Books vs new bike shoes

I never buy cycling magazines. Except for the one that I bought last week, because I had nothing to read at lunch, and I had already read all four daily papers that are common in these here parts, and I can't bear the thought of sitting in a Japanese restaurant staring at the soy sauce label whilst one waits for ones sushi to arrive.

In one way, it was $10 well spent, because I found out that two shoe makers have introduced models that are wider than normal. I put a big corner fold-over on that page, because I have one foot that is an "E" width and the other is "EE". They are not long, but they are as wide as those bread paddle things that bakers use to plonk bread into ovens. In other words, I have fat feet. I can only wear two types of running shoe - New Balance and Brooks, because they are the only two to make a fat foot shoe. I can only wear two brands of ski boot, as only two make an extra wide toe box, and even then I had to get my current pair melted and stretched in order to stop my toes from going numb and falling off in the snow.

Buying nice, black leather work shoes is a chore that I will not go into, as it would bore both of us to death.

So imagine my delight when I found that Shimano and some other mob that I have never heard of have fat shoes. I took that information on board, and today visited my bike shop to see if they had any available.

The very nice shop bloke showed me the Shimano range, which started at about $169 and then went up and up and up to about triple that. I explained that I didn't care whether I got a road shoe with a stiff sole or not, and I didn't want ratchets instead of velcro to tighten the straps - first and foremost, I wanted a fat shoe, and I could worry about the other features after that.

As I stood there checking out the $169 shoes, he did something on his PC and came back with the bad news.

"Shimano have fat shoes in stock, but they only make fat shoes in two models - the 2nd most expensive, and the most expensive".

I had a choice of a $340 shoe or a $400 shoe.

I was not mentally prepared for that, so I thanked him and left. If he had offered me a $250 shoe, I probably would have bought it.

Bugger.

So I drowned my sorrows by going on a book buying spree at the bookshop across the road. I have about 20 books on an Amazon wish list, and I have been inching towards buying the lot as a late Christmas present to me. I have them on a wish list as I doubted that most of them would ever appear in a book shop here in Sydney. Good books have a bad habit of never making it to Australia.

So, what is in these two bags of goodies?



I gave up many years ago trying to count how many books I own. I now measure them by the foot. I just measured the contents of these two bags - they contain nearly a foot of books.

And no, I am not going to weigh them. They are not icecream.



I started reading "It's your time you're wasting" this afternoon, and Frank Chalk would probably be delighted to know that I am already 46 pages into it. In that time, I have done some gardening, made dinner, done some laundry and the washing up, compiled a shopping list, done some monkey-watching and even blogged a bit. In all, I reckon I had 15 free minutes to read those 46 pages. If you are reading this Frank, I managed to read that much that quickly because I am 40, and went to a very strict and very good school. Discipline was tight and tough, and the teachers were not afraid to wield the cane. If I had the choice between not being caned and finishing school as a loser, or being caned occasionally and finishing near the top of the state in a few subjects, then I'll take a few welts on the bum from time to time.

This is an excellent book. Paul and Tony, if you are reading this, get yourself a copy (both are ex-teaching friends of mine). Anita, who is still teaching, will probably laugh her head of at it.



Since I stacked the largest books at the bottom of the pile, "Wasting Police Time" will be next. I've always enjoyed his blog, so the book should be good. The only book similar to these that I could not get was "Blood, sweat and tea", and it is still on my Amazon wish list. When I buy that box of books from the US, "Blood" will be in it.

Frankly, I was amazed to find these two books in a Sydney book shop. I doubted they would ever make it out here. What's going on that Australians want to buy books buy English bloggers?



Had to buy this one - I love Robert Harris's books. This is third on my list.



I read about this one in The Spectator. It's by James Delingpole, and I enjoy reading his columns in the speccie. I hope that "Coward on the beach" is up to scratch. Again, I cannot explain why this book found space on an Australian bookshelf, but I'm glad it did.



I've read reviews about "Spitfire: portrait of a legend" in both the Spectator and The Economist, and just had to buy it as soon as I saw it sitting there on the "new releases" table.



I picked this up in another bookshop before Christmas, flicked through it and put it back as if I bought this book, I would have bought 10 more, and I didn't want to be carting them home in my backpack. So I jumped at the opportunity today to buy it.



Bjorn Lomburg - do you realise how hard it is to find his books? The woman serving me almost picked this up with tongs, and I am sure she wanted to hold her nose at the same time. Trendy book sellers seem to hate handling his stuff, but since it sells, I guess they have no choice.



I read some reviews of "The day of battle" that were quite good. I was hoping that they'd also have a copy of the new book about the defeat of Japan - can't remember what's it's called. Ah well, one fat book on WWII will have to do.



This one caught my eye - "Band of Brigands", about the first men in tanks. I like books that have an engineering/mechanical component to them, and the story of how the tanks were actually built and deployed, and tactics developed, is one that grabbed me.



And that was it. I doubt I could have carried anymore.

Oh, and they cost more than the $340 Shimano shoes. I can put up with my slightly cramped current bike shoes for a few more months - or at least the time it takes me to read through this lot.

I have also issued strict instructions to J that this unread pile is to remain an unread pile in a prominent position where I can easily find it and access it. I don't want the books filed away in one of the bookcases where I'll never find it again - or where I'll find it next time we move and go, "Why have I never read this book?"

Death to the NUS

STUDENT union membership has plummeted by up to 95 per cent since the Howard government made it voluntary.

Oh hooray.

