Don't have a cow, man.

I'm currently reading (or should I say, re-reading) a novel by Kate Grenville. She is a wonderful Australian author, one of my favourites, and this novel, The Idea of Perfection, is a wonderful portrayal of a small town in rural Australia. There is a scene early in the story that involves cows. And this certainly struck a chord with me.

When I was growing up, I would spend my school holidays with my grandparents. My mother had to work and so my sister and I would be sent up to the small hobby-farm my grandparents had retired to, about 4 hours north of Sydney. Their property of about 25 acres was on a dirt road... they were probably about three quarters of the way along it, maybe three or four kilometres off the tarred road. It was the sort of area where they didn't bother numbering the houses. We were simply The Jones's [no, not really] on Bullhill Road [that I didn't make up though]. I kid you not. This was, in turn, about a kilometre out of a small township called Tinonee. Tinonee had a primary school, a butcher, a general store/petrol pump, and some tennis courts. If you were driving along you could blink and have driven through it before you'd realised it was there. And Tinonee was probably about 40 kilometres away from a larger town that was where you went when you 'went into Town'.

My sister and I were incredibly lucky, in hindsight, to have the chance to escape the city and spend weeks with ponies, open paddocks, afternoon naps (it was too hot to do anything else) and the beach. At the time though, there were moments of incredible frustration, as I was the elder and there weren't any kids my age locally. That, combined with the fact that my grandmother and I tended to disagree about most things (hey, I was a teenager!!) meant there were moments when I would stomp down to the back paddock and read books until my temper had calmed down.

Anyway, back to the cows. I like cows in theory, but they scare me. They're big, and I cannot really read them. There are two types; the ones with the big pretty brown eyes, like dairy cows, and then there are those with the little piggy red rimmed eyes that always look like they have a serious attitude problem. It is like they KNOW they are going to end up as steaks, and they are mighty shitty about the prospect! It is the latter type of cow that particularly freak me out.

When I was a teenager, fighting for some independence from my grandmother in particular, I had the opportunity to look after the dog for the people that lived next door. It was a brown spotted dalmation called Zac. I'm afraid, at the time, I thought Zac was the stupidest dog I had ever known. Since then I've learnt that a lot of dalmations are, in fact, deaf, and this makes his behaviour a little more understandable. But even if he was deaf, he was still pretty stupid. And he had no self-preservation instinct. And was hyperactive. But if having to take him for walks each day meant an excuse to have some time to myself, well I was going to take it!

As Zac was impossible to call back once you let him off his chain, when I took him for his walks I kept him on a long rope. It's an unwritten law that if a farmer sees a strange dog on his/her property, they have the right to shoot them. Packs of dogs do untold damage to sheep, calves, horses, so you cannot blame them for their shoot first attitude. This simply reinforced my desire to keep him with me while his owners were away.

This particular day I decided we'd walk down through the back paddock to the creek that bordered the back of their property. In that back paddock was a small herd of around fifteen steers that had been raised as poddy calves, being fattened up ready for slaughter. And yes, these particular steers were of the aforementioned piggy-red-eyed variety.

When I first started striding along, Zac enthusiastically tugging me through the long grass (at least he would have scared the snakes away first), the steers were at the far end of the paddock. However, at some point they lifted their heads and turned our way. And then started walking our way. And then started RUNNING our way! Bloody hell!! Now what I did was perhaps not the smartest, most cow-savvy thing, but then, I am not cow savvy. So I ran. FAST. However Zac seemed more interested in meeting them head on, which didn't bode well for my escape, so I did the only thing I could. I let him go. And ran for the gate.

As Zac ran further down the creek line, the steers (should I have explained that steers are adolescent bulls?) wheeled away from me and followed him. It turns out that Zac thought it was a great game when they were little poddy calves (calves that have just been weaned) to chase them around. Now they had grown and saw the opportunity for revenge. I was incidental to them, but that didn't stop me being scared witless.

It took me hours of walking along the creekbed, climbing through old barbed wire, before I could circuit my way around the back paddock (Zac back in tow now the fun of playing chasings with the steers had w0rn off). Suffice to say, I've never trusted a cow since. Love a good steak though. hehe

A little insight to life in Australia

I know there are some people out there that are interested in Australia, and so I thought I'd give you a little insight into my life with a couple of links.

Sydney Morning Herald
This is the news site/paper that I prefer to read.

JJJ
Known as TripleJ, this is the 'youth' station for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (or is that Corporation, can't remember). It's a national radio station that does streaming, so you might be able to hear some interesting inverviews. It has to cater for most genres, but is an 'alternative' station, so you won't hear the Top 40 R&B stuff on there.

