The madness started a few weeks ago whilst shopping at Toys R Us.  I was meant to be buying birthday presents for the nephews and niece but was thoroughly distracted by the aisle after aisle of awesome toy stuff.  How a tiny kiddy with the attention span of shoe handles that shop is beyond me, because I am thirty five years old and I couldn’t resist letting out a shriek of covetousness when I spied the Sea Monkeys.

They weren’t a part of my childhood menagerie and so I had to make up for that lack (severe childhood deprivation – must have words with parents – dogs, fish and birds were simply not adequate).  I set them up on the window sill alongside the carnivorous plants (who are licking their chops and having their own covetous thoughts) added water and waited with bated breath.  So, while not completely instantaneous, I did have movement after a couple of days.  And they haven’t stopped growing since.

Or partaking in a bit of nookie.

That’s right, I’ve bred a bunch of fiends who have monkey sex at every opportunity.  They’re at it constantly, and it’s quite distracting.  Though it is quite amusing watching Crazy Car Man on his most-excellent-pills being hypnotised by the whirly gig activity in the tank.

Photographing them is quite tricky.

And they chose this moment to have a break from the adults only activities, but you can kind of see what they look like.

Continuing on in the gutter, I have a new addition to the plant collection that lives on the window sill.  It’s a lithop (living stone) of some variety, but has been renamed by Crazy Car Man as the bum plant.

No further explanation is required really.  It is what it is – a plant disguised as a stone, disguised as a bum (albeit, a bum with an unfortunate skin condition).  Awesome!  My inner thirteen year old boy sniggers every time!

So I was driving home from work today, figuring out what to have for dinner, when my inner whacko, let off the leash and encouraged by Crazy Car Man’s decided on this….

Greens, Eggs and Ham.  Boom tish!  Made me laugh all the way home, and then when I told Crazy Car Man, he ran with it, and in the spirit of our one fish shower of the other day he came up with the mysterious ham shark….

Yes, I know, you can’t take us anywhere – but then who needs to go anywhere when you’ve got fish falling out of the sky,  sea monkeys having monkey sex on your window sill, bum plants mooning you from the safety of their pots and Crazy Car Man off his nut on painkillers?

The doc gave him some excellent drugs for the pain that not only make him a little spacey but also cause his inner whacko to spring forth with abandon at the slightest provocation. It’s funny! Except I thought I’d perhaps taken one of his most- excellent- pills by mistake when we arrived back from the doctors office this morning and found this at our front door.

We stared, dumbfounded, minds boggling, and then I looked over the rest of the drive way and up in the air, convinced I was seeing the results of one of those weird natural phenomena of fish falling from the sky (hoping as well, imagine the payday from the weekly magazines!) but our one golden fish, which was about the size of a deck of cards, was all on it’s lonesome.

I didn’t have time to contemplate the weirdness for long as I had to go to work, but Crazy Car Man solved the riddle not long after I left when he was having a good natter with Marge the Chook Lady.  She saw the fish, tutted and picked it up to feed to the chooks put in the bin, at which point it proved to still have a wiggle or two left in it, so was promptly chucked back into the swimming pool/fish pond in Nick the Landlord’s back yard.

Aha!  I hear you say…fish pond next door, that is the source of the mystery fish, not random manna from heaven.

And you would be correct.

But I was sort of correct as well.

The fish did indeed come from next door, but it was scooped out of the pool by a crane who then happened to drop his dinner at my front door.

So it did fall from the skies.  Kind of.

** the photo is a little on the blurry side – Crazy Car Man was blaming it on the fact that he can’t bend over to get closer to the shot. He has later admitted that in his most-excellent-pill stupor he thought it looked ok.

Bub, of I’d Like To Hold A Tarantula, made time in her busy schedule of adoring Most Esteemed First Granddaughter to come down to Crazy Farm to hang out with Crazy Car Man and me!

We gave her a taste of Crazy Town life – cruising down the coast in the Kingswood (I insisted she sat in the front as you’re less likely to succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning in that location – I am nothing if not a good hostess), sitting in the beer garden of a coastal pub, waiting in vain for a whale sighting whilst sipping beer and chatting, eating barbequed Skippy, losing track of time drinking home brew in our kitchen at Crazy Farm.

