My car-less wilderness starts twenty metres beyond my front entrance …
It festures long vistas of bounteous greenery, exotics mixed with native trees …
Impenetrable matted jungles of grasses flow over the contours of Bulimba Creek’s floodway …
The creek itself is almost hidden between the overgrown banks where ducks, dusky moorhens and waterdragons make themselves at home
Usually I can convince the old woman to turn off the TV by about 8.30, for a game or ten involving me getting kibbles for prizes.
We’ve given up on the eggbox, I’m happy to say. Yesterday she tied that horrible furry snake onto the end of a red wheeled thing that she dragged behind her, trying to get me to follow it and get the kibbles loaded onto the tray.
I soon showed her what I thought about that game …
So that night ended with her, after much cajoling, offering me kibbles by ones and twos first on her bare feet (not so scary) then on her knees, then on her hands (scary!) Though I did manage to eat more than half my bedtime snack.
Today was completely disrupted. The two wild human young came while their owner went shopping. The old woman spread the craft sheet over the floor and everybody cut things, glued, taped, then they went to the sink and floated a boat. All this while I hid under the couch.
After their owner fetched the young humans, the old woman tidied the room and rolled up the craft sheet. She’s always saying things like … Now then Moggy-mine, what mystery will we work on today?
Today she hid seven kibbles in the rolled up craft sheet. And after I found them she put in another lot. I don’t mind this game … I think it can lead to greater things. Imagine if she hid a handful?
(This is 29 seconds of me finding eight or ten kibbles. Ttoo long for you?)
We’re both sitting on the couch now waiting for the bedtime alarm. Well, she shuts me in the den then, whatever she does for the nect hour.
AKA the Stone Dragon
With Bag 7 and the second arm-and-claw, the build is finally starting to look like a dragon.
Also already present are a tray of teacups and teapot in the half finished teahouse; at the base the koi pond already stocked with the fish, and the roots of the fig tree growing through the ancient stone; while in the foreground the rocking platform where the martial arts school will practice.
Three more bags to go.
Does it seem that the world no longer makes sense? That may not just be you. The world may in fact no longer be making sense. In the late 1960s, …
Why The World No Longer Makes Sense
Turns out I’m not alone in this, that it isn’t just due to my recent experiences (last 4-5years) that I can’t get a handle anymore on who I now am.
About five years ago, I reworked what would’ve been the next couple of chapters to submit to Worldbuilding Magazine, for an installment they were running on relationships, V3I3: Gender & Relationships
Since I was extracting the story from an ongoing Lodestar Saga and wanted eventually to be able to come back to it—as I am doing now—I changed Srese’s name and backstory. But, although she is called Kate in this chapter and has a whole different history, she is still Srese. As you will see.
Scrim’s parts in the whole deal have not changed, and that part of his life–as it is described here–fits in well with what’s coming for him.
Enjoy!
I was amazed to see one of these yesterday along Bulimba Creek, getting into the ripe native figs everywhere. Only seen them once before, in my previous stamping grounds.
Picture naturally not sharp, bird was too far away and the photo completely unplanned.
After I took ten photos, scoring an image just twice, the noisy miners took note of me and chased the big bad bird away.
Noisy miners are so aggressive—a channel billed cuckoo doesn’t impinge on them at all —it eats figs too large for them to tackle and lays its eggs in magpie, crow and currawong nests. But still the miners need to chase it away, it’s like they own this stretch of the creek.
A slightly better shot, the bird’s bright red eye put me wise to its identity.
These birds have the loudest most amazing trumpeting calls though this one just said kwark kwark kwark.
They migrate to North and Eastern Australia from New Guinea and Indonesia in spring and stay till autumn/fall.
Urban trees seem to be so confused that a lot of figs are bearing good crops of fruit.
My first time at this …
Rita de Heer 