The Seventh of February

Today is an important day on the Mouse calendar.

(Mum's birthday)

It's also a special milestone anniversary for a special friend.

(You know who you are, chicken)

These are nice things which roll around on the seventh of February each year.

Last night I was trying with great difficulty to fall asleep.  Have you ever had a night like that?  Your body is screaming out for rest, your eyes are glued shut, but still your mind won't calm down, your thoughts are racing around your head, and your so worried you won't sleep at all and that you'll be a zombie the next day.

Zombie days.  Not good for someone who can't drink coffee or utilise other various stimulants in order to trundle through the day.

After getting up, walking into a wall in the dark, turning on the light (argh, my eyes!), and reading the first novel on hand (World War 1, in the trenches = depressing), I was in a pretty dysfunctional state of mind.  I even sneezed so hard that my lip started to bleed.  Has THAT ever happened to you?

Then I had a little déjà vu.  (How cool is the word déjà vu?)

It wasn't the lip thing.  My lip has never started to bleed after a sneeze before in my life.
More like the problem of a sleepless night in February.  I déjà vu-ed back to February 2009.
To be precised, the week after the seventh of February 2009.
Also known in Victoria as Black Saturday.

If you live in Victoria I'm sure you know a lot about the bushfires on Black Saturday 2009, so I'm not going to write a whole lot about facts and figures.  The rest of you can look that up if your interested.

I remember Black Saturday because it was close.  Really close.
It was a day which brought fire, destruction, despair, desperation, and even death... really close.  When you live my nice and sheltered little Australian middle-class life you don't expect sudden and horrible death to come really close.

Sleepless nights in February 2009 were a symptom of fear.
Fear for friends near the fires.
Fear for all the local CFA volunteers risking their lives.
Fear that the wind would change again.
Fear that the nearby bush would go up in flames and burn through the suburbs.
Fear because no one really knew what was going on, or what to do, or where the fires were, or where they were going.

It's really hard to process, even now 3 years later.

Last night as I couldn't sleep, I remembered lying awake in 2009, listening to the whirl of my ceiling fan and smelling the smoke, wondering if the wind had changed and was blowing the fire our way.
I remembered the sound of ABC Emergency Radio in the lounge room, remember gathering around to listen to updated warnings.  Biting my nails as local suburbs were read out to be on high alert.  Freaking out when our own suburb was read out.  Trying to get onto the CFA website which kept crashing.
Redoing our fire plan over and over again as situations changed.

That was the one summer we almost moved from our little patch of semi-rural paradise on the fringes of Melbourne.

There are drawbacks to living near the bush, but hello, Victoria is one of the highest risk places for bushfires on earth.  We shouldn't be surprised, just prepared.  Now we know how terribly wrong things can go.

Photo source: Wikipedia

I'm more of an optimist than a pessimist (unless I'm running on no sleep - then the world is a dysfunctional place, people).  So I tend to look for the positives when something bad happens even though it annoys the stuffing out of lots of people (pessimists).

Summer 2009 faded into winter, the fires went out completely, Australia went absolutely nuts helping all the people who had lost everything they owned, the local community hereabouts went nuts supporting families who had lost people they loved.
And it rained.

It rained, it rained, it rained... all through summer 2010 (terrible for beach holidays, but hey).
Events like Black Saturday literally burn memories onto certain days of the year.  My déjà vu won't let me forget that.

The seventh of February is also Mum's birthday, and Nonna has just arrived (with Nonno) and she bears gifts of olives, tomato sauce, fried zuchinni flowers for dinner, fresh basil which survived the storm (hallelujah) and a birthday cake.  She does things properly.  (I go nuts for basil)

I did finally fall asleep last night, because after re-living fearful moments during bushfires, I was then thinking about my Mum.

My Mum is very cool.
She gets all my blog posts delivered to her inbox and then she gives me constructive criticism on my grammar (just kidding, sort of).
I inherited my love for English and writing from my Mum.
So really, without her, I wouldn't be tapping away, spilling my thoughts in a dangerously public arena.
I guess without her I wouldn't even exist right now.
I thank God for my Mum.

And with that, I fell asleep.

Thank you for reading. ;)

A Christmas Tale

Every year before Christmas I scrummage around in the cupboards looking for our Bing Crosby 'Do You Know It's Christmas' cassette tape.  It's usually buried under a pile of redundant cassette tapes and other examples of old and even more redundant audio thing-a-majigs.  

I also scrummage around in the cupboards looking for our Bing Crosby cassette tape before writing a blog post which mentions said cassette tape, so that I can make sure I have the title right.  After wasting five minutes and coating all my fingers in dust, I have a feeling my family is constantly hiding Bing Crosby from me (but that might just be a vicious rumour).

