I wish I could access facebook from here

It's 10.30pm and the infinite calm of a country evening is being pierced by some neighbour shrieking out "erin!" repeatedly at the top of her lungs.

I managed to write 2000 words today before the heat and incessant drone of lawnmowers drove me out into the late afternoon.

It was a perfect New England day... sunny, dry, and not too many flies.

It took me 20 minutes to walk from the southern end of town (where Mum lives) to the final street on the northern edge. I used to think it was WullaMulla street, but discovered that if I head west, that another funny little street has been created "donnegal Avenue", just off coronation avenue...and I wonder if it some kind of weird POMO gesture to reconciliation in Northern Ireland, or just another weird POMO gesture to local weirdness, like the "Welcome to Celtic Country" sign in the Aboriginal Cultural Centre, and the local Kamiliroi dude who works at the tourist centre and dresses up in a Kilt and plays the bagpipes during the celtic festival.

Things like this remind me that NOTHING I DO could ever be as eccentric as the place I grew up in, and that I am but a pale shadow of the weirdness, folly and contradictions that filled my childhood.

I think I've gone completely stir crazy. I spent a considerable amount of sunday sobbing, and then all of yesterday with THE MIGRAINE FROM HELL. I remember soaking in a lavender bath and various muffled grabbings at my pharmaceutical collection, and wanting to cry at the intense yellow of my old lunchbox, and looking at some meat in the fridge and wanting to throw up. I remember my amazement at 2am this morning when it was finally gone, and I felt human, sort of.

today I saw a couple of miraculous things that made me smile -
1) a pack of stallions running along the train line in the late afternoon sun
2) a perfectly pale blue fibro house against the bush on Wilga Street, with a perfectly bare lawn save for a mathcing white and blue caravan in the bakyard
3) a flock of rosellas in the gum trees near Mum's house
4) the wild slates and oranges of another batch of storm clouds swarming at sunset

the skies here are magnificent and *almost* match the delights of waves crashing on sydney cliffs... maybe not almost, actually, but they are pretty good. A clear sky here is a dark cerulean, amost cobalt, and the greys here are dark slate and indigo... Brittany (in france, not spears) matches them in Autumn but they are pretty special....

and I like the cacophany of bird life in the mornings, being woken by kookaburras, and seranded by plovers, those weird cuckoo things, willy wagtails and legions of lorikeets, parrots, rosellas, magpies and the odd mad screeching cocky outside my window, makes a change from the Noisy Mynahs of Erko.

I still wish I was getting the train on friday back to a crazy weekend in my crazy city, but I've planned to hang out in town for the weekend. I promised the local greens that I'd help out on saturday, and it looks like my writing is FINALLY starting to flow. I'm trying to treat this as some kind of durational endurance exercise - but... 3 weeks is a bit too much, even with a thesis to focus on. Maybe I need quality distraction.

wouldn't it be nice if this was my last blog entry under a Liberal government?