Gas

While Australia is not as divided by two common languages as the UK and US, we are still somewhat divided from the US here.

A line from a novel. "I've got Blue Cross". That'd be health insurance. Another, "I've got gas". The latter would refer to wind, burping or farting I suppose.

Every few months we buy gas. That is for our barbeque. There are still some cars around that use gas as fuel and some service stations that have gas bowsers. In the US, buying gas would be more frequent, to fill a car with fuel. 

Our gas is LPG, Liquid Propane Gas, for a few cars, barbeques and camping lights and camping stoves. Natural gas is what comes through pipes for your hotplates and oven unless you are in the country and buy bottled gas, which is LPG.  As in the US gas is petrol for a vehicle, they can't use gas for LPG, so it is called just Propane. I'd be quite happy with using that here but I would not be happy calling petrol, gas. Petrol is a liquid after all.

Where to you buy petrol/gas in the US? We buy it at a petrol station or a service station, abbreviated to a servo. Are you confused? I am.

Echuca Day 1

 A few weeks ago we started to looks at beachside accommodation for a few days with vague plans to see our west coast, which is actually the southern coast of Australia. Alas with COVID making international travel impossible, and who would want to at the moment, Australia is the only option and even within Australia with state borders opening and closing at small COVID outbreaks, people aren't even game to go interstate, worried that state borders will quickly close even as they are in mid air in the case of Western Australia which is a flight of a few hours from here.

We really should visit my ageing step mother, who is 84 and her partner who is 93. They live in the north of the state near Rochester. Rather than impose on them, we booked a cabin in the excellent Echuca NRMA Caravan Park. NRMA is the New South Wales motoring organisation. 

R mentioned our booking to our friend who has a caravan and he decided to join us and booked a site at the same park and we met up with him there.

The idea was to call in Step Mother on our way past. It is a fifteen minute drive to Echuca from there. However she said she had two appointments that day, so that made it too difficult. From home it is over a two and a half hour drive to Echuca. 

We left at 9.40 and I was not concentrating and missed the exit to the Tullamarine Freeway. It didn't matter too much. I could use the Western Ring Road which would be about the same time and without tolls. Massive roadworks are underway near the Ring Road and I exited too early due to poor signage.  That's two muck ups and it was less than 30 minutes into the trip. We found our way onto the M79 and stopped at a layby for a stretch. Further on R said he wanted food and coffee. There aren't any places on the freeway so I pulled off at Kyneton and we found a place selling coffee and sandwiches. 

Sated we headed back towards the freeway but there wasn't an entrance. We had to go further into town and up a side street to the entrance. More poor signage.  We reached the freeway and that was where we were to turn off the freeway. Mea culpa again, I turned back onto the freeway and we were now heading towards Bendigo. Damn. We used the Castlemaine exit and travelled on some minor roads across to Elmore where we stopped again at the Elmore Bakery. 

We weren't in a rush and so we drove to where the house of  the mother of a dyke friend once lived and we stayed there a couple of times. The mother would be dead now and we lost touch with her daughter. We arrived at the park at 1.40, four hours after leaving home for a 2.35 trip. I suppose we would have stopped for breaks for an hour, so I suppose it was only half an hour extra time caused by my navigational errors. R cannot navigate so I did both driving and navigating and my arthritis was playing up big time.

We were very happy with our cabin. We paid extra for a larger cabin than the standard. It had a queen sized bed in the living area and bunk beds for three in the bedroom. That's plenty of space for two people.

We met up with our friend and walked along the Murray riverbank towards the Port. Privately owned house boats line the river here.

The thong tree trunk was full so another has been started. 

I think the first contact between white people and he local Aboriginal tribe was in the 1830s and it was a friendly meeting. 

Echuca is very historic and was the river port for shipments of wheat and wool which would be transported downriver to Adelaide by paddle steamers. The railways killed off the paddle steamers and now they are only tourist craft.

As you may know, I love a good rotunda.

Scarcely believable river flood heights.

Not a great photo of a stunning house in Watson Street. We walked back to the park on the levee bank.

This hopeful kookaburra visited twice a day, always landing on the same lamp post opposite our cabin. It would be after a free feed but we didn't. They can be quite skilled at swooping down to a barbeque and picking up a sausage or a lamb chop. 

Galahs also visited twice a day to graze on whatever they find in the grass. Other birds were huge flocks of corellas, pairs of rosellas, ducks in flight and waddling around, mudlarks and magpies. No Indian mynahs, crows or ravens nor cockatoos.

A very odd structure on the road next to the caravan park. I was wearing thongs and this photo was taken at great risk of bites from jumping jack ants.

Nearby was this fountain. 

We tried the Star Hotel for dinner, closed, The Shamrock, booked out but had luck sitting in the back courtyard of the Echuca Hotel. The meal was nice and it was very pleasant, only marred by a couple of hundred squawking corellas circling around, so loud it was hard to hear at times.

