The thing about the bugs here is not their size, or their numbers, both of which are formidable to be sure. It's that they have confidence. Bugs in the states submit easily to a swat or will just give up after a few casual swipes of your hand. Here in the outback its not so easy. After a quick swish of the hand and a quick shake off it's as a smart man once said "They'll soon be back, and in greater numbers." And when they come back, it's with a vengeance. They know you have an ear, and a nose and proper eyes and they are hellbent to get in on that action. I'm not sure why they want to land on those spots so bad, perhaps its because they lack all of those things and they are trying to find some way to steal them from you. I don't know. if it were as simple as wanting to find moisture then you would think that they wouldn't land on your ear, or that they would just go hang out by the pool which is always full of water and doesn't try to swat them away. I think they are just spiteful hateful and evil creatures and it's as simple as that.
The mosquitoes are actually not that bad here, they do come out in numbers but i haven't been bitten much. The ants certainly are numerous, (it's very hard to take a step inside or out without stepping on an ant nest) but apart from the bulldog ants i saw they don't do much harm. The spiders, while also large and numerous, don't really bother us much beyond the never ending job of sweeping up cobwebs. The various colors of beetles are enormous ( i call them lawnmower bugs because when they fly around it sounds like someone is using a lawnmower somewhere) but they mostly just die and end up in the pool. Life is just too hard for them i guess.I guess the flies taught them all to stay in line.
It's sort of like the dinosaurs from jurassic park. The spiders are the big long necked dinosaurs just sort of hanging out in the corner being big and creepy and not really bothering anyone, the ants are like the little green dinosaurs from the second movie, they are everywhere and they bite but you can step on them and they go away. The tyrannosaurus would be the scorpions. i've yet to see a live one but i know they are out there i found a big pincer the other day. They seem pretty rare but i really don't want to get stung by one. But the true antagonists of jurassic park were the velociraptors. And i can tell you that the flies here are at the point of figuring out how to open the doors. They launch coordinated attacks from multiple angles .... "Clever girl"... and they get inside the house in large numbers when i try my best to keep the door closed. Ruthless, heartless, vicious creatures is all they are.
Sorry just had to get that out of my system. I find a lot of the bugs here really interesting and i really don't mind the big ones as i can play with them or swat them away, but the flies bother me while i'm trying to work or just walk around so in addition to stalking the living quarters with two cans of airborne insect INSTANT KILL™, i just had to get it out here.
Oh by the way i crashed an ATV into a barbed wire fence. So yeah. I was taught how to drive a manual car by a Danish guy in the outback. Actually it's the same subaru outback that my Uncle Art had for forever except with the driver seat on the other side. Then i learned how not to drive an ATV . . . from the same Danish guy in the outback. To my credit i figured out how to operate it fine. i was just in too high a gear for how rough the road was and how steep the banks on either side were and i'm not so good at turning it quickly. I tried to correct myself but alas, too late. The funny thing was that when i first got on the thing i thought to myself how much it would suck if i crashed into one of the miles and miles of barbed wire fencing that line all the roads. Truth be told it wasn't so bad. My arm is a bit cut up and i was wearing my helmet of course so my face is ok. Also i have some cuts and bruises on my legs but i'll be fine.
Scars = street cred.
I spent the other morning traveling around the northern bit of the property cleaning out cow troughs. Hours of smelly backbreaking work, pick-axing the layers of algae off the sides of a sloshy scummy manure ridden cesspool with a shovel and broom. yes a broom. I actually had fun. Truth be told a large part of why i wanted to come out here is to be doing something more physically satisfying than clicking away on a computer for 8+ hours a day.
You can sit there and click all day long and somewhere off in the ether there are a few more 0s and 1s as a record of all your clicking. Now i'm not suggesting that i want to do this for the rest of my life but there is something really satisfying about picking the cow-pies out from the soles of your shoes and looking at the shiny new water trough that you just scrubbed said cow-pies out of, and being able to say;
"F__K yeah. I did that today."
What else happened.....oh i fixed a weed-whacker (they call them whipper snappers here) and jury-rigged the wire part so that i could whack all of the weeds plaguing the edges of all of Delmore Downs. (just the homestead part not the other million acres) and i jumped into a scummy cloudy dead bug infested pool. (it was really hot today)
Yesterday i cleaned the car shop and the generator shed. I swear im going to have the best resume after working at this place. Not only is there the art curation and preservation, there is shop managing, banking, data mining (Don keeps really good track of what the aboriginals buy at the store... big surprise it's ALL sugar) cattle rustling, cooking, dish washing, gardening, equipment repair, hotel room cleaning in the guest house, but after what went down in the generator shed yesterday i could easily get a job working for BP in the gulf. On the floor was a half inch thick carpet of dried diesel and petrol with binder of outback mud to give it mass. Tom and i used about a gallon of handy andy detergent, chemical detergent spray and 2 liters of mineral turpentine. The floor still looks bad gross but after two hours of scrubbing and scraping the globby brown gunk with the rainbow sheen film we managed to get most of it up. Then we had to deal with the years of mostly occupied cobwebs covering every square inch of well, everything. Cobwebs are somewhat like electrons or a single hair, in that you just sort of assume that they have no inherent mass. WRONG. After only seconds of sweeping our brooms were like black cotton candy. Also i thought that the daddy longlegs were big at home. its not so much the surface area in which the spiders differ its all in the bone structure. 0.25 oz of pure muscle.
I made friends with a bat that was living in the generator shed. as i would work towards it's corner it would fly around me a few times then head off to the next corner and when i got there the process would repeat.
i snapped some strings on my banjo and realized that the banjo that i bought was built for guitar strings and all i have are replacement banjo strings. which for the layman, guitar strings have little round stoppers on the end and banjo strings are thinner and have loops on the end. but i managed to use a little nail to hold the strings on and now the banjo works even better than it did before! funny how when you put banjo strings on a banjo rather than guitar strings it works better. i walked off down the road for a bit serenading buster with a song about a mummified dingo i found in a tree (which i actually found) and i just happened to see two live dingos off down the road. Buster was off like a rocket but he soon lost the trail. We had better luck with a Varanus Giganteus, the Perentie. Or as we like to call them in the States, "Big Frickin' Lizard" Against which my dearest Lucy would stand no chance. But man are they fast. I always thought of most big lizards as slow moving juggernauts like a crocodile or something but it FAR outpaced buster who is a cattle dog by trade. He did manage to corner it up a short tree at one point and i had a good shot at it's tail. I managed to just touch it before it jumped clear ten feet out of the tree and into the bush never to be seen again. But it was cool.
Oh crap its dark out now and i don't have a flash light on me. Well between the pictures that i uploaded and this book i just wrote there should be enough for my ravenous and avid readers to digest for now.(so humble i know)
i have to go make dinner anyway. or attempt to... the food situation is not much better. some might argue worse now that there is no SPAM or canned hotdogs left for protein. there might be some beans and rice. . .
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