Suck it up sunshine!

When buying a bag of vacuum cleaner bags from Godfrey's or any other vacuum cleaner shop, you are more likely to encounter poor customer service than in just about any other retail environment.

Upon entering the shop, the retail worker would like you to be contemplating the purchase of a new vacuum cleaner as the sale of the non re-useable paper dust containers is mere bagatelle to his sales bottom line and commission.  You can see his lip drop as you mention what you want, and when you don't know straight away what type of bag it is you are after, from the myriad range, then it's a chance for him to shake his head at you, saying "Well, we've got lots of different bags for different machines, and if you don't know what type of machine you've got, it's going to be impossible to identify the right bag!", as if the problem posed is going to be harder to solve than coming world food shortage.

I actually sort of half knew the name of the machine I had.  I just hadn't bothered to write it down or bring with me an old empty bag of vacuum cleaner bags.  I was 100% sure it was a Hoover (an American president past) and vaguely remembered the model name also had something to do with the US of A - "That's right it's a 'Patriot'!", I muttered to myself as my vacuum cleaner bag name seeking mnemonic invoked its powers of magic recollection.  All this happened at the same time as my eyes moved along the lines of bags, like a visiting head of state inspecting an honour guard, and there it was a bag of five Hoover Patriot bags.

After the gruff treatment I received from the first salesman I encountered, I tried to complete the transaction with another salesman.  However the second salesman, who I suspect was an underling in the Godfrey's salesperson's hierarchy, passed me straight back the curmudgeon I first encountered.  Despite achieving the unachievable and managing to spot the correct vacuum cleaner bag, the first salesman merely processed the sale, without so much as a word uttered in my direction.  I saw his muteness and raised him no eye contact, as if we were in some giant elevator, where all communication had been banned.  Credit card sales can sometimes facilitate silence in the retail exchange, and our interaction was confined to me proffering my card, him passing me the bags and then thrusting a receipt into my hand.

As I exited the shop I realized my working life wasn't so bad, because it seemed to be employed in a vacuum cleaner shop somehow seemed to suck the life out of those behind the counter, and didn't match the autonomy, pushiness and apparent living on the edge their door to door counterparts enjoyed.  Maybe next time I could make the purchase of vacuum cleaner bags more pleasant for all concerned by ordering them on the Internet so then a welcome parcel of bags would one day turn up on my door step, where in the past an Electrolux or Dyson salesman had once stood.

Zappa tours

I have just completed my 2nd tour with an adventure tourism company called Zappa tours.  They provide guided storm chasing tours of tornado alley and throughout the Darwin area.  These tours are led by storm savant Clyve Herbert and thunder lover Jane ONeill.  Herbert is Welsh born, Geelong raised and along with ONeill, both are residents of Trentham, Victoria and Hillsboro, Kansas.

Their recent arrival in Darwin on 24 November saw the two veteran chasers not only hungry for storms, but also food, after Jetstar had apparently adopted austere Aeroflot catering practices with not a bite to eat aboard Alan Joyce's model for Australian aviation.  As they neared Darwin, almost on cue, a monster approached Darwin from the east and their inbound flight was diverted to a different path to the Top End capital's airport, while boiling sparking clouds covered the sky over the Northern Territory capital.

Day 2 looked as it offered slim pickings, but on dusk a costal storm cell grew rapidly and teased onlookers as it crossed Fannie Bay.  It was all vertiginous pomp and gust front presaging its passage to the maritime west and north.  In hue it was a mix of pinks, oranges and blues, with smudges of grey and white.  A short lived beast, its bluster and presence whetted the appetites of storm entusiasts lucky enough to watch its passage.  As it disappeared into the dripping wet night, dragon flies danced in delight, while at low tide, mangroves took a breath.  The chasers returned to their 7th floor apartment, cranked up the airconditioning and waited for early morning sparkage in the darkness that they knew was common in the tropical north.

Saturday saw Herbert twiddling the AM car radio dial listening for zaps so we could hunt down an elusive growing storm hidden among the comings and goings of mounds of confusing cumulus.  Eventually it emerged, expanding puffing convection, slowly wending its way across the flat savannah towards Mango farm and Fogg dam.  It provided ephemeral vistas of blues overhead, deep and vivid with curved striations occasionally punctuated by random filaments of electricity that touched earth like a pole held by a blind man feeling his way through the dark.   Arriving, it bought both cool wind and rain as the chasers dashed ahead satisfied with their catch.

