Soaked

Rural night skies are bigger. Stars shine brighter, and the Milky Way smoodge spills across the sky. Friday night we sat outdoors at a rural pub enjoying a pint and parma under the coloured lights. The table and chairs were rickety constructions which could have graced a backyard of my youth. We’d stepped a quarter century in the past, and had headed up to the large country town of Castlemaine for dinner and a show.

It’s under an hours drive north, but then again it’d be the about same time to head south into the big city of Melbourne. That’s what being half way looks like! Outdoors the lights wove in and around a sprawling old grape vine. The ambience was really quite delightful. By the time the sun went down, the place was jumping with locals. Country pubs are fun places where unusual things can take place. Observant readers will notice in the above photo that a small child is mischievously attempting to open a keg. Dad looks lost in reverie, or maybe he was smoking! Hard to tell now.

The city is an expensive place to live, where most activities are mediated. By comparison, living costs are cheaper up in the bush, as they should be. Amenities are far less, of course. The folks in the pub sure were doing it tough. I saw groups of friends both young and old, drinking, talking, eating and laughing. The background noise was a warm and friendly hubbub. One table even had a bunch of guys my age, with a token lady. Sandra and I both agreed that her good hair and raucous gesticulations would have enhanced the evenings philosophical discussions.

A feeling of mild envy had settled in. It was like stepping back into a social life which I knew a quarter century, or perhaps longer in the past. Maybe I need to get out more? Dunno. But we were in the small rural town to see a show. A late nineties / early noughties Australian band’s (Something for Kate) lead singer (Paul Dempsey), was performing at the local theatre. His name can be seen displayed in bold lettering, under the wide Art Deco doorway.

Fun fact, I’d always assumed that the inclusion of the word in the band name, ‘Kate’, referred to the singers ex-girlfriend, but no. Apparently it was alluding to his Jack Russell dog. A delightful and exuberant canine breed, worthy of such promotional activities. I get that. American readers would never have heard of the band. Australian Gen Z’s, same, same – also not heard of the band. It’s all good. In these days of streamed music, a few tech bros platforms mediate what is largely heard, which generally ain’t local stuff! Seems to be the way of the world these days, but it wasn’t always thus.

The National Youth Broadcaster, Triple J, plays a lot of local music content, whilst supporting young musical artists. It’s a good use of the government’s funds if you ask me. Their FM music can be heard in most locations on this vast continent. The station has a weekly segment which has been running since 2004 amusingly titled, ‘Like A Version’. For those who don’t get the joke, it’s a clever play on words referring to the US artist, Madonna, and her 1984 album and single: ‘Like A Virgin’, whatever that means. Each week for the past 22 years, local and major international artists bravely venture into the studio, and perform a cover song of an entirely different artist.

Opinions, everyone’s got one. Streaming services favour international artists, because you know, they’re international businesses. Doesn’t mean that there’s no talent down under. Here’s a local band, DMA’s, smashing a version of Cher’s song Believe, out of the park without the err, heavy vocal modifications used in the original version.

14 million views is a lot, and the lead singer was apparently chewing bubble gum the whole way through the live performance, as you do. That’s talent!

The bloke we went to see perform on Friday wasn’t the above DMA crew. It was Paul Dempsey, and he’s done more than a few Like A Version covers over the long years with his original band, but also as a solo artist. They’re good performances and caught my attention.

Popular music is a hard way to earn a living in a small and widely dispersed market like Australia. There are only a handful of big cities hugging the coastline separated by quiet. And once away from those huge urban sprawls, the inland towns aren’t all that large. Drawing a profitable crowd for a band is hard in regional areas. And the costs of getting from one city to the next, are not insignificant due to the sheer tyranny of distance. Please excuse the unintended pun, it’s a tough gig.

But then, we went to see the show on Friday night. For two hours, the singer was on stage, just him and his guitar, belting out excellent covers, one after the other. It was like witnessing a troubadour, or bard of old. A truly impressive performance and I had the impression he was pleased to have found a niche. The place was packed to it’s 700 standing capacity, and the crowd was happily singing along.

People like the familiar and comfortable, and popular song covers provide that in spades. It’s a good business too. For those with pretensions, I hate to burst your bubble, but some cheeky wag, who’ll remain unnamed, recently suggested that orchestra’s are the ultimate cover bands. Rarely if ever, do they play original music. Theatre companies do the same thing when re-hashing well tested plays. Heck, how many original ideas can a person have in one lifetime? Probably not many, and whilst I enjoy and listen to current music, there’s also comfort and warmth to be found in the past.

