The gifts that will go on giving

We have had some snow. Nothing of Viennese proportions but enough to cover the ground to the depth of and inch or two. This has since sort of gone away but we have some hard icy stuff all over the place now and in is very slippery. 

This was apparent on Saturday when many Hoosiers drove on the roads as though they were as shitty as they usually are - but dry. Well in fact they were shitty and slippery and many hundreds of cars went into ditches and each other and there was a spectacular crash on the I something or other that involved hundreds of cars and trucks.  Maybe not that many but you know what I mean.

At some stage the state government is probably going to have to spend some money on roads instead of using it to persecute gays and poor people - but then they are Republicans so they have their priorities and for them there is nothing more important than gay bashing and stopping women from having abortions. And sex. Why are they obsessed with sex?

Anyway - as for the ice conditions - I am quite capable - as I have demonstrated previously - of falling down the steps even without snow so I am being very cautious. 

Gwenyth and PK arrive on Wednesday. PK has had an operation on his eye so is a bit wobbly.  He apparently snoozes a lot so he should fit in well here with the dogs and the cats. 

Tomorrow I am buying him an extra special bottle of Jameson so that we can sit around and discuss our operations - even though my brain operation was years ago I am never reluctant to talk about it. 

I love it when I say to people that the doctors told Cate that I was not going to make it and that she should assemble the family to bid me farewell. This alway elicits a few gasps of awe in which I can bask. ‘Oh it must have been so terrible for Cate!’

Well it wasn’t to chuffy for me either. 

Although I will get no sympathy from PK. He is an ocean sailor and has many harrowing stories to tell - which I can only listen to if I am sitting next to a bucket and have some wet wipes at hand. 

There is an amazing amount of stuff to be cleaned when we have visitors and Cate adds to the list daily. Today I was told that I had to get the hard water stains off the drink glasses. 

I am not sure why the water is so hard here. Perhaps because of it being a red state - or maybe Mike Pence sneaks in at night and pisses on our glasses - but I had to watch YouTube to find a solution - which I was unable to do. 

I worked it out for myself and used rinse aid. The glasses are now so clean you could …well…drink out of them. 

It is that time of year when Cate digs through obscure recipe books and finds things that perhaps were never cooked - at least since the 1900’s. My task today was to find pomegranate molasses and golden caster sugar. 

Give me a break.

In years past I would have prowled around Whole Foods and Trader Joes and Fresh Thyme searching vainly for this stuff but I am older and wiser. Amazon. They will be here on Thursday. 

It has been an exciting week so far. 

Georgia ate a corn cob. This is not the first time she has done that but this time it got stuck and she became quite unwell. So it was vet time for $700 and they referred us to another vet who charged another $1,000 but the is OK now and that is all that matters.

Then the furnace had a problem and that cost $1,700.

Then today the downstairs toilet started leaking and that was $400 because of course it had to be dismantled and reassembled. ‘Oh there is a problem here!’ 

Of course there is - this house is older then Methuselah. Just get on with it. 

The plumber said that he had been here before. I said I am sure he had because we have seven toilets and at any given stage one of them is going to have a problem. 

Our Christmas tree was delivered and has been appropriately festooned with lights. It actually looks quite nice. 

As an atheist I actually have no problem with Christmas. It is a tradition - adapted from pagan rituals thousand of years old. But I am happy to participate because I like the tradition. I always say ‘Merry Christmas’. I am not into this happy holidays rubbish.

It’s Christmas for Christ’s sake. 

Cate wanted me to put lights on the trees in the back garden - so I did. She said why do the lights go only half way up the tree and I said that they go as far as I can reach without being on a ladder and as you wont allow me to get on ladders that is the best I can do. 

She is considering rectifying this situation but it is too damn cold. 

I continue to watch the antics of the president-elect with great interest - and glee. I am laying in supplies of popcorn and coca cola because the next few years are going to be really special. So many episodes - and I bet there will be a surprise ending.

Because we are Australians we are really lucky that there is nothing that the orange-utan can do that will affect us. Except of course for a nuclear war. I admit that could be a problem. 

