a little bit country

God, it’s hot. I am so hot. (“You’re not that great.”) If I were any hotter I’d move this hot laptop off my lap and open a window or turn on the air conditioner or something. Yeah.

So I was up at a friend’s holiday place this weekend. I took the Brown Dog with me, as her kids love him and her husband hadn’t met him. It’s up past Traralgon, in Gippsland where all the bushfires are. I told them I would come and stay before the place burned to the ground. They assured me this would not happen: no, if the house was going to burn to the ground, it would have done so last THURSDAY, silly, not this weekend. Comforting. Anyway, it was wasn’t too hot but it was very… heavy, I guess, because there was all this smoke and haze in the air and you couldn’t see the sky properly and there was no wind. (No wind is good, because it means the fires aren’t fanned. But first I typed “no wine”. No wine is bad.) There were lots and lots of birds, as they have all fled the fires: beautiful lorikeets and galahs hanging off balconies and trees. Also fleeing the fires and available in large quantities were, unfortunately, flies. Like Australia doesn’t already have more flies per square inch than I can handle. (New Zealand? Has big, buzzy blowflies, and not very many of them. Australia has thousands of small sticky flies which land on you and DON’T MOVE, argh argh THE FLIES.) More terrifying than the flies, however, was the small quad bike that the children got for Christmas. You don’t know the true meaning of terror until you are sitting on the back of a quad bike being driven by a six year old child who desperately wants to impress you.

The holiday house is lovely and is in a small town on a lake, but obviously because of the fires and the drought there is no water in the lake. So technically they are on a big empty expanse of sand. I think the lake is about 12% full. This is not a lot of water when there’s millions of hectares of forest on fire around you. Regardless, we did not burn to death. We went down to the lake, then we walked into the lake bed, then we walked and walked and walked some more, and then we got to the water.

Here is the Brown Dog trotting through the water.
Notice how nice and clean he is. This will change.

My dog is a terrible babysitter.
I, of course, take no responsibility for this.

Did you know that when you are walking back to the house with two children and a dog, all of whom are liberally covered with mud, that the flies will be attracted to YOU and ONLY YOU? ARGH.