Snakes Alive!!!

I have touched a snake!!!! Yup, I finally screwed up the courage, albeit alongside someone who was holding it, and with the mantra "handbag, shoes, handbag, shoes", going through my head as I reached forwards with my fingers to touch it. I was surprised as it was not the icy cold, clammy sensation that I had always imagined it might feel like. It wasn't warm either, but hard to describe with mere nano seconds of touch. Now while some of you will be gasping "oo er", it was a python I touched and not one of the myriad of poisonous snakes that live over here. The controlled situation was that we took the kids to the local Wildlife Farm last Saturday and the python is one of the exhibits out there (and yes it was alive). We had fed the horse, the donkey and were onto the kangaroos, when one of the lads ran up to say come look at the crocodile as the keepers were going to try and get it to appear. The crocodile is a salty - which apparrently means its a man eater, even though this one is only young. The keepers were behind a barrier fence as they lobbed a large plastic water container into the crocs pool, whereupon said crocodile launched itself out of the green murk of the pool to snap at the container. Let me tell you, it launched itself with speed and snap as it tried to get the container. It was enough to make us gasp and step back and then forwards again with morbid fascination as it leapt for another snatch at the container.



Chloe the snake lives behind the crocodile so after the keeper had finished showing us the croc's paces, she went and got the snake, draped it about herself and walked through the park until she got to the shop and people could touch and hold it. We were told to wash our hands before touching it but as I had my hands filled with children, camera and food for the other animals, I did not get to actually hold it. (That is my excuse anyway, lol). What was really brilliant was our 10 yr old boy quietly waited and asked to hold it, and blew us all away when he actually managed it. The keeper draped it around his neck like a scarf and as he held both hands flat in front of him, the keeper placed the rest of the snake in his hands. He did really well until Chloe started to move with her head to climb towards his face and then the keeper took her back. So, that is the benchmark now and watch this space, I will have a go next time - maybe..... kinda fancy myself in a Medusa look lol. We were reliably informed that Chloe had never bitten anyone in the 8 yrs that she had been at the park and thankfully she didn't disappoint this time either. We had a great time at the park and how awesome it was to take out our 18 mth old and 3 yr old who have never seen most of the real live animals that we saw and to see them with their hands flat, feeding kangaroos, sheep, goats, ducks, chooks, with the horse and donkey. It has made the books and the nursery rhymes that we read most days come alive for them.



I am really enjoying work at the moment and am feeling a great deal of satisfaction of seeing my efforts bearing fruit with these kids. We had learnt the rhyme " the wheels of the bus go round and round" with actions and have at least five verses that we do. I found the rhyme in a library book last week with the verse "the doors on the bus go open and closed" and as I went to sing it on the way home, our 3 yr old indigenous lass sings the doors on the bus go " abrir " and closed (pronounced arbray as much as we can decipher which is spanish for open, learned from Dora the Explorer). Her language was minimal when she came to us - she now counts, knows most of the animals in the zoo, farm animals, counting to 8 in Spanish and twelve in English when counting along with Dora. We now have enough action songs that the other morning felt like a mini workout after I had hopped, skipped, jumped and crawled about the place.



We have been watching a bit of the news with all the disasters around the world and the boys are very fasicnated with the earthquakes and tsunamis. The lad who went for me awhile back with the cricket bat has now become my friend. One of the staff who he stays with occassionally for respite was asking in a subtle way the other day about this new attitude and response was - did you know she lives on a hill, if we get a tsunami we could go stay with her!!!!! Gotta love how their minds work, lol.

