World gone mad

Do you remember when you were a child? Playing on your scooter, push-bike or strap-on roller skates outside the house? Round and round you'd go for hours. Mum and Dad had told you where you could go to and you daren't go beyond those limits.

My brother and I were allowed to go over to the woods. A small crop of trees on the edge of a playing field across the road from our house. He was allowed to go into the field with his friends and play football while I was to stay in the woods, climb trees (yes, I climbed tress) or made Mud Pies.

We would be out of sight of Muv and/or Dad for hours. Muv would be inside cooking up a storm or out in the back garden tending the veggies, while Dad would be servicing the taxi.

Just to prove how crazy the world has become a woman, Tammy Cooper, has been arrested for letting her children (aged 6 and 9) play in the cul-de-sac outside her house unsupervised. Shock horror!

I wouldn't want to be the neighbour that reported her to the police for abandonment.

Is the world really such an awful place now that a mother can't watch her children from the kitchen or the comfort of a lawn chair? Do we really have stand over our children 24/7?

I'm so glad I was given the chance:

- to play in the mud without being told, 'get out.'

- to learn the hard way that sticks do not make good imitation cigarettes. I fell over and landed on the stick injuring the back of my throat.

- to learn, never borrow a bike from a kid you just met and ride it really fast down a hill, because the brakes may not work. Cue fat lip, grazed knuckles and scabs covering the right side of the face.

- Stinging nettles hurt a lot when you fall from a tree into a patch.

- and don't jump into the deep end of the pool when you can't swim, it get really ugly real quick until that 10 year old saves you.

Kids have to learn lessons. They only get some lessons when they go out into the world. The front garden and safety of the cul-de-sac you live in is the very edge of the world and needs to be explored when you're in running while crying distance from home.

The police need to question the intentions of the neighbour and how they reacted. Surely when the woman you've come to arrest approaches you because she's seen you arrive it's clear she hasn't abandoned her children in her own front garden.

Charges have been dropped and Tammy is going after the police by suing them. Only in America?






Picture borrowed from here, I had nothing to do with creating it!

Serena Vs Brian

Written 4th June 2009

I brought a Garmin Nuvi a few weeks ago and after a bit of a wrestle over updating via the internet with speed alerts and school zones it’s worked out well. It’s even providing me with a little entertainment on my journey.

I selected the female voice called Serena to narrate my trips, she tells me when to turn and can pronounce town and street names like Woolgooga.

The speeding and school alerts come with a default male voice. I’ve called him Brian. He sounds like a Brian.

The maps are not the most up to date and with all the recent road works on the Pacific Highway things are changing rapidly, so today Serena got a bit confused a couple of times today.

Near Maelstom a new, improved section of the Pacific Highway has recently opened up, it diverts slightly from the old route and it resulted in a string of Serena calling out…

‘Recalculating’

‘Recalculating’

After a couple of minutes of this I heard a male voice in my mind, it sounded an awful lot like Brian. I pictured Serena and Brian having a barny.

‘You silly bint, it’s over there. Can’t you even follow a map!?’

Tea

I’ve just finished drinking a bottle of Lipton Ice Tea White with Raspberry. I like this tea, it’s refreshing and not too sweet. I don’t know how many of these I’ve drunk, but I looked at the label for the first time ever, today.


Ingredients:
Water, sugar, tea extract (10.8%) [green tea extract 9.7%, white tea extract 1.1%], flavours (contains wheat derivatives), raspberry juice, food acid(296), antioxidant(300). Contains wheat products.

I have two questions; first surely with a higher level of green tea extract this should be marketed as a green tea product and second, how do they manage to get wheat into a drink?

Our Nations Capital

Last weekend Todd and I took a drive down to Canberra. He’s leaving in less than a month and he hadn’t seen Parliament House except on telly. So we piled into the car armed with nothing except our cameras and drove the three hours from Sydney to that no mans land that is our nations capital.

- The Big Arse Merino in Goulburn

We had a Stop Revive Survive moment at Goulburn so Todd could have his phot taken with the Big Marino. Which by the way they have moved. It’s now by the eateries and petrol station on the right, next to the freeway. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard of it. We took a couple of pictures, but got back in the car quick sharpish ‘cause it was freezing! The wind was howling and we were in shirt sleeves with no jumper or jackets in the car. Little did we know at that time, but we spent the whole day dashing from the car to the picture spot and back again.

We stopped at the end Lake George to take pretty pictures of how green it is at the moment (rarely has water in it).
We stopped at the state boarder for a photo shoot with Todd riding the sign.

- Ride It Cowboy!

When we got to Canberra we went straight to heart of it. Parliament House! I stopped were he told me too and within seconds we were being moved on by Federal Police on a push bike. But we got the photos we came for (a few we didn’t) so we left and moved to the next thing. The Birdie on a stick. Actually the American/Australian monument it really is a big bird on a very long/high pole. Todd had to lie on the floor to get it all in, I just told him to get a better camera.

- Move Along please sir!
- The Birdie on a Stick with Todd in the foreground

Then we drove round the inner ring road a few times before moving onto have a look at the Sex Shops of Fyshwick. We’d heard they were good. Turns out there are a lot of them, but not all of them are good.

On the way out of Canberra we stopped at a winery. We tasted (he swallowed, I spat) several very nice wines, both red and white, chatted with the cellar door staff then purchased half a dozen before hitting the road home.

With the light on our side we drove north again. We decided to stop and have dinner in Sutton Forest. We had steak and chips. I had a cup of hot tea and Todd had wine. We were both bloody freezing! We both had a great day, we laughed so hard that snot came out of my nose (I had a cold), we ate McDonalds, we talked crap, we talked about serious stuff and we dared to touch our toes to the wicket that Don Bradman played.

- Last time he tried this he got chucked off for playing silly buggers ;-)

12 sleeps to go.