A DIFFERENT WORLD

I know we are all on the same planet.  I know that everywhere a person goes, and what ever the lifestyle of the people who live there, these places and people are in their own normal just as we are.  It’s such a rewarding experience to be able to stay in a new place long enough to soak in these outside-the-box daily details.  That’s what five weeks can do ... it’s the difference between being tourists (who never really get past being outside observers) and visitors (who have become pretty much locals with our morning walks along the sea wall).  The local hardware store is about to name us their most regular customers as well.  There’s been a home improvement project to keep one of the visitors busy or he might have gone a bit squirrelly.

But, as our time in this pretty place comes to an end, I’m struck with how many ways it is different from what our usual normal is, even if we are on the same planet.

For starters there are the tides.  Ocean tides.  Not much call for prairie people to think about them, but here, every time we go for a walk the water is a different depth.  Sometimes it’s lapping waves over the top of the sea wall, sometimes small sand beaches have been exposed and moms have brought their young children down for a cool off swim.  Sometimes the water level is somewhere in between and I wonder if the tide is in the process of ebbing or flowing at that moment?  In the mystical dance between the moon and the oceans, whose turn is it to lead?  At Ettalong beach the other day there was no wondering at all - we could see the water pushing in.  As a general rule Australians are powerful swimmers: they need to be.

There is also this small thing of them driving on the wrong side of the road from the wrong side of the car.    We visiting Canadians are exclusively passengers here (even though I have tried to get into the driver’s door on a couple of occasions, I assure you it was by accident). They tell me that it’s not so strange.  That either way - our “keep right” policy or their “keep left” one, the drivers are always in the middle of the road.  All I can say is I might get the hang of driving straight down a road (and a straight road is pretty hard to come by here) but turning a corner would undo me.  It would be a natural instinct to keep right no matter how wrong that was.

Then there’s the birds.  Exotic parakeets and cockatoos are everywhere.  Ibis wander the water’s edge looking elegant.  Cuckoo birds live up to their name with a call that sounds like demented laughter, and some of their pigeons look like they are forever experiencing bad hair days.  The ones we hear the most though have to be related to our crows.  They look the part but instead of the hoarse, grumpy challenge of the North American bird, these guys sound depressed and despondent.  Maybe it’s the heat.  I’d be depressed too if I had to wear black in this heat.

Another thing that we have been trying to get straight is our sense of direction.  It’s trickier than you think.  We’re on the other side of the equator, remember.  Moss grows on the SOUTH side of the trees.  I think I’ve asked which direction we are walking nearly every day.  Finally we’ve come up with a sure fire way to tell ... the solar panels on peoples’ roofs will be facing NORTH to catch the most sun.  And yes, I am aware that sounds completely wrong.  Deal with it: I have to.

And on a more personal note, another sign that we are in a different world is that all these walks I’ve been talking about - we have been taking them together.  The Farmer even calls them “romantic” walks when he asks me if I want to go to the hardware store with him again.  At home he is unlikely to walk across the yard with me, so this definitely weird, even if it’s on the same planet.

A Day in the City

For a little country girl such as myself there are many different things to think about than just spiders and snakes ... although walking into a random web in the dark does incite a whole alternate perspective than doing the same thing in  Canada.  With one I go “Gross!  Gross!  Gross!”  I hate the webs worse than their makers at home.  With the other my heartbeat kicks it up a notch and I think “Where is the bugger, and what does he look like?”  But, so far, so good.  No anti venom needed.

There are also the different perspectives of very rural - what I’m used to - and very urban.  I spent a good part of today seeing a world renown city through the eyes of a country girl.

For starters, even though we are only an hour from Sydney’s city center we did not drive there; that would just have been silly.  We boarded a train, sat back and relaxed while the well oiled wheels of mass transit took care of the trip.  No traffic worries.  No parking problems.  A wonderful view of the Opera House when we crossed the Harbour Bridge.  Who could ask for anything more?

Next was the tour of the Queen Victoria Building.  Built in the 1800’s to be a shopping center and refurbished in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s for the same purpose.  The architecture is beautiful, the patterned tile floors and three story stained glass windows are exquisite.  The shopping was out of our league there though - shops selling estate jewelry, art work with price tags starting in the four digit range and climbing, dress shops displaying only twenty or so examples of their designer wares.  Even a cup of breakfast tea was $18.00: we passed.

