Exercise

We took a bike ride up the brook to Amelia Park. For some reason Eloise had shown some interest in some exercise machinery, but observe the use to which she put the outdoor, public stuff (note to English: unvandalised) the park had to offer. Take it from me, she isn't moving.

However later on Hannah came to visit for a few hours and we had a massive pillow fight which left them gasping. And me sobbing.

After the Rain

After the deluge of course the skies cleared and we were back to normal warm Autumn Queensland weather. 

We decided to ride up to Mitchelton Markets, an easy 8k or so, because Nicole was running low on tea and the Tea People would be there.

So off we went, for about five hundred metres, until we saw this vista of inches-deep sand deposited up our lovely smooth bikeway. Now rendered very unfriendly to our bikes.

Still we struggled through, and it soon cleared up, well after a few hundred metres, leaving us a patchy, muddy, sandy, dusty, dirty, slippery journey which should have taken twenty minutes but ended up at an hour.

Deluge

Lyra and I were in Woolworths when it began.

The day grey outside as we sauntered in, Lyra coughing and spluttering with whatever the bug de jour happened to be that day, a necessary shopping trip in an otherwise sick sofa day that saw a lot of television watched and not much else done.

It's not like it wasn't widely expected; the forecasts on the radio had been touted a "weather event" - like something you might buy a ticket to go and see - for days. But they've been wrong, though those skies...

Lyra, ill, a peculiarly calm trolley-surfer as we did the necessary, helping unload the trolley at the checkout to widespread acclamation from our fellow queuers and the nice lady behind the checkout, not to mention the nerdy bloke at the next-door checkout too.

Wheeling the trolley outside, the sound of the hammering rain hit us like, well, a hammer, and what with the unfortunate fact that we had places to be and sisters to fetch from school we had no choice but to take our chances, and so I trotted with the trolley and Lyra in pole position surrounded by the baggage like a buggy boot camp Mum into the car park, aflood to the ankle with fast-moving water in a wide cataract across the pedestrian crossing, my feet instantly soaked, the trolley with four little bow-waves and Lyra looking at me with a "What the flip" expression.

Then to school and dancing by which time the rain subsided, and on to fetch Nicole who inexplicably didn't feel like riding her bike home through the torrent.

That evening, calm; a respite in the rain. But the forecast offered more and worse the next day, along with gale-force winds.

And so, Eloise off to school early for choir, the air still and dry. Nicole to work, no problem. Lyra still ill. Easy day.

Calm all morning, then in the afternoon, under a foreboding sky, the rain began again, raining for hours in a torrential deluge that fell without respite or mercy.

The drive to school, fraught: slow traffic, wipers on frenetic, some idiot determined they were going to get that space on the pickup rank as a tailback built inexorably behind, ten minutes late for a sodden Eloise who had had to wait undercover for "Health and Safety" reasons. Back home - dancing on Friday now too, but hoping for a cancellation. The dance school is down by a creek and prone to flooding.

No cancellation though; dancing still on. So we lump ourselves into the car; but the garage door has mysteriously opened itself and no amount of button pressing or remote-waggling will get it to close; the motor must have water in it. Something else to deal with later. For the moment, leave the garage open; the chickens won't be going anywhere if they know what's good for them.

Five o'clock on Kedron Brook Road and it's dark. Wipers on maximum and we still can't really see where we're going as we tentatively make our way down the hill. Then, at the bottom, the water rises as we plough into what is no longer a puddle or a the water-slick surface of the road but a genuine flood, who knows how deep. Ahead of us at the intersection cars are tentatively making their way through but for us, no dice. We turn around and try to find an alternative route.

On the phone to Nicole, we abandon dancing and decide to see if we can make it through to recover her from the hospital. Kelvin Grove Road on the other side not flooded, not busy; traffic reports on the radio, it's all chaos; the rain still hammering down.

Ironically an easy run to the hospital and back, notwithstanding the obvious, there's little traffic and we get back in fifteen minutes.