"Mr McFarland said that at Wollongong University, the student newspaper was now run entirely by volunteers, the second-hand book shop had closed and a child-care subsidy provided had been removed."

I never could figure out why you had to pay people to produce a student rag that was published once a month, why it's not possible to run a second hand book shop at a profit when there is an ongoing demand for pre-loved books, and why students should subsidise child care when there are already government subsidies in place.

At the University of Newcastle, student-association run entities had cut staff numbers by 65 per cent, the events budget had been slashed, there was no more free Centrelink and tax advice and a computer lab has been closed.

Again, I can't see why a student association needs to pay for staff. These positions should be staffed by people putting in their own time - like charity work. A computer lab might have been necessary when I was at Uni back in the late 1980's, but everyone has a laptop these days, so why is a lab required? It's a hangover from the days of the PC XT, and should have died a decade ago.

As for tax advice, pay a flipping tax advisor for Pete's sake! It doesn't cost that much to go to H&R Block for some basic advice. And if you can't figure out how to get Centrelink payments, then I really don't think you have the smarts to be at Uni!

At the University of Western Sydney, Mr McFarland said funding for clubs and societies had been reduced by at least 50 per cent, a shuttle bus service had been closed and most of the staff positions were gone.

Funding for clubs and societies was always a beer drinking subsidy when I was at Uni. The poor old mature age and overseas students got stung by a compulsory Union fee, and all that money was used to subsidise drinking clubs for the full time students like myself. It was nice while it lasted, but I don't see club subsidies as being a good argument for grabbing money from every student via a compulsory levy. I'm not sure what they did with the shuttle bus, but I'm not sure why a bus is required when there has never been any barriers to students getting off their arses and onto a bike.

I am sad that student unions are not 100% dead. 95% just isn't good enough. Someone needs to squash these remaining pockets of stupidity like a bug.

Cars, cars, cars

With car sales topping the million mark last year, it is no surprise that our car importing facilities (ie, wharves) are running flat out. Here's another car carrier next to the ANZAC Bridge - I am pretty sure it was leaving. I only stopped for a minute to take photos, and there were some guys down the bow casting off lines. I was hoping to see the tugs pull it out, but I didn't have time to hang around all morning. I love watching stuff like this - people actually doing things.



Other people were hard at work (I presume) loading cars onto car carrying trucks and hauling them away. There is a road that goes under the bridge that I am standing on, and a few trucks roared down it as I stood there. Yesterday, I got a photo that showed some Hummers in the front row - new deliveries now mean that they are a few rows back. The cars, they just keep coming in.



So many are coming in that they are being parked in storage areas around the wharf that I have never noticed being in use before. These were parked in an area kind of behind the wheat silos that you see as you approach the ANZAC Bridge.



And yet more were parked on a wharf across the harbour, and I have never noticed any over there before. Apologies for the lousy photo, but I had to use a lot of zoom, and it's hard to get a good photo when you are braced against a bridge railing that is vibrating with every passing bus.



Interesting to note that many of the vehicles coming in are commercial - light trucks (say 5 tonners), crew cab Hiluxes, delivery vans and that sort of thing. I wonder if it is the commercial vehicle sector that is driving sales.

labor voters, utes and boats

I blogged yesterday about the irony of the blue collar voters being amongst the worst environmental polluters. The urban fringe is solidly Labor, and it is the voters in those areas that have the longest commutes (thus higher fuel consumption), live in big houses in a hotter climate (thus use a lot more air conditioning) and tend to have 3 or more cars (because public transport is useless in low density areas).



They are also avid collectors of boy toys - V8 utes, speed boats, jet skis and the like.

Things are toned down a bit in the inner west - all the leftie bogans around here can afford is a ute with a straight-six and a crappy little boat.

How do I know this is a Labor household? The "Your rights at work" sticker on the lounge room window is a bit of a giveaway.

Flogger

What a stupid way to get around. Silly bastard had to push it to the top of the ANZAC Bridge.

I'm assuming he's a software designer.

Hummer hummer

I wrote yesterday about the amazing number of cars piled up on the docks, and the horrible shade of green of some models. You can see some of the green cars in this photo - they're hiding behind the double row of Hummers. Business must be good, for there were at least 30 Hummers lined up across the dock.



So much for belief in global warming being a universal given.

The cars that ate Sydney

Not often that you see two car carriers tied up next to the ANZAC Bridge. The wharf is just about packed to the rafters with cars. It's going to be a busy few days for some to clear this lot away.

One thing that I picked up is that there are some horrible shades of green coming onto the market this year, and I am not talking about Green policies. I am talking about some of the hatch backs parked down below. This is really the first view that you can have of what the public is being offered in 2008, and some of the colours are pretty off.



Check out the logo on the side of the ship - it's like a dolphin with a laser beam shooting stuff out of its nose. Maybe this thing doubles as a high-tech whaling ship on the way back. Why harpoon whales when you can blast them with a dolphin-mounted laser.

Wierd.

About bloody time

Snapped this lot taking down their Christmas decorations today. Not bad, given that it's the 9th of Jan.



Useless twats.

Breakfast of champions

I spent nearly $10 on a cycling mag this week and all that I have learned so far is that I should be eating baked beans on (wholemeal) toast for breakfast. It something to do with their low GI level and something else that I forget.

To hell with that.

I have been working for months on trying to replicate the omelet that I normally order at Circle, which is an excellent Balmain cafe. I like to bag Balmain, but there are some good things there. Like Circle. Interesting thing is that it is run by a bunch of churchy types. You can't eat there on a Sunday because the bloody Uniting Church or some other mob of God-botherers will be belting out hymns inside.