Where we did spend our time and money was on the street malls.  As has happened with many city centers, certain sections of streets have been closed to traffic so that pedestrians can wander from store to store (in Australia it is from shop to shop) without the hindrances of traffic or traffic lights.  A single food court with more ethnic options than I’ve ever thought about serves the whole area.  Here and there are street buskers selling their pencil drawings or singing for pocket change.  Some shop signs are names I know, some I’ve never heard of.  The ones I know are the ones that surprise me; being so far from home I seem to expect everything to be different.

As the day wore on it was only the teenager who felt she hadn’t spent enough money.  Or maybe she just had more energy.  At any rate her mother and grandmother found themselves a shady place to sit as she investigated more shops.  To the uneducated eye our seating arrangements were blocks or balls of concrete seemingly scattered helter skelter along the edges of former streets.  Anyone who pays attention to world news stories knows that they really are strategically placed crowd protectors should evil climb into a truck and try to mow down as many innocent bystanders as possible in a bid to be the leading news story for the next day or two.  When they first became necessary these terroist deterants were huge and ugly but city planners have now integrated them into street furniture, a very smart move.  People appreciate the seating, and achieving this safety feature without constantly reminding the public of the danger they are in makes for more leisurely shopping.

It got me thinking about where I was, though.   When I’m watching the news in my safe little living room at home the horror stories they tell are worlds away.  No terrorist is ever going to target a tiny prairie town; how safe I am!

The shoe was on the other foot today.  I was on an open street shopping mall in a famous city.  I travelled there and back on mass transit.  While we were buying my ticket for the ride home four policemen quietly raced through the station presumably answering an urgent call we never heard about.  Was it a false alarm?  Or something so serious the public was better off not knowing about it? That probably is over the top paranoia, but like I said ... it got me to thinking.

At the end of the day I was struck with the irony of it all: here I am on guard for poisonous spiders and snakes when the most dangerous animal on the planet is the two legged kind.

Road Warriors

The Australians are trying to show the Canadians as much about this country as they can while we’re here.  Considering it’s actually a complete continent all by itself makes the job a bit daunting.  There is no way, even if we spent our entire five weeks touring, that we could begin to take it all in.  None the less, we have covered some of the basics.

The first time we visited they took us camping starting from their home a lovely little seaside town, climbing winding, curving roads up away from the ocean to the tablelands inland.  Flatlanders such as ourselves are both inspired by the steepness of the roads (and drop-offs from the roadsides) and a smidge terrified of the possibility of weak brakes.  We drove through farmland and vineyards, ending up at a place called Bourke, which is where the land changes over from useful farmland to desert outback.  The dirt is rust red, you’d never think it could grow anything but when the rains come it does.

Our second trip over here we all flew across the continent to Broome.  There are two ex-pat Canadians in the family in Australia and they couldn’t live farther apart - kind of like one living in Halifax and the other in Prince George, BC.  This put us farther north and in hotter weather.  The temperatures were really high and the humidity was off the scale but they have a place called Cable Beach ... miles of sand and sea, impressive tides, and I can say I have stood in the Indian Ocean, taken a sunset camel ride, and watched crocs sunning themselves along a river’s edge ... from a bridge above ... no need to get any closer!

So here we are on trip #3.  The plan this time was a camping trip to the south, where it would be cooler.  We only had seven days and nights but judging by the number of pictures I have taken we crammed a lot into that time.  We took the coastal highway and drove over where they had to build a sea bridge because the road continually washed into the ocean.  We stopped at a lookout and watched as people parasailed off the cliffs.  We had a picnic lunch at an inland spot where the kids paddle wheeled to burn off energy.  There were places where pools had been built into the shoreline so that the tides wash in and refresh the water and a place where the surf roars through tunnels in the rock and blows water meters into the air.

And that was just the first day.

After two nights near the ocean we went inland for a farmstay.  The land looks strange - alien, even - very hilly, the grass bleached to a pale yellow, great gum (eucalyptus) trees, mis-shapened by the winds, dark green against the background, and weird eruptions of rock jutting out of the ground - souvenirs of volcanoes from eons ago.  It looks like a harsh place to live and yet the place where we stayed had rose gardens so it must be more hospitable than it looks.

The weather cooled with some rain as we headed back to the coast for our last three nights.  Australia is one gigantic island so the beaches never end.  The one we discovered on our last day was perfection .... a mile of fine sand littered with sea shells and rocks polished smooth by the surf.  The water was crystal clear.  At the far end the beach ended in volcanic rock formations: the kids climbed them, we explored them, the surf pounded them.  If I ever win the lottery I would love to build a beach house on the dunes above that beach.