Although Indianapolis is probably a fair way down the list of targets by Russia and the many other countries that want to exterminate America. 

Ah George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The gifts that will go on giving for the next 100 years.

I blame Obama

Its not my fault that I don't blog nearly enough. I have a punishing schedule and - while I have four assistants - they are all useless. The cats sleep all day and the dogs seem to spend the entire day rolling around and biting each others ears. 

It has taken us a while but Cate and I realized on the weekend that we are involved in an elaborate reality TV show where reality is a matter of perception. We realized that what we are witnessing here cannot be real. No president-elect would be behave like this unless he was pulling our chain. In fact - no sane person could act like the president-elect is acting now. 

So we are much more relaxed now and cannot wait for season 2. Although the shark was jumped on many occasions in season 1 - so we will be interested to see what happens.  

I have found that having two dogs is not like have one dog twice. It is much more difficult and as Indiana is a puppy she is a lot more trouble than Georgia. And it is now very cold so I cannot shove them out the back door and let them run wild. I can only leave them for a short while and then bring them back inside. Most of the time they are in the house they spend chasing each other and biting each others ears, crashing into furniture and creating mayhem. 

Of course to go outside they both have coats which I can put on them. These are expensive weatherproof coats which will theoretically keep them nice and warm. Putting them on requires hand to paw combat. When they get them on and go outside they become fixated on tearing them off each other and playing tug-o-war with what are becoming the tattered remains. They may be weatherproof but they are not dog proof. 

Grizelda came and gave us and the dogs our first lesson. Neither we nor the dogs were any good at all at what we were supposed to do. Indiana is absolutely hopeless and cannot master even the basic things that a dog should be able to do. She is extraordinarily stubborn and is really only good at one thing at that is tearing Georgia’s collar off.

John and Mike and Antonio have finished the work on the house and we have high hopes that it will make it through winter before disintegrating completely. They have put a door on Cate’s study to turn in into a bedroom with an ensuite. So we now have five bedrooms with ensuites and seven bathrooms. Yes I know it seems a bit excessive but we really liked the house.

Cate needed a door on her study because Georgia barks frantically every time the doorbell rings - or the proximity whizzer on the door bell indicates someone or something has approached the door. 

This proximity whizzer is affected by large trucks or buses passing the house - so there is a lot of lunacy in dog land many times each day. And no I cannot change the sensitivity of the motion detector because it is already on its lowest level.

Yes I can tear it off the wall and throw it away. This may happen soon. 

Cate also had John install some mantelpieces above our fireplaces. This is a lot harder than it sounds as first we had to find some reclaimed lumber that was just what we needed - and then take out a bank loan to buy it. We have found that old timber planks from ancient barns are more expensive than gold. 

Then much drilling and messing about was required by Mike and John. 

So now Cate has lots of space for the Christmas decorations which include owls, hedgehogs and polar bears we bought in Vienna.

Today I suddenly realized that Gwenyth and PK arrive next week so I have embarked on a major linen washing and cleaning campaign. Tomorrow I will get stuck into the general cleaning. The toaster will wait until the day before they arrive. 

And then I have to start worrying about Christmas dinner. This is theoretically not my department as I usually have Christmas day off. But I am responsible for the planning and the shopping.

There will also be the last minute shopping when Cate decides to cook minced larks tongues with bat paw foam and shredded musk rat embryos - garnished with a frisson of lightly toasted goat droppings. None of these things will be available in Indiana so I will have to scour the countryside for the ingredients.

So at Christmas we are going to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. We always go somewhere cold at Christmas - except last year when we went to Mexico. Too damn hot for our liking.

We expect to be very cold so I have resurrected my considerable amount of winter gear and am organizing this for the icy cold conditions which await us. I tried on my padded winter pants tonite and alas they have shrunk. This is an increasing phenomenon in this house.

I blame Obama. 

One of the finest

I am particularly bad at blogging at the moment as the dogs are keeping me fully occupied and are driving me crazy. I get very little time to myself. 