We divert to check out the brook; it's as high as I've ever seen it, a massive body of water moving with perilous speed. We can't even begin to imagine the volume of water the channel is carrying, fifty metres across at least and who knows how deep.

When we get home, we discover the dance school called a stop, and had to evacuate with the road a river and cars underwater to their wheels in fast-moving water. Next morning we find that the whole place was flooded and emergency cleanup is required. Nicole and Eloise volunteer to help while I am on Lyra duty.

We look outside; a lovely sunny day. The water is gone, leaving a muggy stillness in the air and a city slowly exhaling.

Autumnal Beachcombing

For the first time in ages, a trip up to the beach. We climb in the car and troop up to our old dog-walking haunt at Mooloolaba or Buddina or whatever the actual suburb is for a spot of rock-hopping at Point Cartwright.

The weather has started to turn and the nice sunny yet somehow chilly days are with us, with the less hardy in long sleeves and others sticking resolutely to shorts and thongs.

We picnic at a playground, then walk around the point. Debating whether Lyra is up to the climb around the point underneath the cliffs - the tide is high and the waves rolling in, some of the rocks quite slippery - but we go for it, the heavy going soon taking its toll on the little trooper as she starts to flag with tiredness.

Around on the flat rocks on the other side, Lyra lies down in a saltwater pool and refuses further progress. I hang around with her and some seagulls looking out over the bay, the waves crashing against the rocks a little way off, the spray shooting up behind.

Returning to the car for some food and a restored Lyra messes about on the exercise area with Eloise. Eloise is showing off her splits ability, much to everyone's disgust and envy.

Attention to Dentition

Not entirely inexplicably, Eloise doesn't much like going to the dentist. Last time, Ellwyn, bless him, under instructions from Nicole, put on his stern face for Eloise in the ongoing campaign to deter thumb-sucking, and Eloise doesn't respond well to stern-ness.

Now Ellwyn has moved on and we have a new dentist-person, a very friendly lady by the name of Alice who has a child Lyra's age. Nicole got her noshers seen to, and Eloise was given a clean bill of health with her pins still perfectly preserved if not perfectly positioned.

The photo is of Eloise with her flouride gum-guards on. Mass medication, I tell you! She wasn't happy about it.

While all this was going on, Lyra and I were gallivanting around the place, playing with toys in the reception area, exploring the rooms in between, some of which were unfortunately occupied, discovering the receptionist doing a bit of furtive texting, and going back to visit Mum and Eloise in the Daunting Chair.

We chatted with the boss-man who has a child Lyra's age, and real handful, so he claimed, regaling us with stories of what seemed like frankly slight misbehaviour in supermarkets and apparently minor sleeping misdemeanours.

When Lyra let loose with one of her foundation-shaking screams he took it all back, and retreated, laughing gently to himself and shaking his head to clear the ringing in his ears.

Lyra wouldn't get in the chair. We looked on it as an exercise in light familiarisation.

Inimitability

Lyra has managed, along with Nicole, to evade the general unwellness and continues to be, well, inimitable.

Hairdressing

Another trip to the hairdressers, with Nicole having her finely sculpted eyebrows finely sculpted and Eloise having herself snipped and preened.

It's up to me to control the Thuggernaught and attempt to keep the salon from irreparable damage, physical and mental. Normally I would go next door with Lyra and imbibe some craft brew, but last time I tried that I had to attempt to keep the bar from irreparable damage, and an orchid may have come off the worse for wear. Orchids! That's inner-city hipster metrosexual bar life for you.

Eloise had a couple of centimetres taken off, which must have taken something around two minutes of young Tegan's time, and then an expansive shampoo and blow-dry session that went on for, well, enough time for the Imp to rearrange the chairs in the place, sample the hair-washing area, drink some hot chocolate, and interfere with the attractive presentation of "product."

Laid Low

With school holidays in full swing, a lower back complaint, and a camping trip abandoned due to fogeyness and infirmity, what better time to contract a debilitating viral distemper!

