Holidays

This week I went away up the coast for a few nights. I stayed in a tidy little motel at Belmont and I want to say it was overlooking the lake. The motel is right on the shore of Lake Macquarie but it is built facing the highway, as things were back in the day.

No matter, I went out and sat by the lake every day, watching the weather and the birds. At one time I noticed some ravens scuffling just nearby and when I looked, they were not scuffling at all but investigating this Tawny Frogmouth. When I saw her, I wondered if she might be dead but a quick google revealed that the head down and wings out position was for sunbaking. As I watched, she sat up and eventually flew away. Why a nocturnal bird was sitting in the mud at lunchtime, I will never know. She looks young and on another day the mud would have been a delightful dust bowl so maybe there was some learning happening.

  
Moody Lake Macquarie. It was drizzling and overcast a lot of the time, which was ok by me. Speaking of the weather, I wore my day time cardigan to sleep in because there was only one very thin blanket on the bed and I was waking up a lot until I finally realised I was cold.
I suppose they expect guests to use the air con but I'd prefer a cold room and more blankets. I haven't ever before seen accommodation where they don't provide extra blankets. I found it quite odd but maybe it's cheaper to run air con than to launder blankets? 

 

Caitlin put these cockatoos on the bathroom wall for me today. I have added an ibis near the front door as well. I look forward to the day when my grandson sees them, meanwhile I will enjoy them. I thought I was doing something fun and different but apparently whimsy is having a moment in interior decor. It's funny how the zeitgeist works, isn't it?

Retributive Justice

I've been watching the situation with Christa Pike, not deep diving into it but keeping an eye on headlines. The poor woman is back in prison while they figure out next steps. I think she has suffered enough. I know she did a heinous thing. I also know she was young when she did it. I also know she had suffered horribly as a child. She has expressed remorse and as they say, an eye for an eye makes the world go blind. Christa has endured 30+ years on death row, survived two doses of lethal injection and recovered from the resulting coma. That is enough for a traumatised child.

Sam Wood is afraid of gaol style punishment for the (alleged) attempted murder of his wife in the presence of her daughter and the couple's three under 10 children. He can dish it out but he's apparently not so great at taking it. I am unsure of how I stand on retributive justice but if he happened to slip on some soap

and hit his head

and the cameras were faulty

and the guards were asleep

and the phones didn't work 

and the ambulance was caught in traffic.....

I would not shed a tear.

Arguing with Strangers on the Internet

 Some days I take a huge amount of delight in arguing with strangers. I know, there's 10 000 more useful things to do.

Today I saw a post from a man who works in palliative care. He described how grief and past traumas can combine to create some difficult behaviours in the family members of the dying.

He also described how he had learnt to give those challenging people a job to do, alleviating their sense of powerlessness and improving their behaviour.

It was a wise and useful post but the first (and only) comment said "Learned, not learnt. Learnt is not a word'

I was inordinately tickled with my own answer and might cackle about it for the rest of the day:

"If you had done the tiniest bit of research you would have found that learnt is, indeed, a word and has been used correctly here. Someone pours out their soul and you incorrectly correct their spelling. You have never learnt to read a room"