I am not really commenting on American politics. But I am watching in amazement as this grotesquery happens in front of me. I am pleased to say that things are going according to plan (as far as I am concerned). I am looking forward to a series of catastrophes which will probably culminate in the destruction of the planet via an environmental or a nuclear disaster of biblical proportions. 

It is with as sense of wonder that I watch as the President-elect tweets a never ending stream of lies and rubbish. 

Not that I believe anything that is in the bible - but you know what I mean. 

When I was in Vienna some people selling religion got into our building. It was supposed to be a secure building but there was a massage parlor called ‘Japan Studio’ on the first floor so there was more traffic through our building than there is in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. 

The girls incidentally were not Japanese - they were Chinese and were led by the redoubtable Ms Elizabeth to who I spoke quite often in a mixture of German and English.

Anyway the religious people made it to level 5 and knocked on our door and I foolishly opened it. They were very tenacious and talked about God quite a bit. Whenever I tried to baffle them with logic they told me what it said in the bible. 

I did not tell them what I thought of the bible but finally - stumped for a way to have them go away without being too rude - I said that if they had been born in Iran they would now be trying to convert me to Islam.

This finally silenced them and they looked at me sadly and moved on to greener pastures. Not that I think there were too many of these in Vienna. The Europeans are fairly practical when it comes to fantasy. 

But because of politics we no longer watch TV and confine our viewing to Netflix or Amazon video. There are limits to what we can endure. It is amazing how long you can spend browsing Netflix before you decide that there is nothing you want to watch. If there was a competition for this we would be certain medalists. 

So we went to Washington for Thanksgiving and communed with our relatives - Australian and Mongolian. I was not put in charge of anything so just mooched around and ate turkey and drank wine. It was quite a satisfying evening. 

We are going to Mongolia next July because Mason (what a fine Mongolian name) is having a a hair cutting ceremony after which we will all exclaim ‘Tom xun bolooroi!’ 

On Friday night we went to the theater and saw a very good play that had a very unhappy ending. The play is called ‘Straight White Men’ and if you are looking for a good time you should see something else. Also do not sit in the front row unless you wish to be covered with crisps. 

On Saturday we went to stay with some friends in Washington. These were people with whom I worked 30 years ago and they are living there temporarily in a quite wonderful apartment in Arlington. They took us to the Stone Tower vineyard in Virginia and we ate cheese and drank wine. 

The girls did a wine tasting and the sommelier asked them how they liked the wine. ‘Not bad’ they said in Australian - which means of course that it is pretty damn good. He was a bit horrified and said ‘I am so glad to hear that’. 

I had seen Wayne a year or so ago and he visited us in Indy and stayed for a couple of nights. We discussed old times and life in general until 5 AM and the next day neither of us could remember anything we said. 

So we were able to do it all again on this trip. We are simply preparing for Alzheimers. As Bill Bryson said ‘I am now too old for early onset Alzheimers - when it arrives it will be right on time.’

The damn tree is finally dropping the remainder of its leaves so tomorrow is mulching day. Some people are also coming to clean the gutters. I cannot do this because some of the gutters are three stories high and would involve the climbing of a very long ladder. 

Cate rightfully will not allow me to climb any ladder let along a high one as she seen me at my clumsiest - which is now becoming my norm - and I really cannot be trusted at any height all. 

If you have a dog and are thinking about getting another one - think very carefully and  contact me for advice. You may not change your mind but I will be able to give you some very valuable tips. 

Indy is smarter than Georgia. This - admittedly - is a not a great leap - but she is a puppy and has had no training at all. So she pretty well does as she pleases. This is not always the results for which we aspire and my constant companions are paper towels and mops.

In fact I have purchased a carpet shampooer - and use it a lot. 

But Grizelda the dog trainer comes on Sunday for the dog’s first lessons. She came a few weeks ago and observed the dogs and her view was that they are redeemable. She has the demeanor of a gulag guard but swears that she will not harm the dogs in any way and does not use methods which involve the use of blow torches for baseball bats.