Yesterday was a marathon drive home but we made it and today I have been sorting through my photos, amazed at how much we crammed into such a short time.  From here on the pace will slow down, there will be morning walks along the sea wall, more watching the kids surf, and at least a little checking Facebook to see what kind of cold we are managing to miss at home.

How To Avoid Dying in Canada

So, it’s a tad cold in Canada at the moment.  Nothing we haven’t had to weather before.  It happens from time to time north of the 49th, and mostly we live through it.  It’s a matter of knowing to stay inside, or dressing properly if we have to go out.  On the one hand, we complain amongst ourselves about the ridiculousness of living in such a climate.  On the other hand we love the bragging rights it gives us - especially when it comes to impressing people who can’t imagine that 40 below zero even exists.

The lucky Canadians plan winter holidays in a warmer place.  The truly lucky manage to pick their holiday dates to coincide with when Siberia sends Polar Vortexes over the North Pole.  That way we can sit on a beach, under palm trees, and brag about how cold it is at home.  It’s like winning the same lottery twice - we can speak with real authority on the subject of bitter cold, but we actually managed to miss it this time around.  The locals are either in awe of us or don’t believe us.

This year we really took cold avoidance to the extreme and decided to not just go to a southern clime, but to the Southern Hemisphere.  No Mexican beach for us this time around.  No Belizian bed and breakfast.  No Arizona desert sun.  None of that sissy five hour flight in the same time zone thing for us this time; no sirree!  We upped the ante to a three hour drive to a three hour wait in an airport for a three hour flight to another airport where we waited ten hours for our sixteen hour flight to the Land Down Under.  There were also several time zones involved; I lost track.  We lost a whole day of our lives, but that’s okay, we get it back when we go home.

It’s been a few days now.  There are days and nights here, just like at home, and our bodies will eventually adjust to the new rhythm, but in the meantime we notice being exceedingly tired or hungry when no one else is and wonder what time it is at home.  The adjustment to the +40 temperatures is progressing, as well.  Neither one of us has keeled over from heat stroke, so that’s a win, for sure.

We’re working on re-establishing our ear for the Australian accent.  It’s trickier than you think - they use the same words as we do (mostly) but it’s not always easy to catch the right meaning.  Up the difficulty level with softer children’s voices or the speed of tv announcers and we end up missing the gist of what’s being said.  We’ll get the hang of it in time to go home and have to tune back into the Canuck accent.

But while this trip does keep us safe from freezing to death, Australia does present us with its own set of dangers.  The grandsons have been going about singing a little ditty that goes something like this: “Redbacks, Funnelwebs, Blue-ringed octopus, Taipan Tiger snake, add in a box jellyfish, stonefish, and the poison thing that lives in a shell and spikes you when you pick it up.  Welcome to Australia!  You might accidently get killed”

We’ve seen none of these national treasures so far, staying in a modern urban home as we are.  I think what they’re really trying to do is prepare us for next week when we go camping.  It may turn out that we would rather suffer from frost bite over snake bite.

And All's Well ...

Back in the day of Roman Centurions - or more likely back in the day of Hollywood depicting their interpretation of the days of Roman centurions - these soldiers left on duty through the night would keep everyone up to date on their security status by calling out hourly ... "It's three in the morning, and all's well!" 

Actually, if the Romans were doing this the announcements would be in Latin, but you get what I mean.

Think of how reassuring this would be if you were a citizen of a city under siege.  Every hour, on the hour, to hear that someone was in charge and that he was sure that "all was well".  Or, at the very least, you would be informed of what time it was getting to be.  That's so important - to know what time it is ... in the middle of the night ... when everyone else is peacefully sleeping ... over and over again ... knowing that the nighttime is slipping away.  I wonder how many of those centurions were hurled from the ramparts by frustrated insomniacs? 

Nowadays we have digital clocks with illuminated numbers to keep the insomniacs up to date on how much sleep they are missing out on.  It's quieter, but just as frustrating.

I'm not a permanent insomniac, thank goodness.  I go through long periods where I sleep soundly through the night.  They are called summers, when we rise at the crack of dawn (4:30) because of a work schedule in Manitoba for the man of the house, and the fact that I like to get outside for garden and yard work before the heat of the day.  Throughout those periods I am too tired to not sleep. To be perfectly clear, a summer 4:30 in the morning and a winter 4:30 in the morning are two entirely different things.  One makes the day longer, one makes the night longer.