Yes, she made the mistake of telling Crazy Car Man that she likes to drink ale. You should have seen his pretty face light up! Finally, someone to share his art, his opus, his well aged beer with. And she drank them. Many of them. Even the one’s he had to blow the dust off.

This was possibly a decision she came to regret during the misery of a home brew hangover the next day.

In fact, she only came to visit again later in the week after I promised she wouldn’t have to drink any more Crazy Car Man beer concoctions! Her slightly woozy memories of the evening had me in stitches!

I thought I’d introduce her to the freak show that is Crazy Town on her second visit. I did give her fair warning – in fact, I think my exact words were ‘I’m going to introduce you to the freak show that is Crazy Town’ and she agreed. We did have a ‘safe word’ though, in case it all got too much and she needed to escape, but she handled our mining town and it’s madness with great aplomb.

And the menfolk of Crazy Town were thrilled! They showed her their very best side – Drooling Man showed his dexterity with his own saliva – we watched in thrall as the strings strung from his mouth nearly reached the floor before disappearing like magic back into his maw;  Falling Over Man not only fell over 17 times, he even managed to fall through the pub door twice, with the second time showing off his special party trick of setting the carpet on fire; Booze Bus Driver demonstrated what he’d learned from his patrons though thankfully someone else was on shift that night; and after the drool display proved to be unsuccessful, Drooling Man thought serenading her and inviting her to a party at his place that night might do the trick. It didn’t.

The next morning (afternoon) Mad Brother turned up while we scoffed bacon and waited for Eldest Daughter Most Awesome Chauffeur to bring the barge around to the front door. The ‘who’s that?’ faces he was pantomiming to Crazy Car Man were priceless, and then when Eldest Daughter turned up I thought he was going to pass out from too many foreign women pheromones. I was proud he didn’t disgrace himself in front of company though.

When Eldest Daughter gathered up the remnants of her mum and took off home I was left in a little daze of hungover happiness – that chick is as cool in ‘real life’ as she is on the net and she’s welcome back at my place anytime!

The real estate agent.

If you are a real estate agent, look away now, for if my opinion offends you, tough shit, you and your ilk are wrecking my sanity, putting the unhappy on Crazy Car Man’s face (and it’s a pretty face that is at it’s finest when happy – for that alone, I hate you) and making me get up at stupid o’clock on saturday mornings, mornings that are, quite frankly, better spent putting the happy on Crazy Car Man’s face. And then having a coffee and enjoying a Vietnamese pork roll without chilli and beetroot.

But I digress.

The first of the real estate agent horrors, who I shall name Knobhead Kissmyarse, rings us at 9am on a sunday morning to see if we’ve changed our mind from our ‘no’ of the previous day. He lies about contracts, he lies about other offers, and he’s lied so much to a vendor he’s stuffed them out of our offer. If not for him we’d be in a good solid little house right now.

The second, who I shall name Barbie Did I Tell You I’m Divorced and a Single Mum of Two Daughters Flick My Hair Ex Husband Is A Bastard Don’t Look At That Crack in the Wall Look at My Broken Shoe Sob Sob Flick My Hair, is actually the agent for the house we’ve got an offer in for at the moment. I think I know more about her than I do my sister. I did my bit for Team Crazy when I left work early on Friday to distract her while Crazy Car Man and my dad did a proper prowl around the joint. She’s very clever with her evil in the sense that she won’t distract you while you’re looking at the good bits, but as soon as a not so good bit presents itself, out comes the cleavage flashing heavy sighs, the doe eyed pleas of single mumhood, and the constant yap about herself.

I almost don’t want to buy the house because of her. She’s drained me of caring and she’s dumped the feminist movement into a whole steaming pile of 1950.

Sigh. It’s been a difficult winter.

Just to add extra crapness to the crappiest season in the year, we’ve had a particularly crappy winter and none of my lovingly planted vegies in the Field at the Front have made it beyond childhood. My sole harvest has been a cauliflower head the size of a ping pong ball. I discovered it one day between massive downpours, and on the advice of Crazy Car Man, made the decision to harvest despite it’s puny size, because as he accurately pointed out, I have a habit of leaving all edibles a day too late to harvest, only to be crushed that too late day by seeing my crops destroyed by possums/chooks/cockatoos/wind/rain/snails/things which are possibly bushrats but which I don’t want to think about too carefully.

