The Trailer Diaries are selling like hotcakes in town - there's only a few left at the supermarket! That's pretty good for a town where approximately most of the population can barely read. On top of that, an Australian women's magazine called That's Life is publishing one of my cute puppy photos - Bandit & Vincent hanging off the edge of the pool. So the puppies have earned $50, which puts them in second place in the household earnings ladder. Smokey is in first place ($100 and a bottle of Jamaican rum), Honey is 3rd (two bags of dog food), the chickens are only in 4th place despite steady egg production (they keep losing points for 4:00 am chicken parties), and our pile of wood is in 5th place, having earned a carton of Jim Beam.
There are several magazines which pay between $50 and $100 for cute pet photos, so I am shamelessly plowing through my photo collection for snapshots. Apart from earning cash with their good looks, the puppies are also very helpful around the bush camp. When they see me dragging a big dead tree branch over to the bush fence, they rush over and grab hold at the other end, carrying it along, sometimes in the same direction as me. It's a shame that we don't need things like Destroying The Corn Patch, Eating The Flowers, Digging Up And Eating The Compost or Hiding One Shoe From Each Pair In The Garden, because they are really good at those jobs too. Honey, Smokey and the puppies come for a long walk with me each morning, all acting like fools in the bushes & chasing each other.
No big news really - daily town madness continues, although we've had a murder-free week. They've nearly finished the new mine camp in town, so we're all waiting for our shares to skyrocket when Andy Well mine goes into production early this coming year. Gary is sick of taking loads of dirt to the camp and looking forward to having a month off over Christmas, which we're going to spend doing day trips and Gazza Tours, looking for old ghost towns and meteor sites and stuff. We're going to take Bithun, our Sri Lankan fellow firefighter, because he doesn't have a car and has hardly seen anything outside of town! I don't know how we're going to fit him in the 4WD, because Bithun is approximately fifteen feet tall and has to be folded into thirds in order to get him into any normal vehicle.
The brigade needs a new Apparatus Officer - they tried to shanghai me into it but I said that I was committed to my new lifestyle of being mostly irresponsible and unreliable, so we voted in Reece instead because he wasn't there. Gary suggested Cam as the Training Officer, which led to me getting everyone into hysterics pretending to be Cam running an exercise. "Och now you fuckers we're going to do a twenty k run in full BA kit over the burning tip mounds in full sun! Stop yer fuckin cryin and faintin' and throwing up in yer fuckin masks yer pussies!" We all agreed that this was no exaggeration and nominated Paul instead, because he is a teacher and can read things which are more complex than the alcohol content information on a beer can.
Rooster Number 2 has started making early morning wake up calls, so guess who we're having for Christmas dinner? Hopefully this time it won't be black and crunchy.
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