like I get a break. I'll have to go up into the shed and put up insulation instead...

Aaargh!

Oh, fantastic.

So Natalie's minor back troubles have flared to full-on pinched/swollen disc issues. She's pretty much horizontal, and that's that. Apparently they took one look at her yesterday at work, and sent her to the physio.

That really ices the cake on this weekend.

I can't duck out of the grading. Already did half of it, and it's an expensive sort of thing to quit on. Plus I don't want to have to go through all this goddam preparation again. And of course, the bossman of the style is coming out from Adelaide for this. So I go.

And I can't duck out on Dion's going-away. That happens only the once, and it'll be a long time between drinks afterwards.

So we've organised aides and babysitters and emergency inlookers. Natalie and the kids should be okay for the day. Tomorrow? Well, the second half the sword seminar would be really really nice to attend, but I'm damned if I'm leaving Natalie flat on her back with three kids again. Either she's significantly better tomorrow, or I miss that second half.

Naturally, since I have to wear a heavy jacket today, the weather's closing in. Huge humidity, possible thunderstorms later. Sweaty, sweaty, sweaty stuff. And by now, my wrists, shoulders and forearms are starting to feel the effects of a week of reasonably intensive practice on the grading techniques.

On top of that, my water supply has a goddam platypus in it.

I like platypussies. I admit it. They're really cool. I love how completely wrong they are: aquatic, duck-billed, egg-laying mammals with a poisonous spur on the hind leg in the males. And on the mainland, they're increasingly rare. But they're not particularly rare down here. Most decent-sized waterholes (and there are a lot) have a platypus or two. Most stretches of river have one or two.

We've got two ponds on the property. The big one, about 25 m across, has a spring under it somewhere -- but it doesn't flow fast enough in the hot season to keep the water flowing. Just fast enough to keep it turbid. That pond is our swimming pool in the still, humid, hot days of summer, and last year I spotted a platypus in it a couple times: nice.

The other pond is only about 4m across, and it's sheltered by a screen of brush and trees. The water in it is clearer than finest crystal, and the little spring that fills it never stops flowing. I keep a careful eye on that little pond, monitoring the various forms of life in it, because that's our water supply. I pump water from there to a holding tank on the hill above the house, where it gravity-feeds to the sinks, showers, toilets, etc.

Also nice. Except that yesterday afternoon, there was a goddam platypus swimming happily about on the surface of the water-supply pond.

Is platypus pee bad for you?

Flat Out

Uhhh... where was I?

Monday was sword training. I did the written part of the grading. The practical part comes Saturday. I've been practicing whenever I get the chance -- but since practice for this grading involves waving around about a metre of extremely sharp steel, I have to be pretty much kid-free. That's difficult. I tend to practice at night.

Tuesday: Elder Son was home. Some math was done, and some socio-cultural/historical stuff. And a Get Well card for his friend who fell out of a tree. But Tuesday night I zipped into Launceston (again) and watched movies with the Cool Shiters. Saw a very odd Jackie Chan flick, in which Jackie played it straight. The film is called "The Shinjuku Incident", and it's banned in China, apparently. It's an earnest film, and Jackie does okay in his role - but I didn't find a whole lot to be excited by. It's the story of an illegal Chinese migrant to Japan, who falls in with the Chinese illegals there and gradually gets sucked into organized crime, then duly chewed up and spat out. No surprises. Many others have made this film before, and lacking anything really new to bring to it, the only reason to see it is for the novelty of Jackie Chan in a non-martial, non-entertaining role.

Wednesday: there's a gastro doing the rounds down here. Apparently it's quite nasty. It's knocked quite a few people down, and a while back there was an entire ward of the LGH locked into isolation for it. So, Tuesday night Younger Son got carried into the house after falling ill at his first visit to Cubs. And Natalie's been a bit off her feed, yep. (Oh. I see I didn't mention Cubs. Yeah. First time and all. I had to drive out into the boonies north of Scottsdale to find the hall... and of course, Natalie told me 1530 hours but the boys weren't actually due there until 1630. Useful. But they enjoyed it. At least, they enjoyed it until Younger Son came over all chunderrific.) So -- Wednesday, I made it all the way through the afternoon of Spanish with the lads, but an ill-chosen afternoon snack (I had some chips with the boys. They were fine chips. My stomach wasn't fine. That is all.) I had to call off the evening martial arts class. Nobody likes to see vomit all over the mat, no.

