The Autumn Rains Bring Unexpected Gifts

Thunder!  Lightning!  Power Outages (small ones). RAIN!
            We have had our first rain of the Autumn season and it was a good one - howling torments and running around like mad closing summer-open windows as the rain poured in.

The morning after, I sent this email to Mum: 
            This morning we discovered that our open windows had let in a piteous trail of refugees - all the summer spiders and pill bugs, coming in out of the rain. As for ants  - the ones that live in the bougainvillea outside the bathroom window got flooded out and headed straight in a body towards dryer pastures.
            Mr Tabubil met them before I did. There was much howling. "They're coming in EVERYWHERE!"  
            "What are? From where?!"
            "Ants!  Lots and lots of ants!  I don't KNOW!  EVERYWHERE!  Do something!"
            I squeezed a lemon so I could break their trail with citric acid and went in. I've found.... six ants so far. 
            A very large part of me would love to see Mr Tabubil go work for a year in Papua New Guinea for a while, just for a sense of perspective.
            -Me

Mum wrote back:
            Mr Tabubil needs a good tropical experience all right - with ants and cockroaches and spiders and geckos - and snakes of course. Did I tell you what happened to your father when he opened his suitcase on our return from PNG last week? In front of him and myself, a gigantic cockroach climbed out of his valise. It was awfully big and I had to go thumping after it with a shoe. 
            This cockroach had hitchhiked its way across  border crossings to lend to strut its stuff in front of all the not quite as gigantic, Australian cockroaches. The bold effrontery of this specimen.  I am sure it had plans to improve on the gene pool of Australia's cockroaches. I did eventually lay waste to its plans with a final and more enraged assault. I suppose in a way, it's speed and cunning, pitted against - ???  --  I guess I could only offer 'size', gave it the huge advantage.  My size meant nothing against its deviousness.
            Have you noticed how hard it is to exterminate a determined insect!?   

Yes, I surely have.  Mr Tabubil has as well.  Mum and I can't really talk, of course.  My deep-freeze Canadian Mr Tabubil might be climbing the furniture but he holds cards of his own.  When the giggling starts, all he has to do is mention Mum's Canadian Bear bells.  And bear stick.  And bear flare.  And the car she picked out because it looked square and solid enough that a hungry bear wouldn't be able to roll it on the first go...

The Devils you Don't know At All and Don't Want To - Ever. So There. THANK You.

Not long after I moved back to Australia, I was out to dinner with Mum and Dad and a group of other brand-new arrivals.  Among them was a lovely young man from South Africa (which is not exactly under-populated with its own beasties), who'd immigrated to Australia with his wife and two small children.

            The thing about Australians is that we're well aware of the reputation for the sheer versatile lethality of our flora and fauna, and we take a perverse and sophisticated satisfaction in winding up foreigners until they're strung so tight you can pluck that last stretched nerve and bounce them half-way to Jupiter.

            This young man had been pretty well worked over by the well-meaning folks in his new office over the past week, and by the time he got to us, he was in a state of bug-eyed paranoia that had him checking underneath his restaurant chair and carefully inspecting the folds of the table-cloth before he sat down, just in case the shadows were harboring something unsavory that would jump out and bite him in the neck.

            Mum and Dad watched him narrowly, and with very little prodding, led him into  a breathless exploration of how Australia required its citizens to maintain a perpetual state of readiness -

            "My God," he said feelingly.  You've got the world's deadliest snakes and the world's deadliest spiders, and they tell me that they all live inside your bloody house. But you can't go outside into the garden either!  You can't put a picnic blanket down on the grass - there's trapdoor spiders in the grass.  And you can't go walking in the bush - there's snakes that look just like little brown twigs lying on all the paths, and when you go home, there's huntsman spiders in your beds, and redback spiders underneath the toilet seats - I tell you, I'm about to quit this job and take the family up north for a long, quiet tropical holiday on the beach.  At least the beaches are safe!"

            This was Mum and Dad's cue.  Mum, who has spent considerable time teaching on the coast up north, launched into a story about her seven-year-old student who walked barefoot to school one day and stepped on a stonefish.  He lived, barely.

            "Don't forget the box jellyfish."  Dad said.

            "The What- ?"

            "Cone shells." Mum said.

            "Sharks."

            "Sea snakes."

            "Salt-water crocodiles."

            "And," Mum said, "The little blue-ringed octopus. It's so small you barely see it, but there's no known antidote. You die in agony; paralyzed and writhing."

