Happening in the park

We live next to a large park. 

I love living next to a park. It's like having a massive back yard that someone else takes care of. Mowing, watering, gardening. They even keep the play equipment in top shape, and this weekend they opened a new outdoor basketball court. Living by a park is way better than having a back yard. Trust me. I've had both. 

Anyway, a fun thing about the park is that stuff happens there. 

Standard stuff, like community sports: soccer, football, tennis, softball, quidditch. 

Parties. 

Dog gatherings. Weekend mornings, everyone and their dog is in the park. I mean it. At least as many dogs as people, and the dogs love it. 

Running. I go running there too, on Sundays. I usually just zigzag around a few of the sidewalks for 20 to 30 minutes. Twice around the perimeter is a 5K, but it's more fun to run diagonally through and diagonally back. Dodge the dogs and the little kids and the old people. 

There is a hospital directly across the park on the south side, so helicopters fly in and out at odd times. The park is a good place for watching helicopter take off and landings. 

Hot air balloons. 

We also seem to be one of the standard take-off and landing spots for hot air balloon tours over the city. That means that on a Monday morning, I might interrupt my commute to work to take photos of incoming balloons:

And on a Tuesday, if it takes me a little longer to get out of the house than the Monday, I find the balloons already scattered around the park -- landed -- in various stages of deflating. 

And then on a Thursday, the smell of smoke fills the air, with firetrucks lining the access road over by the primary school. 

When the main artery on the opposite side of the park was blocked by police, I did a quick scan on my phone. 

The church was on fire!

The church pretty much completely burned down, taking with it a private kindergarten. But the school was ok.

 

The park. The place where stuff is happening.

Three adults and an election

We have become a household of three adults. 

Don't act so shocked. You knew it was going to happen. The years keep spinning, like a roulette wheel. They were going to land on 18 eventually.

Tim makes a delicious vegan cake.

***

In Australia, we had an important election last night, and because we were a household of three adults, all three of us could vote. 

One of us voted for the very first time anywhere. Three of us voted for the very first time in Australia. 

It was glorious. A little cold, and longer lines than expected. But ultimately glorious.

This is the community hall where we voted.

We had a federal government that had been disastrous. We had a prime minister head out on a Hawaiian vacation anyway, when bushfires ravaged the country in 2019-2020. The feds pushed hard-Hard against the state-led lockdowns that were saving lives and saving the economy in 2020-2021. They bullied women, and ignored their concerns aggressively. They tortured refugees on a scale that made international news in 2022. Gave billions of taxpayer money to their mates, couched as 'pandemic' related, while locking universities out of job keeping programs in the pandemic, and vetoing a small handful of carefully vetted research grants. They ignored devastating floods, and the climate science that had predicted them. From my view from here, they seemed to be as corrupt as they could get away with, and with the blessing of Murdoch media, they were confident they could get away with a lot of corruption.

They are out. 

Out! Out! Out! Resoundingly out!

I hoped as I voted that they would be out, and that little voters like me could send a message about climate, corruption, and bullying. We sent a message. 

Both major parties took a beating, but especially the incumbents. Many of the people replacing them are respected, independent, professional women, who campaigned on climate and on integrity. And they have won! Decisively!

Pandemic, war, climate crisis, inflation. We don't need politicians anymore. We need leaders. We desperately, desperately need leaders. And maybe, just maybe, we got them.

And the fact that this vote happened in the country that birthed Murdoch media brings me so much hope. Friends, I have been so hopeless in the face of news media that spurts anger and lies and manipulation.

But people are still good. People are still smart. People can still see when they are being manipulated and lied to, that they can push back. And our system still lets them push back. They pushed!

I am so so so grateful to be an Australian today.

***

Jonathan, now 18, was eligible to work the polls. He applied, and received a 1-night job counting ballots. 

Tim and I dropped him off around 3pm at a warehouse further down the river. He was there until around 11pm, home at midnight, walked in the door in time to hear the speech of Australia's next Prime Minister.

Tim and I sat on the couch watching the election returns, becoming more and more hopeful, and more and more relieved.

I was massively relieved when Trump was dumped in 2020. But in the US, the reasonable voices at the center can still hardly be heard over the crazies, proven by January 2021.

