Moulin Rouge... birds of a feather

This is a response to a meme my sister threw my way recently...
with a minor twist (of course!)
...
Apparently, one has to select the sixth image from the sixth folder in one's and tell the story behind it... of course my photo selection is possibly a little different to most people's...

It's filled with all kinds of strange things and even stranger creatures.

So I sat at the laptop, flicked up the explorer window and counted.

And here is what I found...

Three emus stalking through a paddock.

It was snapped (if I recall correctly) on the way home from town a couple of months ago as my daughter slept post-Kindy. They were stepping out, almost in unison, towards a mob of steers in a neighbours place. They caught my eye at the time, so I pulled up with the car still running and snapped them. I arrived home at Granite Glen, unloaded the groceries and my sleeping daughter, downloaded the images and they have been lost in the bowels of my laptop ever since.

...

Of course, I never really go for the straight-up version of events.

(My imagination is quite bizarre! You may have noticed?)

...

I have been reading some reviews of the movie Australia. Not the 'professional' ones, the ones 'real people' have been sharing, in blogworld. I have yet to see it, but I adored Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! so quite expect to enjoy his take on this little epic. And as I loaded this photo (for this meme) I remembered Wrensong Farm had shared a couple of amazing photos of her emus in the snow (yup, it's crazy!) ... and it made me think!
...

Don't these feathered girls (not sure of gender but they sure have such sweet bouncy skirts) appear as if they are mid-dance? And with those long legs and thigh-hugging flounces... I think I can detect a little French bohemian leg-flinging nuance?

Anyone with me?

Hello?

C'mon... squint a little...

I wonder which one is Satine?

Not so Zen...

Were you around yesterday when I was feeling all calm, and soothed, and Zen?

It was nice - it was peaceful and very non-confronting...

That was yesterday.

Today was more... sharp-edged and IN YOUR FACE.

Note the absence of the beauteous form of the bottle tree - above you can see the harshness and brittle branches of a dead tree. I took this photo as I waited at the bus stop yesterday for my firstborn. It would be an omen of my afternoon...

...

Dash attends a one-teacher school about 15km from Granite Glen - one brave young man teaches 19 children from Prep through to Year 7 (ages 4-12). How he does this I have no idea... it's a minor miracle I reckon. Dash provides our patient teacher with plenty of challenges along the way (not being really naughty as such, just displaying an astonishingly short attention span). He's one of just 6 boys in the school, so gets way too much female attention, and I think the teacher is so relieved to have another male around that Dash gets plenty of leeway. Time will tell whether this is a good thing.

...

TLW loves to go to the bus to get Dash - its a short drive (approx 1 km) and she gets to read the books in the Prado til he arrives. We got to the turnaround beside the road early and settled back to listen to the Dixie Chicks and read a little. I had packed a special afternoon tea of cinnamon rolls (a la The Pioneer Woman) and coffee (for me and SSB) and biscuits and milk (for kids). We were to pick up Dash then head down the paddock (about 10km) for afternoon smoko in the paddock with my darling husband and father of my tribe-of-two.

...

Another pickup mum arrived as we waited at the bus stop, and we chatted. Then the bus arrived (a little white Coaster driven by another mum) and decanted the small avalanche of schoolkids. Dash gets VERY tired by the end of a schoolday and it usually takes someone just looking the wrong way at him to send him into an attack of the sads.

Burrs in his sandals and saying goodbye to his little gang did it this time.

"Whaaaaa! Mum I'm dying!"

(Dash has bit of a dramatic flair)

Time to cut and run.

I said farewell to the other pickup mum and waved her off. I turned the key on the Prado.

Click.

Turned it again.

Click, click. Snap.

"Oh sweet Lord" I said (or something like that).

The battery was apparently dead and the key was broken.

...

I tried calling SSB on the two-way radio - nothing. The battery was definitely out. I went to get the coffee (to help me think in this spiky situation) I had packed in a carry esky, to find it had spilled all through the cinammon rolls and onto the floor of the car.

I looked back down the road to home. It suddenly looked a lot longer than 1 km.

TLW hadn't had a nap and was cranky, Dash was in tears and SSB was waiting for us.

Dear Sweet Lord...

...

So we walked... Luckily for me, some native wildlife scurried across the road to distract from this bout of tears. Can you see?

These emus seem to live around the bus stop area - in a next-door neighbours paddock, and while they are strange creatures, they are much more nervous of us than we of them.

Strange but Groovy... my sharp-edged afternoon softened for a moment or two.