            The South African blanched. "About the only bit of Australia that's safe must be the little strip of sand around your coast between the high-tide line and the start of the bush!"

            "Malaria."  Mum said consideringly.

            "Japanese Encephalitis,"  Dad nodded

            "Dengue Fever," Mum said, and nodded harder.

            The poor man had to call a waiter over for something to settle his nerves.  Several stiff drinks later, Mum and Dad poured him into a taxi and went home very pleased with themselves.

Australia is a lovely country.  And if the new immigrants can survive the Australians, they can survive anything.

The Devils You Know

Speaking of earthquakes - it's an interesting thing, watching the mental processes by which humans process risk.

            Over the last two weeks, I've received some lovely letters from family members, telling me how much fun the earthquakes didn't sound - and wanting to know when are we coming home, back to Australia, where things like this don't happen and the country is safe.  Soon, they hope?

            My Auntie Dee wrote to me from Queensland.  She didn't ask me to come home, but she expressed elegantly and forcefully how completely she is not a fan of natural disasters such as ours  -

            Dee and her husband are farmers in Queensland's red soil belt.  In any given year, they are up to their elbows in floods, droughts and bushfire watches.  It's hardly worth noting the ordinary, everyday, scarcely to be mentioned Aussie annoyances of venomous snakes and spiders in the downstairs lavatory.  During 2011's epic floods, they spent the better part of a week in their farmhouse shut off from the rest of Queensland while water lapped around the margins of their garden path, and later that year, when man-made disasters appeared on the horizon, my uncle was instrumental in defying a particularly bloody-minded government-sponsored attempt to seize the local farming land for strip-mining.

Auntie A  lives in the same part of Victoria that, three years ago, was blasted by horrendous bushfires that killed almost 200 people and left more than 7000 homeless.  Two days after the 7.1 quake, she wrote to me to say that Mr Tabubil and I ought to come home now, please. Soonish. Her own daily concerns are scarcely less considerable, and her own risk calculations deserve full presentation here:

            "I thought my little episode with the Tiger Snake in the lounge room last week was unsettling, but it was nothing compared to your earthquake. I had been ironing in the lounge room for a couple of hours.  I went into the bedroom to put on my shoes, and I think at this stage I may have disturbed the snake. I glanced down at the floor as I walked back into the lounge and there it was.  My brain did a double take as I swung back for a second look, quickly called your Uncle A (who works on the property where they live)who jumped up from his office chair in a hurry and banged his knee (he is now limping) flew home and caught the snake, which was hiding at the back of the couch.  Of course, we turned the bed upside down to see if there were any of his family left.  Still can't work out how it got in as I always am checking the doors to make sure that they  are closed fully.  Anyway, so far we have survived its visit."

            Four days ago, I had another letter from her - her young grandson had been bitten by a tiger snake in her backyard, next to her lemon tree.  He spent 7 hours under observation in the local hospital with his leg wrapped in bandages from his ankle to his hip.  Ultimately, he was let go with no more than a good fright- the snake had struck his ankle-bone and recoiled for a second strike without depositing any venom, in which moment the boy had been able to run and get away -

            "It was a good outcome." Auntie A wrote to me, far more casually than I could have sounded under similar circumstances.  

It's all about perspective, isn't it?  The devils that you know.  Known devils can become almost routine, and if not exactly tolerable, then bearable, and if not actually reasonable, then able to be reasoned against.

            The quakes that we are having here in Santiago are reckoned to be part of the tectonic reverb after the great big 8.8 quake in 2010's 8.8.  The first aftershock of that one rung bells at 8.2, and after a few days of 7-point-somethings every hour or so, the tectonic activity  has been trending more-or-less reasonably downward, ever since.

            Earthquakes become familiar.  As each new one builds, it brings to Santiaguenos what has become a familiar terror, until it peaks and then, then fear settles into calculation - "Well, we got through the big one, and this one feels less than that, so we'll get through this -  so no worries, no worries at all -"

            There's a night spent outside on high ground if you live on the coast, but you're through, and it has settled in the ground and inside your head, until next time -

            Would Chileans take the floods, which drowned so many in Queensland,  or Victoria's fires, which left nothing but scorched bones on scorched earth, or even the daily Australian caution against snake and spider?  Or up in Darwin, beaches that are salted with crocodiles, sea-snakes, box-jellyfish and the immortal blue-ringed octopus?  Or we could be up in Texas this month, praying for a storm cellar as we listen to the roof come off -

            The devils you know are the ones we can live with.  Strange dangers are terrors.  The danger we know are calculable, considerable and endurable.

