Smile! It Only Hurts A Little Bit!

My art therapy project idea is to take heaps of photos of people, pets and things at the hostel and print them all out so that we can all make a big collage and personalised placemats for the dining room wall. So today I hopped around with my camera, trying to gee everyone up. Lynette and Maxine were shuffling around looking like their favourite footy teams had just died in separate plane crashes. "Cheer up! Let's all see happy faces!" Their efforts to smile made them look like poster girls for Bleak Depression Prescription Drug Abuse Week rather than the bubbly "we love helping old people" facebook-style party shots I was hoping for. We can use their personalised placemats to highlight Suicide Prevention Week.

On a cheery note, we have eggs! Every day is like an easter egg hunt - the chooks make funny little nests all over the place, and I finally found the motherlode in the woodpile. At night they come and peck on the sliding glass door. When Gary's out, I let them in the house. Shhh. They're having a field day with all the frogs. The roar of the frogs from the flooded creek across the road is incredible! You can hear it all across town.

More rain. The humidity is something like nine thousand percent; we walk around dripping sweat. You sweat so much out here that you go past the smelly stage and just smell normal, unless of course you have had a carton of beer the night before, in which case your woman just refuses to let you in the house and you have to go back to your mate's place and drink more until she relents and lets you back in to do some plumbing.

Our first chook eggs! Pale blue-green & delicious.

"Lamalamalamalamaphotoheeheehee"
Little old Greta - I just want to take her home with me.

Nita - battling on, fiercely independent

"Gordon you big spunk!"

Maxine & Lynette - you should see them when they're not smiling

Maxine - the best smile you can manage when
your kids have been taken by welfare, you're
covered in scars and trying to stay out of jail

Lynette's attempt to smile - that'll make a cheery
placemat at breakfast time

Barry and one of the nurses.
"Barry, that is a glorious old hat!"
"Heh heh. Yep. Had it a while. Cough."