We are just a few short days from the longest night of the year, and I seem to be determined to experience it to the max.  I've been practicing for weeks - taking forever to fall asleep and then getting a solid three hours in after midnight before turning the rest of the night into a series of ten minute naps between pillow fluffings and blanket straightenings.  And watching the clock tick my night away.

There's always something to think about.  I've solved the world's problems several times (the answer is to make sure Trump is one of the guys who get to go to Mars - and he is most welcome to take his friend Putin with him).  If that was all there was to my midnight ramblings, I could be back to sleep in no time.  It's the five hundred little things that do me in.

Last night's lost sleep can be chalked up to several things: finishing up Christmas wrapping, planning when best to do the remaining baking, going over what needs to be done before company arrives, sorting out what stays and what goes to the family Christmas celebration, planning a big meal here before that happens, squeezing in a few visits over the next week, and then ... just to make things a little more interesting ... packing for a trip, cleaning out the fridge, making sure the house checkers all have keys, and getting the dog to his sitter.  If I wasn't already tired from no sleep, I would be exhausted just thinking about the next week or so.

It seems like everyone has their own best practice policy for dealing with insomnia.  Some say that deep breathing exercises help, some say get up and walk around for a while. Some read, some watch TV, and I've even had super practical people say that if they are awake they may as well work and get up to wash floors.  I have yet to be desperate enough to wash floors at 2:30; let's hope I never get there.

The one good thing about extremely early mornings at this time of year is there is a pretty Christmas tree out in the living room.  There is something peaceful and soul-soothing to wrapping myself in a blanket, curling up on the couch, and sipping fresh-brewed coffee in the glow of Christmas tree lights.  This annual vigil ties all my Christmases together: childhood excitement, coming of age angst, passing on the magic of Santa to my own children, concerts and carols, welcoming the new, missing those gone.  If there is such a thing that is good about not sleeping it would be having this quiet time to ponder these things in peace.

I don't know that tonight's sleep will be better, but as I ate breakfast this morning I smiled over at twinkling lights on the tree and thought to myself "It's 6:45 in the morning, and all's well with my world".

Note To Self:

In the preposterous hope that this will make a difference in my ability to retain semi important facts I will go through the motions of recording them ... making notes is supposed to help with memory problems.

So, here goes ...

Note to self:  NO Jocelyn!  You do not need more Christmas gift tags!  Even if your offspring were to double their output of grandchildren it would take a full decade before you would run out.  Please stop buying more every year.  Likewise with the icing sugar; three and a half bags of the stuff will see us through 2023 at the rate we eat cake around here.

Note to self:  If you're looking for exercise, Jocelyn, then for sure, head on down to the basement without a written reminder of what you are going there for.  Is it a loaf of bread?  A pail of ice cream?  A pound of butter?  Another can of coffee?  Perhaps it's not food related at all.  Did you, all of a sudden, recall it was time to change the furnace filter?  Are you looking for the Christmas laser light projectors?  Or, since it's the far bedroom you are standing in, feeling perplexed and foolish, was your mission to fetch a suitcase to begin packing?  But, back to the original question ... maybe it was the exercise.  There are a full 18 steps involved - make one trip for each item.  Atta girl!

Note self:  As soon as a water jug is empty put it in the car.  When you are up to two empties make plans to go to town for water.  If that's what you care to do, then go ahead and have yourself that 'shake your head' moment about the very idea of buying water.  Lord only knows why you do this self torture but year end calculations show that you have spent $430.00 on stuff that comes out of the taps for free.  Further, as you drive down the road, you can reminisce about the good old pre-flood days when water quality was not an issue.  But the bottom line here is, if you put those jugs in the car as soon as they are empty, you don't have to turn around at the highway to go back to fetch them.

Note to self:  Now Jocelyn, you are just being delusional if you think you're going to remember where you saw that recipe.  I know.  I know.  Your first impulse will be to say Facebook, and that may well be true, but WHERE on Facebook?  Are you paying any attention to whom it was that shared it?  Have you taken note of what the date is?  Are you ever likely to find it again?  You well know that Facebook has at times shown itself to be very judgemental of who your friends are - one day you get to see every one of their kitty-cat pictures and the next day it's like they've been banished from the Earth.  That will be the day you want to try out that great roasted brussels sprouts recipe.  Trust me; go low tech with this one.  Find an actual piece of paper and write that recipe down.  Now.  Where you put it after that is your own business.  Might I suggest that 'safe place' you have?  That's always good for a laugh.

