Piccie of the day

Patrick's Funeral was today.
Very sad, but uplifting too, a lot of shared memories of a very full life.

I'll post the answer to What is it Wednesday tomorrow (one of the guesses is half way there)

This is what it feels like outside at the moment (we just had our coldest June day since 1993).

Snow Gums, Mount Baw Baw Victoria

This is what I wish it felt like

Summer Day, Ben Boyd National Park, NSW

What is it Wednesday?

Well once again it is cold wet and miserable down this way.

As I stood on a garage forecourt filling my car this evening, the radio was predicting snowfalls on the mountains around Melbourne. No wonder I felt a bit chilly!

I have just one word. BRRRRR!

Now as it is Wednesday I have to say: what on Earth do you think this is?

A clue, I have posted this piccie on my blog once before!

Brrr.

I posted about snowfalls in the mountains around Melbourne on Saturday.

I’ve mentioned my new job before, my new office is on the 12th floor of a downtown skyscraper. Well yesterday the snow was a bit closer to home. I happened to glance up from my desk to see heavy snow falling past my window.

Now it snows in the higher hills around Melbourne every winter, but it basically never snows in the city which is essentially at sea level. So I was really surprised to see snow falling downtown.

I got up from the desk and looked out the window. I saw something I have only seen in the mountains before. Snow falling past me and turning into rain below. I had forgotten I was a third of the way up a man made mountain! So if I grumble about the cold please forgive me. This Aussie thinks it is a miserable winter.

On a less gloomy note, we have begun walking Lilli. We aren’t really trying to train her to walk to heel yet. But we are going to have to. As you can see from this pic of Lu setting off with her on Sunday she is getting to be a big puppy. She’s only twelve weeks old and already weighs 10.1kg (22.27 lbs). The vet she saw today for immunisation and micro-chipping says she is going to be a big girl.

On our walk we spotted some galahs feeding on a lawn (yes I do take my camera almost everywhere). These pink parrots are really common in much of Oz.As I snapped away two more swept in to land.Then after walking only a few blocks it was time to head for home because puppies get tired quickly.

Down and Out in Melbourne

I have to apologise, but the tone of this post isn’t exactly cheery.

Things have been rough lately for many of the guys who use the homeless services I run. The cold weather is having a real impact. A number of guys have ended up in hospital with conditions like fevers and pneumonia.

About the only saving grace in such situations is the major hospitals in Oz are public and essentially free.
Yet getting a hospital bed is not the end of the guys’ problems. Often their condition will only be stabilised and then there is pressure on them to be discharged.
Once they are discharged it means straight back onto the street, there simply are not enough emergency accommodation beds in the city.

So a good deal of our time over the past little while has been work around this kind of issue.

Yesterday for example, a regular of ours (I’ll call him Dave) showed up at our breakfast service clearly very unwell. Dave had a high fever and could barely move for pain. My offsider Greg and I spent an hour making sure he got to hospital. Then I was on the phone a number of times to try to get Dave’s needs followed up.

Dave was discharged today, he’d been on intravenous anti-biotics overnight and looked quite a bit better. But nothing like well enough to spend a night on the street or under a bridge.

So I spent a good chunk of the morning phoning around to get Dave some emergency accommodation. The best I could organise: two nights of motel accommodation paid for by an accommodation agency.

As you can guess a situation like this is extremely frustrating. We are working in a system that is in my opinion badly broken.

It would be easy to get very down about how little we can achieve. Yet, what I take from an experience like this is essentially uplifting. I have done what I can, I have tried my hardest. Dave has at least a couple of nights of safety. That means something.

And who knows what we might achieve tomorrow.

Now for a change of pace a Pacific Reef Heron I “caught” up on the NSW south coast as he hunted along a wave washed rock shelf.I haven’t seen one of these guys before although they are apparently quite common around our coast.

Winter.

While I was away on holiday at Merimbula I was posting photos like this.

And this.

Then I was grumbling that despite the gloriously sunny weather I was cold.

People enjoying their Northern hemisphere summer looked at photos like this

and for some strange reason they didn’t take me very seriously.

Fair enough in tropical parts of Oz it never really gets cold.

However, it is winter down in the bottom half of the world and here in the southern end of Oz it gets wintery.

This Aussie for one thinks it is cold.

Now I have proof of the cold down this way.

On Saturday I took this

and this

See, I’m not just grumbling :-)

Warm

I have just been talking to my Brother in the UK and he has describing the Arctic conditions they are “enjoying” up there.

We have also been enjoying “terrible” weather 34°C (93°F) and glorious. Someone’s gotta do it!

To cool off we drove out to the Upper Yarra to have a play in the water.
We were still mucking around in the early evening.
In the dim light down in the shaded river valley someone, either Deb or one of the older girls got behind my camera.
The piccie shows Lu and I going down a slightly quicker part of the stream. Because of the low light, and because the camera was set for bright light earlier in the day the shutter speed has “auto” corrected to a very long exposure.
Here are the results, the camera makes it look as if we are rushing down a real rapid.
But perhaps I shouldn’t crow too much. The bureau is predicting 41°(106°F) by Monday. That is uncomfortably hot, and I’ll be back at work.