With Nicole at work of course there is no choice but to soldier on, but with a few days off, the invisible unconscious getter-upper flicked into Bugger This mode, and with symptoms which I may list in exhaustive and melodramatic detail momentarily, Eloise and I took the opportunity to fail to leave the house for four days.

The first day I have covered already, in which I/we spent the day resting my back in front of the TV in a rarely-sanctioned telethon of titanically tortuous trash, but from there on, as my nasal cavity became dry then wet then blocked, my chest filled with anti-breathing fluid, my sinuses with hydraulic headache making goo, and my joints with what I suspect may have been low-grade grumbling oil. All of this of course required my body to adopt a strategy of sneezing and coughing, a path which with the muscular complaints already present resulted not only in kitchen-roll sheets full of snot and goo but also in paroxysms of exquisite agony the likes of which I haven't experienced in, oh, several months.

Eloise got her part was feeling reasonably chipper during the day (she claimed, but didn't look) but at night nose-diving, abandoning all pretense, and invariably chundering womanfully in the house's en-suite in the early hours before climbing into our bed for some four-in-the-sickbed witching-hour somnolent jostling.

When Eloise and Nicole both started to complain of sore backs I began to wonder whether my back was in fact not broken at all but actually recovered and superseded by viral discomfort. Still my self-administered doctor's orders were bed rest and plenty of it. I even had some AFDs. That's how serious it was.

Still I was disabused of that notion as my upper bodily motility returned, sadly not accompanied by lower body obedience, and as I emerged from y pit it was to stagger around the place in a continuing John Wayne impersonation.

Nicole didn't get it too bad, luckily. Lyra blissfully unaffected. So far,

Lower Back Trouble Leads to Lack of Moral Backbone

So I've done it again, and this year's back spasm paralysis is with me, in reasonably full effect. After a spot of ill-advised dwarf-tossing in the swimming pool, failing to acknowledge my own limitations let alone the fact that the dwarf is no longer a dwarf, I have knackered my back, again, and am wobbling about, John-Wayne-like, only tentatively able to raise myself from prone to unprone.

It wasn't so desperately bad yesterday, until Lyra swung by to say goodnight and took me by surprise while reading Harry Potter to Eloise. She gave me what was no doubt intended to be an affectionate tweak to the chest nut, but so surprised was I that I spasmoed my whole body.

This morning, only ambivalently able to get myself out of bed, I proceeded to hobble around the place, and it wasn't long before I experienced a complete moral breakdown, turned on the bloody goggle box and actually fed breakfast to the little Gavins in front of the telly. Oh, for shame.

I thought, I'll just retire and read a book, but when Lyra came in to play her favourite game (that is, waking me up) I knew the game was up. So I cleaned some windows, like you do, did some other household chores and went back to bed to rest my poor weary bones.

Of course, this activity didn't do my muscles any favours and that transition from horizontal to vertical and vice versa became increasingly difficult, leading to a decisive moment where one or the other had to be selected. I opted for horizontal.

Later, after I could take no more of the inanity that was echoing through the house, I suggested to Eloise that she might like to put on a film. Of course she chose the inanest film she could muster and so I fell asleep once more, this time on the sofa, waking up later to find Lyra asleep also, next to me.

I absented myself for a while to perform some duties, returning to find Lyra in the position illustrated above, still quite asleep, Eloise still gawking zombie-like at the second film of the day, before I exhorted her to some tidying-up, which she did on the basis that she would be rewarded with some time on the tablet - a request I reluctantly agreed to, recognising that it completed my moral bankruptcy.

We (I) woke up Lyra, gently, an event to which she was strenuously opposed, arguing as usual that not only was it not funny, nor fun, but that it was no fair and that we should stop. She took herself off to her room, and shouted from within claims of ownership: "It's my door. And it's my room. Go away."

Still, looking on the bright side, this weekend's mooted camping trip is now off the agenda.

A Hat