Three blog posts in one day! Aren’t you lucky? 
Two of us are crook today.
- Adelaide spent most of the night being violently ill. Poor kid has a terribly upset tummy. Lisa tells me she’s asleep now, but she had a pretty tough night.
- I’m feeling like death warmed up with a combination of hay fever and a head cold.
Lisa is soldiering on as she always does. I suspect her arms are pretty sore though; she spent a bunch of time in the yard with our fabulous new Honda powered weed whacker cleaning up for the coming summer season.
And yes, I know I should have been out there doing it, but I was working inside the house on a few other equally important things. I did take a break from that and help her clean up inside the backyard. She’s done a great job though; the block looks great.
It’s worth mentioning that I visited Birchip over the weekend. I was there for a two day SES road rescue course. Saturday was all theory and Sunday was spent playing with cars in the local wrecking yard.
A few of us (there were 12 on the course) were booked into local accommodation for the Friday and Saturday nights because of how far it was from home. The Friday night I stayed at the Commercial Hotel. It would almost certainly be the worst place I have ever stayed. The room was tiny. The ceiling was mouldy. There was no air conditioning. There was newspaper covering the cracks in the window. I don’t exactly need to stay somewhere luxurious (a basic motel room works just fine) but this dive was unbearable. Those of us who stayed there Friday refused to go back Saturday; we ended up doing a 180km round trip to accommodation in Swan Hill instead.
Here’s the outside of Mildew Manor:
Special points of note:
- The broken cement sheeting above the front door. Maybe it’s asbestos. Not sure.
- The tyre marks all over the road out the front.
- The swan made out of an old tyre on top of the drive through entrance. That’s a classy touch.
Birchip is a pretty dead town. We met a few of the local SES people there and they were great; they looked after us pretty well and fed us really well. There’s really not much going on there though.
The local station seems to have changed hands a few times and is currently available for lease:
The course itself was the first of three weekends we’ll spend there. This past weekend was a mix of theory and practical. Saturday was spent in the air conditioned comfort of the local CFA station’s meeting room going through the road rescue coursework from front to back. Sunday was an early start in the local wrecking yard working through practical exercises in scene approach, vehicle stabilisation and glass management. The next weekend (late January) will be all about casualty handling and extrication, then the final weekend is a wrap-up and final assessment.
Malcolm and Maverick went to the hairdresser for the first time. They’ve been shorn.
There’s nothing left of them. We do have two garbage bags full of wool though; we now just need to find someone who can clean and spin it for us.
Who said what?