The weather this week has been profoundly influenced by that biggerer frozen continent well to the south of here. Cold, foggy, wet, and cloudy describes most days. One morning I was awake at 5am, battling rodents (who were almost winning!) whilst outdoors it was 0.8’C / 33’F. No wonder the cheeky rats and mice had headed indoors. Anyway, disrupting my otherwise sound sleep is earning the twitchy nosed little blighters my extreme displeasure. Take that ye pests! They soak half my brain! Oh well.

Oats and flour stores are now stashed on the dining room table. In these enlightened days, people don’t remember basic anti-rodent technologies. Take the humble table just for one example: the top extends over the legs and/or other supports. Rats and mice can climb the timber legs all they like, but they can’t hang off the underside of a table, that I’m aware of. It’s a simple solution, which works. Tables with legs at the four outer corners, are probably a bad idea.

I’ve zero tolerance for the rodents, especially since they’re unwisely interrupting my quiet repose most nights. If you want good mental health, start with good sleep – you read it here first! Make of that, what you will regarding my current mental equilibrium. Moving on, we bait the rats and mice in the house with some pretty nasty stuff. And they’re eating it, but the mischief continues. Hmm.

Anyway, it’s been something of a mystery as to why they’re not all dead. This week I’ve had no time for such abstract concerns. We spent most of the free time taking concrete action – literally. We’ve been digging trenches around the downhill side of the house, then backfilling them with cement. That’ll f…, err, mess with them! See what they’re doing to my brain here?

Based on investigations made underneath the house last week, we deemed that the most active locations for rodent tunnelling had been on the downhill side of the house. By the end of the week, I’d dug a trench 20m / 66ft long, and removed a lot of material. Cement was then mixed, and poured into the long lines.

It was hard work, and in particular not damaging the house firewall was a tricky business. There were six sections of the long wall, and I did between one and two sections per day.

Mixing up such large quantities of cement is no easy job either. The first day I used the electric cement mixer, but then afterwards mixed the stuff by hand in a wheelbarrow. It’s hard to get a wet, yet mostly dry mixture which will set fast in cold weather in the big machine. I also aim for a reasonably water tight concrete which uses slightly more cement powder. People skimp sometimes, in the wrong places.

By Sunday morning, I finally discovered the rat hole where they’d been entering and exiting the building. Ruby can be seen in the next photo for sizing comparison purposes.

Rats and mice are great tunnellers, but once we removed the top layer of large rocks on the second last wall section, the hole was discovered.Turns out the large rocks we used, hid what was actually going on just below the surface. We won’t make that mistake a second time, but no doubts there’ll be other new and unusual errors.

So as the week went on, removing rocks, digging trenches, pouring cement and the job continued.

By late Sunday, the job on the downhill side of the house was completed. We’ll have to get onto the rest of the house, but I believe that at this stage, we have thwarted the pesky rodents, for now.

For the immediate future, we’ll leave the concrete exposed so that we can observe any changes. Plus there is a plan to install another layer of fibre cement which will work like a plinth. That second layer will strengthen the material which is already there.

Almost forgot to mention, during the work, we removed the enormous quantity of large-ish rocks. You can see in the above photo how they were once used against the side of the house. The rocks relocated are now used to shore up the soil behind a long line of steel rock gabion cages. The plan is that we’ll add a third layer of cages to that area.

Heaps of soil was also recovered from the excavations of the trenches. It’s good stuff for the garden, because it is full of lime and massive earthworms. We used all of the material to build up a new path which runs on the slope immediately below the house. That job was in progress until the urgency for the new firewood shed took over our lives three months ago.

Ollie approves of the nice width of the new path project.

The next photo provides a nice overview as to how the various paths running under the house link up. It’s also worth noting that we are beginning to use the two sloping garden beds immediately below the house, for vegetables and seed raising purposes.

On a vegetable note, the radishes planted in March, are now ready to harvest.

And the sudden lurch into winter this week, has produced a huge amount of fungi.

Onto the flowers:

The temperature outside now at about 11am is 12’C (54’F). So far for this year there has been 336.2mm (13.2 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 317.6mm (12.5 inches)