A bad case of wind

I mentioned in the previous post we’ve been having storms here in Perth, but really the word ‘storm’ doesn’t do it justice. It’s been more like a series of typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes all rolled up into one. Most days it’s wet and windy, and there isn’t a long enough break between the rain to even take the dog to the park. I did try yesterday, but I had to flatten myself around a tree trunk as soon as I got there, and then wait for the horizontal rain to give up and go away.

The stupid thing was I had looked at both my raincoat and umbrella on the way out the door, and decided, that with the sun shining directly above the house and the nearest dangerous looking cloud out on the horizon,  I’d go without. Apparently a rain cloud can cover ground a lot faster than I can.

So this is my 3rd winter in Perth, and without wanting to sound like a whinging Pom, they are definitely getting worse. I don’t know whether it’s global warming that’s causing weather patterns to shift around, but the climate and seasons are refusing to stick to the guidelines. Australian summers are getting hotter and drier, winters are getting windier and wetter, and the Gods of Thunder and Lightening are definitely way out of control.

The first of the big storms came a few weeks ago. A Monday to be precise, the day that my son’s tonsils were due to go under the chopping block. Instead, I was staggering around the house losing my breakfast to gastric flu, my daughter was in bed, busy retching into a bucket and emitting a series of very dramatic moans and groans, and my husband had just flown to Sydney on business.

Setting off to collect my son from nursery, I lowered myself carefully into the car (fast movements are not nausea’s best friend) and went to open the garage door. It went up half way. It came back down again. I pushed the button again. It went up a quarter of the way. It came back down again. Now of course common sense should have told me not to push my luck for a third time. But I did. It was cold, wet, dark and blowing a gale. There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to walk to the nursery to collect him.

So I pushed the button. Once again it went up half way – and then stopped. This would have been bad enough on its own, but of course I’m not that lucky. A massive gust of wind then swept up the driveway catching the garage door on the way, it snapped it off the rollers and then buckled it in half. The twisted hunk of metal than dropped back down – to within an inch of the cars roof, with me in it.

Now I don’t want to come across as a useless, blubbering woman who falls apart in times of trouble, but this really was the very last straw in an incredibly long day involving a high temperature and a toilet bowl. I did attempt to use my very limited strength to push the door back up to an upright position, but unsurprisingly, the door had other ideas. So with the metal rippling away in the wind next to me, I called a friend and sobbed out my tale of woe.

Lucky for me she saved the day, collecting stranded son and sending round further reinforcements, in the form of her husband who helped me to tether the door up with ropes. That night I laid in bed listening to it banging away and imaging how much damage it would potentially cause if it broke free and took off the roof of the house across the road.

3 weeks on and the storms have returned to try and finish off the garage door, which is still roped up and wedged shut with ladders. Trees in the garden are bending like blades of grass and rubbish bins are flying up and down the street like tumbleweed. I feel like Dorothy, minus the safety blanket of a pair of sparkly red shoes.

So the other night my husband came in from work and shut the door. An hour later the wind picked up and blew it back open again. Every other door in the house slammed shut, the roof hatch disappeared up into the eaves and all of the AC covers in the ceilings went with them. Trying to shut the front door again was the tricky bit.  With a cyclone now picking up pace by the door mat, the front of the house had turned into something of a wind tunnel, and we couldn’t get the hall door open to get out there. I half expected the front of the house to take off into the night sky, leaving us hanging onto a door handle below.

The two off us finally pushed the door open and slammed the front door shut, but not before the length of the hallway was covered in hailstones and the coats on the hall stand had all had a wash.

“And that is why I always lock the door when I shut it” I said.

With no sign of this bad weather letting up anytime soon, you have to wonder whether Mother Nature has a real axe to grind with this part of the world. Perhaps she’s ticked off with some Aussie half wit calling her a Sheila, or maybe she’s just having a shocking case of PMT. Either way, until we lower the excess on our insurance I wish she’d air some of her grievances elsewhere and give our badly built house a break.

Planes, trains and watery accidents

My 2 1/2 year old son has been undergoing toilet training for about 6 weeks now, and I have to say he’s doing a lot better than I ever expected him to. Boys are, after all, meant to be a lot slower on the uptake when it comes to the learning about when to poop and pee, and when to clench and hold.

Of course there have been accidents. One next to the sofa, one in the bedroom where he shut the door on himself and couldn’t get out, and a handful around the bathroom – normally as a result of him misjudging the volume of wee in his bladder and shooting off the potty before he’s completed the job.

