Home again, home again, jiggity jig

Hello all,

I am writing this, not from the freezing heart of wintery Europe, but from the warm recesses of north-east Victoria. It is windy. The parrots and wattle birds are making their parroty and wattle birdy noises respectively. The Cure is playing on my laptop. All is well with the world!

I am now in a little town called Mount Beauty, which is where my mum grew up and my grandma lives. The town is located in the Kiewa Valley at the foot of Mt Bogong, the highest mountain in Victoria (1986m, as Mr Google informs me). The aboriginals who used to live in the area called the mountain "Bogong", meaning "big fella," and it's nice to see the big old fella again.

I went for a walk around the lake yesterday - sorry, not lake, regulating pondage - and saw: 2 lots of 4 baby ducks and their mothers (wow, this is sounding like a primary school maths lesson! Now, how many baby ducks, or ducklings, in total, children?), 2 rabbits who ran off as fast as they could when they saw me (I'm pretty scary I know, what with my pistol and t-shirt that reads "I go where myxomatosis doesn't" - but who knew rabbits could FLY across the ground?!), a small tribe of magpies which luckily didn't try to stick their pointy beaks into my head, plus about half a million flies. Fuck, they're annoying! Enough with this war-on-terror shit, our government should be putting all its money and resources into the war on flies. I'm sure it would make many an Aussie feel happier and, more importantly, safer at all those BBQs this summer if there weren't all those frikkin' flies buzzing around and threatening the security of our sausages, rissoles and potato salads. Who's with me in starting a letter writing campaign?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I've opened all the windows to let the wind in. The current temperature is a sublime 21.8ºC, according to the informative website: www.visitmtbeauty.com.au - check it out if you want a visual as to where I am. Though now that I'm back in Oz, I may just get around to working out how to create some sort of photo album on this here blog, so yous'all can see some pictures from my trip (especially ye not-in-Melbourne ones). But no promises, because, you know, technology has this habit of getting the better of me. I'll try and whip it into submission though.

Ooh, better go. There's a wasabi-pea-on-the-floor emergency going on.