But here? Here, reasonable seems to be a possibility. Maybe?

This strange, tentative feeling emerging from the worry and the fear. I think ... I think it might be ... 

Hope?

 

Stuff that happened in April

I've hung onto this blog about 15 years longer than most of the people I started blogging with. At first, it was a fun place to throw out my thoughts on life and the world, and hear others' thoughts in the comments. It was also a place to let far away family and friends know what was happening in our lives, when they couldn't see us frequently. 

And then the world moved on beyond blogs, and we got used to living far away from family and friends. But the blog was still a fun place to put out thoughts and photos, for me, writing for my Future Self. Sometimes, now that I am Future Self, I look back at old posts and remember Past Self, as though Past Self and Current Self and Future Self are really very different. They don't feel different. They're actually all here all the time, bouncing around in my head when I would prefer quiet. Needing therapy. And yet, here I am. Posting. 

Let me also state for the record that it has become more tricky, deciding what to write, and finding the energy. My life is all tied up in the lives of other people in complicated ways, and a lot of the interesting, funny, thought provoking stories I would tell are not really my stories to tell at all. And even if they are my stories, I think of them while walking, or working, or on the train, and forget them before I sit down to write. If I bother to sit down to write. Writing takes energy, and I've been saving up energy for Important Wordle, or similar tasks.

I've also developed complicated opinions and world views that don't match the world views of the people I was writing to back when I started the blog -- as though those people aren't just versions of Me, versions who have also moved on and developed their own uncomfortable opinions.

In any case, while writing an update on April for my family, I realised I might want to put some of that update here. For the occasional reader. For Future Me. And also because I couldn't really remember what happened long ago in April until I started looking at photos. 

So here goes. Stuff that happened in April.

1. The Grand Prix came back to Melbourne. In 2020, the Grand Prix was the first event shut down by Covid-19, when a team member from Italy tested positive the night before the race. And then the city shut down. And the borders didn't open in time for a Grand Prix in 2021. But in April, 2022, the Grand Prix came back. 

The mysterious reader in my head will be wondering why we care about the Grand Prix. Of all the updates, why that one? We are not really race car people, here. 

The reason why is that we live only a few minutes' walk from the track. So when the Grand Prix comes back, it comes back with lots and lots of noise. Cars we cannot see whine around the track nearby, all day. Helicopters just hover. And hover. And hover. Good grief, helicopters. Take a break!

And there are airplane shows in the daylight.

Fireworks at night.

Noise. 

April began with noise.

2. Easter.

Easter is a big national holiday here. The Melbourne museum only closes two days of the year: Christmas, and Good Friday. The university was closed. 

To celebrate, we took a long walk through the Botanic Garden. 

... And home past the trees turning for autumn.

We didn't go away for the Easter break this year. But we did spend a little more time walking. We took a long walk along the bay on Easter Sunday.

And then came home and enjoyed a fancy Easter dinner, motivated by Jonathan, who said we needed to be more serious about celebrating holidays. It takes more thought to plan a fancy meal, though, when the family now only cooks vegan meals. What replaces the roast lamb or turkey for a holiday dinner? (Answer: just omit the roast. There is enough of the other foods to go around.)

3. ANZAC day is also in April, the week after Easter this year. ANZAC day is a day to remember the lives lost in war since World War I. There is a dawn ceremony held each year, also not far from our home. I was tentatively planning to attend this year....

Except I was invited to attend a conference in the US virtually that weekend. I woke up on Saturday morning at 5am to listen to talks, and to give a talk at 8am. And then on Sunday at 5am to listen. So on Monday morning, when I did wake up at 5am in time to get dressed and go to the ceremony, I actually rolled over and went back to bed.

Yes. I am also disappointed in my Past Self who couldn't be bothered to get out of bed for such a major event held in-person for the first time in two years. But I also sympathise with past self. Unless life is full of other stressors, it can be hard to get out of bed. 

And then back to work. 

And that was April.

You see? There are some interesting fun things that happened, but nothing that really needs special noting. And if there had been something needing special noting, I probably wouldn't have noted it here, because I was too busy living it. That seems to be the problem with keeping a blog.

But I'll try to keep up anyway. Because I don't know how to stop.