Spring in the Capital

Spring has sprung in Canberra. Its beautiful! The weather is divine - cool crisp mornings, and sunny days.

But there are traps to spring. Suddenly dawn breaks so much earlier, flooding my bedroom with searchlight strength brightness at an unholy hour. Plants erupt with flowers, triggering horrendous hayfever for those sensitive to it.

But for me, the worst is the wildlife.

If you haven't heard possums mating, then you've missed a true Australian experience. But at 2 in the morning in the gum tree outside my window, it is a very unwelcome sound. As are the shrieking birds at 4 am (well before dawn). The dog that barks up the road. And the neighbour who gets picked up at 5 am by a large truck......

I think I want winter back.

Out of the mouths of babes

I haven't had much to say lately - I've been too busy, too tired, too distracted... Or just plain haven't had much to say! Tonight I am playing bedtime troll to 6 children under 6 and as such am sitting quietly, waiting for the next outburst and taking advantage of some quiet time to catch people up on where things are at.

Exactly nowhere more exciting than they have been for months. I have my own place, but I haven't found the energy or cash to do anything more to it. The onset of summer will probably encourage me to bother with blinds and curtains to keep the heat out, and hopefully by next winter I will have bothered to organise better heating, but otherwise, I probably still wont have got to painting the bedrooms, installing new flooring or ventilating the bathroom!

I still have no love life - and I admit I'm not making much of a push towards getting one. Funnily enough, sitting around in your own living room doesn't afford many opportunities for meeting eligible men.

I'm still frustrated with my family, in particular the ones who live nearby. I did not appreciate getting a lecture on 'loving god' from a five year old this evening. Mostly because I am quite offended by the 5 year old being told that I don't love god. There are those that will argue that it's true, but the person who told the child doesn't actually know what my stance on god is - never having bothered to actually ask me, just assuming based on the obvious - that they haven't managed to convince me to drag myself to church with them every weekend. For the record - I vowed never to go back into that particular church after attending a service in which the main subject of the sermon was how great martyrdom is.

I admit I have a problem religions which focus on how great everything will be once you are dead. It kind of makes me wonder how they get through the living bit at all.... Its frankly morbid, and I believe that whatever else you may believe in, it the living bit that matters - what you do with your life and how you acquit yourself as a thinking, feeling human being. What matters is how you would be remembered here, not how the scales of divine justice play out after you've gone to feed the worms.

Anyway - so rant over. I'll just chalk it up to another 'we are just totally different people' moment and let it slide on by.

Back to being the bedtime troll - there are distinctly suspicious noises coming from bedroom number 1........