Just Call Me Chief

OMG! The local council have just made me the official Editor of The Meekatharra Dust - and they're paying me! It's so exciting! And terrifying! Oh my god

It will just be a modest part time thing to start off with, so I will continue to work at the roadhouse. My first act as Editor will be to declare war on Perth - no, wait, that's my prime ministerial acceptance speech, I mean I will be talking to Belinda the youth activities coordinator to get a kids' page going. Lorraine wants a weather report from the Met Bureau each month, Scooter suggested fishing tips, and everyone thinks that I will be writing all the articles and reporting on all the news in Meeka. I will have to explain that that is not what an editor does. But there's a huge swell of excitement & demand coming from the locals, who feel that our newsletter has dwindled to rubbish over the years and are keen for it to return to its heyday when it reported items such as "Mr. and Mrs. Doggitt of Sheepwash Creek departed on the Thursday train for Perth, where Mrs. Doggitt's elderly mother is unwell."

So in between monthly cattle price reports and the police roundup, I have been getting my souvenirs ready for the tourist season, designing stubby holders, and teaching all 3 dogs to ride on my motor scooter (at the same time). We have a third dog, Sophie, who is a black and white something or other with very large feet, she's just a few months old and a real sweetie. First I get on the scooter, then Sophie hops on between my feet, then Red Dog climbs on so she's wedged under his chest and he puts his front feet on my legs, and we carry Honey in the rear basket and ride round and round the racecourse camps for ages until I get bored. The dogs are obsessed with the scooter and go and sit on it all the time.

Gary is building our bio-fuel solar shed and making a concrete floor. When he does the last concrete slab we are going to do a family handprint with our hands and the dogs' feet (and Smokey's paw) to commemorate the occasion. It continues to be insanely hot so we just do bits and pieces here and there, then lie in front of the TV letting our brains deteriorate into porridge.

Meeka continues to be completely mad. Someone set fire to a car on the flats across from the roadhouse one evening, we have petrol thieves raiding the roadhouse like you wouldn't believe and brown snakes all over the place because of the rain and resultant insect population explosion. People pull up to the roadhouse with skinned dead kangaroos on their car roofs, and this week I caused an astonishing amount of confusion by asking someone if they'd seen Scooter (the fence repair guy), which got translated around town that my scooter (the vehicle) had been stolen, leading to the police coming to the roadhouse to say they heard I was looking for a scooter but what they meant was that Chad (one of the policemen) had a scooter for sale. It was like that "Who's on first" sketch.

Time to go do our handprints!