Fallible and Fragile

Last Friday week I fell out of a beech tree landing flat, face down. It was my friend Jane's tree, a large, mature tree I've picked foliage from most years of the last twenty. Jane, an elderly lady in her eighties was entertaining a visitor for afternoon tea and they saw me plummet from the tree and rushed out to see if I was alright. They found me with the wind knocked out of me and blood coming from my nose and mouth. My nose hit the ground and my teeth had torn the lip inside the mouth.

I have not felt well since with a chest of sore ribs front and back and some probably related neck soreness/stiffness. Indeed I have not felt energetic enough to do my morning walks knowing I had to continue working each day with the pain in the the ribs slowing and tiring me easily. I can only thank my good luck to not have broken an arm, leg or shoulder or worse and I can report that I'm now quite well recovered though I expect the ribs to be sore for some time yet. I did the morning walk today for the first time since the incident and enjoyed it immensely, waving to my catholic friends going into church, and chatting to Stevie and Annie whom I met along the way.

Last Tuesday I came down with some sort of gastro virus, which remains with me yet and made the working week extra tough coping with the the ribs and general debilitation from the gastro. Yesterday I made a dash to the chemist in Cockatoo to catch him before he shut at 12 midday to get some 'Gastro Stop'. I was conscious of keeping under the speed limit through the town but forgot about it departing and got booked for doing 77kph outside Clappo's garage. There was a couple of cops in a black Commodore station wagon with a radar gun hiding just before the Ure Rd. corner and the light started flashing as I got there. An expensive mornings shopping it turned out to be when the $244 fine is factored in and the 3 points I lose. The sad thing is that we have lived in Gembrook for over thirty years and for the first 28 years or perhaps more the speed limit there was 80kph. Old habits die hard, and it is only in the last year or so that our Gembrook Rds are now saturated with traffic branch police from Pakenham in all manner of ruses including irridescent bright green utes and innovative camera concealment tactics. A sad state of affairs, after a quiet existence here for so long, and a sure reason why I'll not be unhappy to leave this town when the time comes. It has been spoilt by increased traffic and bureacratic interference on many fronts, more of which I'll write about on another day, the suburbanization of our little town.

It has done nothing but strengthen my resolve to "not let the bastards beat me." I've set about retrieving my $244 by cancelling my Weekend Australian subscription and charities and telemarketers will find me a more difficult prey. I'm about to continue cleaning out my shed and setting up the extactor and the tanks to start after a bit of honey. There'll be less given away and the price goes up. This month has been a realization of my fallibility and fragility but will leave me with a hard edge.

So I copped a punch or two I didn't see coming in the first round of 2012 and went to the canvass, but I bounce straight up without taking a count, and expect to finish the round full of fight. I landed a couple myself, we learned on Jan 6 when our first electricity bill arrived since our solar system installation that we'd been approved for the the premium buy back rate. And our carbon emissions reduced from 1.7 tonnes to 0.4 tonnes on the same period last year. That makes me happy.