Thursday: uhhhh... yep. More efforts at sword training, and an attempt to get into the domestic stuff. Natalie's done something horrible to her back. She's walking around the place like a cripple, and even rolling over in bed is a production. So there's about twice as much crap to do around the place as usual, but I've got half the time I'm supposed to. And of course, there was the primary school intro ju-jitsu class to occupy the afternoon. I can only be thankful for Kindly Neighbour Lady A, who looked after the Mau-Mau while I was teaching kids the joy of nerve point techniques -- and who remembered to bring along to the school some important paperwork I'd forgotten when she came down with the Mau-Mau to collect her own offspring.

And today?

Today after I dropped the boys off and did the general shopping, I grabbed Neighbour Lady A's little daughter Microblonde, who is the Mau-Mau's Very Best Friend In All The World. And so my morning consisted of two four-year-old girls tearing the place up, down and sideways. No sword training yet. But hopefully, Natalie will take the Mau-Mau with the boys to orchestra... although I suspect I may have to take over that task, because the whole spine thing was looking worse than ever this morning.

I'm taking ten minutes out to put all this down. And to say that the rhododendrons were actually camellias after all. Now I've got to get back to it.

Sword grading tomorrow. Going-away party for Dion after that. Sword seminar on Sunday. And spring has turned my property into an overgrown mass...

A Floral Tour of Chez Flinthart

This was a bastard of a post to manage. My surly satellite connection dropped out twice, and I could only load two images at a time or the whole system overloaded and fucked up on me.

Okay: first, to everybody in Briz I didn't manage to contact over the weekend -- all I had was a flying visit. I tried to call a friend about lunch in town, but in the end, even that didn't happen. I had time to do wedding-related stuff, and bugger-all else.

The time is definitely coming when I have to bring the family north for a proper meet-and-greet Briz holiday, I think.

Second: I took a slow walk around the property this morning, by way of resting a bit. And I carried the camera. I don't plant much by way of showy flowers, except for bulbs -- Natalie liked daffodils and jonquils and irises and tulips. Much of what flowers here is edible. And yet the place is still alive...

Bay laurel. Yes, the kind you cook with. The tree is about 8m high. The flowers look like shit, but they smell great and the bees love 'em.

Fuschia

Apricot

Snowdrops

Raspberry

Blackberry

Strawberry

Blood plum

A daffodil

Bugger. I've doubled up. This was meant to be the Snow Pear. They look similar.

I have no idea. I think it's a weed.

Lavender

Lilacs

Russian comfrey, I think

Nasturtium

Wee little daisies

Purple magnolias

White magnolia

Dunno this one. A native of some sort, and a real bee magnet.

Irises

JOnquils. You can't tell, but they're smaller than the daffy earlier.

Waratah

Rhododendron

Oh! There's my snow pear

Dandelion

Dandelion with afro

Blueberries

Quince, I think

Cherries

Apples.

Slightly Tired

Friday: organised the kids outta bed and off to school and daycare. Swapped cars with Natalie. Made it home, grabbed my bag, zoomed off to the airport in time for a DeathStar flight to Briz. Why? Simple -- the wedding of my old drinking/smoking/moviemaking companion Daryl Sparkes, and the marvellous Deb Marshall. What with having been in and out of trouble with and around Daryl for more years than I can legitimately lay claim to recall, once the wedding invite arrived, it was a no-brainer. I went.

Landed in Briz, and failed to catch up with the Valkyrie of Snark - you know who you are! I do believe she opted to flee to some kind of secure rural retreat once she heard the wheels of the Party Machine being oiled up. Fear not, o Valkyrie: the fallout was limited to Tarragindi, Coorparoo, and certain areas of the inner city.

I caught an unbelievably expensive train from the airport to the city -- $14.50 one way, folks. Brisbane's public transport is just as screwed up as it was when the Lord Mayor abused me for saying it was screwed up back in 1995 -- and noodled around the Valley for a while, purely to take a look at the Old Town. I sent a few postcards to the kids, then gave up on trying to work out which bus might get me to Tarragindi, where my friend and crash-supplier Julie lives, and just ponied up for cabfare.