            So we all endure.

Litchfield National Park

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 

Litchfield National Park is 260 km from Katherine, going northeast back up toward the coast.
            Finding the park wasn't entirely difficult.  Sandor drove and Thea did the navigating. 

            "Drive straight for 236 km and turn right." she said.  And then she went to sleep.

            She didn't stay asleep, poor darling.  The handbook of our trusty van swore up and down that the thing could hit 130 km/hour on the straight.  But it had no cruise control.  Sandor desperately wanted to put the van through its paces on the long straight road, but a van weighed down by five adults, one baby, four metric tons of luggage, and a picnic hamper full of hamburger fixings accelerates like a  turtle in a particularly sucking mud.

            He'd mash his foot onto the accelerator, and the little engine would whine and wheeze a little in complaint, and slowly, ponderously, bucking a little as it crossed through the round numbers, the speedometer needle would drift up toward the red, and five or six kilometers later, when we were pushing 110 on the flat, we'd run into a road-block or a road-train, and he'd have to slam on the breaks and slow right back down again to zero until we were allowed to pass.

            By the time Sandor had turned right through the gates of Litchfield and found some swoopy curves to play with on a long descent down an escarpment, our very own grand-prix racing driver had 236 km of frustration under his accelerator pedal and he was ready to roar.

            Except that top-heavy camping vans tend to wobble when you play grand prix on hairpin bends.

            And the people in the back seats don't think very much of it.  Including and particularly the Sproglet.  The shearing songs had to come out again. 
           By the time we reached Litchfield National Park, we'd had about enough of driving places.  We wanted to stay in one place and go swimming. 
So we did.

But first we had to stop and gawp at the termite mounds.

There are thousands of them, adobe arcologies like standing stones, like soldiers in serried ranks standing at attention facing north, a million termites in each one.
            The Top End's 'magnetic' termite mounds are a mystery.  It's a  miracle of nature - that the termites know the orient direction for the best sun and wind and ways to brace against the monsoon rain - a phenomenon of a billion termites with compasses inside their heads.

            This story-book version, park signboards told us, has been lately and largely disproved. The truth is less a miracle of nature than direct Darwinian intervention.  Termites build every which way, and the mounds that aren't built to precisely the right specs don't make it tall enough to be noticed before they fall down and blow away.  It's the three little Pigs as a morality play - straw and sticks are east and west, and bricks built to north and south keep out all the huffing and puffing that the big bad wolves can throw.

            It's not half as mythic this way.  This way, romance doesn't throb in your veins at all.

And it was hot. Blisteringly hot. We had our photos taken with the termite mounds and we went to Wangi Falls instead, and ate our picnic lunch on a blanket on a lawn, with a pair of black cockatoos peeling the bark off of a tree above our heads. 

Wangi Falls was bright with sun and loud with shouts ringing off the rocks.  The falls are only 80 km from Darwin, and very very popular with locals who choose not to swim in salt-water-crocodile-infested oceans.  There was a path to the top of the falls, but the climb took an hour and had no view of the water below.
             "Sod that," we said.  It didn't appear hugely popular with anyone else either.

            The pool at the bottom of the fall has fish - if we'd brought swimming goggles and a snorkel to see them with. We hadn't, so we stood on a bridge over the little creek that ran out of the swimming hole and watched little fish quivering there, lined up in rows like the termite mounds, oriented parallel to the current, heads upstream.

            And then we went swimming. 

            There are freshwater crocodiles in the swimming hole, but the Parks Service is vigilant, and pitches out all but the baby ones that are as small as the fish in the pool and far too sensible to take a toothy chomp out of a toe.

            In the pool, the best sport was to swim up to the main waterfall - curving around sideways to avoid the current, and climb up the rocks as high as you dared go, then clinging crabwise to the wall, work your way into the waterfall itself until, just when the current tore you loose, throw yourself out into the pool and be spun and dragged half-way across before the current slacked. 

            Over and over again.

            Mr Tabubil came out of the water after an hour, and sat on the grass in the sun with the Sproglet.  The rest of us stayed in the pool all afternoon, until the sun started to drop behind the cliff and the air turned cool.  And the world was very good.

