Keeping in touch - electronic stylee

This week I've discovered the pros and cons of the internet revolution, starting with an email from an ex-boyfriend's wife in the UK demanding to know what unspeakable things had been going on between her husband and me behind her back! I classed this as a big fat con.

Fortunately, in this case I was not guilty of anything more than a few friendly catch up emails over the last couple of years. In any case, it's a bit difficult doing anything more than that when you live on the other side of the world - my arms aren't long enough. HE - we shall call him Mr S - on the other hand, had apparently abandoned her and their two children, early on in our email exchanges, and had shacked up with someone called Vicky 200 miles away from the marital home. Chav-tastic! His 'love' life always was on a par with the News of the World and, quite frankly, Vicky could be short for Victoria OR Victor.

Uncharacteristically for him, Mr S had not deleted some of the incriminating emails from his account and so after breaking into it, Mrs S was able to read them, putting two and two together and making an understandably odd number. Fair play, she has clearly developed some finely honed hacking skills over the years. I quite enjoy looking over past emails, they act as a sort of diary. But in Mr S's case his methods of covering his tracks would usually impress even the finest SAS member - although not in this instance, ha ha!

But this highlights another con with emailing: Mr S had clearly lied through his lying monkey teeth - or keyboard here - to me about his domestic situation, giving the impression that he had stopped his outrageous sexploits and settled down contentedly. Why? Was it the desire to appear successful in life à la Friends Reunited? Or was it a case of exacting revenge for my binning him at the time for an actual rally driver, rather than staying with a pretend one?! The problem with being on the receiving end of lying emails is that you can't see if the sender's keeping a straight face or not.

So what about Friends Reunited then? It's great to find long lost school mates but does this mean that a lot of those smug married entries on there are only a pale shadow of the truth? Are point two of the children really in juvenile detention while the husband's out and about with his boyfriend Roger and wife's best frock? Well it would certainly make the website more interesting to read if that sort of information was on a few profiles.

Of course with Friends Reunited you have to pay a fiver to find out more. With Facebook it's all for free - a definite pro. You can search for long lost people and then bombard them with silly videos and pointless applications for ever more. It's fun. But the emergence of Facebook throws up a few socially sensitive questions: Isn't it nosey to look on other people's pages? What about if you spot a long lost bod you've been tracking down for years on someone else's page? If you contact them you have to fess up that you've been looking at that someone else's Fb page. It also begs the question, why didn't they contact you first? In fact, what IS the correct etiquette for contacting someone? Should you add them as a friend straight away, even though you haven't seen them in 20 years? Or should you send them a polite message first to test the water?

Also, what if an(other) ex or their new partner suddenly appears as one of your friends' friends and they or their pikey girlfriend is a known arch enemy, to be totally shunned and reviled at all costs??!! Do you then never look at your friend's page or forward them ridiculous messages again? Or do you just remove them from your list altogether and hope they don't notice? Maybe that's too extreme.

After receiving the afore mentioned email from the afore mentioned wife, I looked on Fb to see if she was on it. She was. From the limited information I was allowed access to, I could see that she was still in Manchester and she had one friend. Facebook made me feel sorry for my ex-boyfriend's wife and I almost added her as a friend.

Of course one brilliant pro the world wide interweb has brought us is Skype. For the cost of a headset you can make free skype to skype video calls all over the world via broadband. You can also make calls to landlines at amazingly cheap rates. It costs 1.2p per min for me to call my Mum's phone in the UK from Australia. The technology for video calls is still developing and it is quite common to see an image of someone else's face with a few million pixels less than they have in real life. Although getting them to move around quickly on the screen can be an interesting arty experience with all those vapour trails. Still, after a video call it feels as though you've just been for a coffee and caught up properly, especially if you are actually both drinking coffee at each end of the call. Unfortunately, with the time difference between the UK and Australia, it's a bit more tricky to share a beer on Skype, unless you like to wake up with a cold one!

Always remember though, when you're Skyping someone, to tidy yourself up a bit first, covering up any spots or cleavage. Then tidy up the room behind you!

So yes the internet's great for keeping in touch with loved ones, but when it comes to certain other people, sometimes Australia just isn't far enough. And Mr S? If you're out there, consider yourself lucky I never used tinternet to exact my revenge and publish embarrassing photos of you across the universe.

Cane Toads

At this current moment there are about 30 corpses of varying squidgy sizes littered about our acre property. They are mostly flat with a large dent down the middle. This then is the apocalyptic scene that Dave has left behind in the wake of his scourge on cane toads with a large lump of wood this evening.

It is every Australian's duty (so I'm told) to go about murdering these ridiculous creatures as they are a known pest which threatens to wipe out several native Australian species. Which begs the question: What on earth are they doing here then?

It's all to do with sugar cane. It appears that way back in the 1930s, some dork, or possibly a group of dorks, decided that in order to rid Queensland's sugar cane of the cane beetle it would be great if they could introduce a species that would eat the beetles, thereby saving all the cane. Enter the cane toad.

Now, these animals aren't exactly lively. They are sluggish, lazy and totally stupid. They can be identified by the fact that they stumble into view at exactly the wrong moment and have a permanent puzzled frown on their face. Since they are not particularly afraid of humans, they will sit there as death hurtles toward them in the form of a rake handle, golf club or lawn mower - whichever happens to be attached to the human at the time. So it comes as no surprise to learn that once this new force was unleashed against the weapons of mass beetlage, it merely took one look up the sugar cane and decided it couldn't be bothered to climb up. There were tastier treats at ground level.

