The Black Stump

HAHA! Finally a photo has uploaded for me! Hmm... maybe Blogger only likes me uploading one at a time! :S That could take a while.

"Hi" again everyone. Here I am at Paringa, a little Riverland town not far from Renmark where the Black Stump lives! (It is the large, round wooden thing behind me. It looks a bit like a wooden cobweb in my opinion.) We have a saying in Australia, "Beyond the black stump" which means: beyond the middle of nowhere, or something like that! For example the phrase can be used like this, "Oh you are travelling to Alice Springs are you? That's a bit beyond the Black Stump isn't it?!"

This "Black Stump" occurred because of one man's quirky sense of humour one day when he was out on the River Murray! However, I'm pretty sure it would've taken more than one man to haul this wooden stump out of the river and transport it to the front of his house. This is where the stump is now located.

I visited this stump not last week but the week before when I was on holidays. I came back to the Riverland for a few days to see my family and our current exchange student Jenny. I say current as she is our 10th exchange student so far. Jenny comes from Germany and is staying with our family for 10 months. She arrived in Australia in February this year.

Below are 2 photos of Jenny and me on the River Murray Queen, a paddle steamer permanently moored in my hometown Waikerie.

The photo above features an interesting koala sign we saw on the way to Paringa. There is a Koala sanctuary not far from that sign on the other side of the bridge. We visited the sanctuary for 10 minutes or so but didn't spot any koalas which wasn't very surprising... we were right next to the highway! The poor koalas probably hid in fright when they heard us roaring down the drive in our big mechanical beast (my parent's Ford)!

Since seeing this first koala sign I have spotted a couple of others around the Burnside area in Adelaide yesterday. However, the signs only featured an outline of a koala, they weren't quite as fancy as the koala sign in the photo above.

Anyway Toodlepip for now, I heard an old Englishman say that on TV last night so I thought I'd try it out... I don't think it suits me really. Oh well how about see-ya later? XD

*Katz*

Stories within a story

Life is full of stories. In just one day in my life I can come up with several different stories about people. Particularly in the job I'm doing now! I'm a checkout chick at a supermarket, but everyday I'm amazed at the many little stories that occur in people's lives. (This may be one of my reasons for my procrastination with my novel writing. There's so much detail, although it may be irrelevant for fiction writing.)

For example, today at work there was a man who was humming to himself the whole time while he was at my register! Okay so this is more like a mannerism, but there is surely a story behind how he came to always hum to himself whilst he is at the checkout!

When I worked at a bakery I once served a man who tried to pay for his purchase using keys- ordinary house keys. He said, "These should be worth something. How much can I get with them?"

He was elderly so he may have had amnesia but it was quite a strange occurrence at the time. I handed him over to another employee to sort out and eventually he handed over a $5 note for his purchases. That has to be one of the strangest stories that happened to me when I worked there though.

Other people will tell you the reasons why they are making a purchase, for example "We are having a party tonight" etc.

Even the smallest thing like going to the shops for half an hour can turn into a story about say... a person who tries to find a certain chocolate bar. They walk up and down all of the aisles in the supermarket until they finally ask an employee who tells them the chocolate bar isn't stocked anymore. Their reaction to this information can be the most interesting part of the story. They could either shrug this off and look for the product elsewhere, or they could complain to the employee about this and go on and on about why they should be able to find this chocolate bar or about their desperate struggle to find it and that if they can't find it how unfair it would be. This is a hypothetical story but these days shoppers aren't afraid to tell you what they think isn't fair.

But going to the shops is not the only story in people's lives. For example, last night I struggled a lot to get my printer to work. It still isn't working today. But my story didn't start from there. It started last night when I tried to submit my tax return. I was trying to lodge it over the Internet. This didn't work for some reason so I tried to print it out. That's when my printer trouble started and then my computer decided to slow down too. So in the end, one thing was leading to another and I finally decided to give up on the printer and computer for the night. This story isn't usually one you would find in a novel because it would distract the reader from the main focus point of the story. But I just thought it was fascinating how we can fit so many stories into our lives without giving them much regard!

Holidays

Okay. So. Finally it is the holidays and I can actually relax again! Starting from last Friday I officially have no more TAFE assignments to do until... 2 weeks time. Yuck. But still, 2 weeks of hols are better than nothing! Movies time XD

But now I have to work... so I don't have quite as much time to relax but that doesn't matter.

So many things have happened to me since the last time I've been on here. I had my 21st, yay! I got a job... yay. I have been using my new camera that I got for my b-day... okay I'm going to stop saying yay now! It would be nice if I could upload some pics onto here of my b-day but blogger just takes way too long. Hopefully one day I'll add some more.

I'm not a big talker atm. I need to really collect my thoughts and just focus on one topic but I have to go get ready for work so I'll talk to ya again some time!

Ciao.

Katz