A Very Short Afternoon at a Hot Spring

Mr Tabubil and I, along with Mr Tabubil's parents, sister and brother-in-law, have come south to spend the week between Christmas and the New Year  at a parcela just outside the small village of Llifen on Lago Ranco (Lake Ranco), deep in Chile's southern Alpine Region.  
Enjoy!

On our third day, we drove up the Llifen Valley into the mountains to spend an afternoon soaking at the Termas de Chilliuo (the Chilliuo Hot Springs.)

The Road up to the top of the valley and into the mountains was mostly an unpaved one-lane mountain track:  picturesque as postcards, but  hell on the suspension of our small rental cars - low suspensions and  two wheel drives on a mountain track do NOT a return-on-rental-car- deposit make.

It was terribly dusty - thick road dust mixed with a soup of volcanic ash.  Our little Toyota Yarises (Toyota Yari?) had no air-conditioning and we had to leave the windows open, and before we'd left the valley we were breathing soup and scooping it out of our noses and our ears.

Hot, dusty, tasting of ashes and increasingly car-sick, we bounced higher and higher into the mountains.  Stopping at little wooden bridges over bouncing mountain tarns we smelled fresh, cold air and pricked up our dusty noses and dreamed Mountain Hot-Spring dreams.

We bounced through tiny villages that clung to knife-sharp ridgelines, rode switchbacks and hairpin bends around hanging valleys and empty precipices, we jounced past herds of dairy cows in fields dotted with daisies, slowed to choking halts behind gauchos on tall sauntering horses and blasted through bosky, shadowed pine woods . Beyond our personal travelling dust clouds, the world was a paradise.

On a blessedly smooth stretch of road in a long valley at the top of the world we saw a sign for the Termas de Chilliuo.  Swinging our car off the gravel road, we bounced up a grassy lane and rattle gently to a stop in a grassy clearing in front of a row of simple wooden changing cabins.  

Volcanic dust-cloud incoming!

Water gurgled.  Birds chirped. White daisies nodded their heads in the grass.

Steaming gently and hooting happily, we tumbled out of our cars into the mountain silence - and heard a noise.

            Lots of noise.

            And we were bombarded by legions of biting black and orange horseflies the size of light fixed-wing aircraft.  Grabbing our bags, we threw our towels over our heads and ran like hell toward the change rooms.

            The Termas were somewhat anti-climactic, under the circumstances.  The weather had come around and the sun was high and flat and hot.  The Springs were a flat, shallow concrete pan filled with scalding water and the only way to avoid a massed aerial assault was to sit in the steaming stuff up to our necks.  I risked a sprint to an outdoor ice-water shower, and I only made it by whirling a wet-t-shirt around my head like a helicopter propeller the whole way.

            We lasted barely ten minutes.  My father-in-law cracked first.  He rose from the water like a steaming leviathan at a starting post and  made a mad dash to the changing sheds - cursing viciously and flailing away at the flies with his arms above his head.  He didn't have a wet t-shirt to extend his reach.  Poor soul.

            The rest of us badly wanted a photo of us sitting in the spring - ten minutes in that water under that sun was hero stuff, but he refused to come out, and we nearly expired.

            When he did emerge, under the weight of our pleas (and imprecations), he was fully clothed and deeply paranoid and in the three seconds that it took him to raise the camera to his eye and press the shutter, he was bomb dived by six enormous horseflies in a synchronized attack that came right out of the sun and aimed for the vulnerable patch of skin on the back of his neck.

          He broke and ran.

          Clearly, our plans for a picnic lunch on the lawn were right out, so hungry and heat struck and rather worse for wear, we bolted for the cars and tore back down the mountain until we found a meadow where the horseflies were merely an annoyance instead of the country's dominant predator.

But I still ate my sandwich from underneath a beach towel.

And on the way home my father-in-law dented his oil pan.

Butterflies

This blog entry was going to be about something else but the town's been invaded by butterflies.  

            Invaded, possessed, flooded, drowned - take your pick of the metaphors, but the reality is sufficiently surreal - clouds of small, tattered, mis-addressed, mis-directed butterflies.
            I first noticed it at noon, when I was walking to the downtown bus stop.  I passed by a vacant lot  - a flat pan of concrete that was once a service station, and the chain of cracks in the old concrete were full of  lavender bushes.  And only lavender bushes - all across the whole lot.  That, in this town of salt scrub and mulga bush, was strange enough to grab my attention, but it was how I was seeing the bushes that made me blink - I was seeing them blurred, through a cloud of small white butterflies.  

