I spent an hour today with a dear friend drinking sparkling wine and bemoaning the state of our peer group -- almost all of whom including both of us seem to be in some sort of trouble or state of crisis -- and whingeing and moaning about the next few weeks, which one way and another are going to be difficult and demanding. When I got home I decided to tackle a couple of long-neglected tasks before settling down to the current work novel, and started with the very cobwebby outside of the front door hinge side.
Brush jab sweep tug, I went, thinking gee this is a strong web and look at those off-white bobbly things, I know they don't bode well: little arachnid labour wards. As I stood imagining the horror of lots of little spiders bursting out of them, a movement caught my eye: a very large redback, its scarlet stripe blazing, charging up the broom handle towards my right hand.
I would have taken a photo, but let's just say there wasn't time. And a shot of sludgy redback puree on the front verandah really doesn't convey the drama of the moment.
But there will be no more whingeing before lights out, and possibly not for the rest of the week.
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Valencia floods: Our warming climate is making once-rare weather more
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8 comments:
1. it's WINTER - everyone I know is feeling it.
2. RIP dear Mrs Redback.
Last week carrying wood up from a long-neglected pile, I had Mrs Very Large Black and Cranky Spider lurch up the jacket sleeve. How quickly can a middle-aged unfit person strip? Rather quickly. Though the jacket is still out there on the lawn.
And yes, let us hope it is winter. 2009 has the taint of blighted promise.
ARGH! Glad you still have good reflexes.
Yes, reflexes are go, PC.
Once when I was a kid we got redbacks in our roof and one decided to try to settle on mum's shoulder via the kitchen exhaust. My mother was a lady of traditional build and mien, but my she moved like Carl Lewis on that day. It was very impressive.
I'm having that kind of week too. When housework is a refuge I know things are desperate!
When the going gets tough - break out that champagne!
Hah! Redbacks! Just stare 'em in them in the eye (OK, eyes) and they'll back off.
If that doesn't work (and it never does), just flatten 'em with an moldy old Dunlop Volley. The artful sole ribbing ensures you'll never hear the crunch of turning a great natural predator into an smear on your floor.
Anyway PC, this and the last few posts here seem to have been getting a bit dark and broody.
Cheer up. Not like you're a petite arachnid about to be unthinkingly walloped by a smelly sneaker.
You know what is really bad? That brilliant song is really coming together and then this
http://rgrove.com/?p=374
happens to your piano.
The word verification for this comment is
"aerizedw"
which hints at a bigger and possibly positive meaning, perhaps not unevocative, when blurted out in an echoing cave in Cornwall, with the open "a" followed by the "rizd" and then the awkward but final "w'", of the secret catchcry of some boisterous and utterly fictional between the wars English upper middleclass teenage gang, pays no attention to the admittedly perverse laws of English spelling and is the probably the last coherent thought of a redback that's just struggled up the backdoor steps only to meet a big fucking shoe coming the other way.
(It's not as easy as it looks to parody Henry James. But a fuckload of fun for those who relish, as the Master did when he could or would, buggering around with a skilled and skinned technical grasp of syntax.)
Nabs, we all wish you had a blog. Lazy bugger.
Thank goodness, PC, that that redback had its fighting colours on and you saw it. Imagine a sneaky one sidling up to catch you unawares, the horror, the horror.
And regarding falling pianos - saw a great doco on the musician Beck and his artist grandfather who performed installations in Germany(?)which involved dropping old pianos off a castle wall. Beck and one of his friends were finally allowed to do one themselves. I couldn't quite believe a performer would do that, but hey.
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