It's slow going writing this particular blog post as I am doing it with only one functional hand. After almost 7000kms on the bikes, injury found me while running. I wish I had a fantastic story to tell, but I simply tripped on a rocky trail and fell over. You know that meme that goes "If you want to know if you're old fall over. If people laugh you're still young, if people panic then you're old!" I can confirm, I am definitely old! It probably didn't help that two of my fingers were quite obviously either dislocated, broken or both. I begged Kerstin to remove my wedding ring before the finger started swelling, being three hours from the hospital I was imagining the worst case scenario of the ring tourniqueting my finger and its subsequent death and amputation. Poor Kerstin, this kind of thing makes her faint, but she gritted her teeth and pulled off the ring. I then gritted my teeth and asked the ex-army maintenan...
I recently took a phone call from one of the ringer's mums. Not quite sure whether she had dialed the right number, she asked "are you the new cook?" and I replied "I am the other half that came with the new cook, I am more the (kitchen's) helping hand". We then continued to have a lovely chat. She was kind enough to enquire whether we are settling in okay and then she asked "are there still frogs in the toilets?" Ha! I laughed out loud. I told her that almost every toilet we have cleaned on the station so far has come with a "froggy" surprise. Fortunately, they don't make themselves known while you are "in business" but once you proceed to the flushing part of your toilet visit, they jump or slip-and-slide into your vision. God knows how they get into the system in the first place, but once they are in there, they are hard to get out. This is not so much of a worry if they reside in the staff toilets. But when it comes to ...
There's plenty of things I anticipated learning when we accepted the positions at Avon Downs. I thought I'd learn a lot about cooking for groups, about different cuts of beef and how to prepare them. Maybe some stuff around the logistics of running a community which is 260km from the closest centre, and even then, its still Mt Isa... But I didn't really expect to learn a new language. To be fair, I haven't spent a lot of time in the Territory. But they really do speak their own dialect here. Much different from costal Queensland, which is a slower, relaxed kind of Australian drawl. Here it's fast, brief and usually mumbled. I think I spent the first month constantly asking people to repeat themselves, answering the phone is always a diabolical risk. And trying to understand the radio chat, impossible! Then there is all the slang and local shorthand. To be fair some of the slang I suspect has been created by the Ringers themselves, as...
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