Narrogin men's camp

My son and I went on a Men's camp this weekend, where we spent some time helping a young farmer finish his house.

On Saturday night we also spent some time hunting for roos and other pests like foxes and rabbits.

We built a bonfire out of what must have been more than ten large trees – a lovely sight!

We were not very successful with the hunt, because the area is quite dry and our furry little friends were keeping to themselves.  I did have a change to have a go at a fox, but was just too late when he jumped underneath a fence and got away with my shot ringing in his ears.

This was lots of fun – I haven’t had a shot at a living thing for more than 3 years now, and found it quite invigorating.  It is not quite the same as hunting for springbuck at 250m distances, as we used a double-barrel shotgun at short distances while the ute was still moving. Would love to do this again.

We also did some skeet-shooting and target practise on tin cans.

My job was to help install insulation in the ceilings.  We wore these beautiful orange jump suites which made us look like we were working at a nuclear power plant:

Great story coming soon

Yep, it's been a while - I'm just too busy (and/or lazy) to come up with more great material.

But there's a great story on the way, it's taking a while to finish it.

Watch this space...

Booger eyes and guttersnipes

Last night it rained for the first time in 600 years. Or something like that – it’s a record, apparently. Nothing new to me, because growing up in Namibia, which is considered to be one of the driest countries in the world, a few decades without rain never really surprised anyone. We were used to describing a yearly rainfall of 300mm as an exceptionally good year.

Anyway, that’s not what this is about.

The sound of the rain coming down is a pleasant one for desert rats like me – I was raised to always appreciate free water falling from heaven.

But the other noises that go with it – that’s what this story is about.

When I started writing this post, I recalled a funny word from memory – “guttersnipe”. I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, but it sounded applicable to my situation. According to the World Wide Library, however, a guttersnipe is “a child who spends most of his time in the streets especially in slum areas…”, which isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

What I had in mind was something more like a combination between a sniper and a gutter, with the two connecting in a violent confrontation with each other.

The gutter next to our bedroom window has this awful way of making a dripping noise when it rains. Not a constant rhythm that you can get used to, but an annoying disoriented pattern of drips and bangs that makes you go nuts.

We had a similar problem back in Namibia, but there my solution was simple – place a flat rock or a sponge in the bottom of the gutter where it bends out, and the problem is solved. But this stupid gutter has no access point – it feeds into the ground and the water is being fed into some unknown abyss where no unauthorised members of the public have access to it.

This house also does not belong to me – I’m renting, so I can’t just start sawing and hacking off parts that I don’t like.

This does not have a soothing effect on my friendly character at 00:30 in the morning. In fact, it drives me insane. I have tried all sorts of nasty ways to get this ghastly guttersnipe to stop guttersniping. (Sounds like something the old seadog in the Tintin books would say…)

The best solution for the moment is to stick a little piece of plastic in there, so it stops the water drops from falling all the way to the bottom of the gutter. The fancy tool was hastily handcrafted from old ice cream containers. I might have added a little colourful language in the recipe too.

Every time this happens, I promise myself that I’m going to get out my electrical drill and drill out all the rivets so that I can remove (or is it snipe?) the bottom part of the gutter in order to reduce the noise pollution levels in my neighbourhood.

To top it off, once I finally got into bed, I felt my eye hurting like crazy. Went to have a look in the mirror, and it looked like I was just returning from a bar fight in a western movie. My left eye was puffed up like a watermelon.

For a brief moment I thought a spitting cobra had attacked me while I was hitting a hammer against its nest in the gutter, but then I realised that this may be a bit far-fetched. Although, at that time in the morning nothing really seems far-fetched, except the idea of getting some freaking sleep.

When I finally woke up this morning, the old lazy eye was still huffing and puffing, and this gave me enough reason to make use of one of my sick-days at work. I rang up the old doctor’s waiting room as soon as possible, but of course there is nothing available until tomorrow.

I later even tried to find a vet that would have a spot open for me. No one would make room for me and my booger-eye.

So, here I am, sitting lazily at home trying to fix up the booger-eye. Later I realised that we have a chemist within 10 minutes’ walk from our house, so I took the time and walked over to get some over-the-counter eye drops.

I’m busy preparing that drill. Today will be the day of reckoning.  Booger-eye or not, your time has come my little noisy friend!

Even better

29 minutes of pure awesomeness

Minutes from the creditors meeting

The interesting saga continues with stories of intrigue and the lies and deception unfolding before our very eyes…  what kind of a person acts like this, you would wonder?

Life without engineering

Yikes.  During my previous posts I made a few insensitive jokes about Cyclone Bianca, as it did not really have any impact on Perth.  But on the other side of the continent, cyclone Yasi has been raging like an angry dictator with bad indigestion.

This mother of a storm was a category 5 cyclone and caused a lot of havoc around those parts.

The amazing part of this story is the fact that no one was seriously injured or killed during this storm so far, apart from a man who was killed by the fumes of a generator in his room. 

This is all due to the fact that there was enough early warning and that people had enough time to prepare for the worst.  Right across the world everyone was watching expectantly.

Imagine in the old days when the only warning you had was the birds that disappeared and the ants that started going Rambo on you.  According to some of my friends over East, on the day Yasi reached the continent, it was still a clear bright sunny morning and you would have thought it to be a great day to hang around the beach.

All this early warning is due to modern technology and the marvels of electronic engineering, combined with a few other sciences of course.  Without the reliable instruments and communication systems no one would have known what was coming.  Without the satellite footage and the radar images, combined with pressure, wind and temperature measurements this would have been a disaster and thousands would probably have been killed. 

Without great communication tools like radio, TV, phones and the internet, people out in the country would have been sleeping with the barn windows open when the cyclone hit.  We would have seen a lot more flying cows and a few people would have thought their mother-in-law turned into a witch because she was flying around on a tree trunk.

All thanks to the geeky nerds who became engineers and scientists.  Those same geeks who were bullied by the redneck jerks in school now saved those same brainless muscled idiots.  They always win in the end.

Unfortunately there was a huge material loss for many people.  Farmers lost crops and people lost their homes and cars.  People’s jobs and sources of income were wiped out over night.  Not a laughing matter at all.

But thanks to engineering, it was not as bad as it could have been.

Unfortunately this also means that these climate change nuts will gain a lot of support with their fear-mongering.  They still seem to think that man can actually control weather like this.  All of this was apparently caused by my 3.8 liter V6 engine guzzling fossil fuels and spewing carbon dioxide into the air.

I’ll think about that while I drive out to the beach this afternoon.