...i like stories

I presume everyone has a friend (or maybe it's you), the kind whose life is like a finely scripted black comedy. The friend who is terribly unlucky in a variety of endeavours, though usually from backing the wrong horse, often with hilarious results. A friend who's life Shakespeare could have written another two decades of tragi-comedies about.

I have a friend like that, but fortunately he has a great sense of humour regarding the regular mini-disasters that pepper his life.

This friend, let's call him Peter, has dog with a human name, let's call him Phillip. Phillip is a labradoodle, and in the free-spirited manner of his owner, is completely untrained. Well Pete's mother came around one Sunday morning to visit him and his two kids, who stay at Dad's every second weekend. This Sunday morning Pete flushed the toilet after using it, only to find it blocked, and its latest contents came spewing up and out across the floor. After a while of running around with scoops and mops, plungers etc. in an unsuccessful attempt to unblock the loo, Pete's mum revealed that she needed to use the toilet, and rather urgently. Pete had until this point resisted calling the emergency plumber, being in a rental with a lousy landlord and thus no good prospect of getting the bill refunded. But mum couldn't wait any longer by this stage and very crossly headed out the back with toilet paper in hand. She returned a while later saying "I hope you're happy, making your old mum have to go to the toilet outside!". As Pete recounted to me, it's bad enough having your dunny flood your house without your neurotic mum having to crap in your backyard".

A short time later Phillip came bounding through the backdoor, looking pleased as punch. Pete bent down to pat his beloved pooch, and then the smell hit him like brickwall. Phillip looked up, brown smears around his mouth which could literally be described as a 'shit eating grin'.

At this stage of the story I was on the floor, my sides hurting. Pete laughed "It's bad enough that your toilet floods and your mum shits in your backyard, without your dog eating it".

...swingers

What is it with 'swinging voters'? Have they no conviction? Have they no loyalty?

Do they change football team mid-season because their team is having a bad run? Because they don't like the current coach? True supporters know that you have to take the bad with the good. Gah!

Someone once said that the people get the government they deserve. I like that saying, and it would seem Australians don't actually deserve a functional government, which is probably about right. The downside is that now the nation will have its decisions made by three cranky farmers and a gay hippy (not that there's anything wrong with being a gay hippy), so congratulations to those who live in their electorates.


Ah, Australia. Disfunctional one day, off the rails the next.

...phone camera

I like my phone camera. I never thought much of it until I downloaded the images the other day. It's a pretty standard 2008 Nokia type with bugger all megapixels and a dirty lens, but it's good for just capturing random stuff, little slices of life, and things I see and think "Hmmm. That might make an interesting painting one day".

So in an attempt to make this blog more, you know, kinda personal, I thought I'd share some with you.

On the road

Work takes me to the darndest places.

Community Cup 2009 (possible painting #1)

Big trees rock

Possible painting #2

Nieces are cool

Church's sign in place of former sign reads "We forgive you for taking our sign"

The last patch of native vegetation in the Hunter Valley. In a year, all this will be another open-cut coal mine.

Main St. Marysville, where the town used to be.

Nephews are dorks

Factory after rain (possible painting #3)

A tree in my backyard

Moochy Von Schtinkbum

Trentham Falls

Self portrait with sun on back

Barmy for Barmah

Sunrise over refinery

So lucky to have all this so close to Melbourne

It's worth turning 34 to have fried icecream

Daughters are cool. Phoebe at one week.

...priceless vox pop

I think this lady speaks for a lot of us...