So I’ve had a mouthful of cauliflower courtesy of my garden so far.  Crazy Car Man had one too.  That’s about 25 bucks a mouthful.  Marco Pierre White eat your heart out, my food costs more than yours and my brother is a lot nicer.

I still had hopes for my remaining root and bulb crops – the garlic, carrots and fennel all looked healthy above ground -  until this sunday just gone.  I awoke, after our 9am phone call from Knobhead Kissmyarse, stomped miserably out to the kitchen and let out a such a shriek of utter horror that Crazy Car Man thought I’d caught sight of myself in the mirror prior to wash and makeup.  But no, a worse sight than that.  Our ancient landlord was out in my Field at the Front cutting back the four olive trees he has planted there.  He’d worked his way around the field with his zimmer frame, dragging it through the soil from one tree to the next leaving four furrows in his wake complete with carrot, fennel and garlic corpses.

Man!

Has anyone else had a crappy winter?  Or a crappy real estate experience?  Or a crappy landlord stompin’ all over your plants moment?  Please let me know I’m not the only one!

On the good side, I’m out of hibernation, and only have three winter kilos to lose!

So, when Crazy Car Man pointed out greenhouses on sale at Aldi I jumped at the chance of owning my own (small, crappy quality, but still a lovely, sweaty, planty cube all of my own) and lobbed it into the trolley like an oversized, overexcited five year old at Christmas time.

We set it up in the Side of the House Garden and I put my two hoyas, my fig, my iboza and the strawberries that were still making strawberries into their new home, sat back, rubbed my hands together and waited anxiously for the weekend when I planned to get naked and sweaty in my sauna/greenhouse (not completely naked obviously, it is a working farm after all and at any time of the day or early, early, early morning you can expect to see the ancient landlord, Marge the Chook Lady, Keith with no Teeth, the other old dude who occasionally weeds my garden, random useless children of the ancient landlord, slightly more useful children of Marge the Chook Lady, plumbers, electricians and blow ins off the street wanting eggs or olive oil….it’s like Grand Central Station here some days).

You know how they say pride cometh before a fall? Well, anticipation does too. I was hard at work this morning when Crazy Car Man called with bad news. My greenhouse had been blown over by the high winds overnight. I wanted to run out of the office straight away to rescue my babies (and just between you and me, if I had told my work that my children had been blown hither and thither during the night and needed me to rescue them out of an overturned plastic cube, they would have looked at me strangely and possibly wondered why I kept my children in a plastic prison, but would have said go now and help them…..plants don’t get nearly the same amount of consideration), so I was on tenterhooks all day until I got home and saw the destruction.

It was bad.  My heart broke slightly at the sight (and then again later after the rescue mission when I got a proper look at my high heels and good work trousers that I hadn’t bothered to change out of  before crawling through the twisted metal frame to get to the plants trapped inside).

The strawberries, in the white box, are pretty much a write off – I wasn’t able to turn the box over to see how smashed up they were, but I’m guessing they’re a goner; and I couldn’t reach the fig in the corner in the far right corner, but I’ve put the two hoyas and the iboza back into their pots and given them a good water, so hopefully they’ll survive the carnage.

So, yes, I have a greenhouse.  On it’s side.

*  I’ve written before about my utter utter hatred for the Crappiest Season in the Year.  I do understand that the minor fluctuation in temperature that Sydney experiences in its so called ‘winter’ is piddling compared to other parts of the world.  But I still hate it and quite frankly, anything below 25 degrees celsius is a breach of my human rights.

A war that they are currently winning.

It’s not a fair fight though as they have enlisted the duck brigade.

The chooks are like Switzerland though.  They’re playing the neutral game at the moment as they know which side of the fence their food comes from.  And quite frankly, the bloody cockatoos are chowing down on the fallen olives and plethora of bugs that should, by rights, belong to the chooks.  Deep down inside their bitty minds, the chooks realise this, and I think if it ever came down to a choice between me and the white rats with wings, they would definitely choose me.

Meanwhile, I’m having to infiltrate their defenses each time I enter my front gate.

So far they’re letting me through, but not without pooing on my car as they fly off.

