Snoskred - Life in the Country

Today we went for a lovely drive. We visited Surf Beach which is near Batemans Bay.

Then we stopped at Kioloa on the way home. I’d heard it was beautiful and it was stunning. Then again we’re a bit spoilt for stunning beaches around here.

On the way home we stopped on my favourite road at one of the most fun bits to take a photo. You can click on the picture for a larger image.

Julie Pippert asks today - So tell me, what’s your ‘more’ that you wish was ‘less?’ What do you need, what would take that 50lb weight off your chest and shoulders?

I’m here all day, every day, unless The Other Half has a day off. His day offs are never the same day, one week out of four he has Saturday and Sunday but the rest of the time it is Monday/Tuesday, Tuesday/Wednesday, Wednesday/Thursday and then sometimes he just has the one day. If you want to go anywhere around here, especially in school holidays, weekends are times of busy traffic, of crowds, of screaming kids. That’s not something we enjoy.

The Other Half had Saturday and Sunday off, and on Saturday we went shopping in a place which is more populated than where we live. It was scary for me. Too many people. Too much movement. People walking where they want and not paying attention to others around them - bumping, pushing, like dodgem cars. We got in and out of there as fast as we could.

Personally, and no offense to those with kids who work a normal 9-5 week and have weekends off, we prefer the weekdays as days off. When we first moved here, I was working every single Saturday and it suited me just fine. I put a proposal to my parents which would have seen us never having a weekend off. Sales are better on the weekends most of the time, so that is when you want to be in the store. It never happened.

Being here alone much of the time would not be an issue at all if there was peace and quiet. I’ve mentioned before here on the blog that recently this has become a very noisy neighbourhood but the last week was the worst yet. There was not one day where the dog didn’t bark for at least 4 hours of it. As I sit here right now, that droning engine noise can just be heard over my music (coldplay) but I can also feel it through my feet - it is vibrating the very foundations of this house and consequently, going right into my soul. The dog was barking right outside my window about 10 minutes ago, prompting me to skype Sephy with the following -

Snoskred says: cam do ,e a l;ittle favour?
Sephy says: find you some new fingers?
Sephy says: what’s up?
Snoskred says: find out if theres anything i can do about a barking dog
Snoskred says: it wont shut up!@
Snoskred says: and its right outside my window now

Yes, as you can see, when I’m annoyed, disturbed, not at peace, my typing goes out the window.

When the droning engine noise stops, it will be time for kids to get home from school and the people across the road will be outside playing rugby. When you kick a rugby ball, it makes a heck of a racket. It’s enough to make you shudder. Yet that’s not all. They will be shouting, screaming, yelling at each other.

This constant noise is difficult for me to tolerate. By Fridays I am ready to SNAP. Saturdays and Sundays may be a little quieter but there’s still the dog, there’s still the people across the road. My noise thermometer has gone down slightly over the weekend but each week it climbs higher and higher. How much more can I take? I honestly don’t know.

I need to move. I want out of this noisy place. I want to go to the place I believe will be more peaceful. There are 17 properties available where I want to move to right now. 5 of those are townhouses and very close to each other. Having lived in townhouses before and knowing how noisy they can be if neighbours are inconsiderate, I’m holding out for something better. I can see this new lifestyle inside my head, beach walks, a summer of bbq’s, of The Other Half coming home and we go out to walk for an hour.

The real estate agents down there are fairly useless. I’ve left them info about what we want, and have not heard from any of them, once. It baffles me! If a tenant came in and gave notice that they’re moving out, and you had tenants who wanted exactly what they were moving out from, wouldn’t you say - this might be the easiest solution, let me call these people and ask them to come and see it. Then I don’t have to list it, I don’t have to deal with trying to find people to live there. But no. Properties have been listed that we would have considered, and they have not called.

What would break me completely would be to get there and find out it’s just as noisy as this place is. But I need to get there in order to find out. That’s what I need. A new home.

One of the major differences between city and country is petrol stations. That’s gas stations, for our US readers. We have two in the town itself, and another two near to it on the highway. Going to get petrol/gas is like a major ordeal. And here’s the reasons why.

1. Not enough pumps.
There are four at the one we go to most often. They have one pump each side, so you can have 8 cars filling up at once.

2. One pump is always broken.
The other half thinks it is on purpose to get people to use the more expensive fuel. But it doesn’t work and often that’s one space without a car in it.

3. People in the country never just fill up their cars.
They have jerry cans and containers and all kinds of fuel containers which they pull out of seemingly nowhere once they have finished filling up the car. So you’re sitting there thinking.. they’re done, yay - and they end up taking another 20 minutes filling things up.

4. The place where you pay is some kind of black hole.
People go in there, and they seem to vanish for a long time. There is only one person taking money and most people do not pay cash.

5. There is nowhere for people to put their cars while they pay.
So the cars stay right in front of the pumps, leaving everyone else to sit in their cars waiting for the black hole to open up and spit out the people in front of them.

6. The people at the back pumps have nowhere to go if the people at the front aren’t ready to go.
There’s no spare room for cars to get past, there’s always cars queuing behind the cars at the back pump and if the car in front isn’t done, nobody can go anywhere.

7. People in the country often tow things behind them.
This can include boats, caravans, trailers full of all kinds of odd things. Horse floats are another wonderful item you often find on the towbar of the car in front of you.