The omelet that I like is ham, tomato and goats cheese, and they throw in herbes fines for free. I have tried for months to produce something similar at home, and I'm finally getting something that I like.

First tip - only use two eggs. Three produces an omelet that is too thick and it doesn't cook quickly.

Second - use lots of butter, and get it hot. I don't eat this with toast, so I figure I might as well cook it in the butter that I would normally cook it in, plus what I would have put on the toast. Just bite the bullet and put lots in the pan.

Third, less is more. Don't try to stuff it full of ingredients. Be frugal.

Fourth, use fresh herbs. We grow quite a few in the back yard, and I throw in a good chunk of parsley and chives.



I normally use ash-rolled goats cheese, but I made the mistake last week of buying herb infused goats cheese. I thought that would stuff my creation, but it actually improved it. So my next tip is "shop with the Force".

I must have made about 30 omelets before they started to turn out the way I wanted them, so tip number six is to practice, practice, practice.

But what is the brown stuff in the bottom left hand corner? It's not ham, it's not cheese, it's not herbs and it is not tomato. What is it?

Truffles.

J gave me a big jar of truffles in brine for Christmas, so I have been throwing a stack into my omelet. My next tip is "Don't go out and buy truffles for your omelet". They add a certain amount of cachet, but I am not convinced that they make it any better.

But they sure beat the crap out of beans on toast.

Dont' see many of these around here

A couple of fellows, sitting on a fence watching the clowns ride by. Not a bad life I guess.

Three views of the city

Some mornings, the city looks quite spectacular way off there on the horizon. It looks so scrumtious and inviting, I almost want to go to work.



Out in Five Wog, it was drizzling a little bit, but the city was all blue sky. It was one of those interesting juxtapositions that you don't see that often, especially with the city silhoutted against the rising sun.



The same kind of view, but over the water. You really need to click on them and view these full sized to see what I am on about.

Meat heads

Fuck me, this has been a bad week for riding as far as close calls go. Every day has been a litany of idiot drivers opening doors without looking, cars deciding to pull out from a side street without giving way, wingnuts going around me without giving me much room and other cyclists trying to kill me in head on collisions.

I had a non-close encounter tonight with a bus full of meat heads. It was a Coaster bus that was on hire, and I suspect the inhabitants were on their way to the Casino. As they went past me as I rode around the back of Darling Harbour, one friendly character stuck his head out the window and told me to "Get off the fucking road", which was choice, given that I was riding in the bike lane and was not really "on the road". I certainly wasn't in the way of his busfull of drunks.

I caught up with the bus at the next set of lights and thought better of grabbing the bloke by the elbow (sticking out of the window) and giving it a good yank. He was gripping a packet of Winfields in one hand a VB stubbie in the other, and all his mates had mullets and stubbies and appeared to be dressed only in blue singlets. They all sounded drunk as skunks. They smelled like Labor voters.

Why did they smell like Labor voters?

Well I bet that they sure as fuck didn't vote for Howard at the last election, and they didn't strike me as the kind of wishy-washy fairyheads that vote Green. No, these were dyed in the wool, dinky-di, heartland blue collar Labor voters. And they hated cyclists.

Poor old Labor must be in a bit of an internal lather. Out west, you've got your blue collar bogans that want nothing less than a V8 ute to tow a ski boat with a V8 motor back to their 9 bedroom McMansion with a 50 inch plasma in every room. They are the kind of people that think that the SuperNats is great culture (as do I) and that polar bears make great throw rugs in the media room. They are about as committed to consuming less as an alcoholic is to drinking less.

Face it, if you are one generation away from poverty, why are you going to give up all the good things in life like air conditioning, overseas travel, V8's, plasma TV's and so on just because a bunch of sandal wearing wierd beards tell you to? It's all very well for someone that was born with a silver spoon up their arse to say "I will forgo these things" because they had them from the day they first broke wind. But it's not so easy for say a plumber that grew up one pay packet away from the poverty line and has finally made good. They'll be giving the whole global warming malarky two fingers and I say good luck to them.

I reckon the attitude to bikes says it all. Why would anyone ride a bike when they could afford to drive a ute with a six litre donk under the hood? You'd have to be mad, gay or feral (to their way of thinking), and therefor deserve to be run over by a bus.

I'm not sure how the lefties that invaded the party since the 1970's are going to be reconciled to the bogans out in the heartland.

I'll just stay out of the way of buses in future.

Very dense icecream

I have a new contender to add to the ranks of good icecream - a product called Connoussuer (bugger, will have to go to the freezer to check how it is spelt again). I bought a 1 litre tub the other night and found that it weighs 950gm, which makes it the densest of all the icecreams and gellatos that I have tried to date. Got no idea what it cost though - just grabbed it off the shelf in the freezer and brought it home. I think I will continue to buy it. If I can work out how to spell it.

Someone needs to scrub our roads

Had a filthy job to do over the weekend - clean the bike chain. It's been months since I wheeled out Bhopal (my chain degreasing kit) and gave the thing a scrub. Ugh. The chain was 4 parts gunk, 3 parts metal. It looked like I had been doing some off road work, when the furthest off the tarmac the bike goes is 10 feet across the lawn when I wheel it in the back gate to its nightly resting place.

All the gunk has come off our roads and bike paths. Dirt, grit, ground up stuff, dog shit - you name it. Why don't we employ people to go out each morning and sweep the bike paths? Surely there are enough stinking hippies sitting at home on medical disability benefits that could be frogmarched out the door at 6am for an hours work with the broom? It's not work for the dole - it's work for proles.