Two weeks ago now, I spent the night in the local hospital. Not for myself thankfully, but one of our wee lads was admitted with a serious eye infection. It was about 8.30pm on a Sunday night and we got through all the initial process under two hours. Once I was told he would be admitted we were taken through to A & E and had to sit in holding pattern there for some time. He was put on a bed in what I would say was the thorougfare into xrays etc and he had a leur put into his hand. After some time, we were put into a cubicle and he was hooked up to a drip of serious antibiotics and given some pain relief. It was near midnight by then, so got him to lie down, rubbed his back and quietly sang songs to him until he dropped to sleep. I was offered some sandwhiches by a nurse and once we were admitted to the ward around 1.30am, there was a pull out bed made for me beside his, I was told where I could make a cup of coffee, and how to work the buzzer and was checked on several times before I finally grabbed some shut eye around 3.30am. My only other experience of A & E is Waikato Hospital and have to say this was nowhere near as big or as busy. Based on previous experience at Waikato when I worked there, I was not expecting a bed or food as neither was provided for parents or carers back then. If you were lucky you might get a lazy boy chair to rest in, and no meals were provided for parents or visitors - you were expected to eat at the cafetaria. The nurses were lovely and were greatful to have someone stay the night as they had two very sick babies in the ward that took a lot of their time and that was just our room. I was surprised that I actually slept as the noise with things beeping, snuffling, crying, staff coming and going was continuous throughout what was left of the night. I waited until our lad woke up the next morning, explaining where he was, who was looking after him and how to get the nurse, and work the tv - the two most important, lol, before I left, getting back to work just after 8am. So far all my experiences with things medical over here have been positive.



I had to take another lad for a blood test last week and the staff there were wonderful with him. This is the lad I had to take once before who used to have two people have to hold him down. The deal with him and I is that he looks at me while they are taking blood, and we both shut our eyes and do not look at that, holding hands tightly and me burbling 90 to the dozen telling him how brave he is and both times it has been over before he felt anything. The part that upsets him the most is the band they put around his arm first to tighten before they take blood. He gets very upset at that but have managed to talk him through that and we came away with stickers aplenty for being brave. I continually think God has the most warped sense of humour as I keep being thrust into things medical when I do not do icky bits and blood!!!!! So here I am taking kids left right and centre where needles and blood are concerned, and am changing pooey nappies again, go figure.

In between all this, I have been taking giant steps forward on the technilogical front. When I moved into the house, I got a wireless thingie that works the phone that I use my laptop through. It was part of a deal with getting the phone on and a way of increasing my internet useage more cheaply. Of course, it is all through my favourite company Telstra so have had a few ferral moments with them again. First of all, my first two bills went to the workmates which was my old address, where I never had a phone account and despite the address of the phone location being my current residential address. Then, the idea of the wireless hub thingie was that you should be able to use the phone and internet at the same time. Wrong. It took me three months to get that sorted out, though I must say, more due to me being busy than their lack. Once I rang up and spent a day on the phone sorting it I have been right since. The next foray into technology was to update my mobile ph from prepaid to a plan linking it with the above. There was a special deal that has enabled me to get a phone that is linked to Windows 7 and with 1G of internet useage per month and $400 of calls and texts per month for the same price as I was spending on my prepaid. Well, you no longer get a booklet to work out how to use your phone - it is all on line. So far I have got all the internet stuff sort of sorted, ring tones finally set up, can tell the weather, check facebook, hotmail and bigpond email, check the time but I have yet to make a call, lol. Have not found out how to enter phone numbers and contacts - have all email contacts loaded - again go figure. I have three days off this weekend so am planning to work things out then. Of course, within three days I had lost the internet off the phone but with a trip to the telstra folk it was quickly rectified. Now, last but not least, I have a new lap top. My old one was starting to fall to bits, letters off the keyboard, over heating etc so I now have the trifecta. Of course the world has turned (3 yrs) since I bought the last one. I have double the G's of that one, more oomph all the way round, but this comes with Windows 7 which supercedes the Vista of the old one or was it XP, anyway, it means finding my way round a new set of obstacles. There is no longer outlook for email, new toolbars and graphics but so far so good. Somewhere in the midst of this I had to get a new bigpond address - I think it might have been when I got the hub thingie. It wasn't until I got the new cellphone, that I needed to change it to my main address and cancel the old one. Well, wasn't that a bundle of fun. That was another entire day on the phone to big pond and OMG what a hassle. In the end I cancelled the old address and managed to rejig the new one to my facebook account (crucial, lol) though I could not access facebook mail through the new address on my old laptop. Somehow the settings forbade that. (works ok on the new lap top woohoo). I had forgotten my new address and pin number so a frantic search through papers before I found it scribbled down and able to activate things. At the end of the day what does all this mean - effectively I should almost be contactable 24/7 lol. That is if I do not leave the ph home by mistake! and that I keep it charged and I am not asleep and miss the buzz of an email message coming through.