Photo courtesy of Laing Real Estate

The Crazy Lady met the Crazy Man one sunny day and she liked the look of his long blonde hair and the shape of his butt through the rip in his shorts, but the Crazy Lady’s heart had been smashed into a million pieces and at that point in time there wasn’t enough of that heart stitched back into a heart shape to give to the Crazy Man and so they became friends.

The Crazy Lady slowly embroidered the pieces of her heart back into shape and all the while the Crazy Man nourished her with scrambled eggs and smoked salmon until she had completed the most difficult sewing job of her life. And then, and only then, did they declare their love for each other, and live happily ever after.

That’s only one of the stories to come out of the Pink House, the backpackers hostel where Crazy Car Man and I met.

Photo courtesy of Laing Real Estate

The castle itself, The Pink House, is a Victorian mansion house hidden in one of the back streets of Kings Cross in Sydney (some call it Potts Point, some call it Elizabeth Bay – both suburbs having more of a salubrious image than crusty Kings Cross with its thin veneer of glamour over a seedy, edgy, dirty underbelly) and the reason why I’m writing about it now is because the hostel has closed down and the building was auctioned off this weekend just gone.

Crazy Car Man and I went to see a part of our history sold off and it’s a very good thing I didn’t register for the auction, for I had a difficult time keeping my hand from shooting up to bid. We arrived early to hang out with our friend who managed the place up until it’s closure, and to say goodbye to a building that’s very walls were soaked with good times from our past.

Photo courtesy of Laing Real Estate

I stood in room 6, seeing it for the first time stripped of it’s backpacker accoutrements, and remembered how it was. My giant ancient telly that was positioned in just the right place that I could turn it off with my toe; my bed with it’s top bunk that ended up being a storage unit for friends from the hostel who went off on their travels in their combi vans; the window where I kept my cyclamen I had named Elvis; and the spot next to the sink where I had my fish tank.

Just outside room 6 is a courtyard, and it was in this courtyard that we had the funeral for my goldfish, Wanda, when she left this mortal coil. We put her corpse inside a box wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a pretty pink ribbon, and a couple of the fellows in residence, dressed in the finest gear they had in their backpacks, acted as pallbearers, carrying her tiny coffin on the tips of their outstretched fingers. They carried her in respectful silence out to the back courtyard, where a motley crew of travellers from all over the world congregated to pay homage to a little fish that had given me great joy. We buried her amongst the roots of the avocado tree and a tiny cross, constructed from popsicle sticks, was erected with her name on it. We bowed our heads, thinking our own thoughts, wondering where to go next with this funeral, when Canadian Mike piped up and suggested sushi as a food option for the wake. We laughed like loons and went to the pub.

Crazy Car Man had a similar montage of images flick through his head when he reached room 9 and it’s balcony that overlooked what was nicknamed ‘Needle Park’.  Crazy Car Man, and the other residents of room 9, would sit on the sofa on the balcony of room 9 and watch the goings on in the park behind the Pink House – ladies of the night, drug addicts and the homeless would all make an appearance at some point during the day, and every now and then things would be shaken up by Naked Screaming Man. Naked Screaming Man would do just that – take off all of his clothes and primal scream all of his pain and angst out to the universe.

Room 9 balcony also overlooked the courtyard, and Crazy Car Man entertained the masses one Christmas by using the balcony as his stage and playing Jingle Bells, in the style of Jimi Hendrix, for the listening pleasure of the homesick and drunk.

Thousands of people lived, loved, laughed and cried and had their lives irrevocably changed by their time at the Pink House. I have some friends that own pieces of my heart that I met there – they’re scattered all over the world now, but pieces of them have been embroidered into the heart I fixed up when I worked and lived there.

Our Pink House – The House of Pink – The Pink Lady – she’s gone but she’s not forgotten. Long may the laughter that’s echoed in her hallways fill the ears of her new residents and give them the joy that so many found there.