             They floated beside me as I walked past the lavender garden and into main street - no trees, no grass, no lavender bushes, but dozens of butterflies falling lopsided through the air past brick walls and plate-glass windows.  When I got off the bus on the other side of town they'd arrived there before me - hundreds of them, flapping haphazardly in and out of hedges and flowerbeds.  When I stopped by the small supermarket near our house the butterflies had kept pace with me, small white bodies lay crushed and broken inside the supermarket doors - trodden, rolled on casualties of hapless, helpless flight.

            Hundreds of thousands of small white butterflies, their wings blinking open and closed with ad-hoc, clockwork precision, falling in and out of the sky without the least hope of purpose or direction, batting the air and sifting the sunlight between their wings.  It falls in shards.  

          Clouds of them. Millions of them.  And I have better things to do than sit inside and write.

Mr Tabubil and Australia

Mr Tabubil really isn't liking the Australian fauna very much.  We have a few screened windows, but insects DO get in at night.   The mesh is a rather large weave, and the smaller ones come right through the screens.  I found him gibbering a week ago - terrified of the "horrible monster beetle" in the middle of the carpet.  It clocked in at one centimeter - including the feelers.  

Not long after he arrived in Australia, Mr Tabubil had a Moment. 

We were eating tea - far too late in the evening - and the light above our head started to strobe.  We looked up and there were a few winged things bouncing off the light housing.  A moment later, there were HUNDREDS - little winged ants that blundered into the light and onto the table and into our shirts and Mr Tabubil - Mr Tabubil very quietly lost his mental equilibrium.  In vain did I point out that they were 

a) sting-less

b) not mosquitoes

c) short lived

d) silent and 

e) not mosquitoes

(Mr Tabubil had not yet recovered from the mosquito bombardier four nights past.  His sensitive ear can detect a mosquito in the most rumbly and purr-y of electric motors.  Our air-con, our fridge and the generator from the squash courts down the street all apparently have wings and a sting.)

Looking out of the window, the halo from every streetlight was hazed and dancing with millions on millions of tiny bodies.  It was like the footage you see taken three miles down in the abyssal trenches - a rain of glowing, glittering particles.  It was a phenomenon.

It was a termite swarm - on the first hot day of summer, the winged ones take flight by the hundreds of million - harmless fliers that drop their wings and wriggle down your shirt and die promptly, and neither eat you nor settle in your house. 

This phenomenon of nature left the Canadian unmoved.

"Please let me go home to Canada now" he whimpered, staring out the window at the opaque night.

I have video footage of him vacuuming the poor termites out of the air.

Welcomed Home by Eight Legs or More (And a Canadian)

We had some mild excitement my first night home.  Around bedtime, when we were yawning on the sofa and stretching our arms and discussing the pleasing prospect of fresh sheets and pillows under our heads, Mr Tabubil let out a hell of a yell -  and we saw a gigantic cockroach sauntering merrily across the living room floor.  Quite two inches in length, it was. I dropped a book on it and took the remains outside - taking due care and diligence as I cross the threshold.  We have hit summer cockroach season, the time where if we step outside we have to do it FAST and watch the door frame to catch 'em scuttling in.  Where they will create monster colonies of monstrous cockroaches that will chew holes in our underwear and breed in our socks.  

            The horror bug dispatched, Mr Tabubil climbed down from the arm of the sofa and went off to the bathroom to brush his teeth.  In a fit of misdirection he stuck his head into the laundry instead- and bellowed loud enough to wake the peaceful dead.  This time I ended up on the arm of the sofa.  (My adrenalin was up.  So there.)

            A huge and hairy huntsman spider had dropped off the ceiling right next to his head and into our stack of re-usable shopping bags.  (South Australia is very pro-active on the plastic shopping bag issue.  Our state's attitude gives one fits of the superior-minded smuggeries when one is up in Queensland and being handed cart-loads of plastic bags whenever one visits the supermarket.)

Mr Tabubil bellowed, dancing from toe to toe.
            "It was enormous!"

             "How enormous?" I asked.  

            "This enormous!" he said spreading his fingers wider than the width of my own hand.

            I was skeptial.  Huntsmen just don't get that big up here.

            "Fine." He chuckled nervously.  He moved his fingers toward each other by two centimeters.  "This big, okay?  And hairy."

            Lovely.  First an enormous cockroach, now a full size, out of season huntsman.

            "The first thing" I said, "is to move all the other stuff out of here."