Commuting by bike has gone down the crapper so far this year - thousands of people seem to have made a new years resolution to get fit/lose weight/produce less CO2 and they've pulled the bike out of the shed, dusted off the cobwebs and hit the road. That's all very nice and whale friendly, but all these new fuckers are getting in my way. I nearly had a head on collision last night with one sandal wearing lentil eater and have had to brake whilst going uphill to stop myself from running up the date of a hairy legged, cheese avoiding vegan.

I wish all these people would do something useful like fuck off to Antarctica and strap themselves to a harpoon or something. Or get back into their cars.

I just need to be patient. By February, they'll all be driving again. Only the mental manage to stick to commuting by bike over the long term.

Nice clean car

As much as I like driving a clean car, I am not a fan of acutally doing the cleaning. Things weren't so bad a few years ago; I lived around the corner from a car wash and it cost me $9 once a month to run the car through it. I occasionally stuck $2 in the vaccuum cleaner thingy and gave the inside a once over as well.

But I never resorted to a pine scented dangly thing on the rear view mirror. See Repo Man.

After our recent country sojourn, it was time the Disco got a bath. After driving 2500 km through about a billion bugs, and parking it under trees populated by galahs on laxatives, the car was a mess. It was a travelling collection of bug guts and bird crap, held together by paint.

Being New Years Day, I had to drive around for the better part of half an hour before finding a place that would give the car a once over. I eventually found a place on Parramatta Road, and settled in for an hour whilst little brown people went to work in the hot sun.

I was joined in the waiting room by a bloke that drives a hire car for a living. I found out a few interesting things from him.

One it that it only costs $9000 a year for a hire car plate, and many CEO's are now getting them for their cars as it allows them to use the transit lanes in peak hour.

Another is that the best place out this way to get a car wash is a the taxi petrol station on Victoria Rd in Rozelle. The thing is that it only operates from 8pm to 5am, but the plus is that my favourite kebab man operates from that site, so next time I want a kebab, I will stop in for a cheap car clean.

Bugger. We talked about lots of other interesting things during our hour of waiting, but they are the only two that spring to mind right now. I will have to come back later when I remember more pearls of hire car wisdom.

One thing that did stick in my memory is that the price of a good car clean is half the price in Burwood as it is in Mosman (where I used to get the car cleaned) and they do a better job in Burwood. Pity they don't do coffee though.

Venezuala: Think British Leyland

After reading much blather about the mess that Hugo is making of Venezuela, it suddenly hit me today: his Bolivarian Revolution is going to turn the private sector into a big fat series of British Leylands (as in the company, not the cars).

Todays yoof who worship Chavez of course have no memory of the disaster that was BL. I have driven or sat in a number of their products - rusting, unreliable Triumphs (Stags and Dolomites); leaky Rover SD1's that leaked oil through the roof and oil through the sump and went nowhere as a result; P76's with bits falling off them and of course the truly awful TR7.

He's compounding it by throwing Army officers into management positions. Given that most South American militaries make Colonel Blimp look efficient and level headed, the combination of British Leyland-style socialism and military ineptitude will probably reduce the country to a Zimbabwe type economy in about 5 years time.

I suggest that anyone that thinks that Hugo Chavez is a great guy should be forced to drive an early 1970's XJ-6 for a month.

They'll be dead of frustration or an electrical short within a fortnight.

Fond memories

I loved Spinal Tap when I first saw it. Many years ago.

I wonder if I would enjoy it as much if I saw it again now. It would be like watching an old Terence Hill and Bud Spencer movie like They Call Me Trinity. Lots of fun as a kid, maybe not so good 35 years later. Age is not kind to many films.

Takeaway coffee should be outlawed

I have been reading Graveyard Barista again and come to the conclusion that take away coffee in cardboard cups is a greater threat to civilisation than an Iranian bomb.

Face it, if the mad beard-faces develop a working bomb and light up a bit of the middle east, Iran is going to be glowing glass from the mountains to the seas. If a bunch of people that like to head butt a beach towel five times a day get recycled into pyrex, I am not going to be that bothered. Even if I have to take a lead coated umbrella with me everytime I go outside for a few years.

But take away coffee - that is a resident evil that must be stamped out. I hate sitting at my desk with a too-hot coffee in a too-thin cardboard cup next to my keyboard, with the lid sitting nearby leaking brownish milk froth onto the desktop. Probably with a pop stick perched on top after it has swizzled in a bit of sugar. To me, it represents the intrusion of work into a relaxing activity. When I work, I work. I don't tend to sit around and gossip in the office - I have work to do, and so do other people. If I want to relax and shoot the breeze, I go down to the nearest cafe, order a coffee and sit there and read the paper or gossip. Coffee is something to be relaxed over, not something to be worked over. I refuse to drink the filtered shit that we get in meeting rooms because (a) it tastes like crap and (b) it should imbibed in a casual, non-work atmosphere. If I want to drink beer, I go to the pub or a BBQ of the cricket. I don't sit at my desk drinking beer. It's inappropriate, and so is drinking coffee at the desk.

The unfortunate side effect would be that my nice, relaxed cafe would be over run with a million anxious coffee drinkers, all trying to throw a coffee down their throats before rushing back to the office for another important meeting. So maybe I'll have to water down my concept of abolishing take away coffee.

How hard is it to get an iced coffee around here?

This is Yass.