So in general, a trip to the petrol/gas station takes roughly 30 minutes from when you drive into their driveway. You sit there and watch the goings on, which are either amusing or horrifying. Usually this is when the in car mp3 player chooses to play the best songs available on its little memory card and these are the songs I wanted it to play when we were actually driving so I could sing along to them. Yesterday when we were at the petrol station, this is the song that was playing, a nice trip down memory lane for ya’all.

Gotta love that hair.. Though I am more a fan of his current do than the long, sweaty locks of old..

Some months ago I wrote about hairdresser hunting. Since moving here I have had some horrible haircuts, and the last one which was back in September was so terrible I had not been back to a hairdresser since. It’s taken 9 long months to grow out the layers put in by the last woman.

So I have been putting it off for as long as possible but now that it is winter and the hair was really long and taking ages to dry, I had to firmly pressure myself into going and finding a new place to get it cut. I’d seen this place in an alleyway off the main street of our local town which looked interesting. I went, I got my hair cut, and it feels a lot better. But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.. a place that does everything. Haircuts, waxing of legs and eyebrows, all in one convenient location. That hairdresser does not do it. ;(

After getting hairs cut, the Other half and I went for a drive to get some night photos. The moon was almost full and we were hoping to get some kangaroos at night pictures. There were no roos out and about, but we did get these. Where the last shot was taken, as we stood there the water is so crystal clear even in the dark, that we saw a big stingray gliding through the shallows in the moonlight. Amazing. I want to spend more time beach walking around there. Both shots are long exposure and we were using a tripod. It was windy at the first photo location - and there were rabbits! The second location was much calmer, no wind really and no waves, but there were also rabbits. Sorry, I didn’t get any rabbit shots, they ran off before we had the camera set up. Rabbits but no roos. It’s full moon for a few days now, we might try again over the next few days.

Today we went to do a few chores and also for a nice drive through the mountains. I thought I would share a couple of pics from today with you. We went to a lookout at the top of a local mountain and just as we got out of the car we spotted this scratching around in the bushes. It is a lyrebird. We’ve seen a few since we moved here and the last time we drove up in the mountains one ran out in front of us, luckily we missed it. Back in our Zoo days we used to sit and eat lunch in front of the lyrebird enclosure and many times we were treated to the amazing mimicry calls from the lyrebird nicknamed Chooky. You could call him and he would turn up, and often launch into his little dance and song. It was very difficult to get a photo of him as the lyrebird prefers to hide in the rain forest, so I am happy we got these shots today. This is a male, the female has a much shorter tail without the beautiful feathers.

Going from a town where there’s just over a million people to one where there’s just over 23,000 is great in some ways, and in others it is the strangest thing.

For one thing, anywhere you go, it seems there’s a face that you know. When we first got here, there was this guy from the local fish shop who returned a griller to our store, and one of our staff members completely insulted him - well the thing was filthy. I ran into that guy everywhere we went for the next 3 weeks. Walking down the main street, shopping in the supermarket, they were at the next table to us at the local Chinese retaurant, and there was a local airshow, they were sitting within 50 metres of us.

The local paper only talks about local stuff that happens. So generally, when something happens, you know you’re going to find out about it. For weeks there was these loud explosions happening at night time. One day we were driving to work, and there was this kangaroo tail by the side of the road. It looked very odd, not like someone hit a roo and kept going and bits of the roo were left behind, but like it was cut off deliberately.

Two weeks later, both mysteries were solved when the local paper reported that a man had been pulled over by the police for a breath test. He blew over the limit, so the police searched the car, and they found -

- a loaded 22 rifle on the back seat
- a machete
- kangaroo body parts in the boot of the car!

So this guy was going roo shooting - in a populated area, at night time. Thankfully they did not give his name, if they did and then he came into work as a customer, I might have freaked out totally. He doesn’t sound like a nice guy.

We went to the supermarket one day and the woman (clearly not a local, more explanation on that next) in front of us was called out to the carpark because her car had been run into. I said to my other half “well, whatever happened it’ll be in the paper” It turned out her kids had been left in the car and one had released the handbrake, the car was on a hill, and rolled down a slope.

How can you tell if someone is a local, or not? This is absolutely impossible to explain, but you just *know*. It might be what they are wearing, it might be that you’ve never seen their face before, or it might be a Friday afternoon at the shopping centre, and this is where people go to their summer houses for the weekend. They all have city stress on their face - that’s the best way of explaining it. They also usually have expensive sunglasses, and are dressed for travelling.

Fridays, let us get into that for a minute. This town is cut in half by the highway. You don’t want to have to go anywhere on a Friday afternoon, because you will get stuck in traffic. Traffic = people driving down from Sydney for the weekend. For a people who are used to driving from one side of town to the other in less than 10 minutes, to have that same trip take 30 can certainly bring on road rage. You want to get any shopping done well before 3pm - preferably on a different day entirely. Sundays they all go back, so it isn’t a good day to go anywhere either.

Driving - most of the major streets around here are 70kms an hour. The highway drops back to 70kms an hour until it gets out of town then it goes back to 110kms an hour. A lot of the roads that take you places you want to go which are say, 10-20kms away, they will be 110kms. You get used to going faster, and when you can’t go as fast as usual, you get annoyed.

Where would people want to go? I’ll dig out some pics of our beaches for you and post them soon. There’s this stunning beach less than 10kms away from here, and it is the most incredible, unspoiled beach you’ll see. We have a local river, I stood in it fishing last summer, and it was so much fun. Fish nibbling at your toes, but not your bait.

However, me, I long for shops. I never did before when I could go to them anytime - and I rarely did go to them, but now I have to drive some distance for decent shopping, I miss them.