Even worse, the cane toad is poisonous and sometimes the size of a dinner plate. Any other animal that would normally try to eat it tends to drop dead. So, having no known (successful) predators and needing at least a couple of attempts to club it to death, it is practically indestructable. And breeding like each day is it's last. Which, in our garden, would be correct. Since being intruduced in Northern Queensland, these toads can now be found in New South Wales and the Northern Territory. It's estimated that there are over 200 million of these marching onward toward other states at a rate of 40km per year.

Dave assures me that he will be collecting all the bodies in a bin bag tomorrow morning before I have to clap my delicate lady's eyes on such a bloodbath. That's fine. Just as long as he doesn't try to put them in the kitchen bin like last time. Eeuuww!

And anyway, what IS the collective noun for dorks?

16.3.08 Body count update: This morning Dave went hunting for corpses to put in his bin bag. Out of potentially 30 victims, only 2 were found!!! We can only surmise that something bigger (and now sicker or deader) has come along and eaten the rest of them or they were only pretending to be brown bread - which is quite likely.

Transport Woes: If only everything in life was as reliable as a...yeah right.

It's lucky I bought that car before Christmas, so that we weren't totally dependent on a 1992 Fordamundo and a 1954 Matchless motorbike, isn't it? So that Diver Dave and I could go off in our opposite directions. You know - the VW I bought off ebay. The 1998 Polo with air conditioning, Mitsubishi wheels, Holden stereo and a gear knob from Super Cheap Auto. The car that Dave christened Jim, after Jim Morrison, because, within two weeks of owning it, all the bloody doors were f***ed.

The same car that last week gave up the ghost in spectacular fashion on a right turn at some traffic lights in the middle of Nambour. It decided it didn't want to turn right, or left, or anywhere else for that matter. It certainly wasn't taking me to the railway station so I could catch the 7.03 to Brisbane and it seemed quite happy to sit there as I got redder and redder in the face whilst trying to restart it at the head of an increasingly large queue of traffic: A long line of vehicles that seemingly had no idea what the hazard lights on the back of my car might imply, ie. that I wasn't going anywhere because I had no choice and I couldn't move it out of the way because I am only one weak and feeble female. Fortunately, a nice man came along and pushed me to the side of the road and I sat there waiting for the RACQ while watching my train go past.

Unbeknown to me, and the RACQ bloke that repeatedly told me to try starting it, the timing belt had snapped causing untold damage to all the valves each time I tried turning it over. $1800 worth of damage to be more precise. That's nearly 900 quid. That's about half what the car's actually worth. It's about what I'd hoped to pay for a plane ticket back to Blighty for my best mate's wedding in July.

Jim has now been at the garage for the last week as they appear to be having trouble getting new valves for it. Meanwhile, our hopes for a solution to our transport problems were raised when Dave managed to get his 50 year old motorbike working again for the first time since before xmas. Hoorah! We were a two vehicle family once again. He spent a manly weekend bonding with it all over Noosa. He used it to go between work and home. For all of three days. Then it conked out again.

So we are now wholly dependent on the 16 year old humungous sized Ford Fairlane known as Bertha - because that's what you have to do with it when you park it. And you all have to keep your fingers crossed, hold your breath, say some prayers - whatever it takes to keep her going - because her ABS brake warning light is permanently on and yesterday the petrol indicator expired.

All this when there's a perfectly perfect VW Lupo GTi in a garage in Windermere, raring to go, desperate for me to collect it from the kennels and let it off the lead, and waiting for me to show it some car love.

A Medical Procedure on the Wallet

This last couple of weeks has seen a succession of blows to our bank accounts and transportation arrangements, starting with Diver Dave's leg.

Or more specifically, his ankle which received a thorough drubbing when he fell down a mountain. He was running down it on purpose at the time, as a form of recreation, so adjust your sympathy levels accordingly. He is in training for a local event known as King of the (afore mentioned) Mountain. While the incident occurred a few weeks ago, it's only in the last couple of weeks, where it's resolutely stayed the same tree trunk size since it first happened, that we concluded Something Had To Be Done.

To begin with, Dave manfully subjected himself to two sessions of rigorous torture at the hands of the physio lady at around $70 a groan. Whilst she was able to treat his right ankle (yes, he injured both of em), she eventually realised she was inflicting too much eye popping pain on the other, now elephantine, foot for him not to go to the doctor's ($50). Luckily, the doctor is in the same building as the physio and Dave's workplace so it took a matter of minutes for dave to nip out of work and be told he needed both an x-ray ($70) AND an ultra sound ($140).

At this stage of the arterial bleed in Dave's wallet, he could have considered that getting up again immediately after the fall and continuing to run back down the mountain may not have been such a good idea after all. Nor indeed were the attempts to maintain his fitness levels by going swimming three times a week. And the chances of him actually being crowned King of the Mountain in July were now looking considerably bleak. As was the chance of him going away on a much anticipated diving weekend this weekend - not with a cast on anyway. Aww.

All this medical stuff has brought home how much we take the NHS for granted in the UK. If you don't mind waiting a bit it's all free, although you might come home with some hideous wasting disease you'd never heard of before, but I think that's a small price to pay. I suppose Dave did get his appointments very quickly but, with money being on the tight side at the moment, he was loath to fork out so much wonga. The system here is that everyone pays for private medical insurance. When you need treatment you have to shell out for it first and they reimburse you MOST of it at a later stage. Most people go to a doctor which deals with bulk billing. Now I'm not totally sure what this involves but to the patient it basically means you don't pay - just your insurance company does. Unfortunately, none of Dave's practitioners were offering this so he has to wait three days - allegedly - to be reimbursed with two thirds of what it cost.

As it turned out, there was no fracture and, whilst the doctor recommended no diving WHATSOEVER, Dave chose to ignore this in favour of the physio's advice that it would probably be ok. Her way's more fun - spending a whole weekend out on the freezing cold high seas, getting mashed about by the dive boat's landing board and all the sharks. Woo hoo!