Just when I think I've had the craziest Meeka day, another one comes along and tops it. Today I found a dog lying injured in Main Street, had it treated by Royal Flying Doctor Colin in the hospital driveway, saved its life, rescued Curtis from limping home on crutches by the creek, took him and the dog home to the demonic pensioners flats, caused a sensation at the pensioners flats (story below!), got the Department of Housing to organise a town meeting about the hellish flats, nearly ran into Gary in Oliver Street as he came around the corner driving the big bulldozer thing, then came home to discover that the new chook had got into the other side yard and the chicks had disappeared into thin air.
Then Gary got home and we had the most hysterical time herding chooks, which are the wiliest escape artists in the world. We found the chicks running loose in the bush outside the compound, we still have no idea how they got out, and somehow we ended up with Smokey and mum chook helping us to round up the chicks, except for one which ran to the other end of the compound following Ethel ("are you my mum??"). Ethel was trying to hatch some eggs, so she thinks she's had a baby. New chook is wandering around by the swimming pool with the babies riding on her back! Gary is making a new gate with Matt Taylor blues at volume 570 on the stereo and is doing hilarious guitar solos with the power drill. The whole place has turned into Funny Farm.
But the big story of the day is the infernal pensioners flats. I have been drafting letters and organising people to prepare "we won't tolerate this anymore" petitions, taking photos and talking with the poor beleagured assistant manager of the Housing Department office who has been trying to sort out the mess (long story of ridiculous bureacracy). But at lunch time I had a sudden idea, and when I did the meals on wheels run I took a great big stack of rubbish bags with me. The usual mob were sitting around in the mess.
"Hello everybody!" I called out. "We havin a big meeting now, you mob and me, come and listen up." They all stared at me. "The town is going to shut this place down if it doesn't get cleaned up. You mob going to lose your homes, so we got to do a big clean up. All that rubbish here and in the bush, we gonna put it in these bags. Who's the boss here?" They laughed. "Okay, I'm making Curtis here the Big Boss Man in charge of Cleanup. He going to give you all a bag each, you go round for five minutes and pick up rubbish, put it by the big bins, then whitefella come and take it away."
They CHEERED. Curtis took the bags and I went off to finish my rounds. I had absolutely no faith that anything would happen, and went back after work expecting to see heaps of empty rubbish bags blowing around. Bugger me - I roll up and there's Curtis's mother and sister Debra, they've taken over running the cleanup and have done one side of the buildings already. I hugged everybody and promised to come on Monday to join in, then went down and told Julianne at the Housing office - she could not believe it. So she's all fired up now and organising a town meeting, a rubbish collection team and alcohol bans, and wrote down my suggestion that they build an outdoor sleeping shelter and fire pit, and put in a full time caretaker there. Awesome! We'll see if it all turns to crap on Monday, but for a few minutes, a production manager made a difference.
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