And I have to apologise to people who have posted comments here if I haven't commented on your blogs. I definitely visit them on a fairly regular basis, but for some strange glitchy reason, I can comment on HaloScan comments, but not on Blogger comments. So where I can, I do, and where I can't, I get frustrated and grumble a lot.

Venting some self loathing

I was expecting a cheque today for the work I’ve been doing on this contract. As I haven’t worked over the past month, I’ve got a few bills that are now starting to get pretty urgent. I’ve never been good with money. If I have it, I enjoy it, and when I don’t have it, I make do until I can get some more. For a very long time I was on a salary and so I knew I could expect a pay at the same time each month. Now I'm freelancing, and experiencing the less pleasant aspect of the casual employment market. So, I was expecting a cheque, but due to end-of-month report runs (blah blah blah), I won’t be receiving it until NEXT Thursday. Add on to that the three working days required to clear the cheque, and it is not looking good for paying those bills any time soon.

I really, really, hate this feeling of insecurity. Some kind of self-destruct in me means I live in denial when things are good, and sheer panic when things inevitably go bad. I want to be mature, an adult, a grown up, a person who has that little something behind them that allows them a safety gap, and cushion, a little nest egg, an escape fund. It is like, regardless of how much I have, I manage to sabotage myself so I can only just meet my basic needs. And when I need that buffer… I end up sick with anxiety: the realisation of the shit I’m in flashes itself in my mind at inopportune moments, and I’m almost breathless with fear.

How can I be concerned with such petty things as failure in love or failure in ambition, when I do not even feel confident I can pay the rent?

I know that tomorrow morning things will seem more manageable. I know that I'll be embarressed that I even mentioned any of this. The mature Hooch that everyone sees and believes to be the real Hooch will have settled back into my skin. But at the moment! At the moment it feels like there's a concrete block on my chest.

My shopping basket this evening: • 4 rented DVDs • chocettes • maltesers • leg wax strips -- anyone would think I had PMS!

The Clan

Well, I warned you I'd introduce them, so here they are!

I don't quite know how it happened, but it seems I am practicing for my Crazy-old-lady-that-lives-in-the-scary-house-with-all-that-cats licence. I wouldn't call myself a 'cat person', nor a 'dog person' for that matter. I love them all. It just happens that where I live, and my lifestyle, it wouldn't be fair to keep a dog.

Originally I just had the one cat, Billy, who I rescued from being put down because his owners were moving overseas. This was when I was still married (more on that episode in my life another day, I'm sure). Then Kirby adopted us. He was a stray, and he literally walked into the house one day, jumped up onto the arm of the chair in which I was sitting, looked at me and said 'What's on telly?'. For a long time it was the four of us (including the hubby). And then it was the three of us (excluding the hubby!). Billy was killed last Halloween, hit by a car, and so it was just Kirby and me.

Even though Kirby and Bill had never gotten on particularly well, both being male and territorial (even thought they WERE desexed), Kirby did seem rather depressed in the empty house, and I'll admit I missed Billy terribly. We had had a connection unlike I'd ever had with a pet before. When he died, I stayed up all night, just stroking his coat, because I couldn't bare the thought of him being alone before we buried him.

Kirby and I had been living like that for about three months when a woman at work came in quite upset. Her (adult) daughter had found a cat who'd just had four kittens in their yard, and she didn't know what to do. She is terribly allergic, but when she called the RSPCA and Cat Protection Society, they both said they would have to put them all down, as they simply had too many strays at the moment. OK, so I may have been caught in a moment of insanity, but I volunteered to foster them until they were old enough to be weaned and adopted. They were only a day old.

Since then, they've grown, terrorised Kirby's tail, destroyed my pot plants, learnt to climb virtually everything in the house, and given me hours and hours of delight. I don't regret my decision for a moment. My sister ended up adopting two of the kittens, and I have kept the mother cat and the remainder kittens. So here they are.

Nina, the best little mother I've ever seen. She has now been desexed and is allowed into the yard (much to her delight... I think she really enjoys the break from the kids!)

Chloe, who is a delicate little lady, until it comes time to rumble her brother. She's smart and acrobatic, but never with a hair out of place.

Ziggy, the little devil, gets himself into all sorts of scrapes because he's exuberance simply leaps out of his skin. If you look into his eyes sometimes, it's like he's been here a hundred times before. He's an old soul, and a newborn, all at once. Yep, I adore this little guy.

