Australia has a new Prime Minister

Today our former Prime minister, Kevin Rudd stood down and allowed his deputy, Julia Gillard to be voted new Prime Minister by her parliamentary colleagues.
We Australians were not asked if we wanted a new Prime Minister..
A few powerful unions and a few Labour Party factions got together and decided for us... and they still call us a democracy.

Julia is our first female Prime Minister and that is being used as a pretext to help them get away with it...

Julia, is a lawyer.

Julia has worked as a lawyer for the countries unions for some time before entering politics.

Julia may well be a better Prime Minister than Kevin Rudd...

But still I would have liked the opportunity to vote for her myself.



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Geocaching disaster

When I started geocaching I quickly realized that I needed a team to help me search for caches. There were places I couldn’t go or couldn’t reach, places like Red Back spider infested rock holes, under lose embankments etc.
I looked about me and decided on two of my oldest grandkids. Mr.7 and Miss.6 were happy to hear that they were going treasure hunting with grand dad.
A time was set for their initial training run, the gear gathered together and I arrived to pick them up…that’s where it started to go wrong.
Their parents, my daughter D2 and son-in-law J, decided that it sounded like fun, and since they weren’t doing much that day, they would join us.
Actually we had a very good day and found a couple of well hidden caches as well as having a really good time doing it. It seemed I had scored my own team of eager searchers, you see D2 and J have four kids…a team of seven…Woo Hoo, no cache was safe!
So it was that Geocaching became a good family activity for us, we would have a BBQ followed by a few caches or coffee or all of the above. The kids quickly became adept at following the moving arrow on the GPS and were always there and searching before we were able to catch them up. All good then!

But then came the news, one savage blow after another…
D2 and J had joined Geocache.com and registered themselves as a team…
Then they were telling me about caches close by…

Then they borrowed my GPS and went out on their own.

I've lost my team of extensively trained searchers….

Disaster!

I got nuthin

Well, it’s winter down here in OZ.
While the rest of the world is slowly warming up toward spring and summer we’re descending slowly into a freezing winter. ..Actually, not all that slowly, and compared to many of you…not all that freezing either.

Short story…I’ve got nothing much to say, it’s cold and I’m suffering…
SO, I can either bore you with some crap about nothing much or maybe just tell you a funny story or two…

Two guys are walking through the woods and come across this big deep
hole.
"Wow...that looks deep."

"Sure does... toss a few pebbles in there and see how deep it is."
They pick up a few pebbles and throw them in and wait... no noise.
"Jeeez. That is REALLY deep... here.. Throw one of these great big rocks
down there. That should make a noise we can hear."
They pick up a couple football-sized rocks and toss them into the hole
and wait... and wait…Nothing.

They look at each other in amazement. One gets a determined look on his
face and says, "Hey...over here in the weeds, there's a
railroad tie. Help me carry it over here. When we toss THAT sucker in,
it's GOTTA make some noise."

The two men drag the heavy tie over to the hole and heave it in. Not a
sound comes from the hole.
Suddenly, out of the nearby woods, a sheep appears, running like the
wind. It rushes toward the two men, then right past them,
running as fast as it's legs will carry it. Suddenly it leaps in the air
and into the hole.
The two men are astonished with what they've just seen...
Then, out of the woods wanders a farmer who spots the men and ambles over.
Hey... Have you two guys seen my sheep out here?
“You bet we did! Craziest thing I ever seen! It came running like crazy
and just jumped into this hole!”
“Nah”, says the farmer, “That couldn't have been MY sheep. My sheep was
chained to a railroad tie”…………………………………
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My mate Les owns a farm just down the coast a bit, and seeing as we’ve had a few hard years of drought, he has been doing it tough for a while now. He raises sheep you see and there’s not much money in skinny sheep.
His wife decided that it was time to diversify their livestock and so it was decided that they would buy a few pigs to breed up.
My friend Les loaded the truck and took all the money they could spare and headed to the local market where he got four breeding age sows.
He built a fine sty for them to live in, fed them well and waited for their first issue.
After several weeks there was still no sign of pregnancy, so he visited his neighbour for advice. Graham spent some time looking over the sows and proclaimed the problem to be that Les had not bought a Boar.
Knowing that Les had no money, Graham offered the use of his own boar to get him started with his breeding program.
Next morning Les loaded his four sows into the truck and headed off to Grahams farm to allow the sows to be put to the boar. Later in the afternoon Les returned to pick his animals up. He asked Graham how he would know when the sows were pregnant.

Graham told him the farmers sure fire way to tell, absolutely and for sure.

“When you get up in the morning” he said, “have a look at the sows, and if they’re rolling in the mud or running in the morning sun, then they are pregnant”. He went on, “If they’re relaxing under the trees they aren’t pregnant and you will have to bring them back to me to be put to the boar again”.
The next morning, Les rushed to his bedroom window and looked out hopefully, to his great sadness the sows were all laying under the trees ignoring the warming rays of the morning sun. Once again he loaded the sows into the truck and headed off to Grahams farm. Once again in the afternoon he headed back to pick up his animals and return them to the farm.
Next morning he bounced out of bed and headed straight to the window, but once again the sows were relaxing under the trees. Reluctantly he again loaded his sows and once again he retuned to get them late in the day. This went on for several more days, each with exactly the same outcome.
About day five he woke late to find his wife brushing her hair by the window and peering out.
“The sows”, he said, “Are they rolling in the mud?”
“No”, says his wife.
“Are they running in the morning sunshine then?”
“No”, says his wife.
“Then they’re laying under the trees again?” He says, almost weeping.
“No”, says his wife, “They’re waiting in the truck”.