Good Samaritans

It was bitterly cold this morning. As I posted only a week or so ago, it has been unseasonably cold. At the breakfast shift this morning I saw one of those little moments that makes you feel good about being human.

One of our regulars (I’ll call him Tom) turned up for breakfast without shoes or socks and wearing nothing warmer than a summer t-shirt. He wouldn’t say what had happened, but presumably he had some kind of trouble in the night and had to abandon some squat in a hurry.

Immediately, some of the other guys responded. One took off his own coat and gave it to Tom, and another rummaged in his bag to find a clean pair of socks. A third organised Tom a hot coffee and buttered him some toast.

All these guys have next to nothing of their own. All of them live one day at a time in desperate conditions. Yet two of them recognised how much more Tom was in need and shared the little they had, while a third stepped up to do the bit he could.

Before anyone worries too much more about Tom and the other guy who gave up his coat, I was able to help both out later. Thanks to some emergency relief supplies we can get access to, the other guys coat was replaced within a couple of hours. As to Tom, thanks to the supplies (largely provided by Local Church Parishes and charities) we were able to make good most of what he had lost. So by this afternoon he had a whole new kit including new boots, good second hand clothes and a new swag.

Now some photos, these are from Port Melbourne. Port Melbourne is sited on Port Phillip Bay at the mouth of the Yarra. It is a funny mix. In the past it was largely industrial and what housing was there was essentially slums. Now it is in the process of being shifted upmarket so you find:
Harbour facilities and warehouses.
Multi million dollar flats (apartments in American English),
Derelict piers,
And expensive boutique shopping where millionaires park their boats.
Now that is enough for tonight.

Of Humble Pie

We have developed a strange obsession with going out into the wide blue yonder what ever the weather. Today for example it is another cold damp day and blowing a gale. What do the household do? Curl up in front of the fire with a good book? Sit and watch the latest DVD? Do anything warm and cosy?
No, not a bit of it. Instead we head off for a picnic.

But the plot thickens and humble pie is called for.
At the insistence of our eldest, we again headed for Mount Donna Buang, in a quest for snow.
Now anyone who has been following my blog during its brief existence, will remember that just under two weeks ago, I wrote very disparagingly about the snow cover up on old Donna.

If a picture is worth a thousand words

As you can see same place but now definitely not the same story.
Admittedly only about six inches cover at the moment, but definitely snow.

My eldest is still girding her loins in preparation for her “wet-pracs”. She says she is feeling a bit more able to face the idea. But the poor thing is still very apprehensive about being physically ill come the day. What is keeping her going is the long term goal.

Given the title of this blog I had better say a little about my literary endeavours.
Basically they can be summed up as: word count - 0.
Too many early starts and late finishes just lately.
Writing and the day job don’t necessarily go together.
Truth be told I am probably spending too much time looking at other peoples blogs as well. But a boy has to have some fun from time to time.

Then again writing or researching are fun, but I find I need much more energy, more focus to work on the book. If I write tired, more often than not I just junk that material when I reread.
So speaking of tired, I ran breakfast at work this morning (we try to provide a service 365 days a year) which means a 5:30 am start. So without further ado goodnight and talk to you next time.

Wish Me Luck!

I have had an interesting possibility come up regarding my manuscript. In a case of who you know rather than what you know, I have an editor from a UK publishing house reading my manuscript.
Oddly she is the daughter of a colleague of my other half. Does that make sense?

She is home in Oz to see her family and the cheeky approach has paid off.
There are still a lot of if, buts and maybes. Firstly, she has to like the book. Secondly, although she is in publishing, her field is not fiction. So even if she likes it, the most she is able to do is suggest me as a possibility to some of her colleagues. Still this is the closest I have got to getting someone on the inside to read the piece so I am happy.

And of course nervous

Cold, cold, cold again today.
Once I came home from work (among other things I run a breakfast service for homeless people) our eldest was bouncing around saying "Let's go to the snow today. There's bound to be snow on Donna Buang."
So after warming up with a cuppa' we piled into the car and drove about an hour up to Mount Donna Buang.
There was snow, I took a photo of it (of all of it I might add) just to prove it was there.
And just to prove it here it is! See it does get cold in Australia.

The sign in the picture (which I accidentally cropped) says "no tobogganing", I suspect there is not much danger of that rule needing to be enforced at the moment.
It was cold and wet, but apparently not enough for snow. What was there has well and truly melted.

So after waiting in the cold for someone who shall remain nameless,

we piled back into the car and drove back to Warburton at the bottom of the mountain for the much more civilized pursuit of drinking hot coffee in one of our favourite cafes.

This evening, for a change I went out in the cold again. I have been wanting to get some shots of the city at night. Tonight was a first experimental foray. I spent a lot of time driving around looking for places safe enough to stop (traffic, even on Sunday night is quite busy around the city).
I was moderately happy with some of the results, but I think two things will improve my shots:
I had the ISO set too high and most of the shots are over exposed; and a darker sky would give better contrast, tonight there was low cloud hence a lot of reflected light from the buildings below.
Anyway I was happy enough with what I took to try again another night.

Just a couple of photos I took tonight to finish off.

This one is St Patricks Catholic Cathedral, just east of Melbourn CBD.

This is the Bolte Bridge down at the docklands area of Melbourne.