Sunday's soup of humidity served up a gruel of weather visiting heat stroke on one of the chasers, who found the skies offered nothing in the form of relief to the low profile of clouds and drippingly high dew points.  Meanwhile, the atomsphere stored up and saved heat and latent energy for another rainy day.

As the following evening approached, with the air again a giant sauna, a failing shower threw warm spots of rain, while we peered at a far away storm more shape than substance, that later provided a light show as the day departed to the west.

Finally on our last day we counted four storms, the first an alarm ringer that shook us from our beds leading to a balcony chase in pyjamas.  Then before morning tea could be had, the view from the wharf gave us almost 180 degrees of a heavy thundery shower giving back evapouration and condensation to the sea from whence they had come.  Two hours later, outback edge country 100 kms to the south held a large thumping collection of wind, rain and lightning that blotted out the sky.  After its best work had been done, the third storm of the day became brilliantly lit by the sun, rendering an indigo shade reminding us where it had been and what it had done,   As our holiday closed, another storm lurked somehwere behind columns of tropical moisture held aloft.  Passing through a veil of rain, we saw it for the first time, rolling along and through the landscape accompanied by low rumbles, another forboding mass shouldering its way westward to an inevitable hydrological destiny.

Another great week in the tropical Top End had unflolded providing us with a stark contrast to our temperate lives in our everyday elsewhere.

Ripped off by the floss?

I want write about the process of working out whether I've been ripped off by those who sell dental floss.  Recent purchases of dental floss that I've made seem to have run out quicker than earlier purchases of this item.  Currently I am using Oral B tape, which ostensibly extends for 25 metres.  I am not using dental floss more frequently so it should be lasting as long.

Time seems to go faster as you get older, so maybe this quickening up of using dental floss is based on distorted perceptions and is just apparent and not real.

I could keep all the used bits of floss and painstakingly concatenate and measure them up.  On reflection this would seem as impossible as putting together pieces of paper that have been through a shredder.

There is only one way to resolve this - to unravel the floss and assess it against a standard and see if it measures up.  So I plan to ask a friend to accompany me to Bruce, lay out the thin white ribbon and see if the measurement on the packaging lies or whether indeed it really lies from one end to the other of the AIS 25 metre pool.

Nanny stateism

There is an interesting nascent debate going on about whether the government is too involved in people's lives, the nanny state.  The main complaint is that the government passes and then enforces too many laws.  This happens in the same environment where many in society complain about the government not doing enough to help solve people's problems.  A recent example that comes to mind is the disappearance of a guy in the South Australian outback, with family and relatives complaining that the police didn't do enough to locate the missing man - that is this in an example where there is an expectation that the government should solve people's problems.  Of course the media are involved here.  They clamour for a leaner government, which will then be unable to be as involved in people's lives as it would if it, the government, was more resourced.  The media also clamours for government and its resources to solve the myriad of complex problems they catalogue, like this unsual example of the guy disappearing in the South Australian outback.

Today I was listening to a program on guns and gun control in Australia.  There was a 'beautiful', if that's the right word, example of how the government should be involved in people's lives.  The gun lobby urge for easier access to firearms (that is, a lessening of nanny stateism) while relying on police to be responsible for intervening when guns fall into the right hands.  As I say, this 'elegantly' sums up the idea of government taking a preventative stance to minimize of problem (guns), versus some in the community seeing government's role being to be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, in this case to enforce the laws about gun use.

Post holidays challenges at the Men's refuge

Came back from two weeks away on holidays to find a series of small things wrong, domestically.  Australian Post who were meant to have held my mail, can't find the mail they held, having no idea where it is, where to start looking for it, or who to ask where it might be.  I want to get the $22 back from them that I paid them to hold the mail, but I'm more concerned about the new credit card that is probably among the held mail.  I guess all of the letters they held for me and ultimately have lost, could  end up at the dead letter office.

