Ink marks on a blank page Mon 20th December

There it be, wasn't going to write again until after 'THE' day, but there are one or three things that weigh heavily over the robbi at this moment. Nothing so heavy that you will be sick with angst or want to rise up and dowse one with flames, or maybe you might. Should you be animal lovers, or more to the point , admirers of Rattus norvegicus, then look away .Go no farther.

We all have things that in life we do not mutter about in polite society, or should do, just little pecadilloes about oneself that are best left under the blanket ,to use a metaphor. I am one such, for it are in life that it is my downfall ,some would say, the robbi is a little bit of a softy. To be a softy is not a pecadilloe or something to despise, not at all and possibly when I started to use the p word you came over all hot 'n' bothered like, are we going to get into the good stuff now, a la bold & the beautiful et al. The robbi cries in movies ,at weddings/watching some plays/reading great poetry/listening to good music at toddlers who the cutest things and when I slip off the pedals of my bike to hit the cross bar.

Oh I feel that I am rambling but shall endeavour to make a point, which is.

That I live in the suburbs of a small city(1.8mill) in an newish house, which is opposite a park that has a river running through. Said river is about 50 yards from my front door. The house itself is reasonably large and on a flat block slightly elevated up from the road that runs in front. The block size is 925 sq metres and has a large front garden composed of native plants bisected by a dry creek (of river pebbles). The back has a side garden of native plants and a pond, a raised herb bed two citrus trees,bay tree,plum ,two nectarine,one apricot,one peach and a 5thous gall rain water tank. The fruit trees are espaliered onto frames which contain within a chicken house complete with two chickens. The whole is complimented by various gates /paths/a shed/compost bins and the minutae of living. There are several pieces of statuary of mine scattered about with a totem pole that I made (carved) for my grandchildren,now 4 off.Along the side of the house is a pergola that extends over the pond. The pond was really a mistake as I dug it in a fit of pique one day when upset with Hortense, one of those projects that one does in a flurry of bad temper and much sweat. I say mistake as after installing said pond it are somewhat of a chore to maintain, also to keep the water from growing masses of algae come summer I had to build a pergola over it. That is also why one should never do in fits of pique, it always invariably blows back in your face. That we are well pleased with the garden as a whole is a comfort, therefore the pique never gets a mention. To save the grandchildren from floating in the pond I have placed temporary pieces of mesh over it, said mesh somewhat removes the esthetic effect that pond lends to the ambience of the place but it do stop little people from drowning.

The above is not meant to convey to you a sense that the robbi is a landscaper extreme, or the most diligent of gardeners nor anything else that springs to your collective mind(s), merely though to illustrate perhaps a small point of the robbi psyche,ie softy.
For the thing is y'see if you have fruit trees in your back garden in OZ you will have rodents who visit when the fruit is ripening and or falling to the ground , ripe. my guess is that in other climes it are the very same, but although I have lived amongst others in different cities/countries I have only ever grown fruit here.I have read in various tomes too that when in a city one is only ever no more thant ten feet from a rat, two or four legged I have no idea.
Rats are not my favourite persons, either variety, the human or other.From herein this gets amight squeamish to recite, so I shall be as brief as I can. We have ascertained several facts, the growing of fruit attracts rodents, they spoil the fruit, I don't like them, the robbi is a softy. So I saw that rats persons were eating my glorious peaches, I purchase bait,they ate the bait. So much so did they eat the bait I assumed that either the rat(s) actually were getting fat on my bait or I was harbouring several packs of the beasts. I purchased rat cage, the gentleman selling the cage told me that it would catch a rat, to dispose of said rat I was place rat cage into a large bucket of water and proceed to instruct said rat into the art of swimming underwater without a snorkel or any other method of gaining air with which to breath. Lo, the very first time I set rat cage up I caught a very fine, large specie of Rattus norvegicus. Bucket of water at the ready I proceed with swimming lesson uno. Alas the cage was just exactly the same height as the bucket resulting in rat being able to tread water and just keep its little pink snout above the water line.Dilemma, what to do, grab the hose turn water tap to max and force snout under the water.
Damn but that little bugger could turn a nifty somersault or three I can tell you, also in the course of somersaulting rat was taking deep breaths. Eventually though the force of water and the iron will of the robbi caused rat to ingest enough so as to sink gracefully down, but I swear to you with such a look of "help me please' on its face I found it hard to get t sleep that very night.

There you have the saga of robbi who has had to go back to the laying of baits as he cannot face having to endure giving more underwater swimming lessons.Oh do not mutter amongst yourselves that I should just get a deeper bucket, as it is each time I walk past that bucket I can still see rat turning a soulful eye toward me, I swear that one arm was raised in a farewell gesture as it breathed in the last mouthful of H2o.