Once back at the cabin I called Step Mother and she had made a mistake. Her appointments were the next day, not the day we arrived. We arranged to meet with her between appointments. 

Not really a problem?

The source said the digitised system deleted a key hours-long interview with an infected person in the Black Rock outbreak, but the department spokesman said there was “no indication” this had occurred.

There have also been problems with the new program using US date formats, which list the month before the day, the source said.

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Featured snippet from the web

NASA lost its $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter because spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data before the craft was launched, space agency officials said Thursday.

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This post is set to be posted 07/03/21 as I set it but then asks for confirmation that I want it published on 03/07/21. No, I want it posted now, today and not in July. What a mess. If a web site is international, and most are, at least use the international system of 21/03/07. That's year, month, date.

Does the US still manufacture cars? If so, do they still use A/F rather than metric? I hope no car manufacturer is using the English Whitworth system. It was rare even when I was young but I had to have three sets of spanners to deal with three measurement systems. A/F was the most common for Australian made cars but now it would be all metric.

Sunday Selections

Joining with Elephant's Child and River for Sunday Selections and a quick and easy balloon themed on this week. The balloons went up in Fawkner Park, which is a lot more photogenic than when they land there. Dawn is arriving later, in this case 7am, so I was up to take photos and I am quite pleased with them.

Town Hall Tuesday

This is Caulfield Town Hall, or City Hall as it is named at the front. It dominates the corner of Hawthorn and Glen Eira Roads. It has a nice clock tower and portico, alas not a balcony above the portico. A basic brick building was completed in 1885 and added to over the years including the second storey, the clock tower and the portico.

It is correctly known know as the Glen Eira Town Hall after 1990s council amalgamation of the City of Caulfield and parts of the City of Moorabbin. It's not bad at all, but not my favourite.

Interesting sculpture in front and everything is so well maintained.

I'll be away for a few days and hopefully keeping up with what you post. Ciao. 

Monday Mural

For my spinal xray we took the car to Balaclava and had a bite to eat somewhere and as we were leaving, R piped up and said, 'Let's go past our old house', and we did. The names of our neighbours across the road did not come instantly but the names Helen and Ross we did eventually remember. They were a lovely couple who we interacted with socially at times and now there is a mural on the side of their probably former house as they were about ten years older than us and have probably moved on in someway, to put it kindly. 

But what to make of the mural? It's dramatic.

Some questions for US and perhaps Canadian readers. Do you know the two letter abbreviated name of all of the United States? Is it a formal system, which I guess it is as it appears on car number plates? Most are obvious to me, but not all. Can you guess what would not be obvious to a foreign type? 

I know Canadian provinces but if asked to list them, I would forget one, maybe two, but no one really lives in them so it doesn't matter.

For Australia they are quite simple.

South to north on the east coast are Tasmania, TAS.

Victoria, VIC.

New South Wales, NSW but within that is a territory where Australia's capital city Canberra is located, Australian Capital Territory, ACT.

Then to our northern most state, Queensland, QLD.

Travelling west is South Australia, SA.

To its north is another territory, Northern Territory, NT. If you are wondering, the territories are governed by the Federal Government in Canberra, but they do still have the own local territory governments.

Our really large state is Western Australia, WA. Now I say Western Australia but it could be West Australia. I think at some point it was changed and I am not really sure which it now is. Grace? Sami? Jan? Marie? 

Here's a map with the capital cities of each state marked by a red dot and it says Western Australia. 

Sunday Selections

Joining with Elephant's Child and River for Sunday Selections, this week quite random.

My grandparents house in North Road South Oakleigh is of a similar vintage and was built with cream bricks. My grandparent's house also had a port hole window near the front door. I think there was a sand blasted bird on the glass and it was too high to see out of, so purely decorative and for light. 

An untimely Halloween photo that became lost. 

Melbourne Grammar fence shadows.

The fence changed styles.

 

Where I buy coffee at times at Kettle Black.

The Yarra Trams officer found a nice shady grassed spot to park while there was nothing requiring his attendance, and his work car was bogged and had to be winched out. I can imagine the radio chatter about that.

 

R loves his new Samsung S21 and bought a phone case for it at a shop in Chapel Street, and a screen protector. At the last minute for $19 I bought a new clear case for my phone. You can have some Lego play in the shop.

I assume these are phone repair tools for use at the shop. Clever and amusing. 

Pain in the neck

Remember I said I had some neck pain? I needed some new prescriptions from my doctor and what would have been a telehealth phone call, a COVID innovation, I wanted to see him personally about my neck pain. Is it a cancerous growth pressing on a nerve? Doc sent me for an xray and it seems I have osteoarthritis in my upper spine. 

Isn't that just so terrific to be diagnosed with an incurable disease! Some of you know what that is like. 

