Lake Bolac: The Home of Bob the Bunyip

It felt like a cramp: I got out of bed and stood on my instep, finding enough relief to get back to sleep for the last few hours of darkness that morning. But my calf was still sore the next day. "Perhaps I'd torn something trying to relieve the cramp?" By Thursday the oedematic swelling in my shin and ankle was ummistakable and the dull pain had not abated.

"Might as well go straight to the hospital!", my surgeon mate told me, "That's where the GP will send you anyway." So, off to St V's it was, where Cas was not the experience A Current Affair would have us believe. The triage nurse was friendly and instantly concerned. The wait was fair but not extended. A quick history for the registrar and around for an untrasound. Oh dear! Mum had consistently warned me about the need for clean undies, but I think had never really come upon even the concept of "going commando". The technician was gracious and passed me a towel before smearing gel from groin to ankle. (They even think to warm it beforehand!)

No dallying pubis to patella, but the pause behing the knee was the giveaway, and the black texta mark a few inches above the ankle. Of course he couldn't tell me that it was a thrombus - that was the doctor's job, but "No" I couldn't walk back to Cas: "Wait for the orderly, he'll take you on the trolley".

"Have you had surgery lately?"
"Been on any long plane trips?" (And I thought they were bunyip specialists at St V's!)
"Gained weight recently?" "Not really, I've lost 10kg."
"Had your leg in a cast or been in bed for a prolonged time?"
"9 times out of 10 we don't know what causes them anyway!"

Several vials of blood, a couple of jabs of clexane in the belly, a warfarin tablet and some advice later, I was discharged to the care of Hospital in the Home for daily injections and bloods. Proud I was (forgive the Yodaism) of my bravery in learning self-injection and gradually the warfarin pushed my INR above the therapeutic and mystical number 2, so the need for daily nursing visits is gone.

And now I wait like some sixteenth century monk for the looming dissolution!

Photo Captions From Katrina Stir Debate
By JOCELYN NOVECK
The Associated Press
Friday, September 2, 2005; 6:23 PM
NEW YORK -- In one of the photos, a man wades through chest-deep waters with a large black bag filled with items from a grocery store. In another, two people wade through equally high waters, carrying bread and soda.
They were just two out of hundreds of stunning images transmitted Tuesday, the day after Katrina ravaged New Orleans. What has drawn attention to these two photos, though, is their captions. Full story: Washington Post

This only takes a minute. Sometimes when you have a stressful day or week, you need some silliness to break up the day. And, if we are honest, we have a lot more stressful days than not.

The following in an excerpt from a children's book, "Captain Underpants And the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants" by Dave Pilkey. The evil Professor forces everyone to assume new names...

Use the third letter of your first name to determine your new first name:
a = snickle b = doombah c = goober d = cheesey
e = crusty f = greasy g = dumbo h = farcus i = dorky j = doofus
k = funky l = boobie m = sleezy n = sloopy o = fluffy p = stinky
q = slimy r = dorfus s = snooty t = tootsie u = dipsy v = sneezy
w = liver x = skippy y = dinky z = zippy

Use the second letter of your last name to determine the first half of your new last name:
a = dippin b = feather c = giggle d = burger
e = chicken f = barffy g = lizard h = waffle i = farkle j = monkey
k = flippin l = fricken m = bubble n = rhino o = potty p = hamster
q = buckle r = gizzard s = lickin t = snickle u = chuckle v = pickle
w = hubble x = dingle y = gorilla z = girdle

Use the third letter of your last name to determine the second half of your new last name:
a = butt b = boob c = face d = nose
e = hump f = breath g = pants h = shorts i = lips j = honker
k = head l = tush m = chunks n = dunkin o = brains p = biscuits
q = toes r = doodle s = fanny t = sniffer u = sprinkles v = frack
w = squirt x = humperdinck y = hiney z =juice

I hope no-one noticed ... it's gone now ... hidden in the fifth word of this very apologia. But it will probably be enough to get me expelled from the Ancient and Noble Order of Pedants!

One can't help thinking of Pierre, the Marseillais WW1 hero and the taunts of the jeunes mecs locals ... "just one little apostrophe" sounds so hollow when all is said and done and written!

Apparently the phenomenon is going global but that's no excuse for us at the Lake. We've devoted nearly 0.763% of our lives to its eradication only to find "it's own pace and rhythm" lulling us into compacency! The price of freedom IS eternal vigilance.