Ok, it is not Yass. It is not even the outskirts of Yass. It is the huge truck stop where the Hume Highway bypasses Yass. Yass is some kilometres down a horrible access road out the back somewhere. This is as close as I like to get to Yass, and I'd prefer it if the Yassarians (Yasserites?) didn't get as close to me as they sometimes get.



We usually stop here because it is the last outpost of drinkable coffee before you hit Wagga. And Wagga is about two hours from here, and the last drinkable coffee is an hour back up the road at Goulburn. I just can't do the three hours from Goulburn to Wagga without pulling in here for a leak and a top-up.

The other good thing about stopping here is that you are encouraged to do lots of arm exercises to ward of deep vein thrombosis. The fly population is such that the trip from the car to the front door is a blur of maniacally waving arms and expletives about "These fucking flies". The locals don't seem to notice, but then many of the locals are the sort that wander around with their mouth open all the time. Spare us from mouth breathers. Then again, they probably suck in a reasonable percentage of the fly population, so I shouldn't be too hard on them.

Ray Kroc (the guy that started McDonalds) would have a fit if he entered this store. I read that he was a maniac when it came to cleanliness, and the dead flies lining the windows, and the crap all over the floor of the toilets would have had him running around disemboweling store managers. As he should. If I am going to eat a packet of fries, I don't want to do it next to a pile of flies - dead or alive.

Eating outside this store is an exercise in recreating Gallipoli. You remove your Quarter Pounder from the packet, madly shoo away 1000 flies and then rapidly take a bite in the hope that you don't scoop up a few fat, slow movers in the process. Getting through a Quarter Pounder without inhaling as many flies as you have fingers is no mean feat.

And if you always wondered why they put lids on the drinks, its to stop them being used as insect swimming pools at places like this.

But I don't mind any of those things. I don't even mind the fat bogans in the their late 1980's Commodores with the peeling paint and the sagging doors and the bonnet scoop and the greasy hair. I don't mind the staring retards that seem to be occupying most of the seats. I don't mind the reeking baby change room.

But I do mind the lack of a proper iced coffee. It shits me to tears. I have written about this before, but if I go to Gloria Jeans (of which there is one in Wagga) and order an Iced Latte, they will give me a big plastic cup that contains one or more shots of proper coffee, milk and ice. They usually ask me if I want whipped cream on top, and after restraining myself from hurling them through the plate glass window out the front, I politely decline. The Gloria Jeans people know how to make a passable iced coffee - but never ask for an iced coffee. That is made up with pre-mixed powdery shit that tastes vaguely of chocolate rather than coffee. And its sweetened to death. I can't bear any form of sweetness in my iced coffee. It has to be strong and punchy - the coffee that real men drink when its 42 in the shade.

As an aside, iced coffee consumption is pretty pathetic in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. In the NT, it appears to be the beverage most consumed after beer. In WA and SA, annual consumption is enormous. I attended an AGSM conference years ago and had a discussion with a marketing manager from a Qld milk outfit. She told me that their market research showed that WA and SA between them drank 4 times more iced coffee than the entire eastern states put together. That's not per-head; that's total volume. Given that the east has about 5 times more people than WA and SA between them, the sandgropers are drinking 20 times more iced coffee than the cockroaches and mexicans. I think it has a lot to do with the weather, and the fact that iced coffee in WA is both drinkable and as available as Coke. Brownes and Masters (the two market leaders in iced coffee) have done an amazing job in building up their distribution outlets.

But back to Yass.

Every McCafe that I have been into refuses to make me a proper iced coffee (or iced latte to use Gloria Jeans parlance). They insist on selling me pre-mixed snot which is made with coffee syrup that is apparantly caffeine free. I can't stand the stuff. I ordered it once at the McCafe next to RPA hospital, took a sip, frowned, took another sip and put $5 worth of beverage down on the counter and walked out. Since my philosophy is to try most things twice (in case you got a bad run the first time), I gave it another go somewhere else.

Same result.

Working to the principle that the definition of insanity is to continue doing the same thing and expecting a different result, I gave up buying extortinately priced dog piss from McCafes.

I did however start to ask them to make me an iced latte. I explained how Gloria Jeans did it, in the hope that if they could see that someone else could do it, then they would do it too.

No dice.

I then skipped the Gloria Jeans angle and just asked for a cup with ice, milk and a shot of coffee.

No dice. That combination is not in the operations manual.

I then gave up. No use flogging a dead horse.

But I am going to try a sneaky angle next. Last week, I got into the habit of going into the Gloria Jeans in Wagga and ordering an iced latte for me and a bottle of milk for Monkey (I provided the milk bottle). They charged me $4.50 for my milk, ice and coffee and 45 cents for the same amount of milk for Monkey. Boy, ice must be expensive in Wagga. But I will not complain - I was just grateful that they'd fill up my Monkey pacifier for the hour long trip back to Narrandera.

That got me thinking - can I try a similar stunt at a McCafe? Monkey loves eating ice blocks, so I will hand over his bottle and ask for them to fill it with milk, and a cup with some ice to "soothe his fever". No one can resist helping a sick kid. Then I'll order me a single shot of coffee.

Then I'll mix all three together in front of them and run out of the store before they lynch me.

Wish me luck.

Potential for circle work

A lot of work is being done on a nasty single lane stretch of the Hume somewhere south of Yass. A new section of road has been carved out of the hills and graded and I presume it is approaching the time of the holy laying of the asphalt.



As I drove past miles of wide, pristine gravel roads, I wondered whether the odd ute driver feels the need to put left hand down from time to time, cross the verge and pull a few donuts on the gravel. If the Disco were capable of doing handbrake turns without flipping over, I'd probably give it a go myself.