Anyway we gave her a vast amount of money and she will appear on Sunday to get the dogs into shape.

Bits are falling off our house so John and Mike and Antonio have been back to effect repairs. While looking up at some guttering that was falling to bits John said that I had a real money pit on my hands.

I reminded him that it was he who sold us the house three years ago. He laughed. But he is a gay Democrat - one of the finest people on earth. 

Winters, fires and dogs.

Hunter at work

Georgia stalks a squirrel. By the time Georgia gets to where the squirrel was it will be sitting up in the tree buffing its nails.

Hold the feet

So I am over American politics and shall write no more about the whole sordid business.  But I must say - giggle - that it is to going to be great fun to watch over the next few years. 

We have been watching ‘Crown’ about the Royal Family and it has made me realize that I know almost nothing about them. Whatever I know has been gleaned from newspapers over the last 60 years or so. And I never really paid much attention. They were just always there and made no difference to my life at all.

I do remember when I was small and lived in Deniliquin NSW in Australia that I caught a train to Shepparton Victoria to see the Queen. I stood in a large crowd of small people and waved a small flag as she went past in her big black car. And my goodness she is still there. If people ever think they have a bad job they should look at what the Queen has to do. And she never retires. Think about that. She pays into social security for her whole life and then dies. And collects nothing. 

There has been in Australian for some time a movement for us to divest ourselves of the monarchy and become a republic and elect a president. I suppose it will happen one day but I don't think it matters. I think we should just sit there and watch with horror what is happening in America. 

More importantly - my new leaf mulcher is a ball tearer. Last year I had a hand held leaf mulcher and used it for hours and hours and nearly crippled myself. So I bought one that just stands there and that you throw leaves into and it works a treat. I tried it out last week and have been overwhelmed with the ease of use. Of course it is  not very efficient and only mulches selected leaves - but small enough to enable us to throw them on there garden. 

Each year - on the day it decides is best - our gigantic mulberry tree decides to drop its leaves. So it starts mid morning and in four hours it divests itself of every leaf. So it started today and we said ‘today is leaf day ‘ but at noon it stopped completely. Not a leaf has fallen since. I just don't understand the world anymore. 

And I have a new poo bucket. Much improved on the old one which - post Indiana - was too small. And disappeared. Could someone have stolen a plastic bucket with holes in the bottom - which was used to collect dog poo? I am sure they would her been sorely disappointed. 

Indiana does poos in the most amazing places and I am not usually able to use the garden spade because to the intricacies of the location. I have commandeered a pair of kitchen tongs and use these to extricate her droppings mainly from ‘ground zero’. This is an area of the garden - thick with ground cover - which appears to have gained her favor - although she does spread this around a bit. I have to remove a great deal of foliage in poo collection but I am sure nature will cope. 

So on Wednesday we are going to Washington for Thanksgiving to be with Cate’s brother and his wife and their son who is married to a lovely Mongolian woman. So thanksgiving there is a blast with 5 Australians and about 10,000 Mongolians. She has many relatives. 

I am usually in charge of the oxen spit but may not be allowed to do it this year because last year I overcooked the oxen. This is not hard to do if you start cooking and drinking at 6.00 AM and get lackadaisical about the heat beads. 

I reckon this year it might be the coleslaw. It wont stop me from drinking.

We are going to Mongolia next year and apparently have at least 1 million relatives there by marriage. 

I have seen Indiana Jones movies and am not eating any yak’s eyeballs or cobra’s hearts. (That may have been Anthony Bourdain but nevertheless I want only good wholesome food like barbecued goat. Hold the feet.)

I was devastated

So I am sort of recovering from the election of the orange idiot. 

I was devastated. 

We are permanent residents although not citizens. So we do not have the rights of citizens - but I figure that as my wife pays $150,000 in taxes each year - and the president-elect has never paid any taxes ever - this gives me complaining rights.

Like most other people I did not see this coming. 

George Carlin said ‘never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups’. And he was right. In fact he was always right and he would have predicted a Trump presidency.