Nor does it assuage our feelings of shame and guilt to know that the error was rectified without "external audit" or that archive.org failed to capture it. There is no comfort in knowing that us dystypophobics often make such rods for our own backs! The gum has fallen in the gully and a sound was born! The proof reader will be taken to a forest in Siberia! Oh dear ...

The longest night has gone, here down south. Paris can't be found, nor Farouk. I did tell them both that marsupials and members of the family, Mustelidae are not wont to hibernate, but the cold weather just seems to have that effect on us all: we just want to curl up in a branch or burrow warmed by the sun and wait till the wattle blooms.

Daphne's in Siberia by this stage, we think. The last postcard we had was from Japan where she had sheltered briefly with my brother who coaches cricket there.

When winters become countless (as they do for bunyips), melancholy blooms. It was just all getting too depressing for me, so I thought I'd do an early spring clean on the blog. New warm colours, better defined text to make reading through screens that fog up in the dew easier!

And I took myself to the cinema in Hamilton to see Kingdom of Heaven. That was probably a mistake! Baldwin IV, hiding his leprosy in his iron mask, was horrific enough: thank goodness it ended just as Richard I failed to persuade our fictitious hero Balian the smith to return with him to slaughter the 2,600 innocent Muslims at Acre.

Too many shades of the present day to make pleasant viewing, to my mind!

Yes, I know others use "intraomphaloskepsis", but we, at the Lake, have never found mixed roots very appealing!

Little did Daphne expect the tempest she would unleash with her simple quack of ennui posted on the pretender to our friend, Scaramouche's website, Dreamnation Recording Co. [dnrc].

How were we to know that some ex-hippie who found Damascus Road in Brisbane in 1984 would have turned the most modest act of personal hygiene into an international record?

Or that *the substance formerly known as navel fluff/lint*, of which the average human accumulates some 2-3 milligrams a day, was dangerously inflamatory as well as inflammable? (That's some 85kg in a lifetime, by the way.)

Despite all the kerfuffle (pardon my Gaelic), we still need help, friends; Daphne remains inconsolate because no-one has yet answered her question:

"does anyone know the correct word for the lint that collects in one's navel? and why is it always blue?"

It transpires that she's been reading the Don Vivo trilogy:

"Don Emmanuel grinned, scratched his rufous beard and then his pubic region, and said, 'I will give you all the advice in the world if only you can tell me why it is that the dingleberries excavated from my navel by Felicidad are always composed of blue Lint, when I possess no clothes of that colour.' "

Extract from The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman by Louis de Bernières, published by Secker & Warburg.

Please post if you can help her with her questions - then we can all get some sleep.

It's autumn on the shores, and the season has its own pace and rhythm. Things are at once slow and busy as the weather works its wonders: no new growth but provisioning aplenty.

Farouk took his Easter late in a year when the Julian and Gregorian calendars were most at odds. Daphne saw this as a portent of the world as we know it. But, she has always been a bit too ready to catastrophise. Those of us with no ritual duties headed off for the weekend to visit the North East. Paris still refuses to be photographed by day and hid in the trees while some friends from Alexandra and Bali chatted with Scaramouche, a llama in exile:



There was a further example of this bizarre ikonophobia some weeks later when Paris (the Peripatetic) and I also spent a weekend along the Great Ocean Road visiting some relatives who run a bough and breakfast in Ocean Grove with some Melbourne mates. He was busy "marking" the famous entrance to the road when some tourists stopped for photos. He was off like the powers of ...! You can just see his tail disappearing past the "Historic Marker" sign. How apt!

Some things still take time! Once everything did, of course; and strangely, I didn't seem to notice it so much then. Now, it's like a nanosecond is always too long - even if you're dealing with 100 gigabytes! When I read Christopher Booker's The Neophiliacs back in the 60's, and his lament that we were all 'plunging down a cataract of change', as well as the metaphor being a little queer for those of us who do such things, I was struck by an overwhelming feeling of ruth for a man so averse to risk.

And now it's just told me that it will take 7hr 36min 11sec to do a backup ... hang on: it will take me a few minutes to calculate how many nanoseconds that is - 2.7371 x 10¹⁴ ... and wouldn't you know it? While I was calculating that, my backup failed!

Paris to the rescue! Apparently, we can make the backup over the LAN and that will take a mere 2.445 x 10¹² nsec - a great time saving during which I think I will have a swim!

Feeling better now, and that wonderful little green bar has almost run full across the screen: less than 13 minutes to go.

I was going to write that sometimes, these days, I don't want things to go quite so fast either, that I wished it wasn't all "brilliant sun without the healing shadow". That must have been before I got my computer.