And a special mention should be given to Kirby, who has shared his home with... well I can't say without complaint. Sometimes I think he's going to pack his little bags and move home. Fortunately his tail seems to be less attractive as the family is getting older. He is VERY sensitive about who touches his tail. Kirby is like the cranky old bachelor uncle that comes to visit on Christmas Day. All he wants to do is crack open a beer, watch the sports on TV, and scratch his bum occassionally. What he gets is little people racing around his chair at a million miles an hour. "Get those !Q#$$#%#$% kids away from me!!!!!" Yet for all the muttering about how awful this generation of kids are, sometimes I catch him watching them play chasings around the living room and I'm sure I can see a smile playing on the corner of his little pink mouth.

So, have I earned that Crazy-old-lady-that-lives-in-the-scary-house-with-all-that-cats qualification yet?? Yeah, thought so.

Till next time.

Hadn't thought

I haven't really thought very hard about where I want this blog to go, or what I might have to offer to the world at large. If I'm honest, I figure I'm probably talking to myself, and that's fine. Certainly noone I know will stumble across these pages, so I don't have to worry too much about offending people. Hell, I do that well enough face to face, so I doubt a little blogging will worsen the relationship dents.

The people whose blogs I've linked so far have interesting stories because of their work or their writing style, or, most commonly, both. Entertaining and fluid. I don't hope to follow in their footsteps (for a starters, my job is pretty mundane, and verbose should be my middle name). But maybe as time goes on I can get into the habit of jotting down the little stories in my life that might strike a chord with someone else. The most important thing though, is for me to simply be writing. Because it scares me senseless. Yet once I'm doing it, it feels like home. I have had that reaction to a lot of things I've loved in my life actually.

I think I'll start jotting down some personal stuff, and I apologise if it's boring as batshit, but hey, this is MY blog after all *hehe*.

Anyway, better go and put the horde to bed (I'll introduce you to them soon), and myself as well. Tomorrow is the start of another work week afterall.

I live near a suburb called Leichhardt, which is also known as Little Italy. It has a main street lined with cafés and restaurants, and people meet up with their friends and family, parties of people in pretty dresses and suits converge, others casually walk along, chic in designer jeans and designer sunglasses, and designer dogs in tow.

In the entrance laneway that leads down to the Forum (which I am told is designed to the same slightly off kilter angles as the actual Forum... having not been to Italy, I can't verify that)... anyway, in that laneway there is a small shop called The Merchant of Venice. I occassionally drink long black coffee and eat rich chocolate cake in the café opposite this small shop. I like sitting opposite this shop. It is a shop of masks. Beautiful Venetian masks. There is something both frivolous yet satisfying (for me) about a shop that creates beatiful things simply for their beauty.

Steel blue walls contrast the creamy faces, gilded and sparkling. People pause and look into the shop window, pointing out the masks. They are faces out of time. Out of place. Out of history. And it isn't a history known by us. It's a history of Venice and Carnivalé. Most of us wouldn't know the names of the faces we see on the walls, faces which would have been instantly recognisable to Venetians of the era. Yet people walking by are still drawn to the window. Is it perhaps because of the individuality of each of the pieces, standing out in an era of mass production? Feathers, sparkles, gilded faces, suns, moons, hearts and cherubs, sneers and winks and hooked noses. Tri-hats with bells and puss-in-boots. The fantasy of our romantic childhood catches the eye and draws out the child within to coo in wonder.

This little shop won't dress you for success. It won't offer you handbags with which to define yourself. It won't make your life easier and more productive with its personal organisers and mobile phone deals. It is not even likely it will be an investment to be profited from fiscally.

What is this little shop then? It's a shop of imagination and naivety, even as it displays wares that historically were the devices of letchery and decadance. It steps us outside the world of crushing consumerism and exhausting acquisition... for just a moment to stop and restore the soul of the child.

Of course, for those who are captured by the window, there are also those who don't even give it a second glance. I wonder what that exposes about them.

A mother, pushing a pram, coos to her young daughter, dark-eyed and maybe four years old. "Look at all the lovely masks!", but as they walk on, the child's eyes do not leave my plate with its dark rich chocolate and whipped cream.

"Can we have an icecream?" she asks her mother, and only the small girl and I will know where the inspiration for the request came from.

A quickie

I'm knackered. I started a contract job today and although I am extremely grateful for the work (and the pay) it's hard work working!!

I live in the Inner West, about 5 km from the centre of Sydney, and where I'm working now is about 50 km west. It's not a difficult drive as it is against the peak hour traffic, but it is in an area I have never ever been in before. There are steel mills and timber mills and lots of very large trucks. As far away from 'corporate' work as you could imagine, which is fantastic!!