Also my set top box, aged VCR and timer for my central heating were not working when I arrived home after a fortnight away.  Another power plug was playing up & all this made me think there had been a power surge, which I mused might have been due to all the solar panels feeding in too much power to the grid or just the coal generated power protesting against the carbon tax.  After two days of set top box and VCR on the blink, I rushed out and purchased a new set top box, DVD, VCR combo and a surge protector for $380.  When I brought it home, the apparently dead set top box and VCR miraculously had come back to life, meaning I'd wasted $300 on the new stuff from the Good Guys.  Knowing the Good Guys were probably good guys, I asked if I could bring back the DVD VCR set top box combo and get a credit.  "Maybe" was their answer - they need to inspect the pristine new equipment and see if is still sufficiently pristine.

Today, on a nearly completely unrelated topic, I saw a church in the Canberra suburb of O'Connor with solar panels on the roof in the shape of a crucifix.  The power of the Lord, I thought to myself.  Maybe Julia needs to pray at this place for a lift in the polls,while I could try and enlist support from a higher force to stop the surges and bring back my mail from the dead letter office or whereever held mail gets held up.

Storms and skyscapes: 2003 - 2009

My best storm and weather photos taken during 2003 - 2009

Personal Queanbeyan recollections

I once watched a documentary film in which a harridan wistfully recalled being told by her mother never to go out with/marry anyone from the end of a railway line, because apparently only dodgy people settled at the end of a railway line.  This woman lived in Cunnamulla, the penultimate stop on a line that terminates in Eulo.  Many people from Canberra scoff at Queanbeyan, but it is the second last stop on a railway line that ends in Canberra, so it can’t be all that bad.

It’s a town, 90% of the time, I enter via a side/back route skirting Oakes Estate and then proceed past the Sunrise motel, subsequently diverting left down another  street to sidestep the centre of town as I head towards “Little Canberra”, aka Bungendore.

I was once registered on the electoral roll in Queanbeyan to help make my vote count more in a marginal seat – but the AEC were onto me, and removed me from the roll, and so doing, I was cast back into the then self government forsaken ACT.

Once I went to see the premiere of a musical in Queanbeyan.  It was also its last performance, but that had nothing to do with its intrinsic worth.  The premiere was ‘savaged’ by a Canberra Times critic, who, to this day, I believe, must have been certifiably deaf.  I also saw Todd McKinney perform his one man cabaret in Queanbeyan – this was post Boy from Oz and pre Dancing with the Stars.  Even back then and even for a show business person, McKinney seemed unusually ‘full of himself’.

Another time, I went on a sort of date (at least I thought it was) to a trivia night (you’re right, what sort of person could think they were going on a date to a trivia night).  Anyway, the woman who invited me, also invited another person, also bearing the surname ‘King’.  This King wore track suit pants (let’s not eschew stereotypes; this was pure Queanbeyan but he was from there).  Apparently they weren’t going out at that stage, but after this night of trivia, they ‘hooked up’ (as they call it in Queanbeyan), and subsequently married.  Whether my presence during the evening had any catalytic effect on bringing them together I don’t know.  However, being present at the start of a relationship is sometimes a bright counterpoint to a work life dominated by the casting asunder of those previously ‘hooked up’.

Avoiding disasters

I seem to have a knack at avoiding disasters associated with holidays.  Whether it's staying at home, when I was meant to be away on holidays, or coming home early from holidays, or at the last minute, deciding to go on holidays, I can think of four instances of missing out on calamaties, associated with last minute vacation change of plans.  Back in 1983, I had a change of mind and left Anglesea early on the morning of the Ash Wednesday bushfires, returning to my place of residence in Melbourne.  That night Anglesea burned, along with half the Great Ocean Road.  Twenty years later, I made a late decision and left Canberra and my Duffy abode (ironically) to go storm chasing, thus missing the Canberra firestorm which scorched parts of the ACT, including my suburb.  Then in 2009, there was the near miss with the marsupial incursion, when sickness meant a cancelled holiday in tornado alley.  However, this a prevented a five week possum home invasion and the mess that would have brought.  But I think Friday just gone is my finest side step of being a witness to tragedy.  No time available to be taken off work meant I wasn't on a plane with friends, to Tokyo, for a three week vacation, that was due to start last Thursday.  After this demonstration of tidal power trumping nuclear power, my friends are heading home two weeks early, shaken, but safe.