We even negotiated the grid safely and with the salt-water droplet count still relatively low. TLW's borrowed thongs were proving difficult for power walking however, and her tolerance for her mother hurrying her up was low. This was still only about 400m into the walk...
Dash was getting sick of waiting for his sister and decided to skip ahead. Tears ensued.

Both Dash and I tried to convince TLW that it would be easier walking where there weren't corrugations in the road. She would have none of it (did someone say stubborn? I think she takes after a certain aunt!). At this point I decided to walk ahead and call SSB from the house two-way. Tears ensued.

And being the cruel, cruel mother that I am, I kept walking. And then I took time to take a photo of my child wailing and walking.

What kind of woman am I?

(Rhetorical question...Don't answer that!)

...

SSB did answer the call and come home to rescue the situation. He hardly complained at all about being interrupted from his afternoon's work. We piled into the ute and went to diagnose the Prado. And do you know what happened?? Can you guess, cause it's spiky and definitely un-Zen-like...

SSB climbed in, held the broken key just so, and the bloody thing started first go!

Sweet Lord! (or something like that)

He smiled at me, in a kind of 'there you go, dear - just needed to try once more' kind of way.

I said 'thanks darling'. But inside I was saying: Humphhhh!

Ungrateful woman that I am... Sigh.

...

Now I need you to know that we found another key. And that the Prado clicked again when I tried it. Then it started. Damned thing doesn't like me! What was that?? Oh...

Breathe....

Oh, OK. Thanks.

Weird Creatures and bitumen...

One of the fabulous things about living in the bush is "going for a drive" - where the constantly changing "movie guide" of Granite Glen offers better vision that any Jacques Cousteau TV feature. Today I took Dash (5) and Little Woman (3) for a drive in the Prado - both had been driving me quietly insane bickering as I attempted 23 different projects at simultaneously (and consistently failing to complete any).

The drive generally accomplishes a couple of important objectives:

1) To calm my frayed nerves (both hands on a steering wheel and butt in a separate section of the car from the two wee combatants ensures no-one can be successfully throttled!)

2) To calm my wonderful offspring (strapped into their car seats they can no longer attempt to throttle each other)

3) To pick up the mail (a minor but important chore with the said mailbox being over 1km from the homestead)

4) To remind ourselves how gorgeous our chosen home and surrounds really are...

As the house faded from the rear view mirror, and children's ranting slowly subsided in the back seats, I felt the drug that is the panorama of our property doing its stuff. Fresh green panic grass overflowing from the roadside onto the edge of the red dirt road, huge grey speckled boulders rising from the green pasture like sentries over this age old land, massive white clouds billowing from an eye-squintingly blue sky. Aaahhh...

The bickering in the back had almost faded to silence (and I admit, I hoped towards sleepiness) when there was a grey flash from the corner of the rolling wide screen offering on my windscreen. Flash, flash....

"Mum!!! Look at that!!!" Damn, no afternoon naps on my horizon!

"Mum - its an emu!! Ak-shully its a whole fam-bily"... Little Woman was on the ball...

An entire community of emus were indeed making their way, in their awkward, Jim Carey kind of way, along a fence line. Emus are not normally overly concerned about humans - they seem as cautiously curious about these intruders to their paddocks as my kids were about them.

No-one could accuse these strange ancient-land creatures of being beautiful, but they have a mesmerising appeal with their ponderous stepping, soft brown skirts and darting heads and small, beady black eyes. I grabbed my trusty camera and took a couple of shots...

The place they had chosen to graze/loiter was near a small stretch of bitumen (post to come on this particular phenomenon) and as they goose-stepped across the tar (one by one) the strangeness of the contrast between the ancient-ness of the flightless bird, and the modern-ness of the man-inflicted road engineering occurred to me. An image worth saving perhaps?

Dash was busy demanding his go at the camera (my battered Nikon digital) as I clicked the shutter - I know I shouldn't let him handle such an expensive bit of equipment but he does LOVE it and even takes some very groovy shots on occasion... Such as:

He can barely lift the heavy camera, but gets a groovy angle, that's for sure!

After a good half hour of curious interaction, with fights and stress all forgotten, we packed up and headed back home. Full of talk about why emus cannot fly, and did they taste any good! I was unable to answer either earnest question!!!

As I pulled the Prado up at the side gates, I smacked my head on the steering wheel... I had forgotten the mail! Ah well, at least our tempers had been happily salved by our wonderful weird neighbours...

Anyway, must send SSB off to get the mail as I head off and hunt through the fridges for something to offer the emu-spotters.

Cheers

Bush Babe