Shiny hands

This is a moisturiser. This is what I rub into my hands. It stands on the sink and after I’ve had my egg, toast and vegemite in the morning, I wash the plates and then rub some of this cream on my hands.

This is a floor cleaner. This is what I rub into the floor. Doesn’t look much like the hand cream does it? It stands on the sink ready to give the floor a quick mop after I’ve washed my breakfast plate.

Guess what I did this morning? At least I now have beautifully clean hands with a glossy non-slip shine

Awful pets

The Gastropod thing is getting worse.

Imagine for a second, a common brown garden snail, and now imagine one of those more than 20 centimetres long.

That’s what’s been found on the Gold Coast, not far from one of Queensland’s most popular nature parks, and the discovery of the world’s most destructive land snail has forced quarantine authorities to re-think their inspection procedures. The last Giant African Snail outbreak was at Gordonvale, near Cairns, in far north Queensland in 1977 – hundreds were found and they took eight months to eradicate.

Some people keep them for pets, ugh, like the office workers at
Grove books

The Rise and Fall of the Plastic Bag

Have you noticed how hard it is to get a plastic bag these days?
When I was a young nipper we lugged the groceries home in big wicker baskets that scoured your hip and cut through your arm to the bone. Then, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we got plastic bags, which also cut through your arm to the bone, but left your hip mercifully unscathed.

Where are they now? Where are the plastic bags of yesteryear? Apparently 20 million Australians currently use around 5 billion plastic check-out bags every year. I’d like to know where they are, you can’t get them in Collingwood. My shop only has paper bags, and the last time I asked there for a plastic bag, the Young Thing at the checkout rolled her eyes round like a nervous horse as if I had asked her for frangers.

According to the National Geographic News, paper bags are the environmentally friendly choice because they’re made from a renewable natural resource, and can be re-used again and again.

How? How do you re-use them? Mine last five bloody minutes, I’d rather have the plastic. They might scar your arm for life but they don’t tear at the bottom and let your oranges, eggs and milk drop on the footpath.

Park Pews for the People

My local Council unveiled their contribution to Australia Day this morning. A new bench in the Park. Pretty pathetic I thought, you can’t help but compare the contributions of our great-grandfathers with their huge lumps of statuary on every corner. The old boys donated dozens of Queen Victoria statues to the community, they had a strong sense of duty in those days despite their awful facial hair.

Still, I know seats are very popular, especially amongst the elderly. Take a look next time you’re outside, you’d be surprised how many people, when they see a seat, will sit on it.

The Good Luck Frog

My grandmother used to say ‘A frog brings good luck to the house it enters.’ This is possible, I started thinking about frogs and, lo and behold, a cheque I was waiting for arrived this morning. It worked!

I had better keep this information to myself or the Council Home Help girl will think I’m losing my marbles and jump on the blower to my interfering doctor or, infinitely worse, my interfering grandson. I need a frog charm to ward off them off. Better put a bit of dried leg in a silk bag and tie it round my neck.

This is an old charm of my foremothers, a rough lot who knew heaps about herblore from the Old Country. The frog leg wards off warts, baldness, gout, toothache, constipation, epilepsy and St Vitus Dance. (I think I’ll sit that one out). I’m also told a dried leg has a deleterious effect on vampires, which is always a handy thing to keep up your sleeve.

When you need an Umbrella

Well I’m certainly pleased to have a frog in my garden, she may keep the blasted gastropods from returning. Drop in and say hello to my tenant ribbiticus, (in the rent-my-blog over to the right there) it’s her birthday. She didn’t come down in the last shower

Plenty of other frogs came down in the last shower – or the one before that.

Throughout history, there have been tales of raining frogs. These stories, as crazy as they may seem, are apparently real events.

In 1873, Scientific American reported that Kansas City, Missouri was blanketed with frogs that dropped from the sky during a storm.

Minneapolis, Minnesota was pelted with frogs and toads in July, 1901. A news item stated: “When the storm was at its highest… there appeared as if descending directly from the sky a huge green mass. Then followed a peculiar patter, unlike that of rain or hail. When the storm abated the people found, three inches deep and covering an area of more than four blocks, a collection of a most striking variety of frogs… so thick in some places [that] travel was impossible.”

The citizens of Naphlion, a city in southern Greece, were surprised one morning in May, 1981, when they awoke to find small green frogs falling from the sky. Weighing just a few ounces each, the frogs landed in trees and plopped into the streets. The Greek Meteorological Institute surmised they were picked up by a strong wind. It must have been a very strong wind. The species of frog was native to North Africa.

As long as the passing breeze doesn’t pick up any snails

I think it may be the bathroom

Getting out of my bath this morning I felt a little dizzy, I think it’s the spots combined with the squares that throw me off kilter. My Council Home Help girl has been nagging me about the colour scheme but I supect she’s an ageing hippy and wants to bring in a phalanx of potplants to steam up my mirrors and glossy surfaces. (It’s the undercurrent of ancient patchouli oil that gives her away)

You can never trust an old hippie. Their morals have always been a little too loose for my liking. Nothing wrong with playing guitars in the desert and dressing like an impoverished 19th century peasant, but I believe they suffer drug flashbacks. I can say in all honesty that I’ve never had a flashback from Bex Powders. Which reminds me, I’d better make sure the bathroom cabinet is stocked.

Money saving tips

On the television earlier tonight, I watched a woman in a yellow frock giving out money saving tips. How can you take anyone wearing a yellow frock seriously? Even Imelda Marcos wouldn’t be caught dead in one.

Anyhow, her money saving tips are along the lines of “Take your lunch to work” and “See a movie on a week night”. I’ve got better advice. Eat less and stay in.

Was God a Gardener?

I had a serious confrontation with a gang of gastropods this morning.

This is not the first time that we have run into problems. First off, I don’t like ‘em. I don’t like snails or any of their numerous cousins and assorted kinfolk. That said, I realise they have a right to exist in their own appalling little world as I have in my own, and I’m prepared to look the other way, merely wrinkling my nose with fastidiousness, when they ooze across my path.

But they can keep their ugly stomach-feet out of my herbs!

I’ve done my best. I have made a safe spot for them, a refuge, a haven hidden behind a particularly ugly clump of agapanthus, with a couple of old beer cans hidden under the leaves, some mossy overhung mini-boulders and a fat wad of newspaper. Gastropod heaven. If they would just stay there we could co-exist peacefully.

This morning I found a half dozen of the slimy things in the last of my tomatoes. Ingrates. Perhaps the heat of the last few days addled my brain, because I lashed out at the whole lot of them in fury. I shrieked at them. “I told you never to come in here. Don’t you know who I am? I am the Master Gardener, the Great Mother, I am She. I am God!”.

I picked them all up, threw them in a shoe box and carried them around to the back lane where I deposited them in the middle of the cobblestones. They are evicted. They are expelled. I wash my hands of them.

Sitting down with a soothing glass of sherry to calm myself, still shaking from the trauma, I started thinking.

Was God was a Gardener?

Some mornings …..

Some mornings it doesn’t pay to look in the mirror

I stood, staring at my head in a sort of incredulous shock for a full five minutes. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My hair was sticking upwards and outwards in a weird parabolic curve, like a dead bush out in the mulga. And I mean dead. Like some old straw stuff that comes out of ancient packing crates, or gets tossed in bundles in the corners of paddocks.

OK, so I went to sleep with a wet towel around my head, (it was hot dammit) but this morning my appearance was beyond a joke. It’s something about the blonde hair. Once it was admired for its golden sheen, but now it’s just a colourless old straw cap.

How are the Mighty fallen

Lucky no one sees me in the mornings