Trying to shoo the dog away as I re-dress, empty, bleach and wipe is the hardest part of all.

Unfortunately my sons days at nursery do set him back sometimes. Whether it’s the excitement of finger painting or the 15 or so other kids queuing up for the potty, some days I go to collect him and am met with a bag of wet clothes and a rather nasty smelling teddy. The washing machine never had such a good work out for so few clothes. One day, when he had gotten through all 3 sets of spare clothes in his Bob the Builder backpack, I arrived to find him wafting around the room wearing nothing more than a kimono from the dressing up box. That was one of those occasions when you wish you had a camera to hand.

As with many things in life, thinking about doing something is often worse than actually doing the deed. The very idea of replacing nappies with pants on a leaking child is one such time. I found the only way to really stay one step of the game in the beginning was to spend every 4th minute asking him if he needed to go, and then ferrying him backwards and forwards to the potty, armed with 16 books and a thermos of tea (for me). It was monotonous and repetitive, but it did the trick. After a while, and probably because he got so damn sick of being asked, he started to tell  me when he needed to go. Or rather he’d screech “Poo Mummy” as he scurried towards me, with one hand behind his back clutching his bottom.

Seeing that I would drop everything and leap to attention when he needed to go, he quickly realised that the whole process could be manipulated into something of a game. I’d run to get him to the bathroom, peel off the layers, sit him down and then he’d laugh. “No Poo Mummy”. Hmmmmm. That one soon wears very thin, particularly when you’re in the shower, eating your breakfast or halfway up a mountain..

A Blue Mountain to be exact. Let me explain.

We’ve just got back from spending a week in Sydney. A week in Sydney in the rain. Who knew it would be so cold, or so wet at this time of year. Everyone but us apparently. Typically, the weather forecast for the week changed upon our arrival. It went from sun and a spot of cloud every day, to rain with a touch of rain every day.

Damp weather aside, holidaying with children is always a test – a test of a parent’s patience, stamina and will to live. Air travel in particular can be stressful at the best of times (something I wrote about before),  but throw in a couple of kids and several tonnes of ‘can’t get by without you’ luggage and you can find yourself half way to a nervous breakdown at 30,000 feet.

It’s always hard to know how your children will react to leaving the ground in a vacuum packed can. My son wasn’t amused. At all. Watching the aeroplanes through the terminal window – great fun. Walking down the air-slip onto the plane – not so fun. Sitting in his seat for take off – simply not going to happen.

So what does he call out in a desperate bid for freedom? “Poo Mummy”.

Yes, just what all the passengers around us wanted to hear. I’m sure some actually recoiled and held their nose in fear. So, with the fasten seat belt sign lit up and the plane doors already closed, he was whisked up the aisle to the toilet with potty in hand. Did he need to go? Of course he didn’t, but it would have been a pretty brave parent to take the risk.

And so followed a week of untimely potty stops. In the bushes in front of the Opera House. In the undergrowth next to the museum. Sat inside the land train going around Darling Harbour. Behind the seal enclosure at Taronga zoo. On a grassy knoll overlooking Botany Bay. On the train into the shops, and around the back of the Police Station in the CBD. There was no where he didn’t go. And there was no where we could go without a potty, wet wipes and spare clothes at the ready. It really is amazing how the bowels of a small child can shape and dictate your day.

The mountains, as previously discussed, were probably the worst. When he decided he needed to go, the rain was coming in at us diagonally from both sides – with the force of Niagara Falls. We happened to be out on a nature trail at that moment, trying to take at least one photo of the view to prove we had enjoyed the grey and misty scenery. We ended up in the car pack, huddled over him with umbrellas, as he sat on the ground to give it a go. Did anything materialise?  Nope, not even with the encouraging sound of gushing water hitting his parent’s heads.

Same story in the Jenolan caves, and then twice on the way back up the mountain at night, in thick and surprisingly spooky fog. At times like this it is definitely tempting to ignore the little voice from the back seat, but the car seat was hired and the excess for damage to the car was $3000. No pee is worth that much. This time he sat perched on his potty in the boot of the car, smiling up at us, as if it were all perfectly normal.

All pit stops aside, the biggest and most costly accident that occurred during the week, was not by my toddler, but by my husband instead. We were on the ferry traveling from Circular Quay to Darling Harbour, and had decided to sit outside in the spitting rain, to take some pictures of the Opera House as we went past.