I have written this tonight against the backdrop of more news of the tsunami and earthquake in Japan. I have to say am feeling almost overloaded with disasters and after thinking Christchurch was bad, this one is almost incomprehensible. There has since been an earthquake off Cairns over here, and flooding continues in various places. There were pictures the other night of flooding in the Nulliboor and I saw last night that Warnham and Derby up in the Kimberlys have been completely flooded out. We had girls out at Tardun from those two places so am imagining they and there families are in the thick of it. Mother nature certainly is throwing a few curveballs at the moment. The day after my last post, I was talking to sister Kay on skype when she announced she was receiving a txt from her daughter Laura as we were speaking, who was txting from underneath her kitchen table as Wellington was hit by a 4. something earthquake. That was extremely surreal as the next thing Mum popped up on skype as well, so here were all were sharing in the immediacy of the experience, albeit from a safe distance. Have heard via facebook that the couple I know from Hamilton,, are safe and well in Japan, nowhere near the danger areas.

I was very impressed when I went into the local IGA last week to see buckets at the checkout for donations for the Christchurch earthquake with IGA going dollar for dollar up to $15,000 raised. Having worked lots of hours, I dropped $100 into the bucket hoping that will parlay into $200 by the time it gets there, in fact it may be more given the exchange rate at the moment. I see Prince William is visiting Christchurch and Queensland disaster areas as part of his trip down under this week. Will need to be watching the telly over the next few mornings to see how it all goes.

Last Sunday I had the day off so decided to go to the local market run by the Lions club here for a look. The Lions have their van parked in front of the visitors centre and sell drinks and donuts, while various folk have tables set out with there wares. I have to say, there was an amount of unmitigated rubbish and I am amazed at what some folk think is saleable. Friend Donna from work had come and picked me up so we had a good wander around all the tables and I did well to come away with only a jar of relish, some dukka and three bodice ripping novels for $2 each. It had been coolish when we started out but as the morning went on, the heat from the sun started to sting. As we were wandering a woman thrust a pamplet about a shop in the old jail which was adjacent to the car park, so Donna and I decided to go have a look. Several people have shops set up in old cells and I use the term shop adviseably. If you swung an average size cat, you would hit every wall no problem. Two of us in each cell was nearly too many. It made me realise that people were much smaller back when it was built and that it was certainly no soft berth for criminals back in the day. It was closed for business as a jail in 1982 after being open nearly 100 yrs. It is made of brick blocks, concrete floors and looks very sturdy. You enter via the old exercise yard which would be the size of a large lounge and had wire netting completely over the top, I guess to prevent escapes. The walls inside of the corridoor have framed letters sent by various bodies about the welfare of prisoners, outlining policies etc, again there was not much fun spelled out amongst them. After a look around there I was gasping so we hastened off to Dome where we had a nice leisurely lunch before heading home and a nana nap for the afternoon, lol. It was stinking hot by then so not much else for it.

It is now less than a month before I head home to NZ and though not counting the sleeps yet, it will not be long. I am getting quietly excited at the prospect of catching up with family and friends. We have entered autumn here with temps dropping down to the mid 20's some days and more so nights but then the last few days it has been back in the 30's. One of the effects from the rivers in flood has been the change in the colour of the ocean. At first it was a narrow strip of brown against the blue of the sea but over the past week it has spread to nearly two thirds of the ocean view with just a third blue. In Dongara there have been signs saying no swimming or taking fish due to the possible pollution in the water. Friend Donna is coming round for a coffee so will sign off and get this posted. I have some running around to do today - pay the power bill etc and buy several cans of napalm equivalent fly spray. I have been held to ransom one to many times by some large bush type cockroaches who somehow manage to get into my hermetically sealed environment lol. I was talking to someone the othernight on facebook and one raced across the floor, so legs up on the couch and the rest of a piddling fly can, it ran into the sun porch area, but then another one appeared. The spray did not appear to work so am over it. I want a spray that will kill it dead on the spot, not give it time to run about, eeeek, possibly towards me, or which is worse, possibly to fly at me. Would need a defibulator on standby for that. Again, watch this space :).