Question: what happened to all the fat, sleazy, balding white guys who used to drive Brisbane's cab fleet? I caught three cabs over the weekend, and every one of them was driven by a friendly, polite younger gentleman of Asian subcontinental origin. Not that I'm complaining, mind. I'm just wondering what happened to the thousands of sweaty fat balding white guys that used to squeeze their beer guts behind the wheel? Is there some kind of Epically Horrible Retirement Home for the Terminally White-Trash Racist that I don't know about?

I know: I'm generalising. But don't forget -- I drove cabs in Briz for about five years, and I met those guys everywhere. It was like there was some sort of special Fat Horrible Bastard farm designed to churn out creepy cabbies.

Times change, I suppose. Some things really do get better. Not one of the three drivers tried to tell me any gross, racist or sexist jokes by way of 'passing the time'. I count that as a huge improvement.

Anyway. I found Julie's place, and the key she'd left, and let myself in. It was hot, as Brisbane is wont to be in late October, but Julie's found a decent spot with a forested gully behind her. If I was actually capable of nostalgia, I might even have spent a few moments recalling endless summer days, cicadas singing, gum leaves rattling in fitful breezes, the iron band of summer heat clenched around your chest as the sweat trickled down the backs of your knees... nahhh. Hell with that!

When Julie got back, we ducked out for supplies. The official pre-wedding "Buck's party" was at her place, so we had a few things to get in order. I made a smoked salmon pasta salad, a melon and ginger salad, and a large guacaomole. The rest of the watermelon went into a vodka punch, which was more like a Mike Tyson left hook, to be honest. Tasted great, but it was wayyyy too easy to drink on a hot Brisbane night.

And then I caught up with a few old friends. Hello Simone! Hi, Caitlin! Thomas, yes, you too. Pat Stewart, you eternal goddam hippie! Mick, you useless bastard! Yvette, yes, sorry ma'amselle, but you joined this menagerie of your own accord. Lawrie Mullins, looking like a streamlined hood-ornament version of himself. And Daryl... yep. Check. All present and accounted for.

Missing in action? Oh, there were a lot of faces I'd have liked to have seen. But you take what comes, and it was a good night. Good enough that I managed only three hours of sleep after walking Simone back to her residence through the danger-bestrewn Mean Streets of Tarragindi...

Sunday, therefore, was not my finest hour. But I managed. Got into my specially-chosen wedding garb in plenty of time, with the aid of ibuprofen and watermelon and paracetamol and Brisbane's God-beshitted so-called "water supply". (Anybody like a little water with their industrial chemistry?)

The official dress code for the wedding was "cocktail lounge". For some reason, most of my male friends took that to mean "funereal". I haven't seen so many black suits outside a mortuary. Points to Brian, who was actually wearing a natty grey charcoal grey pinstripe job which he admitted he'd inherited from an expired relative... dead man's suit! Cool!

The wedding went off more or less okay. Tom handed me a groovy camera, so I drifted around, looking for good photos. Got one or two that I liked -- a particularly nice one of one of the bridesmaids, who happens to be Daryl's 18-year-old daughter from a previous relationship. I hadn't seen young Emily in many a year, so it was nice to meet her as a real, live, adult-type person. She did a good job in her role - must be kinda challenging to do bridesmaid for your father when he's marrying someone other than your mother, but I get the impression that Emily and the bride get along very, very well, which speaks well of all concerned.

The wedding was a bit Godly though. Lotta Catholic stuff with responses involved. And singing. I didn't know the goddam words or the music, though, so I beat-boxed instead. Personally, I felt that the whole "alleluia" business was far, far better off with a bit of ghetto rhythm behind it, but apparently the people around me weren't quite so sure.

Oh! And then there was this bit where the priest was blessing the couple, holding his hand up like a sort of half-arsed Hitler salute, and encouraging the congregation (we were a congregation? Who knew?) to do likewise. I have to admit, I felt that a Godly blessing from me would be complete bullshit, so I curved my hand into a claw, aimed it at Daryl, and intoned "I find your lack of faith disturbing" instead.

Didn't work, though.

So we finished the wedding, and ducked into the city for the reception. Had to hang around an hour or so, sipping drinkies, before it kicked off, but that was okay. I caught up with more old friends, and made a couple of new ones. (Hi, Sue!)

The reception was very fine. Everybody was in a good mood, and the food was mucking farvellous. Seriously good cuisine. And there was wine, and booze, and lots more conversations, and possibly a bit of bread-roll hurling...

