Dodo Au Go-Go

On the last weekend of February 2022, starting on Friday, it rained in Brisbane. Not normal rain. It was a strange rain - heavy, hard and non-stop. It fell furiously and at the same thick, relentless volume all day. Maybe it eased off once or twice, but mostly, non-stop. All day long. I've never seen rain fall like before. I'm used to rain coming in bursts, easing up as though to take a breath, then falling hard again for a bit. Not non-stop. I worked from home, periodically looking out to marvel at this incredible non-stop volume, and very grateful I didn't have to go into the office and drive in this kind of weather. That evening, we took a little walk in the rain to look at the creek at the end of the road. It fills very easily after a little bit of rain. The creek had climbed its banks and had filled the surrounding parklands into a lake. Some local kids apparently took their boogie boards down to have a play in the new lake. The creek that turned into a lak...

A few weeks ago, I had to do a solo run from my main work place in Brisbane to our other big Gold Coast workplace 60-90 minutes away, depending on traffic. Hardly newsworthy, you say? Well, normally I would have to agree. But this run was notable for a few reasons.  In the two-and-a-half years since we moved from the icy winters of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales to sub-tropical Brisbane in Queensland, I've barely done any driving. And certainly not of the hour-long kind. We also moved from a relatively rural town where you have to think in 45-minute driving distances before you can even begin to arrive anywhere, to a suburban life edged with warehouses, industrial work, highways and where everything you need is surprisingly, hilariously close. My work, supermarkets, bookshops, pathology labs, fruit and vegie markets, baby supplies warehouses, tyre shops... all within 5-15 minutes of where we live. In many ways, it's been a welcome shock to the system to realise we no lon...

There's been a gap of some twenty months since I last wrote anything here. Basically, as you can see by my previous 2-3 posts, I lost my puppy-boy, Bodie. I grieved, cried, wrote down every single blessed memory of him I had, and cried some more. In-between, life, love and light gathered. Our much-longed-for Little One arrived. Bodie is our sky-angel, and Indi, his sister, is our earth-angel. We're a family of four. In my mind, we'll always be a family of five. Then, in quick succession: I took a new job, we made a giant move interstate and we moved from the four-season climate of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (emphasis on the freezing-cold bit of the four seasons) to the tropical north. Brisbane, Queensland, where heat, humidity, frangipanis, poincianas and very mild winters reign. For the past year-and-a-bit, we've been building new roots - as you do when you start making the unfamiliar everyday familiar - so you can live in it with some comfort. One...