northbysoutheast

Well it doesn't look like rain anytime soon so it's pretty safe to report that January this year has has less than 5% of the rain we got in the same month in 2002. And back then the total rainfall for the month amounted to a bit less than half a cupful per square metre. Somewhere this week I heard Peter Cullen, awarded the 2001 PM Prize for Environmentalist of the Year, with the paradoxical concept of the dryest continent "exporting water" in the form of agricultural produce. Obvious when you think of it, but one of those conundrums that can drive policymakers let alone concerned citizens quite mad.

Meanwhile the PM Howard does the rounds of shock jocks and talk-back monkeys, his favored means of communicating with his constituents, to tell us that sending troops to Iraq doesn't mean we have actually committed them to any actual war. Apparently we're supposed to believe that we await UN sanctioning the popping of guns. As if, when the Prez gets too impatient to hold back, our dear PM will tell his soldiers to sit on their hands?? Gerard Henderson, who as a former Howard staffer tells us on RN's Breakfast this morning that Howard is in fact being open and honest, that he just takes a long time to make up his mind. Sure. Perhaps that's why the disturbing stories of rebel attacks in East Timor haven't been mentioned. Ain't this a more immediate threat to the security of our region? Didn't we expend a lot of hardware and humanity, to say nothing of political risk to support the independence of that little country? Perhaps Howard is taking a leaf out of Bush's notebook by avoiding the messy task of completing one job by trying to swing attention onto a different one. What has happened to Ossama? Sipping sweet mint tea with Saddam in one of his palaces?
Still, it is reassuring to hear our PM telling us that the war we're not really having, won't last long anyhow, based on the experience of the '91 Gulf War. Can someone remind him that US and UK warplanes have dropped bombs on Iraq every day for the past decade?

Now that HH has left, I have renewed energy that's being channeled into cleaning up my sad, rundown cottage. A lot of this is out of necessity – the little prick left fallout, like Louie da Fly wherever he moved – but also because (ahem!) it really has been a long time between flicks of the old duster! So curtains have been taken down and cleaned leading to windows being washed (well you see just how dull they've become don't ya) then that leads to a general removal of cobwebs and … I'm exhausted.

So that's how I spent the holiday-after-Australia Day. The event itself went unnoticed until I saw the usual stuff on the tv news: kids with painted faces, cockroach races and lamington gorging contests in dusty bush towns, honor lists of unknown names receiving Order of Australia gongs. I thought this year might have gone by without another millionaire sporty being groped by the PM, but no, Leighton Hewitt's there sans cap. I wonder how that Young Australian would have managed the call-up in an earlier decade with an earlier war?

And this is the day the compost is turned. Last week was the third week of ferment and by the end of it the temp had settled around 55°C. I had envisaged this fourth week to be the final one for precomposting, but I'll decide after reviewing the progress of the warmup. In the meantime, I really must stop procrastinating and find some stakes to support the borders for the raised beds so they can be prepped for a Feb planting.