Newbies March 2014

Of gnomes, Yetis, bubs, Dear Leader and Dear Premier, Elvis is the AG for QLD, droughts, prisons and wars.

Walter Furness

Our thoughts go out to John who lost his partner Walter at the beginning of the year.  You will be missed Walter.  You were a gentleman in the old fashioned sense of the word.  After a fall two years ago, you spent months immobile in hospital being fed through a tube in your stomach which for a celebrity chef must have been purgatory. You never complained. Not once.  The staff loved you. “Wal”, you were a perfect demonstration of courage, selflessness and gentleness.  You never gave up. We love you and we miss you.

Fareweell Cayman

The Newbies have done the long haul from Cayman to Miami, LA and then Brisbane.  This was our last glimpse of Cayman as we took off. 

Simply crossing the US of A is a big deal - the distance from Miami to Los Angeles is about the same as from Brisbane to Perth.  Comparing Australia to Grand Cayman is difficult - Australia is the sixth largest country in the world by total area (7,692,024 km²) whereas Grand Cayman is a tad smaller at 196 km².  Let’s put that into perspective.  Cayman is a bit smaller than the dots used to show where cities are located in this overlay of US of A and Aus. 

Aus is a BIG island. USA is a BIG landmass.

One good thing about the long haul is that we get to read the Sky Mall, an American Airlines’ mag in the seat pocket. Go to their web site (www.skymall.com) and see what you think.  Here are some of our favourites. A life size Yeti for the garden perhaps (beats a few gnomes for sure) or the Affirmation Chest perhaps?  Talking of gnomes in the garden, we see the cross dresser nearby has tidied up his garden and moved the gnomes.  More in a later blog.

A Yeti for your garden?

The Affirmation Chest - it talks to you when you open the lid!

 Just to illustrate the point, here is the blub for the “Affirmation Chest”.  I am not kidding! “Bob's legions of fans, although devoted, are not available for 24/7 worship.  Fortunately, this treasure chest of cheer is here to step in and save the day. Every time the lid is opened, a perky voice pipes up: "Lookin' good, Bob," "You sure are sexy, Bob," "Way to go, Bob," and "You're the man, Bob."

So, if you could record something for the Affirmation Chest, what would you want to say?

Reflections on Cayman

“Life on a Small Island” might include the following:

• The less paint a car has, the more polite the driver;
• Buy it when you see it if you need it – the ship doesn’t come in that often;
• A Ferrari here is less use than a dog with two legs;
• Buy 1 Jerk, Get 1 Free (ladies, this doesn’t refer to the hubby/partner/boyfriend – it’s the way they cook chicken and beef);
• Clearer water and friendlier people you won’t find anywhere;
• No Malls (as in Western Malls where they are all the same, the shops are all the same and to men, they are all equally boring.  Indooroopilly near us has “improved” their monster by making it very hard to find a parking and even harder to get Fat Harry’s (our Hyundai Santa Fe) ample backside into any of the spaces;
• Rugby Clubs should be modelled on the Cayman Rugby Club (more in a later blog);        
• Everyone has a dog and there are more than a few left over.  The Brits walk them. (Who else?)

Thank you to everyone there who made us so, so welcome, in particular the Soto family.

Personal and Family

Bub update

Here she is, the star of our lives.  Miss Sierra Madeline.  Mark and Bridget have been going through the “Whose turn is it to sleep” routine.   Sometimes you have to catch a ziz when you can….by the way, for all the ladies demanding to know where the little one is, look closely at the top of the sofa.  See, I didn’t leave her out. 

Kidner Jeremy’s Usefulness.

Loyal readers will recall KJ was useful in Cayman for picking up doggy doo doos from BK’s lawn where, because he is a trained observer, he noticed that the dog pooed in a straight line. What do you think goes through a dog’s mind when it poos on the lawn?  “Left a bit, right a bit, aahhh…” 

Dog poo in a row

 

Kidner Jeremy is less use than a couple of concrete blocks to a Jamaican carpenter and he has driven everyone nuts mooching around the place getting in the way when he’s not picking up doggy do doos, so he’s going back to work.  More specifically, he is going to try and create an online service based on the consulting work he and his brainy partner Dr Richard (Barber) have done here in Aus.  He got off on the wrong foot when he checked in at Owens Robert International Airport in Grand Cayman and found he had left his new PC in the apartment.  Thanks BK for retrieving it and getting it to him before the plane took off.  “New” PC do I hear you say? Yes. He spilled Samuel Adams Ale on the old one.  This is not a good start to an online business.

Back in The Big Island (Australia, a large island a little North of New Zealand).

In the month we have been back, 80% of Queensland was declared a drought area (the highest area subject to drought on record) and farmers are having it terribly hard. Last night we got 95 mms (just under 4 inches) of rain, enough to fill the pool to overflowing (about a 6 inch rise in the water level).  It’s not often one gets a 6 inch rise….

One thing that is immediately apparent here is that the roads are pretty well maintained despite the common perception that they are not.  You want poor roads, try Kenya – they lose articulated lorries in the potholes.  The huge irony is that big Four Wheel drive vehicles are very common in Aus and, if they are garaged in town where most of the population lives, they never see terrain requiring 4WD.  We often mused that in Thailand you could only tell where the road ended and the pavement (sidewalk) begins because that was where the dogs slept in the sun.When Cayman gets a big wet (i.e., pretty well every time it rains) you get waders in the puddles.  No, I am not kidding.

Cars, Wheels and the Meaning of Life

And how’s this for a set of extreme wheels? Snapped at a car show in Cayman.  When Kidner Jeremy was wandering around the show, getting out of getting in the way at home after all the doggy poo was safely in the bag, even slightly deaf as he is could tell that the Jamaican DJ was going at it full tilt. His ears were bleeding. The DJ’s that is.

Rant of the Month – hospitals and prisons

What do the Dear Leader (North Korea), the Premier of Qld and his Attorney General have in common?  Cynics will say they are all a little extreme in their politics although that is a little unfair to The Dear Leader.  Rumour has it that the Dear Leader is looking towards our Dear Premier for clues as to how to deal with irritating people such as political opponents.  Well, our Dear Premier has come up with legislation that even the Dear Leader wouldn’t dare try in North Korea.  Sex offenders and bikies are on the run, soon to be followed by doctors in the State Health system.

 

Queensland must be the only State in Australia to have an Elvis impersonator as the AG and a Kim Jong-un impersonator as Premier. Certainly, more people may be singing “Jail House Rock”.   Here are the Blues Brothers with their version. http://youtu.be/qcqtAPge_bI .  While you look at the video, think about the graph of prison populations.  I also read that Kenyan prisons have an occupancy level of 343.7% according to the BBC.   Queensland may be up there if our Dear Premier gets his way.

Captions are invited.

Current Events

2014 marks the Centenary of World War 1. The BBC has a forthcoming series “The Pity of War”. Niall Ferguson has made a few controversial points in his book of the same name, including a suggestion that Britain should not have entered the war so the series will be worth watching.  There are some surprising statistics revealed in the series, for example – 9 out of 10 soldiers in the British army who went into the trenches survived. 

Keep Well, Stay Safe

Kidner Jeremy and Mrs K