Photo courtesy of Laing Real Estate

PBE – gone but not forgotten

We didn’t spend a lot of time exploring Mildura as most of our afternoon there was spent driving around looking for a campsite that would allow us a fire. A tent is a wonderful and free-spirited accommodation, but when the night closes in and the sun disappears it gets damn cold and a fire is necessary not only for food production but for warmth and light. Luck wasn’t on our side in the land of grape – the place we stayed at, while very beautiful, if a bit twee with it’s pastel coloured concrete wishing well planters and meerkat pot plant decorations, had weird fire rules going on – you could only spark up if you were staying for two or more nights and if you were part of group of campers – and as we were only there for one night and were Nigel No Mates we were banned from fire access. Between you and me, I couldn’t stay for more than one night in a place that thought plastic meerkats added value to a riverbank as beautiful as the one above.

This was all by the by as the next day we were heading towards Mungo National Park – the shining star destination, the whole point of the roadtrip, the place of great anticipation. The road was unsealed, the road was red dirt, and the desert was green.

Yeah, it was green. Lush and verdant and spectacular. Bloody rain had gone and turned our desert into an oasis.

 
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When we arrived at the visitor centre at Mungo National Park, we were also informed that the rain has resulted in there being water in Lake Mungo for the first time in forty million billion years.

Not quite enough for kayaking but water nonetheless.

We were so excited about seeing the strange landscapes at Mungo – the images we’d seen showed towering, wrinkled pinnacles and barren moonscapes in shades of red and white.  Alien and strangely exotic images.  The stuff that we travel great distances to experience and which fuel witching hour conversations both before and long after the event.

We joined the tag-along tour and drove the 12 kilometres out past the Lake that had water in it for the first time in a hundred trillion years and pulled up in a cloud of dust behind our guide, champing at the bit to get out to the Great Walls of China (as this weird landscape was nicknamed 60 000 years ago by the Chinese workers who gazed at it with longing for home in their minds each morning before a grueling day in the woolsheds).

Not long into our tour we found out the other thing the massive rains had accomplished besides causing long dormant seeds to bloom and water to sit stagnant in a lake bed dry for a squillion years.  Once towering pinnacles of rutted sand and rock had been washed away, leaving odd wrinkly stubs only thigh high.

And while interesting to look at up close, they’re no more fascinating than a termite’s nest, which is a dime a dozen in any national park worth it’s salt.

The disappointment was immense.  We stared around at this stubby landscape listening to the guide rabbit on about 40 000 year old fireplaces (seriously, that’s all they have left to talk about now that half the wonder that is Mungo has been washed away) and the usual swell of emotion that is a part of travelling and experiencing new places just wasn’t there.  There were two instances of interest in the two and a half hour tour – one was when one of the small boys on the tour found a spider, spilled sand on it and then watched as it burrowed it’s way to the surface and popped out of the small- boy- made hillock, and the other was when Crazy Car Man grabbed the camera, said he wanted to take a photo of the 40 000 year old fireplace, pushed his way to the centre of the crowd staring bemusedly at the spot on the ground, and returned with this masterpiece of a picture.

Yeah, we travelled three days to see that.  Pretty amazing (ly mental).

We burnt the damper that night too.  Sigh.

The next day, a lot of time was spent on dirt roads, and a fortuitous stop was made for a cappuccino in Pooncarie (a surprisingly good cappuccino.  Surprising, because Pooncarie is here).  The lovely man who made the cappuccino also informed us that the dirt road we were heading along was impassable about 100 kilometres up the way due to the rains.  He whipped a map out from under the counter, wielded a high lighter pen and gave us excellent detailed directions on how to get around the washed out bit, and also advised a stop overnight at Lake Menindee National Park.  Being the kind of people we are, we followed both pieces of advice, zig zagging our way through the back country and ending up at a place of immense beauty (mostly closed due to the flooding).

The reflection of the sky in the lakes was truly stunning and a welcome sight for two people seeking the fantastic.

We shared a campsite with a father and son X 3 team that night.  The three boys latched on to us and entertained us with tales of their six days on the road with dad, competing to tell us stories and ask questions, and I found myself sharing damper making duties with the two youngest.  The eldest dragged the littlest away at one point with demands to help set up camp, and as they walked away we heard him say ‘You know you’re not supposed to talk to strangers’, to which the little one piped up at a volume to make ear drums bleed ‘It’s not like they’re gonna kill me’.  We muffled our snorts of laughter at that, and then even more later when the little one invited himself and his family over to our campfire to share our damper.