Somehow, and don’t ask me how, the camera leaped out of his pocket, dropped onto the ferry floor and slid 2 foot across to the edge of the boat. As it happened (does it ever happen any other way?), there was a gap in the side of the boat. About, oh lets say, camera sized in width. The only bloody hole, I might add, that there was down our side of the boat.

The camera then proceeded to slide through the hole and sit on the outside rim. I’m sure the camera lenses winked at me. We both looked at it in disbelief – I know I was certainly wondering what the hell is it doing down there. Having a child on my lap I couldn’t move. My husband, who swears it all happened in seconds, apparently has the reaction times of a snail on speed.

PLOP, over it went. All of our photos sank right to the bottom of the harbour. I’m not embarrassed to say I burst into tears. My husband did what any intelligent man in the same situation should do. He kept very quiet and looked at the floor. After several minutes of watching my tears mixing with the rain, my daughter helpfully piped up.

“Now you’ve lost all of my photos.” Followed by. “This wouldn’t have happened if we’d sat inside you know.” I believe she received quite a glare.

We all left the ferry in silence. Even my son knew better than to say he needed a poo. Half an hour later, when we were standing underneath the sharks inside the aquarium, my husband ventured to speak to me. “Well obviously we’ll buy a new camera tomorrow.”

And so we did.

He did feel marginally better when told in the camera shop that he was the 3rd person that week to drop their camera into the water. Had our home contents insurance actually covered us for the camera outside of the house, then he might have redeemed himself a little more. But of course, despite trotting along to the Police Station to report it’s loss (hence the potty stop), it didn’t. Now had he dropped it into a mug of tea at home, we’d be quids in – go figure.

The new camera is shatterproof, waterproof, snow-proof and husband-proof. That of course means it comes with a manual thick enough to sit on at the breakfast bar. By the next holiday I might just have worked out which setting goes with which, and how to use the ‘Beauty Mode’. Till then, it’s safe to say my dearest husband will be remaining on the other side of the lens, and paying for his act of clumsiness through the public humiliation on this blog.

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Fighting Flies

Having spent the entire day armed with an aerosol can and stalking flies around the house like a mad woman with a nervous tick, I have decided that enough is enough. Having already lost the last 3 months of my life to the debilitating effects of vertigo, there is no way on God’s earth that I am now going to put up with a constant buzzing in my ear that I can do something about.

So tonight I brought out the big guns. Envirosafe traps, ($10 from Bunnings). A quick and easy (just add water to the powder and shake sort of easy) way of catching the little buggers as they buzz in the kitchen door and head straight for my clean work top.  Their presence might be slightly more tolerable if not for the fact that right before they trample their mucky little feet across whatever it is that I happen to be eating at the time, they have been out in the garden and feasting on a buffet of the dogs finest deposits.

Strangely enough the idea of the dogs last dinner ending up smeared across my plate is an incredibly unappetising one.

After last year’s endless battle against these airborne pests, I am determined that this year I will be ready for them. If it’s the last thing I manage this spring, it will be winning the war against the world’s most pointless and annoying insect and hopefully coaxing as many of them as possible into the various watery graves hung around the house.

I am aware that this may make me sound like a blood thirsty insect murderer, and a slightly possessed one at that, but in my defense this is the effect that an endless buzzing drone in ones ear can have on an otherwise peace loving girl.

It may be ridiculous to let something so small wind me up so much, but they do. They really do. They are almost impossible to catch, swat or squash and can literally drive you up the wall when trying to coax one back out through an open window. I suppose their ‘you’ll never catch me’ razor sharp reactions have something to do with those 2 large compound eyes that let them see in all directions without even needing to move.

These eyes mean that unfortunately it is pointless trying to sneak up slowly on a fly from behind. It will watch you, laugh at you and then nip across the room and land on your half eaten sandwich before you have even lifted up the newspaper to swat it.

Strangely enough although flies have these clever, swiveling eyes to help prevent themselves from being flattened against the wall, they don’t actually have any eyelids to protect them. So although they spend much of their time tiptoeing through rubbish, rotting meat and dog do-do, they then have to rub their own eyes with their dirty feet to keep them clean. I wonder if this is natures way of enforcing karma?

Flies come from the Diptera family (Greek: di = two, and pteron = wing), which includes all those annoying insects with wings (namely flies, mosquitoes and midges) whose sole purpose in life seems to be to carry germs, spread diseases, chow down on unsavory things on the ground and generally ruin any attempt to ever sit and relax outside or eat the food you have just charcoal-ed on the BBQ.

