Our work routines are hilarious! I'm doing the home & community service shifts at work this week - meals on wheels, taxi, shopping, whatever. Thank god I used to be a film runner, otherwise I would just lose my mind. Wheee! Darting around town in the crappy white van, I often come across Gary in various trucks. We just stop in the middle of the road and have a quick chat. "Ross has got an old windmill tower we can have, it's sitting out at Silver Swan." "OK. Don't forget to pick up the chook wire." Wave, beep beep, off we go on our rounds again.
Today I had Maureen as my assistant. She's "doing her hours" - community service time in lieu of jail, for some kind of vehicle offence. Sadly she doesn't compare with the excitement of working with Maxine, who at least livened up the day with chasing her hubby down the street and pointing out the various strange places her little blue car had been left by drunken crazy friends the night before.
But Maureen has lived in Meeka all her life however and is very handy for tracking down missing meals on wheels clients and translating the barely comprehensible information obtained from whoever is hanging around ("Where Dot?" "She gone Wingo's, not here." "You tell her call the hostel she want her meals eh."). Each day is a comedy of errors as I try to locate the people on our meals delivery list, wondering if they've gone off to Wiluna or are lying dead in unspeakable filth in their living room. When we get to Nellie Mongoo's place, she tries to give me the five stray cats that are living at her house. "Nellie, just call the vet and they'll come and euthanase them." (The cats are not in good shape; I'd adopt them in a flash but it would just be the start of hundreds).
One of my chores today was to go to our bush camp and gather up a big bag of gidgie tree twigs for Greta's chewing tobacco ash. On the way back, we spotted an aboriginal fellow trudging along the Wiluna track, carrying a swag, so we drove over to see if he wanted a lift. "Yer that'd be good." I couldn't make sense of how he'd come to be walking the Wiluna road, but we dropped him off at the infernal pensioners' flats. On the way however, I pulled over and made him & Maureen wait while I crept around in the acacia bush photographing one of the wedgetail eagles that live near our place; there's a dead roo off the side of the road and the eagles have been hanging around. Then we stopped by my house to kidnap George's horrendously dangerous bar heater. All in a day's work!
Then Paul came round to the bush camp after work with his great grandfather's old Winchester .22 rifle, what a beauty - it's 110 years old! Gary's astonishing encyclopedic knowledge of machinery, tools, guns and lord knows what else came into play once again and he & Paul had a very pleasant evening cleaning the rifle on top of the Engel fridge while I made dinner, then we went out and shot it at the gum tree by our front door ("Don't shoot Smokey!") before settling in front of the fire to watch Dr. Who.
But our after-work recreational activities don't stop there. Gary's going to go and get another dead roo that's lying off the road up by the racetrack turnoff and put it out on the flood wash near our place so it will attract the eagles. Nothin' like home-grown fun in the bush!
No comments:
Post a Comment