Wild Dog Hill

Look out for falling white men...

Looks like a long way up from here..but it's not much over 70 yards up.

James risking his life for a picture....

Flat as far as the eye can see..great sunsets from here.

Spot the Kangaroo, she spotted us way before we saw her.




Wild Dog Hill is about ten miles out of town and being one of just a few hills here on the saltbush plains, it gets a few picnickers, bush walkers and rock climbers.
It’s named after an Aboriginal dreamtime story of lost love and a nasty death; as such it’s a sacred site. This doesn’t mean we can’t go there, just that we have to treat the area with due respect.
I have a friend raised in a large city surrounded by mountains…she came…she saw…she did not see why we bother going there at all.
But in these flat lands, it’s like… “Look, a hill… W O W!”
In case you’re wondering…No, we’re not hicks, but we do share a weird sense of humor… Out here you have to take your fun where you find it…or is it just me?!

It’s not much of a hill by world standards, and not much of a park...but way out here…well, it’s the best we’ve got.

Do you see the pic with the red triangle? Click to enlarge it and you might be able to see the female Kangaroo watching us from the safety of the bush. (Did you ever wonder why they’re that color?) This is their country and they can move up and down these slopes with ease, you don’t have any chance of catching them here. (As if you’d want to…) We’ve had a reasonable amount of rain recently after several years of drought so this is actually very green for here, every female Roo is carrying young and the bush is as green and lush as I’ve seen it.
The loony risking his life for a good picture is son-in-law James, he’s done some free climbing so immediately saw the site as being full of potential and proceeded to freak my daughter right out by scaling the face. Behind him is typical of our saltbush plains, low Saltbush and Bluebush with stands of Myall trees many hundreds of years old.
My daughter, son-in-law, their four kids and I were led here today by my GPS which promises a Geocache site somewhere hereabouts.
The half hour walk to the top is pretty easy nowadays, there's a rough built staircase up the side of the hill, instead of the precipice that preceded it. I’m hoping for an escalator soon…
The view from the top is pretty good …miles of Saltbush plains with the occasional hill, not that the kids cared at all, all they want is to find the ‘treasure’.
The GPS dragged us along a narrow trail then off the side of the hill and into a rocky escarpment. (Ok, fifty rocks from large dog to bowling ball size)
Once we located the immediate area we started looking in and around the many rocks and bushes, with kids going in every direction. (imagine a running race for blind people with no sense of direction) Despite the Geocache rules about not putting caches under heavy rocks, the kids were immediately trying hard to lift rocks larger than themselves. James found the cache hidden in a crevice under a rock, a matt black and green painted lunchbox with the usual log and collection of trinkets inside.
Log filled in, trinkets swapped and back down the hill for coffee before the drive home.
I did kinda stuff up though, after finding the cache I turned off my GPS…if I’d left it on it would have told me about the two caches hidden along the road on the way home.

Oops!

Being A Bloke

There has never been a more difficult time to be a bloke.

These days you have to be pretty sharp to impress the ladies. Lets face it, between the computer and the turkey baster, there isn’t much left for us to do.

We’ve become accessories, chunky charms on the bracelets of independent women.
We should have realized our days were numbered when they bought out cute designer gizmos for taking the lids off jam jars…

There’s no doubt about it, nowadays if you want to make them yearn, you’ve got to earn it..
But it wasn’t always that way.

Once upon a time, back in the days when men were men and the sheep were scared, we had a certain authority, things were very different.. It was all so much simpler then.

A short walk over, a quick whack over the head, she has stars in her eyes for you alone, and it’s back to the cave for some Neolithic action on a mammoth skin rug.

Now that’s what I call clubbing….

I think it’s fair to say that men look back in awe of those times, and maybe it would be worth the cold cave, raw meat and fleas to recapture those times.

I blame Adam for this, it was easy enough wasn’t it? Have what you want, when you want and beautiful young Eve to share it all with… but don’t eat that one thing… Easy!
(what was he thinking?)

Hmm, this boy had to be given some encouragement, but in fairness, it was new territory for him.
After years of fiddling with his fig and worrying the animals, he was bound to need a few pointers.

Fortunately, Eve was a bit more clued up.

I’m sure she made a fine sight standing there in her naked loveliness, her pippins in her hands, a giant python wrapped around her lions.
One glimpse of her fruit and veg on display and Adam decided to turn over a new leaf.
For the first time in ages the animals felt safe bending over at the waterhole.

Sadly, it all ended in tears when the man upstairs got to hear about their frolickings.
..and so we end here and now where men change every few years to suit the new requirements.
Shaved chest or no shaved chest? “Haven’t you heard? …bulging muscles are out this year” …. I don’t go for that at all I must admit.

I’m just waiting it out until what I have comes back in style….