How often to grader drivers get to work and find that they have to re-grade yesterdays work after the local bogans have had a night going sideways?

Mr & Mrs Lawnmower

Nasty way to keep the grass down. Mrs Grumpy Goat head butted the fence if anyone got too close.

Kywong

Kywong. Ever heard of it? Neither had I. I can't even find it on the map. I know it exists because this is the Kywong wheat bin (or whatever they call these things in NSW). It's closed now - looks like it shut down years ago. There's no road into the place anymore, and the weighbridge has departed for somewhere else. Further on in this blog, you can see photos of the heavily used rail line that leads to this bin.



I worked at a number of wheat bins back in the latter half of the 1980's. Helped pay my way through Uni. I did a short exam, which showed that I could add up, and started work straight after my last Uni exam. As a casual staffer, I always ended up at least 300km from anywhere. Air conditioning was unknown back then, most of the permanent staff were alcoholics and the accommodation was a demountable with chicken wire frame beds and a microwave. None of them had a TV, as none of them had TV reception. I generally had the place to myself, and chose to sleep in a swag plonked on the bed - I wasn't going anywhere near the mattress if I could help it.

I did manage to blow up a microwave once. I was having a few end of work beers (something to wash the wheat dust out of my mouth) when I got the munchies. Being young and stupid (and drunk), I decided to boil some eggs in the microwave.

30 seconds later, there was an almighty bang and the door flew off the microwave and the interior of the demountable was coated in scrambled egg (including bits of egg shell).

The boss didn't turn up until morning, and by then I had the egg cleaned off the ceiling, the door back on the microwave (but it refused to latch) and the bits of shell un-embedded from the far wall. However, in my month there, the smell of scrambled eggs refused to go away.

Duck

Anyone wondering about rainfall west of the Blue Mountains should take a look at my patented Duck Indicator Index, which I invented 5 minutes ago.



I snapped this happy fellow at the Narrandera swimming pool. No, that is not the swimming pool behind the duck, and the ducks do not appear to make regular appearances in the swimming pool. The water behind the duck is part of Lake Talbot, and the swimming pool is right on the shoreline.

There were quite a few ducks lounging around with this duck, and I noticed during my travels that every dam had ducks on it - because almost every dam out there was full or overflowing. Some roadside verges were no longer passable because they had turned into swamps.

I have no idea what duck numbers were like before the drought, but the presence of ducks on every body of water must mean that there are a reasonable number around, and there is plenty of water for them now. Although I don't know what the inland lakes are looking like - I only saw farm dams.

I can only surmise that duck numbers are down, since I rarely saw more than 10 ducks on a small dam. Many years ago, I jumped a fence and snuck up on a dam with my shot gun and when I poked my head over the dam wall, the air turned brown with ducks. It was like a locust plague taking flight. I am sure the dam level dropped about six inches when the water displaced by all those ducks slopped back into place.

Being useless with a shotgun, I failed to get even one.

But the sky is not going to turn dark with ducks this year. They will not be blotting out the sun. Which is a pity, since I am partial to a bit of duck.

I hate tailgaters

I hate pricks that get so close to your tailend that their number plates disappear from view. By the time I pulled the camera out and snapped this photo, the driver had actually pulled back somewhat, but cameras make idiots seem to be further away than they actually are.



There we are, out in the country with the cruise control set on 100, and dingbat decides to attempt to connect their roo bar to my tow ball. The road is flat and straight and devoid of double white lines (see earlier post featuring GPS shot of the road in question) and the only things in view out the front are squashed foxes, dead roos and the odd galah eating spilled grain on the side of the road.

Mr Retard decides that instead of overtaking, he'll sit on my arse for 10 km or so. I reckoned that if I put my foot down and tried to loose him, he'd just speed up and get even closer, so I shook him off by disengaging the cruise control and slowing down.....and down.....and down until the fucking clownfish finally got the message and overtook me when I was doing about 70.

Turned out that the fuckwad was fiddling with his mobile phone - possibly trying to send a text - in an area where my phone gets no signal, even with a car kit. Just what I needed - a tailgating texter.

Morons like this seemed to abound over the Christmas break. Some appear to get right up your arse with the aim of making you go faster. Now if I was driving a Mini and a cement truck was tailgating me, I'd be speeding up. But I'm driving a tall, lumpen 4WD, and I don't give a shit if someone in a low slung boy racer with enormous front and rear spoilers and a number plate like XCCENTU8 gets too close to my tail. One nudge of my brakes and the road will be littered with fibreglass that used to be shaped as a spoiler. Hence my refusal to remove my towball, even when not in use.

The best way to lose them is to just slow down. If they want to go fast and wrap themselves around a power pole, you won't find me getting in their way. I'll just slow down to a grannie like pace that will force them to go around. Of course I always do that in the hope that a radar trap is just around the corner.

But screw them. Just because they want to go faster, doesn't mean I have to break the speed limit as well to satisfy their juvenile need to get to the next KFC 30 seconds faster. I wonder if I can still get the car registered if I have a rear facing flame thrower?

The great vanilla slice hunt continues

Once again, a previously unsampled purveyor of vanilla slice has been tested....and found wanting. This horrible little monster came from Gloria Jeans in Wagga (I think) and the photo shows how little of it I was able to stomach. A vanilla slice normally lasts only seconds in my hands, but this one ended up in the bin.



The poor excuse for passionfruit icing on the top was the first to go. I have found that some slices can be salvaged by peeling off the icing and discarding it and just eating the custard and pastry bits. If the vanilla sliceis half-OK, that's not a bad option.

