Gary hates dealing with money or household management, so he handed over his bank card and said "I'll work, you're in charge." Crikey! Talk about retro lifestyles - we've gone all 1950's, but instead of an apron and polkadot sundress I'm in dirty old work boots, cowboy hat, motorcycle goggles (they keep the flies out of my eyes) and not much else (it's really, really hot). My job: run our budget, make and grow food, google bike parts, shopping, cleaning and rescuing Gary's socks from the dogs. Gary's job is 9 to 5 hard yakka on the big machines, fuelling the genny, investigating suspicious noises in the night and Fixing Things. We're so traditional that I give Gaz pocket money from his pay each week - and he really likes it! But I drew the line at ironing (we gave that job to Smokey).
I'm working one or two days at week at the hostel, writing, gardening, building shelves, training the dogs, collecting eggs and taking Gary's morning tea out to him on the moped. Now that summer has hit us like a furnace, I get up at four thirty or five am to water the garden, take the dogs for a rumpus and get as many outdoor chores done as I can by mid morning - by ten am the ground and any metal objects are too hot to touch, and by midday it's so hot and dry that if I tried to walk the thirty metres to the genny shed Gary would come home and find my desiccated corpse lying in the dust, clutching an empty water bottle. So I go inside and write until the laptop's too hot and then me and the dogs go and lie in the shade by the pool under wet towels, moaning and eating flies. Smokey just goes to his secret air-conditioned kryptonite cave (he won't let us in), then strolls out looking cool as a cucumber at about dinner time.
As outback housewife, one of my jobs this week is to kill, pluck and gut Mr. Noisy Loudmouth Rooster. I debated keeping him to fertilise the eggs, but he started crowing at three this morning. "I've given him a name," I told Gary. Gaz moaned. "Oh no. You can't give them names, you'll get attached. What did you call him?" "Dinner."
Being a modern outback sheila, I used YouTube to learn how to do him in and get him on our plates. The best one was from a survivalist in Tennessee. "Now y'all jest git yer chicken and humanely pull his head off, oh yeah he's gonna flap around some but y'all just stand back from the blood jettin out of his head GIT BACK GODDAM COON DOGS then y'all want ter hang yer meat a few hours afore ya pluck, so go check the moonshine still and GIT DOGS GIT OFF THAT GOLDARN CHICKEN"
Maybe I'll just quietly take Mr. Rooster over to Sherwood Station. "Run! Run for your life!"
The internet is just a godsend out here. I even ordered Gaz a new tuxedo, shirt, shoes and socks (he likes to dress up for Masons) for less than $300 - and he looks like James Bond! (if James Bond had no teeth). We're going to have to get a fancy silver chain to attach his false teeth to his waistcoat, like a fob watch, because he keeps forgetting to take them with us when we go out on special occasions. I have a beautiful formal dress which was made for me in China for like $75 and it looks amazing, so I'm really looking forward to our next formal event where we can scrub the chicken blood, dust and diesel stains from our parched, scaly bodies and emerge from the dust-caked ute in style.
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