in the blink of an eye...

Wow, seems like I blinked and the weekend disappeared!

working all day saturday just seems to get harder and harder... it really eats into the desperately craved for 'homelife' time… and a lot of the evening is spent winding down from the day on desk... and saturday we were one short for the day - by late friday there was just no-one prepared to come in for the shift, so knowing we were going to be shortstaffed sailor lily provided a bottle of howling wolves vegan wine for us to share and help the winding-down process once we'd closed the library (thank you!!) - it wasn't as good as having another body on desk would have been, but at least we had something to look forward to after the hard slog... there were four of us to share the vino so we had a glass, a quick debrief and catch up and then went home - i got a lift so i was pretty much at home in the same time it would have taken waiting for public transport… maybe that's how the day should end every day - well, at least if you have to work at the weekend anyway?!! 

and what a wild and windy night it turned out to be – definitely a night to spend by the heater - but we lost power here in st kilda for a few hours - there went the heater – luckily i'd had dinner because once 'the lights went out' I couldn’t even have a cuppa because the flats are all electric – bummer – thank fuck for candles and laptop batteries – at least I could listen to music - when i could hear it over the storm that is - the whoosh of the wind was incredible!!!

my heart goes out to those in the rural areas where flooding has become a major disaster or where communities are living under threat... so many areas affected - i've lived in bushfire prone areas but never been close to a flood - i can only imagine the anguish, heartbreak and frustration of having to deal with the devastation so much water, mud, and debris would cause... and then there are the animals - voiceless victims of every disaster...

it caught my attention when i heard they were sandbagging in skipton - i once lived near there and seeing this map sent me tumbling down memory lane to 1989 when brann and i 'packed up the family' - the animals that shared our lives and whose lives we were fortunate to be part of - goats (3), dogs (4), cats (10) and numerous chooks (mostly progeny of those we'd saved from battery farms) - said goodbye to our 'shack' and 50 acres of bushland and granite outcrops high up a mountain in tallarook and moved to snake valley...

we lived in a small campervan for the first few months and the annexe became our kitchen... we had a small two-burner camping stove with gas bottle and the fridge was an esky replenished with ice every couple of days... the dunny was either a bucket, or a shovel and roll of toilet paper - now this wasn't too bad in the summer, but for the first few weeks we were there it bucketed down - luckily it was september (and an unseasonal amount of rain) but at least it wasn't bitterly cold too!!!!

once the weather 'fined up' we had a dam dug, and then a western red cedar house built to lock-up... it was only 10 squares - but it was big enough for us to start with - we had 20 acres of beautiful australian bushland to supplement our space and add to our enjoyment... and the house was 500 metres from the front gate - blissful seclusion...

we moved in to the empty shell and started the hard work of doing all the internal stuff ourselves - walls, ceiling, fit-out etc... we put in a large water tank and a gravity feed tank on the roof, had a septic tank installed, fitted a slow-combustion stove in the kitchen and a wood heater in the lounge - we had plenty of old fallen trees on our bush block - we just had to do the sawing and chopping! - and finally we could afford a small solar and battery setup... up til now we'd been living with a generator, 12-volt battery power and candles (mains power was way too expensive to get connected!) but we were forever having to get the racv out to charge up our car batteries!!!!

we added a wide verandah - this was the view from it before we started landscaping (that's caspar wandering around in the yard - his sister suli was probably off being wicked somewhere - we had a 1/2 acre fenced off around the house - plenty of space for everyone to entertain themselves) - it was a wonderful place to watch the resident wallabies, kangaroos and kookaburras - we had a regular visiting fox that came right up to the fence and teased and harassed the dogs terribly once it realised they couldn't get out!!! and there was also a koala (we called him kelly) who took up residence at certain times of the year...

this was home - my country dream - by this time it was 1992 - we'd had our ups and downs over the years but hey, we were still together after 17 years so there was no reason to believe that we weren't going to be here forever - we were even trying to conceive... but then one fateful phone call became the catalyst in turning our lives upside down, and our world started to implode...

in the blink of an eye...


you may notice i don't use photos with brann in them - i have many photographic memories of him but since we split up i don't know that i have the right to 'share them with the world' without his knowledge or approval so consequently i keep those to myself...

enough of memory lane - it's hard to keep the tears at bay - so i'll leave you with janis and a song called 'little girl blue'...

when love has gone...

why is letting go so hard? why does it hurt so much? in knowing it's what has to be, when will the tears stop flowing? memories of the past haunt us - we try to make some sense of it... but there is no sense to make, there is no blame to lay - it took both of us to reach this place... we thought we were forever, but nothing stays the same... we tried so many times and failed, caused such heartache and pain, but in trying to keep what we had known, our love died along the way... but we have our lifetime of memories, intimacies we shared... we wove an incredible story, unforgettable chapters in our tale of life.... we once felt deep love and passion, and that we can't deny... but we've grown too far apart these days, our politics so different, beliefs no longer shared... we need to live apart now, and move on with our lives... but what becomes of friendship, when such a love has died? are the memories too painful, the differences too great? we'll see where our paths take us, and learn if friendship can survive...

We have shared so much together
Love... laughter... fun times... tears;
Yet sometimes we can't turn back time
We must walk away, allow ourselves to heal

(excerpt from "Letting go" by Judy Burnette - it's a lovely poem until the last paragraph when it mentions god!!)

back to the 60s...

I found this 1966 newspaper cutting amongst me mum's photos last time I went through them... it's from The Sun newspaper of June 1, 1966 - The Sun used to come out in the mornings, and The Herald came out in the afternoons... that was way before they merged in 1990... I couldn't resist posting it (sorry about the quality... paper's really, really fragile!!!)

this was how Judy (me mum) found out that me brother Darrell was wagging school (and had been for months!!!)... the article makes it sound like he was on a school excursion... being in the newspaper was a dead giveaway of not being at school!!!! but it was also a catalyst to finally getting out of the christian brothers college that he hated so much.... some of the 'brothers' and the 'sisters' could be violent people - and of course corporal punishment was allowed in the 60s!!!!

the column 50-50 (does that still exist in the Herald-Sun?? - I don't know, I don't read it!!) gives a 'window' into what concerned some people in 1966 - apparently whether bread should be baked and sold on Sundays was one of the issues... hard to imagine these days not being able to get bread on a Sunday, hey??!!!

and here's some of the music we were listening to in 1966... enjoy...