But this particular slice was bad from top to bottom. It was bad to the bone. It was right up there in the top 5 most inedible vanilla slices that I have eaten. (I reckon I have thrown out only 5 in my entire life, this being the most recent one).

Still, it joins a proud list of other country vanilla slice disasters. I've always had this idea in the back of my mind that because of things like the CWA cookbook, country women are great pastry cooks - baking cakes for country fairs and all that sort of thing.

If that's the case, why have the two most memorably bad vanilla slice experiences been in Wagga and Gundagai?

This has put me in the mood to have a vanilla slice for breakfast. I can't think of anything more disgusting, but it could be just the trick to expunge the taste memory of the wagga experience from my tongue.

Grow your own railway sleepers

Somewhere on the track between Wagga and Narranderra, there are trees growing through a disused railway line. I reckon it is somewhere around here. I got a GPS reading, but the GPS is out in the car, and I cannot be arsed to go and look it up. It might be this:

Sturt Hwy @-34.998729, 146.790332



In case you think the above photo is an optical illusion, here is another view.



Not many trains are going to run along here, especially when some bastard has built a fence straight across the tracks.



Here was my initial attempt to photograph this at 100kmh - didn't come out too clearly. There is a grain silo just down the line, and it looks well abandoned. I was going to drive into the silo to have a closer look, but never got around to turning off and seeing it close up.

Something to annoy Jeremy Clarkson

I've watched plenty of rants on Top Gear over the years about caravans, and whilst I've always found them to be hilarious, they've never struck a chord with me. I can't remember the last time I was stuck behind a slow moving aluminium annoyance. I just can't. It's possible that it happens so rarely and for such brief moments that it's like trying to remember what shoes you wore on your third birthday.



That's probably because the caravaners are all up north, annoying the banana-benders, or they are spread over a much bigger continent, meaning we don't have caravan densities of 20 to the traffic jam.

Another alternative is that because most of Australia is so flat, caravans are rarely reduced to poxing along at 30kmh whilst the Morris Minor towing it has a heart attack. You rarely see a caravan being towed by a vehicle with less than 3 litres under the bonnet - most seem to be towed by a 4WD that could pull the Queen Mary out of a swamp. The biggest problem in Australia is probably being overtaken by mad caravan owners trying to see how much axle wobble they get at 100 miles an hour.

I have to say that if I had not taken this photo of this caravan, by now I would have forgotten that I had ever been stuck behind it for all of 2 dead foxes.

Gliding along

The area out west of Wagga is probably perfect for gliding - flat and hot and not many big things to run into when you land. Odd that I haven't seen more gliders being towed around like this.



Still, don't know why the lazy sod didn't fly to wherever he was going. Isn't that the point?

Boredom

You know you are getting bored when you start taking photos of the GPS showing a straight stretch of road in front...and all you can see out the windscreen is a straight stretch of road.



This is not the longest straight stretch that I have had to deal with. That would be the Nullabor, where it got boring enough to tilt the drivers seat back as far as it would go, put a brick on the accelerator and steer with my big toe.

For about an hour. Anything to break the tedium.

Harvest time

Most city dwellers probably presume that harvest time means oddly dressed peasants wandering the fields with a scythe over the shoulder, stacking stooks of hay and threshing wheat from husks.

Yeah. And milk comes from cardboard cartons.

As I wandered back and forth along the Sturt Highway, I failed to stop and take photos of the different methods used to stack hay bales. These is what a stack of jumbo bales looks like at 100kmh.



Then there is the farmer that prefers to use the big cylindrical bales, which are barely visible through my bug-gut splattered windscreen. Various other combinations were apparent, but none of them turned out in my "I'm not slowing down from 100 to take a photo of that" list of photos.



This to me is the symbol of harvest time - a line of semi's waiting at the weighbridge at a wheat bin.



So much for attractively piled stooks painted by impressionist artists.

Tiger Moth

Narranderra has a Tiger Moth in a cage. Pity. I'd prefer to see this thing stonking around the countryside, scarring the crap out of the sheep.



I like how the display includes a couple of bombs (down next to the wheel on the left). The kind of very un-PC thing that you still see in country museums.

Hideous chairs

Spotted this outside an antique shop last week. J was interested enough in it for me to put her in handcuffs and lead her away.



Our family had a set of these when we were kids. It was our BBQ furniture (although we had reproduction stuff cast in aluminium). I remember how grateful I was when some local scum hopped the fence and stole the lot. It was the most unbelievably uncomfortable table setting I have ever used. Dad gained my eternal gratitude by going to Bunnings and buying some comfortable plastic chairs as replacements. The plastic replacements are ugly, but so nice to sit in when one is relaxing by the pool with a beer or three.

These things should have been melted down during WWII and turned into Spitfires or tanks or something useful.

If Hicks was still in Guantanamo, I'd send him a set for his cell. Five years sitting on these would be torture beyond description.

What is this?

I am not auditioning for a spot on an antiques show. I was shown this the other day, and asked what it was.



It turns out that it is a wafer press - for making church wafers. Communion things. Something I have not seen in years.

Just call me slag

Spotted whilst refuelling at Yass - a classic case of what the Poms call a chav, but I prefer to call a slag.

I don't mind the odd discrete tattoo, but check out the two on the back of the neck. A love heart and some other indistinguishable symbol that did not come out well at 3x zoom. Probably says "slag" in Chinese.



A full blown view of our slag.



This kind of arm tatt is reasonably appropriate on meat head males, such as rugby league players and Samoan bouncers. But not on women.



