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Week 4 - November
The sun, quite impertinently, refuses to set over the ocean. This is contrary to what I had grown up accepting as the only proper solar behavior. In California it’s taken for granted the sun retires for the night beyond the briny deeps – but not here, here it hides its colorful daily finale behind the tangled branches of mangroves and eucalypts.
Not one to be out-witted by a giant ball of gas, I swim out beyond the waves, and watch the sun set from there. As I slowly backstroke through the warm water, the sky fades through ever darker blues. The silhouettes of large fruit bats flit about, before it fades entirely to black and a stunning array of sparkling stars in unfamiliar constellations. Finally I reluctantly leave the balmy water and walk the hundred yards to my empty house.
I try to outwit the sun by getting up early enough for sunrise, darting out to the beach in the grey pre-dawn light, the sand soft and cool around my bare feet, but, one step ahead, the wily bastard actually rises, slow and yellow like an egg-yoke, over a headland which curves out into the Coral Sea. The sun always wins here.
By 6:30 every day I'm headed to work, sweating, with the windows down, already too hot for hot coffee. The first and often only human interaction of my day would be at the bakery, where I stop for a meat pie for breakfast. “How are you?” I ask the proprietress.
“Thanks,” she says.
“How was your weekend?” I ask,
“Thanks” she says.
“Hear about the storm they say is coming?” I ask.
“Thanks” she says.
During the rest of my day I likely won't talk to anyone. I don't know what my phone's ringtone sounds like, no one has ever called me.
The beehives are mostly among the cane fields. Twenty-one trailers, just the skeletal frames of trailers really, each with a row of beehives on each side. They're parked in twos and threes, surrounded by solid walls of sugarcane like a hedge maze. It's rather like giant grass, like perhaps you've been shrunk to the size of a bee. Every few weeks they harvest the cane and burn the debris, so the fields become walls of flame, and then you're surrounded by open space again, until the cycle repeats. In some places the fields are bordered by impassably thick forest, in which insects make a constant loud buzz like high tension wires. There's a bird that makes a sound so much like someone whistling for my attention that I turn around every time. There's nothing there but a four foot goanna lizard giving me a wry look from the scrub as if to say, “As if there's anyone else here, mate.”
Twenty-four beehives per trailer. Five hundred hives altogether. Approximately thirty million bees. Commercial beekeeping smells of diesel and is caked mud on your boots. It is hard work in the hot sun. It is working for crotchety salty bosses as you slowly become one yourself. It is getting stung until getting stung is the normal condition of life. My predecessor in this job had to leave after he lost his eye and half his sanity. I'm told he's still seen around town on occasion, randomly, like a restless ghost.
My boss, the farm owner, reminds me of Steve Irwin -- he has the same short boxy stature, the same exuberance, except rather than for animals and conservation his enthusiasm is entirely directed toward profitably growing vegetables. Everything he says is peppered with the most shockingly profane analogies, of a sort that will leave you pondering for the rest of the day if it's anatomically possible and the epistemological implications. Despite being one of the largest vegetable growers in the Bundaberg area, I have never seen him wear shoes. He has this unnerving propensity to appear like an unholy genie the moment anything goes wrong despite his properties being spread over thirty kilometers. Someone rear ends my work truck? Oh there's Trevor coming around the corner. Truck gets stuck in the mud, oh look Trevor is just coming along.
January 2013
The rain is pounding on the pub's roof and cascading down in waterfalls in front of the large windows.
“Last run of the courtesy shuttle!” a staffmember announces, even though it's only mid afternoon. I hurry outside and climb into the van waiting under the covered pick up area.
“They think the road out of town is about to flood so I have to get out before then if I want to get home to Bundaberg” explains the driver. The van plows through water like a motorboat, and in front of my house I slide open the door and jump out into about two feet of water before climbing up my driveway. I assess I have another foot or two before it reaches my house.
For three days I can do nothing but watch the rain coming down diagonally in front of the windows, mop up the water coming under the door, and nervously check the water level in the street. Debris and branches flow down the street like a river.
I'm alone with only the radio news reports to connect me to society.
“Water is over the roof of the Bundaberg grocery store”
“17 helicopters working overnight evacuated 7000 from rooftops in Bundaberg”
And then the power goes out. Now I'm alone with the pounding rain and the rising water, no news.
I'm jarred awake in the night by an ear piercing alarm, I tumble out of my bedroom in the dark fearing the worst, only to find the smoke alarm has chosen this moment to run out of batteries.
I wake in the morning to sun streaming in the windows. Some neighbor kids are swimming in the street. Power is still out. I go walking around “town” to survey the damage. Moorepark was never much of a town at the best of times, two blocks of suburban houses wedged between the beach and a lagoon. Many residents are out walking because there's nothing else to do. Helicopters land and take off on the grassy central square. We're still completely surrounded by water. I grab the last three cans of stew amid the bare shelves of our small grocery store, and then collect coconuts on the beach.
Every evening I walk to the edge of town and watch the sun set in an orangish-red fireball into the vast inland sea where the surrounding cane fields and road to Bundaberg had been. For three days, under blue skies the waters around me continue to rise, as water continues to flow down from a vast inland catchment area. When the waters finally fall, it's all at once overnight like a plug being pulled. One morning at 6am to my utter surprise someone is pounding on my door. I jump out of bed to answer it, and there is Trevor, shoe-less as always, grinning at me.