George had a great understanding of the fundamental ignorance of large swathes of the population. He would paint a picture of the great unwashed religious zealots and bigots in middle America and his audiences would laugh out loud at the caricatures.

But he knew that he was not talking about caricatures - he was talking about living and breathing people who had turned dumbness into an art form.

I knew that there were enormous numbers of stupid people in America - the system is designed that way. The education standards in America are appalling - the lowest in first world countries. But any system that favors the really rich needs a whole bunch of dumb grunts to actually do the work. 

And Americans are used to being conned by charlatans. This is the very nature of the society in which they live. I listen to mainstream radio each day and most commercials are designed to inveigle people to partake in the immense number in scams that are legal here.

Have a major tax debt? We can fix that. Have a bad credit score? We can fix that. Have a large debt for college tuition? We can fix that. Want to earn $100 per hour at home on your computer? Just send money and your bank account details.

So why would not those people fall for the biggest con of all time.

Now the very people who voted for Trump are going to be well and truly fucked over bigly. No the coal mines are not going to reopen. No manufacturing is not coming back to America. No the wall is not going to be built. No the Mexicans are not going to be deported. But yes - maybe 20 million people will lose their health cover. 

I really feel sad about this. They needed help and instead they have been fucked over. But I am more concerned about things other than stupid people.

Trump has the opportunity to do lasting damage to the environment. He may appoint to head the EPA a climate change denier. This nitwit will have the opportunity to do enormous and irreversible damage to our environment and to poison the future for our children and grandchildren. 

He has already caused chaos with there LGBT community and with other minorities who are regarded by many of his supporters as non-citizens - as people who should not be an integral and vital part of this country. Across the country these people are being attacked. 

I find this concept appalling. It is contrary to everything I believe, 

This is why - as a resident of this country - I will fight tooth and nail for the restoration of sanity. For the acceptance of science. For the contempt of religion zealotry. And for the preservation of the rights of the the gay and minority communities which are so much a part of what we believe America should be.  

We have a new dog

Indiana

So we have a new dog. She is a German shepherd mix and is four months old. Her name is Indiana and Georgia just loves her to bits. The idea was that she would give Georgia some company and that this would take the pressure off me and stop Georgia from following me absolutely everywhere.

That is not actually so bad but Georgia has more than a few psychological problems and when I went into my study to do things she would stand in the hall outside the study and look at me - possibly reproachfully - hard to be sure.

We had not intended to get another dog until next year but Cate went to a Humane Society breakfast last Thursday and Indiana was outside on show - waiting to be adopted. Well Cate being Cate she immediately fell in love with Indiana (who was then Mosey) so we went to the Humane Society on Friday and got her.

She is a truly lovely dog and we are all as happy as clams together. Georgia is teaching her how to dig up garden beds and eat Cate’s plants. 

Of course she is a baby and is currently teething so I am covered in bite marks. And there some issues with toilet training but best if I do not talk about them here. 

I have started yoga. I have been wanting to do this for a long time but have never had the courage to drag my ancient wrinkled body to a yoga place and put it on display while I did the downward dog. 

So I have had three private lessons and will have another one in week or so when my teacher gets back from holidays. Yoga is much harder than I thought it would be and some of the positions are just about beyond me - although I have surprised myself - and my teacher. 

It is apparently idiot proof

Why do women complain when I grope them? I am so rich and so orange. 

My goodness I am bad at blogging.

Over the last week I have made two types of pumpkin soup. Both were inedible. I have never been able to make pumpkin soup. Whatever I make is disgusting. I don't understand this because I follow tried and true recipes but have obviously not used the right amount of ingredients.

Anyway both batches went down the Insinkerator. I love that word. It takes talent to make a word like that. A word of advice. Do not put asparagus down your Insinkerator. It will die and a man will come and say 'you should never put asparagus down your Insinkerator’. Not only will its pee smell funny - but it will be completely fucked!