A safe place?

Another person was found not guilty of murder in Canberra today, this time a double slaying, which now makes it umpteen (a number greater than ten) who have been found not guilty of murder since a couple of lovers were convicted of the charge, back in 1998, in a crime that was very much de rigeur love triangle gone wrong.  That pair must nearly be out of gaol now, probably cursing their bad luck that somehow they didn't get off when they had their Court hearing.  The most famous case of non conviction was young Mr Porritt (who sounds like a time travelling refugee from a Dickens novel but isn't), who having stabbed his mother 57 times, had the charge downgraded from murder to manslaughter.

We have road signs in Canberra warning of dangerous roads that say 12 people killed along here since 1975, and factories (of which we don't have many), often have signs which detail the number of days since the last industrial accident.  I think in Canberra we should have a sign on our outskirts, just underneath 'Twin city with Nara, Japan', that says 'Canberra - no murders since 1998'.

Paradoxically though, while no murders (with someone convicted of said crime) have taken place over this 13 year period, many people have been killed by others, so the safety of the community isn't quite guaranteed.  But in some way the claim that there have been no murders since 1998 befits the ACT's status as the home of politicians and their art of spinning the facts - as I say, there most definitely has been a range of grisly and gruesome slayings, just an absence in the scorer's column of convicted murderer's.  In terms of homicide and its pre-eminent role in crime waves, it's been so long since a good old fashioned murder, we wouldn't know a crime wave if one came gift wrapped with blue and white check police ribbon.

It has to be said there was a case involving an unfortunate girl who was the victim of foul play and somehow found herself dead in Lake Burley Griffen.  It looked like a murder and no one has yet been charged with the alleged crime.  Even if they did find someone to 'pin it on', it's likely that there would be some bizarre explanation for how she expired in the lake.  After watching Jeremy Wade's program on ABC 2 about freshwater monster fish that are waiting to kill people in our inland waterways, the poor woman's demise seems a likely candidate for piscatorial bludgeoning.

No wonder the good citizenry of Canberra love their Friday and Saturday night crime on the ABC, with its 'Wire in the Blood' and 'Midsumer Murders' - no home grown variety, so they lap it up on the idiot box.  To adapt a phrase out of the Lerner and Lowe's songbook, "Homicide hardly happens here".

I have heard on the underworld grapevine that it is so easy to get off a murder charge in Canberra that hitmen offer discounts.  Of course the upshot of all these 'not guilty' convictions is that some of the Canberra populace, inclined to paranoia, think maybe they aren't as safe as they should be in the ACT, an apparent 'killers'; idyll'.  Thus people are going to bed with anything dangerous they can lay their hands on to protect themselves with, from kitchen knives to large dogs.

There may be an upside to our apparent recently untarnished record: we could mentor troubled cities throughout the world, where murder is a daily occurence - of course our lack of persons being 'rubbed out' may be cold comfort to those on mean streets of cities in 1st, 2nd and 3rd world countries.  We could however, follow in the footsteps of what has been done with Education and Schools, and develop a 'My City Murder rate web site' so we could proudly boast of our wonderful record, and this benchmark might serve as an inspiration to other places so they might strive to better their own sorry murder stats.

Despite all this, things may be about to change; a lot of people have their fingers crossed that an apparent alleged drug execution style slaying, in a fashionable inner south suburb of Canberra, may break the 13 year convicted murder drought.

rejected Facebook status updates

Found  a stash of unwanted coathangers today

A solitary pea in the bottom of a plughole is strangely poignant

Overheard going up Mt Ainslie today: Do you reckon Bateman's Bay is better than Torquay?

Passed two groups of two lady walkers and both were talking about spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel

The black dog mega coincidence -a black labrador comes to the fences as a friend texts me while I'm on the other side of the fence, about the 'black dog'

Thinking I should prioritize purchase of a pair of shoelaces tomorrow

My herb garden has been devestated by some creature

weird things on my bucket list - to shear a sheep

commented favourably on local MLA, Vicky Dunne's groceries this evening