... but I had an 0700 flight to catch, so I pulled the plug a bit shy of midnight, and caught another cab to a pointless little hotel near the airport. I managed about five hours of fitful sleep before it was time to jump up and grab the final cab to the airport proper to board the plane for Launceston and home. I grabbed a copy of Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld book to keep me company - having slashed my way through Paul Haines' "Slice of Life" and Deborah Biancotti's "Book of Endings" on the previous flight. Discworld is good aeroplane fodder, and Natalie likes the series too, so it seemed a good idea.

Got in, grabbed my bag -- oh, and here's a big thanks to Brown Banana Lady, who tried to smuggle an elderly and rather unappetising banana past the Quarantine Beagle. Couple-hundred people trying to get off that damned flight, and we're all standing there, jammed shoulder to shoulder while you and the dog-handler went grubbing about in your onboard baggage in pursuit of a banana which frankly, any self-respecting chimpanzee with rabies would have violently rejected... jeez, lady. If you're going to piss off that many people, couldn't you at least have done it for a halfway decent piece of fruit?

But the weekend wasn't done with me. Not yet. Nope.

I made it home. Natalie reminded me I had to go and visit Historian Mike. And then she got me to wipe down the high bathroom walls with bleach. Shortly after that, I loaded the kids up, and went to Mike's place.

Mike particularly wanted me to meet some academic chap from the university's English department. Tired though I was, I felt it politic to agree. And lo! In one of those unbelievable Brisbane/Tasmania coincidences, the academic in question turned out to be the director of a comedy revue I'd been part of in UQ about twenty years ago. So instead of a meeting, it was a friendly reunion, and what had been a vague plan of some kind of project on my part has now swung firmly towards the near-certainty end of the scale.

But I was dead on my feet. I had a couple of desultory arguments with passing philosophers... and I'm afraid I was tired enough to laugh hysterically when one of them (Jamie) spoke firmly of "getting the truth out of" the other (Graeme.) I couldn't help it: it just seemed too much like a set-up for a Monty Python sketch - one philosopher interrogating the other in order to "get to the truth". Do philosophers use waterboards? Or do they simply subject one another to Existentialist poetry?

Still not over, though. Because Natalie wanted to go into town for her weekly music session, so I had the reins for the evening. No sleeping permitted! I fired up the chargorilla, cooked sausages, hamburgers, and a truly wonderful roast chicken stuffed with many good things. Then I threw the kids in the bathtub and washed their hair. We retired after that to watch Pinky and The Brain for a while... and honestly, I don't remember a whole lot after that.

I do know that it was damned hard to drag myself out of bed at 0700 this morning, though.

Must Be Springtime For Sure

Everything is green. In the greenest possible way. There are shades of green down here in Tasmania that could make Ireland sit up and take notice -- and I'm not even taking into account the weird shit down the back of my fridge, where the kids put their leftovers.

In between all the green, there's the rainbow of flowers. The cherries. The apples and pears. The late bulbs -- daffodils, jonquils, irises, tulips, and a shitload I don't know. Then there's all the other stuff. Rhododendrons - I know them, sure. But what about those orange things? And that mass of white? And all those purple things? Does ANYBODY actually know what all those flowers are?

But the surest possible indication of Springtime is my relentless need to Cook With Charcoal.

I love charcoal. I have done so ever since I did a high-school trip to Indonesia, and ate my first goat satay from a street vendor somewhere in Jogjakarta. Oooooh, yes please. Charcoal is, so far as I'm concerned, the finest food technology ever created. A handful of chips from a hickory tree (or a sassafras, if you're down here in Taz) and you've got pure goddam foody bliss.

The absolute, final indication of springtime is this:

That would be the shiny new Weber barbecue thing my good wife purchased yesterday, in Launceston, after her weekly yoga outing. She knows when she's onto a good thing, that woman. Because, of course, this would be the first chunks of meat in the Weber...

A couple of nice, locally-raised, organic bits of lamb, dressed out with garlic and rosemary from the front garden, lemons from the tree at the front of the house, sea salt and black pepper.

Toss in a couple Small Blue Things*, and I'm set.

*Small Blue Thing: Shot of decent gin, shot of blue curacao, splash of lime juice, tonic water to taste -- over ice.