Poor dad looked a little shell shocked after 6 days dealing with 3 kids under the age of 11, so we did the neighbourly thing of soothing his raw nerves with bourbon and entertaining his kids for the evening.  Even through the massive hangover the next morning, you could tell he was grateful for our intervention!

We took off the next morning – destination Broken Hill – with cries of  ‘You can come live next door to us in Bathurst’ making our ears bleed.  The previous nights damper was obviously a success!

We had a loose plan of heading to the south west of New South Wales, taking in the delights of Mungo National Park before making our meandering way to Broken Hill and then back home somehow.  It was a very loose plan, and as loose plans tend to, it changed pretty much on a daily basis.

First stop was Hay, and like all good wannabe hard core campers we had our trusty copy of ‘Free Campsites Along Australian Highways’ and we were determined to use it.  That is until we stopped at the first free campsite and came face to face with a dead sheep and the biggest, scariest, most horror movie like spider webs I have ever seen.

As nature would have it, super giant webs the likes of this are not made by sweet rainbow coloured spiders that sing lullabies and tuck you into bed at night.  Oh no.

We walked along the bank of the Murrumbidgee River for a bit, acting tough and trying really hard to convince ourselves that we could do this free camping with sheep killling spiders thing, and I’m a bit ashamed to say that I broke first.  I turned to Crazy Car Man and said ‘I can’t stay here love’, and he said ‘Woohoo!’ grabbed my hand and dragged me at a fast clip back to the car and it’s mutant spider free space.  We high tailed it out of there and stopped at the next official campsite, paid our $19 to the lovely owners, set up our tent and breathed sighs of relief.

One of the pieces of equipment stuffed in the back of the ute that I was most looking forward to using was my brand spanking new camp oven.  I just wanted to bake damper.  That’s all.  If I could produce one perfect little loaf of bready goodness in my camp oven, then I was a hardcore camper.

I’d come prepared with my self raising flour and salt, and I’d decided to use beer as my leavening agent and substitute for water or milk, not only because I’d experimented with beer bread in my regular oven at home and liked the flavour, but I also knew that Crazy Car Man would not let me down with beer supplies throughout the journey.  I figured he’d be happy to sacrifice one beer for drinking if it would provide breakfast.

So I measured and mixed and pretended I knew what I was doing.  I instructed the Man to build up the fire and then let it burn down to coals, before putting the camp oven in to heat up.  And when I had judged the time to be right, with a quick cross of the fingers and a short prayer to the bread goddess (that would Demeter if anyone’s interested), I popped the dough ball into the camp oven and had an evil moment where I wanted to ring the folks and tell them I had a bun in the oven!

Twenty minutes later the oven was removed from it’s firey home and Crazy Car Man lifted the lid on what was either going to be breakfast or epic failure.  I admit, I held my breath for the moment of reveal, and no doubt the entire campsite will remember the night we made our first damper for we cheered our success unashamedly!

Crazy Car Man was so astounded that beer and flour made food and now feels himself justified in stating that beer is the only liquid product a real man needs.  He was so enamoured of the damper that he insisted on holding it, and while doing so wondered why such important skills as this were not taught in school.

Needless to say, breakfast the next morning was a humble meal of campfire cooked bread and Vegemite, consumed with a giant helping of pride!

Coming up in Part 2:  Murray, Mungo and Menindee

I don’t know why I find it so astounding to see chickens in trees.  They are birds when it’s all said and done.  And I have seen them jump really high when they won’t get out of the way of the scraps being thrown over the fence.  But there isn’t even a roof on their enclosure and they never seem to jump super high on the rare (and devastating) occasions when the foxes make their wily way in.  I am wondering if I need to construct egg catching nets or if they can jump down when it comes time to do what chickens do.

It’s been raining constantly lately – in fact the other day the weather guy said it was the wettest April in 11 years, and if it rained again the next day it will be the wettest April in 12 years, I laughed like a lunatic over that comment, urging the rain to stick around for two more days so it would be the wettest April in 13 years – and as a result of all this rain the chook pen is a little wetter than usual.  I’m wondering if they’re just sick of getting their tootsies wet and figured it had to be drier up a tree.

I just can’t get the image out of my head of a chook using its wings and little scaly feet and climbing that old tree like an eight year old boy.  I so want that to be true.