But recently I have made some excellent Thai dishes. We have an astonishing market here that sells absolutely everything Asian including lemongrass. What a wonderful thing this is. At this market there were - and I counted them - 60 different types of leafy vegetables. I bought shrimp paste and other stuff that you cannot find anywhere else. I could have bought cod balls and grees nuts but I have no idea what these are for. 

The fence is being moved again on Wednesday. This is to give Georgia more grass. She really loves grass and we can play chase the hippo for hours. The hippos are indestructible plastic toys that squeak and she loves them. We cannot give her anything made of fibre or cloth because she destroys them and eats them and the results are not pretty. It is bad enough collecting large turds  - but multicolored stringy ones are just too much early in the morning.

We have a very large and very old house and there are three stories. It is hard to see what is happening up top but my casual observations have deduced that large bits are rotting and are in need of attention. There is no way of proving this because there is simply no way I am going to climb an 80 foot ladder. At my stage of life I am risking everything just climbing out of bed.

So I thought I should buy a drone with a camera so that I could send it up to take photographs of the destruction.

Drones are much more difficult to manage than I had imagined. But then I have trouble with the toaster so it should not have been much of a surprise. I spent some time crashing into trees and bushes before it took on a life if its own and vanished into the ether. The last time I saw the drone it was heading towards Carmel. I am sure I will not see it again but can only hope that its last act was to decapitate a Trump supporter. 

I have ordered another drone from Amazon. This one is apparently idiot proof. But these drones have never encountered an idiot like me. We shall see. 

We gave Georgia her first bath on the weekend. Oh sure she has had baths before at dog grooming places but we have never dared to try. So we girded our loins and had a go. We were not expecting much as she is the most timid dog in all of Christendom. The previous day we had been at Petco and she was such a wimp I told he that she really had to put her big girl pants on. I did in fact say after Petco that she did not appear to have any big girl pants.

But she was amazing when we washed her. She was still and quiet and let us lather her up and wash her nether regions without complaint. So she does have some big girl pants after all. I now have to clip her nails. I cannot do this alone but Cate does not want to participate because she thinks it will be awful - but she he going to have to put her big girl pants on too.

Tonite is Halloween. We have left the lights off and kept quiet. This is because last year we left a big basket of goodies outside and a horde of children got out of an SUV and took the lot. Sort of destroys the trick or treat thing so we could not be bothered.

I just can't wait

9 November: WRONG - I never ran for President. 

Well the ribs I cooked were just awful. I had not realized that they had already been covered in rub so I could not use one of Myron’s rubs. I did not smoke them for nearly long enough and they were not the way they should have been. I suspect that were not the best quality ribs. It was not a happy experience but I shall try again later this  season.

We had been spoiled because Cate was given some ribs which had been cooked by a guy named Sherman - and they were fabulous. He guards his recipe closely and will not give to anyone. 

There is still no sign of Johnny so I am doing gardening things myself. 

It is less than three weeks to the election and it will all soon be over and the orange moron can go back to doing what he used to do. 

I have never seen anything quite like the last 12 months or so - and the debates were a sight to behold. 

I think in 200 years they will still talk about the Trumpeter as the single most dangerously unqualified person ever to run for office. I mean it is one thing to not know anything about - well - anything and to be a rampant narcissist and a frothing conspiracy theorist and a serial liar and a misogynist and a racist and a promoter of violence and a cheat and conman extraordinaire - but to combine this with more than modicum of outright hooting lunacy is a combination I do not think this country could survive. 

As it is there are millions who are now cleaning their guns and sharpening their pitchforks ready to take to the streets to massacre all those election rigging liberals on 9 November. 

Cate bought me a Hillary tee shirt and I sure as hell will not be wearing that in public anywhere in this town.

It will be - as they say - a shit show. Best to lay low for a few months or years. 

I finally changed TV providers. We had a service which was provided by satellite. This was fine unless there were storms or tornados or high winds tor heavy rain. We have a lot of that kind of stuff here so we constantly lost our service. 

I could not afford to have something like this happen on election night which I expect to be almost delicious as the night John Howard lost his seat.

I just can't wait.