Unless they are slags.

Let me say it one more time: Slag.

Oh, and did I mention the two kids in the back of the car? And the lack of an adult male with them? I guess the father (or fathers) are both in goal.

Narranderra water slide

Since it gets stinking hot in Narranderra, it's fitting that the place has a good pool complex. And it's cheap - taking the Monkey to the pool there cost me $2.50, and the icecreams are cold. I took Monkey to the Leichhardt pool last night, which is run by a bunch of grasping socialists, and it cost me $6 to get the two of us in and the icecream is never cold.



I'm told that the Narranderra pool is privately run, whilst the local pools are of course all Council operations. The telling thing about Narranderra was that all the staff multi-tasked. All of them appeared to be life savers, and apart from failing to tell kids to not run and fall over on the concrete and skin their knees, they also mowed the lawns, picked up rubbish, staffed the front counter and sold icecreams.

In Leichhardt, the pool appears to be a job creation scheme for those that like to gossip. The two or three people on the front counter just sit there and yak. The shop person never leaves the shop (although that might be a private concession). In Narranderra, the two functions share the same space and one person can let you in and sell you an icecream. Combining those two tasks in Leichhardt would probably lead to an MUA picket out the front.

But you want to know about the slide. So do I. I took a picture of it, but never got to ride it as it was never open whilst I was there. Apparently they only crank up the water pumps and pull out the slidy boogie boards when there are enough people there to make it worthwhile.

That's appropriately capitalist. If Leichhardt Council was running the show, the slide would run 16 hours a day, but no one would be allowed to go on it due to health and safety concerns. You might get water up your nose.

I'm told it is a very good slide. I might have to wait until 2009 to find out. The locals tell me the trick is to ride your board all the way to the other end of the pool. Only two kids did it in 2007, so they are famous throughout Narranderra for this feat.

The kid telling me had achieved this feat, and I could believe it as he does not fit the Narranderra stereotype, which is to have a body shape like a pumpkin.

Not so speedy

J took this photo on a back road outside Griffith. We were undertaking out annual pilgrimage to the Catania fruit farm to buy some odd ball jams and mustards. (I got some Shiraz jam, which is not made with wine, but with Shiraz grapes, and my favourite 5 cup relish, which is a great tomato chutney that goes well with bacon and eggs).



Mr Turtle here was going from the drain or canal on one side of the road to the weedy, swampy, algae infested canal on the other side of the road. I spotted him at a distance, and initially thought he might have been a goanna or blue tongued lizard, but as we got closer, we say that it was a long necked turtle of some kind.

I am sure someone will tell me it's a tortoise rather than a turtle. I don't care. I'm calling it a turtle.

It didn't like being photographed very much - as soon as J hopped out with the camera, he pulled in all appendages and sat there on the tarmac like an upturned dinner plate.

Not the kind of thing you see every day.

Happily back in bogan land

Ah, how nice to be home. I open the paper to find this story: Mother caught street racing.

This happened on Victroria Road, which is a bit of tarmac I find myself on quite often. I was surprised by a number of factors in this story.

The first is that it happened in Victoria Road rather than around here. Victoria Rd is the nice end of this suburb, whilst we are at the sink hole end. I think the bath plug is just around the corner. Certainly the grease trap is. I went out for milk at 10pm last night and the street was full of wanna-be street racers. In the UK, most of them would be known as chavs. I prefer to call them bogans, but they're not really. Bogans used to drive panel vans and wear tight black jeans and desert shoes and flannel shirts. These are wog bogans, who drive tarted up rice burners, have strange hair cuts and wear more bling than a Vegas pimp. Are they wogans?

But back to the street racer. How on earth did she get up to 100 kmh on Victoria Road? It's got more lumpy hills on it than the seven hills of Rome, the road surface is more pock marked that Route Irish going into Baghdad, and the density of traffic rarely allows you to get out of second gear.

I can only presume she was driving on the footpath.

Once more into the breach

I've been without computer for over a week, and frankly I didn't miss it at all. Some might think that I am addicted to my PC, since I sit in front of it often and blog or read other blogs or peruse weird sites that discuss US politics and other stuff. But when I am away from home, the PC holds no allure. I've had friends take a laptop on ski trips, and I just look at them and go, "Why?"

We're here to ski, not to read the news. Who cares what happens beyond those white, snow capped mountains? We can worry about that next week when we get back to whatever it is we do for the rest of the year.

I have just spent the equivalent of a week in the snow, but without the mountains, the snow, the cold and the schnapps. We have been in Narranderra visiting family.

Narranderra?

Depart Sydney as if heading for Canberra. Avoid taking the Canberra turn off. Two hours later, take the Wagga turn off. But don't stop in Wagga - you kind of skirt the industrial area of Wagga and take the road heading west, which takes you to Narranderra and then Griffith and then Hay (if you are feeling really keen). Narranderra is only an hour up the road from Wagga. Just over 6 hours in total from Sydney (assuming no rest breaks and a full tank of juice).

Narranderra is not the broadband capital of Australia. Given the size of the inhabitants, I'd say the most popular past time is sitting on the recliner watching cable and eating chips by the KFC bucket load. I doubt many of the locals know the internet even exists.

It's not Yass, which is definitely duelling banjo territory. I always get the creeps when we stop at the Yass McDonalds for a coffee refill - in Yass, the locals are both fat and thick. And wierd looking.

David Hicks should move there. He'd fit right in.

I will post more on Narranderra as I dig the photos out. But let me put it this way - the only thing with a keyboard in it in Narranderra is a piano.