I was very careful on the way there this morning, with my map and all, but tonight I was tired and it was dark and I just hopped in my car and started driving, without thinking about where I was actually going. It only took one wrong turn to get me completely lost. Around where I live, you cannot really drive too far before you come across a major road that is familiar. Out there, the more I drove, the more rural it got. Once I started seeing paddocks of horses, I figured it was time to pull over and figure out where the hell I was!!

So there I was, still in the city in which I was born and bred, but I suddenly felt very alone and quite vulnerable. Which is ridiculous of course. It took no time at all for me to backtrack onto a road that got me to the freeway. But it got me wondering, just how far do we need to step away from our own front doors before we are no longer at home?

Marathon Monday

Today has been one of those days where technology has decided to be a royal pain in the arse at every turn. And considering what I do for a living, this can be an issue.

What do I do, I hear you ask?? (hehe I know, it's the echo). Well, at this stage of my life, I find myself working as a Mac Operator, or a Graphic Artist. And I am doing this as a freelancer. Well, really it's more like a temp than a freelancer. Freelancer kinda infers that I work independently on projects, whereas what I really do is go into studios and offices during their busy periods, and when people are away.

I have been really lucky in my nearly 12 months of freelancing that I have spent 9 months of it working fulltime for a great design studio, with people whose company and humour I really enjoyed. Having come from a corporate environment, where I was the resident freak, suddenly be surrounded by like-minded people was enlightening and enriching. And good fun!!!

Unfortunately freelancing projects come to an end, and so I'm back to doing a day here, a day there. Which means working on different machines all the time. And this brings me back to my original point (yes, I do tend to ramble away on tangents quite frequently). The machine I was on today simply did not want to play fair. It was into serious mind games. The kind of mindgames where you would start a file, save the file continuously during the creating of the artwork, and then close the file. It would then be a reasonable assumption that you would later be able to open said file again. Nup. Not gonna happen. Doesn't matter how many times you try baby, I got you figured. You are not opening that file. NOOO. I'll freeze then. Huh, sucked in. Restart me, see if I care. Won't make any difference.

That was the course of my day. I did eventually get the artwork done, but it took hours longer than it needed to, and I hate to think how hopeless the client must have thought I was. Sigh, oh well.

So I have a drink with a friend after work, which was just what I needed to give me that alcohol induced attitude adjustment. Feeling much better, I head off home. And once home I decided to check emails and the like. Ok, whatever attitude adjustment I had went completely out the window when this MONGREL of a thing decided to play mind games as well. Not going to log onto the Internet. Oh, I'll log on for a minute, and then stall. And again. And again. What the hell am I paying for ADSL for!!!!. In a state of complete frustration I gave up. And of course, once it sensed victory, it decided it would work. Which is, of course, how I can now be posting this.

I'm sure absolutely everyone has stories of borderline violence (if not actual violence) that they've wanted to inflict on their computers. I've never been one of them (apart from an incident where fist met printer once, but that's another story). I've prided myself on my patience and logical elimination of possible causes of the problem. But tonight, I wear my badge proudly. TECHNOLOGY SUCKS!!!

oh, no, I didn't mean You, my little laptop. Of course I love you. (shhh don't let on, otherwise it'll just boot me again, and I just don't have the resilience to fight back anymore *sob*)

Who's Hooch?

I suppose I should begin all this with a clarification.

Hooch is not what you think hooch is. I'm not a sex-fiend bimbo, as some of our American brethren have inferred in the past, and I'm not a pot-head who enjoys the cannabis related title.

There is a little story...

I've never had a nick name (or at least, not one I was called to my face!!) so when it comes to forums etc. I struggled to find something witty and clever, so I just decided bugger it.

The first forum I ever joined was a horse-related one. I love horses. I ride horses. I detest the creepy little slimeballs that find sexual innuendo in that. Get real, and get a life, for god's sake. So anyway, when I had to sign up and choose a screen name on this horse-related forum, I noticed a lot used their horse's name. At the time, I was having riding lessons on a nice grey gelding called, very appropriately, Hooch. And I am sure there was a drug inference in HIS naming, as he was the most laid back doofus in the stable you could possibly imagine. Not quite so predictable under saddle, but still, a great horse. So I nicked his name. I admit it. I am a horse-name-pilferer. Since joining that, and other forums, I've gotten used to Horsey_Hooch, or Hooch for short, so I'm sticking to it, inferences be damned.

So there you go, my first post. Wasn't as painful as I thought it would be. I've been visiting a few that I've found really inspirational (and bloody funny!!), and hope to link them to this blog soon.

Well, gotta go and do some family-related stuff, so until next time.