Apparently there are 30 000 species of Diptera that live in Australia alone. At a rough estimate I would say for a handful of weeks in the year at least half of these species seem to dwell in our back garden.

I was aware that Perth had something of a fly problem before I came, (the fly screens on all of the doors and windows were a subtle clue) but when it comes to forces of nature, seeing is definitely believing. All I can say is I am very glad that I didn’t arrive right in the middle of the ‘fly’ season last year, otherwise I might just have packed up my bags and returned to the UK. That last statement is a real indication of how bad they can get, as nothing would make me want to go back to a country that is disappearing down the toilet.

The worst time in Perth is in the Spring, around about now, hence the traps and the war cry. At this point the weather warms up and all those 1000′s of nasty flies wake up ready to do battle. I say wake up because flies can actually remain dormant until their body temperature reaches 18 degrees, they then emerge to begin their hunt for food when the air temperatures goes above 20 degrees.

For that (relatively) short time of the year when they first appear, this place can be a nightmare. Forget the spiders being an issue, the flies are without doubt the single most annoying part of Australia’s wildlife that you need to contend with. They can make going out for a walk a monumental struggle against gravity. The amount of flapping you have to do with your arms and hands is enough to make your feet leave the ground.

This constant flapping about your face and person is known as the ‘Australian Salute’. Having a third hand at this time would be very useful, to push off that one fly that has decided to make you it’s buddy for the day and follow you for hour.

Everywhere you go you can see people walking around in the throes of what looks like a fully fledged epileptic fit. Worse still for those mothers pushing prams. If they use one hand to swat a fly then they run the risk of junior veering off under the wheels of a car, if they keep both hands on the buggy then they are forced to eat fly. Babies are OK, they are all hidden from view under what looks a lot like an Arabic abaya/jilbab. A Factor 50 sunshade that also doubles up as a moving fly screen.

So to save myself the stress brought on by the inevitable aerial attack, this year I have decided that for the worst weeks I will not worry about forcing the kids out for fresh air and exercise. We will instead stick the dog on a treadmill, stay on the safe side of the fly screen and burn calories on the Wii.

I might also invest in one of those famous cork hats. Finally I realise that it might just be worth looking like an extra off ‘Crocodile Dundee’ if it meant that my diet wasn’t supplemented with quite so much unwanted protein.

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Bring on the Spring

Yeah, the cold weather is finally on the way out. After a chilly and incredibly wet winter (we were on the brink of building an ark in the garage) Spring is finally making it’s way around to Perth. After months of huddling around the fire and looking pale and pasty, the sun is trying to make a come back and I can already feel my blood slowly starting to defrost.

Without doubt this has to be the nicest time of year. The sky is bright blue, the sun is out and the temperature is hot enough to warm creaking bones without the risk of flambaying your brain at the same time. The UGGS and scarfs have been packed away and the multiple pairs of Crocs brought out and brushed down. The dog no longer tries to dry his wet paws on the couch and has instead gone back to sunbathing in the corner of the garden. Noise levels in the house have dropped as children can once again be peeled off the walls and herded back out into the street to play on their bikes.

Soon my complexion will lose its Adams Family shade of pale and I will be able to expose those parts of my body to the sun that have been covered up and increasing in girth from the ‘eating to keep warm’ diet. Nothing makes a body look thinner than a little colour, though I hasten to add that while the aim will be to achieve ‘bronzed v sickly’, I have learnt well enough from one summer here, that any fanatical sunbathing without protection will leave you looking as appetising as a burnt sausage.

The return of the warm weather does of course mean that the flies will soon be back and the spiders will be going into overdrive. I must now crank myself back into gear and back into the gym if the stitching on my bikini is to have any chance of holding. My slipper soft heels will go back to being as dry and cracked as a desert floor within a week and in the interests of staying alive, it will now take an extra 10 minutes to get ready to go out, as one by one the whole family is dipped in factor 30 suncream. Worst of all, I really will have to do something about my legs. After months of hibernating under the cover of denim they have taken on the characteristics of a Yeti. Quite simply they will not be ready to go back on public show until they have been taken to task with the garden strimmer and a good pair of secateurs.

Those few issues aside, it’s great to see the sun again. The best bit being that my laptop and I are back out in the garden and the view from where I am typing away makes writing even easier to do…