            "Brilliant!"  Mr Tabubil said, from outside in the corridor.  From over on the other side of the house in the kitchen, actually.

            Gingerly, I began to clear the room, and found that, courtesy of a damp kitchen towel, the  laundry basket had turned into a space-habitat for ants. Bravely, Mr Tabubil steeled himself enter the chamber of horrors and run a hot wash in the washing machine, and I carried the rest of the laundry out into the corridor.  He yelled again.

            "It's coming right up the side of a supermarket bag!  Can you see it?  Can you see it?  It's right there!  It's right there!!!" 

            I came running. Oh.  Oh yeah.  There it was, all right. The big scary monster. A little quarter-scale South Australia huntsman spider.  No fur.  Barely two inches across.

            "Do I have to kill it?" I sighed.

            "Yes!"

So I squashed the poor thing between two shoes.  And gave Mr Tabubil a very VERY fishy stink-eye.

            "Bigger than my hand, huh?  The poor baby."

Two night ago we found another two-inch huntsman in the bedroom - scuttling out of my pajama pants as I picked them up to put them on.  Mr Tabubil is still smarting from the indignities of last week - this one made it outside alive in a drinking glass.

            However.  My Aunt and Uncle A came to stay with us over the long weekend, and Auntie A told me that the things live in pairs.  And as much as I choose to believe in a live and let live philosophy of life, I draw the line at sharing my pajama bottoms with eight other legs. 

The hunt is seriously on.

How to Make a Public Spectacle of Yourself in Seven Easy Steps

1) Locate a nice sunny day and go for a walk through it.

2) Wearing a comfortable t-shirt and a tight, knee-length skirt, sit down on a patch of grass underneath a shady tree overlooking a river.

3) While listening to the rotary flopping sounds of a duck trying to take off from a mud wallow, idly brush away the the large black ants that appear to be crawling over your skirt and t-shirt.

4) The ants may be biting, so swat briskly.  Avoid howling; this indicates to the ants that you are impressed.

5)  Sharp, sudden pain will draw your attention to the ants that are now marching, in formal ranks, up the insides of your thighs, biting as they go.  Remove them without drawing the attention of every jogger and sunbather on the riverbank.  Remember that your skirt is long and tight and you will really have to reach.

6) With solemn dignity (insofar as possible), rise to your feet and indicate to the ants that the lawn is now entirely theirs.  Walk away slowly.

7) Wait until you are bracketed by three gentlemen with briefcases and a pack of cyclists, and discover that one of the ants made it past your defenses and has just bitten you right between your legs.

Almost exactly right betwee- 

Attempt to resolve the situation without drawing undue attention to your discomfort.



He's not letting go, is he?



(redacted)




(redacted)




7a) Walk away as briskly as politeness allows, reflecting with gratitude upon the charity of those who have chosen not to make a citizen's arrest for public indecency.

Spring Grass

The first mown grass of spring!
            The moan of a whipper-snipper outside your window, the thick green smell of freshly cut grass - intoxicating odor! Threads of it fizz and burst inside your stomach and brain like New Years fireworks, sending you wild to climb out the window and be off - somewhere- anywhere, traveling by cartwheels and handsprings and running for miles and miles without stopping until the long fuse sizzling inside your belly burns itself out. Sometime next February.
            Or whenever the flies get too much to bear - in November sometime, probably. This is the outback, and the warm weather is waking the insects up. Yesterday I saw my first fly-swarm of the season - a boiling black cloud, buzzing fretfully against an iron fence. Smaller flying things are waking too - tiny stingless winged ants, so small that they pass right through our window screens and make pale clouds around our ceiling lights.

Mr Tabubil is not particularly fond of Australian insect-life, stingless or not.

He does not like it at ALL.

Last night I caught him with the vacuum cleaner again - vacuuming tiny insects right out of the air.