I leave you with a small pictorial of the robbi garden, do not judge me too harshly, a man sometimes has to do that which he thinks a man must do.

ink marks on a blank page Fri 18th Dec

Well 'tis sort of getting around to that time again, seems as though 'it' starts around October these days.Here that is just about the case ,most stores have some sort of bauble or three up and running, by mid November all the malls seem to be echoing to the sound of sleigh bells and the like. Might be just me being an old curmudgeonly type but that , sleighs/snow, really irritates the life out of me, we have heaps of snow here but in OUR winter. Life in OZ December is mostly about the beach ,surf, sand and cricket. yes I know there are lots of folk here who at one time came from a place where there is snow in December, all my folk did too, but for everything there is a season.This is also the dead season for TV and radio here in OZ, nothing but repeats or fourth rate shows on all channels, radio fares no better as even the public broadcaster we listen to on our brand new digital radio has its second string announcers on. To make matters worse the Copenhagen conference is on everything , what a load of toss that is as well. Our oppostion party here would not pass the prime Ministers Emission Trading scheme before he went to the conference, and a jolly good thing too.
Can anyone tell me what an Emission Trading scheme will do to stop pollution? The way I understand it works is like this; company A is a steel mill, they are heavy polluters so for each tonne of carbon they emit they will pay a levy.That money goes to the Government of the day.But how does that stop pollution?? They way I see it if the steel company has to make steel to stay in business then they will make carbon, let's say they make a hundred tonnes of carbon a week to make 5 thousand tons of steel so that they remain in profit. That carbon makes them polluters, so they pay a tax, the Gov gets the money(some middlemen get to cream off a bit too).They still have to make that hundred tonnes of carbon to make their weekly total of steel so that they can employ people and make a profit, so they still send up into the atmosphere that hundred tonnes of carbon, all that will happen is because they have to pay a carbon tax their steel will be more expensive for the consumer. The consumer will then eventually say bugger that dear steel from here,I will go buy my steel from India or China or perhaps Brazil as they are developing countries and don't have a carbon tax.
Thwe robbi is not a climate change denier, I freely admit that we as people have sent great plumes of pollution into the atmosphere, one of the reasons I left the farm was the seasons began changing quite rapidly and where we used to get a large crop of one type ready before Christmas it became harder as our December got colder and the bees weren't around to pollinate. I do believe that the Earth is continually evolving and changing, what was weather patterns fifty years ago will not be a pattern today, man has also had an effect on that pattern, but not to the degree that AL Gore would have us believe.The fossil record bears that hypothesis out as any geologist will be able to show.73 thousand years ago there was an earthquake and a volcanic eruption which changed the ecology of most of India, these cataclysmic events are happening all the time as each volcanic eruption spews many millions of tonnes of dust and ash into the atmosphere ,mixed in with that is large quantities of Sulphur. When those Sulphur particles mix with the ice in the upper stratosphere a chemical reaction takes place , the resultant particle formulation stays in the stratosphere for a long time and creates a warming blanket effect for many months.That warming also speeds along climate change over the area that is covered by the eruption, so man alone is not all culpable .
The following I wrote in another forum, the tenet of that was what I was going to write for this blog, I just got carried away with the hot air minutae of Copenhagen. (Breaking news from Copenhagen)The developing countries want us 'rich' nations to stump up $110 BILLION dollars to give to them, just how many AK47's will that lot buy ??? Bugger that I say, if they want money sure give it them, just make SURE that every last cent gets spent of fixing up their pollution and not buying Cadillacs and tanks for the ruling junta. Just an aside, I do believe that most of the really good fairy stories have been written in Copenhagen well before this summit.

Here we are again, the month of months. How many of us are saying that it seemed like only yesterday that it was Christmas '08. Well in terms of the age of Earth it was only a blink away. I tend to think along those lines because, as y'all know, I am a few years older than most of you.That doesn't make me some sort of troglodyte or one given to crusty sayings a la morgan freeman whilst swinging on a porch seat. Oh no, I give out crusty sayings porch seat or not, ten a-penny, or if you care to listen long enough they come free. I grew up reading people like James Thurber, chuckling over cartoons by him and Charles Addams, writings of them,S.J. Perelman and Robert Benchley. These writers and others of their ilk wrote and cartooned for the New Yorker and from the earliest of my reading memory I read their words and studied every line of their cartoons. Therefore I have an arsenal pf pith with which to assail your ears.As my children are oft heard to say"You do talk a lot of pith too" Thurber was oft fond of pillorying Christmas as a sop to overspending and indulging even before it became a blood sport to do so. We all like to make fun of Christmas in some form though don't we? One cannot walk through a shopping mall in mid November without hearing faint strains of Silent Night. Everywhere you go here there are cards depicting sleighs /holly/ reindeer/pine trees etc none of which we have or are endemic to this country at this time of year.We do have snow ,lots of it as well, but at the right time when it is OUR winter. Don't misunderstand I, the robbi loves Christmas, as it are I have never grown up and just can't sleep on the 24th so I get up early to see just what Santa has brought me. I make sure mother Christmas bakes two Christmas cakes so we can scoff a piece each night until the DAY, oh delight of delights.Then on the day I eat so much that moving is out of the question so have to have a BIG sleep after lunch. Do I hear some of you muttering that robbi has entirely missed the actual import of Christmas, well before you do I must tell you that I am agnostic and it is my understanding that the celebration really was a pagan one at that before it was hi-jacked ,that is. Don't let's argue anyway, this is the time to forgive etc and be jolly tra-la-lah. So I will take this time to WISH you ALL, the compliments for the time that it be,.MAY YOU LIVE LONG AND PROSPER xxxxrobbi
No Hortense I haven't forgotten your contribution for the year, not only the year little one, my whole life .'Tis true Horty, I owe you my all. Now don't blush girl, 'tis all that life is, just how all unfolds,and that's the way of it. Next year come 30 January will be the 45th, I like that,has a grand ring ,can't wait for the 55th though,now that will be a day.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxrob