We interrupt this week of humanitarian work stories to bring you a public service announcement…
OK, not to bring you a public service announcement at all. To complain, basically. And also to bring you another picture of a snake, since everyone seems to love those. I am totally bewildered to find new snake related search terms bringing strangers to that post about Phoukhoun every day. Here are some of the highlights from the last week:
- giant snake lao
- massive snake
- laosnake
- giant snake in electric fence
- giant snake bites electric fence (who comes up with these searches, and how bored are people???)
- giant snake in amazon
No one is asking for my blogging tips, but here are two pieces of free advice – advice I bet you won’t find on the thousands of websites that do regularly offer blogging tips. If you want more traffic to your blog:
- Write about big snakes.
- And, toilets usually go down well, too.
Without further ado, here is what my mama emailed me this morning. Dad found him in the shed yesterday. They have named him Bruce. I think, from looking at him, that he’s the harmless kind (not the brown snake kind) so they probably just let him be in hopes he’d help keep the mice and rats under control. (Gee, Mum and Dad’s place is sounding better and better, isn’t it?)
They also sent me a picture of yesterday’s double rainbow, which made me totally homesick [sidenote: here comes the complaining] because yesterday was a 9.5 on the sucky scale. The woodworkers over the back fence have been at it for days now, from 8am to 5pm, with their electric sanders and their hammers and it’s driving me mental. I manage to hold it together OK during most days, and then I’m grumpy and exhausted when Mike comes home (because that’s rational and fair). It is illegal to do what they’re doing within city limits, so I had been holding out hope that city council would tell them to stop when we amassed enough data. But last night we got word that, “yes, there were laws, but… this is Asia, see” and “they are only trying to make a living.” This may not stop.
Now I know that some small part of me should be celebrating this as a triumph of small business, or lauding them for doing honest work instead of being out breaking into people’s houses.
But, yeah, after six days of this… not feeling it. Not feeling it at all.
And, to top it all off, just when I was trying to get to sleep last night at 10:30, karaoke started. Very loud karaoke. It went on until long after midnight. Long after I’d resorted to Ambien.
So I’d take the rats and snakes and mice at Mum and Dad’s place right now. That and their rainbows.
But I’m going to put this up and go get some breakfast and sigh deeply and try again to find a way to block out the awful high-pitched shrieking from next door and get back to humanitarian work-week. Because I have a post today to write about a sick kiddo and a complicated situation, and then I have a bunch of work to do for a project in London.
May Your Day Be Silent.
(And if that’s not an official blessing in any faith tradition, it should be).
17 comments
Oh Lis,
I feel for you! Hoping and praying the noise fest stops for you soon.
Very impressed with Bruce – your folks must have ROUSs in their shed to keep him happy 🙂
Unfortunately, the best I can do would be to send photos of swooping magpies from home. Everytime hubby walks to school he gets divebombed! So not everything is good down under 😉
Love and hugs from one Aussie to another xo
I think they do. I’m still bitter about the lovely dresser that the mice chewed their way into and peed all over. So, yes, not everything is good down under. Thanks for the smile 🙂
Remember, the rainbow comes AFTER the storm.
Today I’d skip the rainbow if it meant I got to skip the storm. I would I would I would.
forgive the obviousness of this comment, but that rainbow picture looks straight out of the movie, “Australia!” ok, sorry.
re: snakes: YUK.
It does, doesn’t it? That’s my parent’s backyard. Mike and I got married in front of that little gazebo. There was no rainbow that day, but there was a most spectacular sunset.
Nooooooo mooooooooore snaaaaaaakes! Ack! Maybe once you stop SCARING your readers the woodworking and karaoke will stop. 😉 Although you did also post a picture of a double rainbow which, according to the laws of the universe, should balance the snake picture out. I second the ear plug advice. I wear them every night bc dear hubby snores. Not so sexy but they work. 🙂
Yeah, they help. They don’t fix things completely, not these singers or saws (yes, there was a bit of waaaah in my tone when I said that last bit, I’ll admit, I’m still in waaah zone – it’s so impressive, I know). As for the snake, this one’s real cute and everything :). He’s even harmless. OK, OK, no more snakes for a while at least.
Loud karaoke blasted from the hilltops is a tradition in Papua all through the Christmas season. For a month, really. It goes on for most of the night. My dad eventually got so sick of listening to Elvis’s Christmas that he hiked up the hill in the early morning hours and gave them a Steve Green Christmas cd, which we then heard often for the following years. 😉
Oh my word… all night??? All Dec??? I shudder just thinking about it. Noise and heat… Noise and heat… those two are my Achilles Tendons.
Alert Alert… Note from Mama: “YOUR FATHER sent the pictures to you. He has missed out on the credit for a couple of things lately and i said i would rectify this assault on his general well being.”
So, please all note, it was papa that sent the pictures.
Also, please all note that at 8:03am this morning the saws started up again. Bletch.
Now I’m wishing that I still had snakes in my back yard. (Not really!) The rainbow brought some much needed beauty into my day. I’m glad I stumbled upon your blog today. I plan to come back often.
Hi Re (I don’t know how to get the french accent over the e, sorry!). Thanks for coming by! Cheers, Lisa
What’s up with the double rainbows? We had one here last week. Crazy, yeah? Just stunning.
And for the record, your parent have to be lovely people to let the snake live. The only good snake is a dead snake.
They are lovely, but letting Bruce live is pragmatic. Bruce is pretty harmless, and he loves eating mice. If Bruce had been a King Brown he would have been deader than dead very quickly – he would have had an unfortunate collision with the sharp end of a shovel.
“The other…” ha ha ha… I’ll have to use that next time I visit your blog.
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