Note to self ... or is this just a point to ponder?  A mere existential question, really, about why you can remember every word from a song from 1972 that you haven't heard in at least two decades, but regularily stall out mid sentence because you forgot what you were talking about.  I have read that it's the music accompanying the words to the song that acts as a trigger for our memories.  Does that mean that if I sang everything I said I could tell a complete story without loosing my way?  I wonder which would happen first?  Would I be arrested on some "abuse of music" charge, or just locked up in a padded room somewhere?  Like I said, this is just a point to ponder; weak as my mind is on daily conversations, you can't stump me on anything Neil Diamond, the Beach Boys, or The Guess Who has ever sung.

Now, back to business.

Note to self: go find that new 2018 calendar you picked up the other day and start transferring important data from this year to next year.  Dentist appointments and grandkids babysitting dates, meetings, seminars, and that tax time date with the accountant.  While you're at it scan through the next week or two in case you have commitments booked that have slipped your mind.  Heck, just for the fun of it, glance back over the past month just to see if you missed anything.  Nothing better than finding out you missed an order deadline for something you really wanted.

But, most important for now is to STOP BUYING CHRISTMAS GIFT TAGS.

On the other hand, Jocelyn, you are almost out of wrapping paper.  Are you going to remember that?

                                             The Little Job That Grew

I don't know if I can say I didn't see this coming.  I wasn't looking.  I have no excuse.

Probably, if I had taken even one moment to think about it, that little sensible voice in the back of my head would have said something like "Do you know what you're getting yourself into?"

But that's all moot.  I did not stop to think about it.  The little voice didn't have a opportunity to ask her question.  I am armpit deep into a job that I anticipated being only ankle high.  And I'm not done yet.

The "little" job I volunteered for was updating the home town information for the South Saskatchewan Vacation Guide, an annual publication that strives to educate and inform travellers of all that our corner of the province has to offer.  I had already had one kick at  the can last year when the publishers had asked our local tourism board for fresh event dates for 2017.  When I reviewed the advertisement that was going into print I promised that we would absolutely be freshening up the information for the 2018 edition.  That was this time last year.  Naturally I didn't given it another moment of thought until autumn.  They don't call me the procrastination Queen for nothing.

So, at the last meeting of the season I told the rest of the board that I would happily do the write up.  After all, I am comfortable in the role of writer and they were quite willing to let me run with it.  That was eight weeks ago, and I'm farther behind now than when I first got started.

Around the same time as I began to gather information and photos for this vacation guide project I received an e-mail about information and photos needed to revamp our online presence.  I'm one of the newest members of this board - I don't know if it was my greenhorn status that kept me from realising that this was now actually two projects:  one for a printed magazine and one for a province wide tourism web page.  I agreed to this second job thinking it was the first job.  That was the bad news.  The good news was that both projects were looking for the same info.  The print project wanted more written info, the electronic media could handle lots more pictures.

Which constituted phase two of my project: try to track down high quality photos that illustrate the things I wanted to write about.  I wrote letter to other community groups formally requesting both info and photos to help me out.  No one got back to me.  I asked people who take a lot of pictures to see what they had.  There are good shots in bad light and great vistas taken at the wrong time of year to show off a campground.  And who can believe that we serve Saskatoon pie and ice cream for four months straight and have never bothered to take a picture of a pretty table setting of this treat?

About this time, in my quest for clearer instructions from Sask Tourism my call was forwarded on to a guy named Bob.  My new friend Bob.  Bob, who assumed I had called him about his new pet project - a day trip guide within our area to augment the more general information in the vacation guide.  I had not called him about this, yet another project that would turn out to be job #3.  He sent me an e-mail describing it in detail ... the info he is looking for is mostly the same as jobs #1 and #2, only a little more detailed.  Oh, what the heck!  Since I'm in this up to my waist anyway, what's one more?

It's early December.  My deadline is the end of this week even though the publishing deadline is a month farther down the road.  I have an assortment of pictures and some copy written.  Today I decided I'm far enough along to send what I have out to other board members for feedback, which may well complicate my life further.  On the one hand it's good to have more ideas and insight for a more well-rounded effort; on the other hand more ideas and insight will take more time.  I'm just crossing my fingers that if there is tweaking necessary, it won't be much.

Meanwhile my desk is cluttered with copious notes about what I need to do, piles of paper scribbled with the information going into each project, and lists of photos that need to be sent.  The whole thing has woven itself into such a tangle in my mind I'm going to have to call good old Bob one more time just to see which e-mail addresses belong to which job.

If I dig deep enough I'm bound to find my "List of Things to do Before Christmas".  That's next week's project.