Online again in 2011

2010 has been and gone, and most of 2009 before it - without me having posted here. So much for my '(almost)daily' intentions. So with the new year, new intentions.

Part of the problem has been that if I limit the focus of this to local and personal happenings, I run out of things to write. There's only so many times I can comment on the flowers and rainbows - lovely though they are. Although some people can make a lifetime's work out of local and parochial commentary. Or paintings, or poems or sculptures on a limited range of subjects... as they perfect their skills, or find infinite variety and beauty and challenge in a small domain.

Not that everything here is beautiful, and I have been reluctant to comment on that which is less attractive. I don't want to offend anyone with whom I might have to interact - being perhaps a bit of a coward - and this is a small place. Being a small place, it has its limitations. Being a small place, it has its advantages.

We had various friends and family come visit over the holiday period. Some came for lunch on different days, some came to stay a day or two. Everyone comments on how peaceful and lovely it is, and over the last week it has been particularly lovely, with long sunny hot days, the creek and my pool sparkling and the big birds - probably white-bellied sea eagles - soaring high on the thermals. The fish have been jumping furiously in the late afternoons - jumping for insects, for life, or for joy - who can tell? We sit down on the jetty and enjoy a cup of tea or a cool drink at the end of the day , watching the light change on the the trees and the water and the peace is interrupted by splash after splash after splash of leaping fish. Each day they seem to come a little closer to the jetty: yesterday B said if we held out a landing net one was sure to jump straight into it.

All our city visitors enjoy the chance to see the wildlife. There are the fish, and a variety of birds. As well as the eagles we see cockatoos, lorikeets, corellas, herons, magpies, crows, Native and Indian Minors, butcher birds. We hear the Koels - I like their repetitive liquid tones, but B doesn't, and I have heard bell birds occasionally. There are many more birds including pelicans, black swans, and cormorants. And there are the lizards. We have large water dragons hiding out under the jetty. They like to stretch out along the sea wall to soak up the sunshine. The dogs like to chase them off the sea wall and into the water. First thing in the morning when I let the dogs out they are off to the bottom of the garden barking and scaring the lizards. We also have blue-tongue lizards hiding out under the pool side decking and the dogs like to scare them up too. Fortunately, the lizards are quick to scurry.

So those are some of the charms. Less attractive - and part of the price for living in a semi-rural area - is the smell of manure on a still, hot summer night. There are cows in the fields across the creek, but the smell probably comes from the chicken-raising sheds up the hill. There are a few in this area. Chicken shit is great for the garden, but in industrial quantities it sure raises a pong. If there is a wind, we don't smell anything, but on a calm night the odour can be distinctive. And it's those same warm calm nights when we really appreciate being able to sit outside and dine alfresco. Fortunately we don't smell it often - either that or our olfactory systems are quickly desensitize to the smell.

Even less attractive than the side-effects of a staple food production are the ugly behaviours of the human animal. There's the loutish behaviours of the bored young boys (and probably some girls) who are out late, unsupervised, probably a bit the worse for drink. There's the odd bit of graffiti, the odd bit of vandalism, and the broken glass and empty bottles and cans strewn in the park areas along the creek - they haven't even bothered to put their rubbish in the adjacent bins. Then there's the too-loud music played until 4 in the morning by someone along the street or up the hill with a hugely powerful bass system: no melody to be heard, but the thump thump thump of drums reverberates through my whole house and body. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I get really, really angry.

I lie in bed and fantasise how I might get my own back on these insensitive noisemakers.

Sometimes I imagine sneaking up to the culprit's house and just flipping the switches in the electricity box so that nothing works and it cannot be turned back on. Other times I imagine giving them a dose of their own medicine: blasting them at close quarters with a bit of full-on Wagner or brass band, or police siren sounds. I imagine waiting for a different time of day, mid morning, perhaps, when they are in recovery mode, and then cranking up the biggest system I can find, with a monster megaphone funneling sounds at maximum volume straight into their room. (The megaphone is a special design so that the sound is only heard where it is directed.) Part of that fantasy is that the sound JUST KEEPS ON GOING AND THEY CANNOT ESCAPE and I don't let up until they are grovellingly sincere in their promise that they will never inflict their noise on me again.

But of course, I never actually do anything. I drift in and out of sleep and am too tired during my awake moments to get out of bed and find which house the noise is coming from. Unless I have developed a migraine, in which case I am too ill to get out of bed to do anything except heave in the bucket. Funny how the throb of the migraine tries to synchronise with the throb of the music; and fails because this 'music' has such an asynchronous non-rhythm.

But as I said, it doesn't happen often. Generally this is a quiet and peaceful and lovely place to be, and the biggest noise at the moment is the splashing of the fish and the sounds of the cicadas. Did you know that cicadas make the loudest noise of all insects? At over 120 Db the Green Grocer cicada can hurt the human ear. So next time the local human noise makers annoy me I think I'll fill their house with a truckload of singing cicadas.