Booger

It's not what you ride
It's how much fun you are having out there.

Extract (Bus)

Some half thought out, quickly scribbled diary notes from this week's travels and travails. Have a bus-free weekend. (Unless your "bus" is a kombi)

"This is not my bus. 
No mine is missing in action, a phantom on some mythical schedule where transportation runs on time.
The electronic notice board said mine was 29 minutes away - enough time for me to almost walk home.
So I hop the first bus that comes along that will drop me near my home."

"But the passengers on this Other Bus are a different demographic from way out on the perimeter of the city where young people still get Southern Cross tattoos and sport Bad Girl and We're Full stickers on their cars with pride .

No this is not my normal ride, where everybody vaguely knows each others faces but doesn't talk, preferring to stay immersed in mobile phone apps. Or in my case mobile mantras.

No this is not my bus alright. It's more like some surrealistic Dylan ballad where cowboys, tarot readers and gypsy women mingle in the shared goal of Getting Home."

"The highlight was seeing something I've never seen in all my years of travelling here or overseas - a young bearded bloke making origami sculptures, oblivious to the eclectic mix of passengers swaying as the bus hits its stride. Origami is definitely a handy skill for a twenty something in today's depressed job market. One must have a point of differentiation ."

Monochrome Monday (scorcher)

My Dad was born in Summer but loved Winter.
My Mum was born in Summer and loves Summer.
My Mum actually gets excited about the approaching hot season.
She will happily sit in the sun without a hat or sunglasses, weeding her garden.

I've never seen her wear sunscreen.
And though she lives at the beach, she's never had a skin cancer to zap or cut out and wait for that best word in the English language - "benign".

She'll be calling today "glorious" while the media will use words like "scorcher" and most folk hunker down under the melodic thrum of their air conditioners muttering about "global warming"or"bloody northerlies".

I don't understand the weather.
I mean I know it's hot because the wind is from the north and I know the surf is lousy because the wind is from the north.
But. its early Spring.
The magpies are attacking pedestrians and cyclists with egalitarian gusto.
The jacaranda trees are flaming purple.
The air is redolent of blooms.
It's not Summer for another 50+ days.

Dean Brady at his local Point

And yet it's going to be something like 35 degrees Celsius of 95 degrees Fahrenheit, where I'm sitting, wearing a fleecy vest three hours after dawn. 

Glorious.

Monochrome Monday (Seapunk)

 Todays post 

is for all the wrecks, 

relics and 

sea punks.