Last evening I took two pain killers which gave me some relief. As I woke this morning at 5am to go to the toilet, my neck was fine. At 7am I cried out when I tried to raise my head from the pillow after further sleep. It has been like that most mornings for the last few weeks. I sat on the balcony in the cool morning air and I couldn't turn my head left without great pain. A hour later, almost all pain had gone and my neck just felt stiff.

I am not sure the doctor's diagnosis is correct and I feel like the pain will go away in time. I am trying to learn to ignore it, but to be on the safe side, I'm learning about arthritis from Dr Google. I am also remember that five years after a cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment, my father died at my age. A pain in the neck is better than death.

I saw a physiotherapist yesterday, one who I saw a few of years ago after I injured my back. She knows her stuff. My doc has put me on a five visit care plan for no cost using our public health system for chronic medical problems, so physio visits won't cost me for a while. Physio is not normally covered by our health care system.

Arthritis or not, I am not going to let it stop my life, but gosh it can hurt at times. 

Friday Funny

This clip runs for less than I minute and I thought it was very funny, especially the last part. I think he is a professional comedian. Anything playing on words and language grabs my attention.

Some Planning for Port Melbourne

I had seen a mural as we passed by in the car. Rule 1: Photograph murals only by using visiting by public transport where practical,  and I noticed there was a bus stop opposite the mural. I caught the 58 tram to the (now in disgrace) Casino and although it the bus service was only every thirty minutes, I had planned this down to the last detail and it worked. I was curious about the bus terminus and I stayed on the 236 until the end. 

I crossed the road and had a look around the shops and cafes and it was only a ten minute wait until the 236 departed back to the city. I left the bus at the Port Melbourne Life Saving Club and it was a bit hot, so I bought a Golden Gaytime (icecream) at a kiosk. I then walked to Bay Street and caught the 234 bus back to the (there will be a Royal Commission into what goes on there) Casino and the 58 tram back home. The mural photos will be posted on a Monday in due course but here a few photos taken during the outing. 

Morleys Coal Depot repurposed quite wonderfully. 

The 236 bus terminus at Garden City.

Swallows Biscuit Factory repurposed as apartments. Nice work.

Aloha sailor.

I am busy with others stuffs

Too much to do. Will do better tomorrow. Norway it seems is good.

https://www.facebook.com/libideology/photos/a.659900810741412/3892857627445698/

And a comment on the post was, And Norway make Corporations and Rich PPL PAY their FUCKEN TAXES

Town Hall Tuesday

When I showed R this photo he said it looks like a mosque and given there is a large Muslim population, why wouldn't it? Except Coburg City Hall was completed in 1922 and there would have few if any Muslims in the suburb and City of Coburg. 

The City of Coburg was absorbed in the 1990s local council amalgamations to the City of Moreland, or as often known comrade, The Peoples Republic of Moreland. It is the administrative centre for the City of Moreland.

It is a rather strange building and it can host huge events. It was hard to take full photos as there are huge trees to either side. There will be some more about Coburg after a very interesting visit to somewhere I did not know about.

Monday Mural

 It's not really a mural but just metal figures attached to wall in Queen Street, Altona, just off Pier Street.

Collective brains = Zero

R and myself were in the city to get a couple of things and a brunch so late it was nearly lunch. I wanted to take a couple of photos in town so we came home separately. After comparing notes later, we both agreed there were some strange people on the tram home for both of us. "You are not a local person. You have no business in our street. Go home". In the meantime I wondered why there was a hovering helicopter. But we didn't click what they were about. R lay down on his bed and napped and missed the action; the helicopter, the chanting, the loud hailer and the police sirens.

They were anti vaxxers, anti lockdown, anti medical science, COVID non believers, anti government ****wits making a great fuss. They stopped trams running for more than an hour on the busiest tram street in the world. They caused traffic chaos north, south, east and west. Some motorists surrounded by protestors were no doubt apprehensive at least. Twenty people were arrested and charged or will be charged.

After the fuss was over, I went across the road to the rather newish and good Giro d 'Italia for coffee. Nine woman were sitting at two tables outside. It was another case of this is local place for local people. You are not welcome here. One had a protest sign leant up against a chair leg. I had sat down with a mask on and they must have noticed. At times I glared with hostility at them.

The former Federal Government Senator, AKA Famous Bearded Celebrity Resident also rather likes the same place for afternoon coffee and sits outside but today he was wisely hiding inside. 

It is so easy for white people to pick on overseas born, especially overseas born females and of course that it was they did. To a passing young masked Asian woman, one said loudly, "Take your mask off. It will make you sick."

I took my mask out and hung one loop over my ear and they noticed. When I finished my coffee before rising from the table I slowly and defiantly masked up while staring at them and went to the window to pay. I had rehearsed in my head what I would say if they said anything, but of course an older white man is a little more challenging than a young overseas born young female. If the troup of like minded women had a collective brain, they might be dangerous.