I love Bing Crosby cassette tapes!  

The first track (is it called a track on a cassette tape?) is my very most favourite Bing song:
White Christmas.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the tree tops glisten,
And children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow....


When you grow up in Australia, it doesn't take too long to realise that this song was not written about Australian Christmases.  If it was, Bing would sing it like this:

I'm sweating during a hot Christmas,
Just like I sweat every year
The melting tree tops are shimmering
The pool full of children is glimmering
And we all set fire to the barbecueeeeeeeee 

Sorry, I couldn't resist (most Australian versions of Christmas carols are lame anyway, so I fit right in).

At about 4:00pm on Christmas Day 2011 we were slumped sitting around the pool trying to digest the large amounts of food which had been consumed for lunch (hard work).
There was a little light bantering about who was going to go for a swim, who was going to get pushed into the pool, etc.  No one actually moved.

At that point the sun also went behind a very large black mass of clouds, and the hot air suddenly felt even hotter and more stifling.

WWW: Mythicise

[This post comes to you through metaphorical blood, sweat and tears.]

The Mouse struggled for days to overcome the great force which had surrounded her.  It was sucking her in, like bathwater down the plughole, gurgling, pulling and pushing until she had no choice but to succumb to the vortex and be washed away in a wave of lectures, readings and outlines.

Tossed around like a leaf in a book of English Literature that weighs 2.2 kg, The Mouse finally found the strength to surface and answer the calls of her neglected blog.  Pushing aside over 100 freshly printed PDFs which threatened to drown her in dry ink, The Mouse used her mechanical pencil to fight off duelling due dates and crawl towards the computer.  She hacked her way through a forest of Word Docs and Google Chrome tabs, hitting the red 'x's with super precision, until finally... she found herself in a safe haven of friendly photos and cute fonts.  A place she could truly call her own.  A Kingdom for a Mouse.

I'm thinking this is a good kingdom.

City Mouse [still movie]

Hairy Maclary

The other day I was walking around the house with the words 'Hairy Maclary' and 'Donaldson's Dairy' stuck in my head...along with pictures of little black dogs with tiny paws... where did these seemingly random memories come from? (I seriously wasn't sure)

Thanks to Google and the mysteries of the Internet, I am able to revisit my childhood.

Introducing...

Out of the gate
and off for a walk
went Hairy Maclary
from Donaldson's Dairy

The Reason

A little story about a religious skeptic who worked as a farmer [by Paul Harvey], which I would like to call 'The Reason'.

One raw winter night the farmer heard an irregular thumping sound against the kitchen storm door.  He went to a window and watched as tiny, shivering sparrows, attracted to the evident warmth inside, beat in vain against the glass.

Touched, the farmer bundled up and trudged through fresh snow to open the barn door for the struggling birds.  He turned on the lights and tossed some hay in a corner.  But the sparrows, which had scattered in all directions when he emerged from the house, hid in the darkness, afraid.

The man tried various tactics to get them into the barn.  He laid down a trail of Saltine cracker crumbs to direct them.  He tried circling behind the birds to drive them toward the barn.  Nothing worked.  He, a huge, alien creature, had terrified them; the birds couldn't comprehend that he actually desired to help them.

The farmer withdrew to his house and watched the doomed sparrows through a window.  As he stared, a thought hit:  If only I could become a bird - one of them - just for a moment.  Then I wouldn't frighten them so.  I could show them the way to warmth and safety.

At the same moment, another thought dawned on him.  He had grasped the reason Jesus was born.

From the The Nativity Story

Oh Holy Night

Placide Cappeau de Roquemaure

1847

Oh Holy Night! The stars are brightly shining,

It is the night of the dear Saviour's birth.

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

Till he appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.

A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices,

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees! Oh hear the angel voices!

Oh night divine, the night when Christ was born.

~

Truly He taught us to love one another,

His law is love, and His Gospel is peace.

Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother.

And in his name all oppression shall cease.

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,

With all our hearts we praise His holy name.

Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we,

His power and glory ever more proclaim!

Adoration of the Shepherds, Gerard van Honthorst, 1622

As a side note, it's interesting how all the old paintings of the nativity scene, etc. show the Jewish Mary and Joseph as Anglo white people.  Not very politically correct *cough*.

I'm sure you'll understand that by displaying these pictures I am in no way promoting this sort of exclusive idea.  Hence, I included the previous picture from the movie The Nativity Story, which I think is much more realistic.