Spiders Redux

The exterminator was only a stopgap measure. We quickly learned that any spider intrepid enough to make it past the film of diatomaceous earth on the outside walls would be welcomed by our house with cries of "Doors are open, Darlings! Last one inside's a Daddy-Long-Legs!"
            Example: Last night we took out the rubbish and met a very large Redback with a very large egg sac in a very new web strung right across the laundry door.  We watched it scuttle into a wide crack between the door frame and the brick wall that should have been filled with grouting - but wasn't.  
             The construction of this house is not exactly quite up to reasonable par - or building code. Big city developers are buying up old housing trust homes, knocking them down and putting up rows of cookie-cutter ranch houses on sub-divided lots the size of domestic postage stamps.  They're doing it fast and cheap and lousy.  Our house is only eighteen months old, but our walls are full of cracks, our corners are no longer quite square, and the grout and window seals never seem to have happened at all.  Door are hung off plumb and let the desert in as creeping dunes of red sand. The insulation in the roof is made out of crumpled cotton wool and sea-mist, and when you open the windows, they fall right out of the frames and into your arms.
            It's really something. Last week our friend the Architect and his fiancée Zoe drove up from Adelaide to spend a weekend with us in Whyalla.  Bouncing out of the car, the Architect hugged me absently and bellowed "Bloody Hell!  It's like someone hit copy+paste all the way along your street!"
            We gave them the grand tour. We pointed out the hole in the soffit over the front door- where a builder had tried stuffing paint-stirring sticks into the gap and forgotten about them half-way through the job.  We let them open windows and giggled politely when their arms suddenly became unexpectedly full of window panes.  We pointed out our budget sized portico, with the Grand Column twenty seven inches from the front door and the Unitex Dado Rail stapled to the wall.              
            We even showed them the big banana - the party trick. Our garage has three doors - a door from the kitchen and a roller door on both ends: one to the street and one to the back yard, so that the garage can double as a shed and an entertainment space on wet or hot days. It is all very functional and sensibly planned out - except for one teeny tiny design flaw: the kitchen door is placed exactly underneath the backyard-side roller door, and when that roller door rolls up, the roll extends twelve inches out over the door to the kitchen and barricades it shut.  An easy mistake to make and a deadly one never to fix - twelve inches of lazy CAD design by some remote office boffin brainlessly dropping CAD blocks into model space, and a builder that didn't care enough to make it right.
            And once the Architect had done guffawing, we showed him the twelve inches of eave overhanging the north façade. All of the other stuff is small stuff.  Amusing sound bites to show off  to guests.   We laugh at it and it gives the house the personality that shiny new houses that are built right take years to earn.
            What is genuinely infuriating is the house's terrible environmental design.  In the middle of the desert, in a climate of climbing energy costs, rising energy pollution and massive private and public focus on sustainable building design, our roof is black, our north façade is pure window with no overhang and the windows and doors, far from being sealed and double-glazed, are quadruple-vented and drafted and gusted at every seam.            
            Our house is fairly representative of the contemporary mass-produced domestic design and building technology in this town.  It seems about as cynically inefficient as it is possible to contemplate.  Under that black roof, our cream-puff and vapor insulation is more or less useless.  One of our wedding presents was an indoor-outdoor weather station.  Careful observation has established that at 25 degrees centigrade, the internal and external temperatures equalize.  They rise steadily together until the outside temperature reaches 32 degrees C, at which point the inside temperature begins to rise faster than the outside temperature and the house turns into a Turkish bath.   In high summer, with the air conditioners going full-bore, we have struggle to keep the inside temperature under 30 degrees C.
            We spend most of the summer subsisting on popsicles and ice-cream sticks and cucumber salads.
            On the flip side, this house is a fantastic case study in the value of really good environmental design.  I am writing this in our study - the eave-less, window-lined ex-main bedroom on the North side of the house. We are having a cool week and the main part of the house is pleasantly chill.  But it is a lovely sunny morning and in the two hours since the sun came out the study has become so hot that I am sweating rivers in a tank top and boxer shorts, while the spins fast enough to raise whirlwinds.  I am about to move out and go set up my computer on the dining table, where bare arms raise goose bumps and I can shunt the bulk of my personal energy budget from gasping and sweating to thinking.


*Mr Tabubil won our private side bet. 
            I said Not even the Architect.  
            He said You wait and See.
            And Sure Enough, as the Architect entered the city limits, he made a phone call.
            "What is your address, by the way?  I've just realized it never occurred to me to actually ask you where you live.  Reckon I should have thought of that a few hundred kilometers ago, eh?"
            And two minutes after that, we received another call mentioning apologetically that he hadn't brought a street map, so could we possibly offer a few directions? 
            This was complicated.  Our town doesn't have street signs (there are a few, painted on the kerb in letters two inches high, but they're hard to see in daylight and completely invisible after dark) so they drove around town aimlessly until they found a hotel with a name visible on the front and we talked them in.
            I paid up.  

Spiders

When we first moved to Whyalla, our house was plagued by spiders.  Redback webs* covered the outside walls like tatty lace curtains, and mama redback spiders sat in the window tracks laying down egg-sacs like strings of sea grapes. Inside the house, there were Great Big Black Spiders with abdomens like ripe plums. When you entered the kitchen you'd see them scuttle across the floor and flatten out under the fridge like they'd been cross-bred with cockroaches. They were in the bathroom.  They were in the bedrooms. They were in the closets. They were, god help us, in the cracks between the cushions on the chairs.              
            More seasoned heads told us, in superior tones, that that these big black things are not, for a strictly limited definition of poisonous, actively lethal.  Unless you are pregnant, weigh less than sixty pounds, have a compromised immune system or are Canadian.
            If you are a Canadian, it's not the venom, it's the psychological shock.  Canadians do not do well with Bugs. When we lived in Toronto, we spent a fair bit of our free time in the comedy club scene. The city has some good clubs, and there's a huge range of comedians that pass through, and whoever the comic, or whatever his style, the biggest laugh that a Canadian comic will get all night is the one that happens right after he talks about the Great Outdoors.
The jokes go like this:
            "I was out camping last weekend, and I saw a bug!"
            Gales of laughter. 
            "No kidding, eh?  It was thiiiiis big."  He holds his hands about three inches apart and the Canadians in the audience will roar and slapped their thighs and roll their heads from side to side with hilarity.
            "It was sooo big, I saw a shadow!"
            And the Canadians fall out of their chairs sideways because they're laughing too hard to breathe.**

Back in Whyalla, our first real breaking point was when, less than a day after we'd set up the furniture, Mr Tabubil found a redback building a web among the television cables under the TV cabinet. The web was a solid and substantial piece of real-estate, indicating permanence and long-term planning- the sort of brick-and-mortar edifice for which you're prepared to stump up a 60 year mortgage, then move in to bring up all your children.
            Mr Tabubil hollered. "Where's the Raid?"
            "Why?"
            "There is a redback underneath the television and he's looking back at me and I don't like the way he looks at me and he's gonna die."
            Half a can of Raid later, even Mr Tabubil could safely admit it was definitely dead, but the living room was uninhabitable. He claimed that opening a window would dilute the potency of the gas.
            We began to spend our evenings with the can of poison gas underneath our elbows and things went from worse to worser. I'd lift a pile of laundry from the basket to dump into the washing machine and a big black eight-legged grape would scuttle shamefacedly out of the sleeve of a shirt.
            Mr Tabubil would pick up a pile of clean and folded laundry to put into the closet and he'd find another spider making a run for it from the bottom-most pair of underpants. 
            But the absolute, ultimate straw was when Mr Tabubil put on his trousers one morning and a juicy black thing the size of a 50 cent coin made a high-speed getaway down his right leg.
            We are city folks. We make no truck or peace or treaty with nature when it's got eight legs and a venomous overbite. We called the exterminators.

*For my North-American friends: imagine a black widow spider with a big red cross on its back and a bite that makes your North-American venom feel like the soft furry nuzzle of a newborn puppy.

**To be perfectly fair to Mr Tabubil, when my Australian Mum and Dad moved to Vancouver two years ago, Mum had to deal with a few small issues of her own.
            A week or two after they arrived, a friend of theirs came to town to care for his brother in law, who had been mauled by a bear while out in the woods doing a survey inspection along a power line.  Mum reacted sensibly. She took Dad out to buy a high-riding station wagon that could double as an armored personnel carrier. A few days later I had a phone call from Dad, sounding oddly diffident.
            "Hi Tabubilgirl."
            "How you doing?"
            "We're in a sports store."
            "Mmm?"
            "Your Mother wants to buy a bear kit."
            "A bear kit?"
            "It's for when we go hiking."
            "Mum hikes?"
            "You know what I mean" Dad said impatiently. "For emerging from the car, walking gently in the mountains, that sort of thing."
            "So what's in a bear kit?"  I asked.  "Pepper spray?"
            I heard a gusty sigh. "There's a bell that you tinkle all the time when you walk so the bear can hear you coming.  Not sure of the logic of that. He might think it's a delivery bell. There's pepper spray for when he decides you are the menu and wants to season the dish.  There's a water bottle. For you. Not for the bear. There's your basic hiking stick that can double as a club or a spear for when he decides the pepper spray is a seasoning. There's a flare gun to scare him off when he decides the hiking stick's a toothpick - "
            There was a clanking sound in the background.
            "What's that?"
            "I think that's the Howitzer…."