“Mate, the water's receded, time to get back to work! I checked on some of the hives already and they seem alri--” and then his eye fixes on the smoke alarm hanging open “--mate, mate! Your smoke alarm ain't got no bloody battery in it! You can't have it hanging open like that! You know what's going to happen?” he pauses for just a moment as I stare at him blearily trying to catch up with what he is on about, “you know what? Your house is gonna catch fire and you're not going to realize because your alarm ain't working, and then the fire brigade is going to come, and you know what, they won't care a fig about you because you didn't have a working smoke alarm, and neither will I! You're going to die and they're just gonna go out and bury your body out back like a dead wallaby and that'll be that.”
I had been awake for thirty seconds. Last I knew I was on an island, and now it’s 6am and here is Trevor with some fascinating extemporaneous speculative fiction I am totally not prepared for yet.
A surreal scene awaits me in the formerly flooded lands. I drive past tin skiffs tied to telephone polls. An entire house sitting in an intersection. Dead fish laying around my beehives. By a miracle all the beehives survived.
Soon life is back to normal. Sixty hour weeks in the bee mines. In the evenings the sun slants sideways through the forests, bathing everything in a warm golden light. Sometimes the summer sun is already setting by the time I head home. When I'm running the honey extracting machinery in the corrugated metal extracting shed, it's an eighteen hour day –because it takes the machinery over an hour to heat up it's inefficient to do less-- so I emerge long after dark, into the fresh night air covered from head to foot in honey, to find the world illuminated by the moon as if by a floodlight. Just the cane fields and the metal shed under the moon and stars, it might have looked the same a hundred years earlier.
At night the narrow muddy tracks amid the cane truly feel like a labyrinth. When I get home to my empty house, I make myself something quick to eat and walk out to the beach, where I sit in the sand under the stars, watching the lightning on the horizon as I eat. Sometimes I think I have it pretty good. Sometimes I feel I am serving a sentence of exile.
February 2013
I’ve been working hard, getting paid well, and being responsible for an entire 500 hive operation is fairly accomplished for a beekeeper, but I can’t help but wonder, is this what I want to be doing with my life? I had once dreamed of a career in the public sector benefitting society in a greater manner than simply producing honey for profit. Now I worked 72 hours a week the same thing day in and out stretching to eternity.
A job posting came to my attention, someone sent it to me. A “crop protection agent” ‘working for a national organization in the United States, attached to a university, inspecting beehives, liaising between commercial beekeepers and university labs to help improve bee health. Must be an experienced beekeeper, willing to travel. It sounds like my dream job. I apply.
The next morning I have a response, they think I sound very qualified. They’ll call next month to interview me. I spend the next month daydreaming about this upcoming job. I must get it, it would be too heartbreaking not to get.
March 2013
They’ll interview me by skype at 12 Eastern Standard Time, which I triple check to be sure it’s 4am my time. A panel of literally the half dozen biggest names in beekeeping in the United States!
I test my internet connection 12 hours earlier and it for some reason isn’t working at all. Finally it begins working with no particular reason why it didn’t. I hope it will be working at the time of the interview! I get up at 3am and make coffee and breakfast, put on a dress shirt and tie but retain the pajama bottoms. I didn’t know if it was going to be a video call or not, as it turns out it wasn’t.
It seems to go very well:
"normally we ask how people are with lots of travel but...",
"normally we ask if people think they can handle working in inclement conditions but...",
"normally we ask if people are sure they'll be able to handle the hard work involved in lifting beehives and working in an apiary but..."
And its over. I think it went well. They’ll interview the finalists in Chico California in May. No problem I’ve got a project in Nigeria (I am told the king of Sakiland is eager to meet me) and in Egypt in April; instead of returning to Australia I’ll just travel from there to California if invited. I thoughtfully sip my coffee as outside the darkness slowly lifts towards morning.
April 2013
I leave my keys and the remaining rent money on the kitchen table and head out barefoot down the beach on a journey to circumnavigate the world, from which I may or may not return. Not without boots of course but carrying them so I could feel the sand here for potentially the last time. Some coworkers from the farm who give me a ride to Bundaberg town joke “if I were you I wouldn’t return!” and I just smile, I’ve left everything in order in case I don’t but as far as my boss knows I plan to return.
###
Having now about 46,000 words written, which I think will be about a third of the total, I sent a link to what I have so far (in one consolidated google doc) to a publisher of beekeeping related books yesterday. This morning he had written me back asking for an outline, which I'm sending him so we'll see how it goes. I'm not sure what I might hope to get back from him at this point other than possibly encouragement.
Moorepark Memoir
May. 27th, 2018 02:22 pm So the Geelong* Writing Club puts out an annual anthology and recently put the call out for next edition, and the theme this time is... the hardest theme of all ...open topic. ::cue picture of Edvard Munch's the Scream:: *Geelong being my nearest large town. Submissions may be poetry, flash fiction, short story, and memoir. The flash fiction prompt is this picture, which includes the caption "Early morning, Barwon River" (which runs through Geelong), but if I can ignore the caption (it just says respond to the picture so it depends on if the caption is considered an inherent part of it?), the picture does actually remind me of the low native fishing boats I've seen in Africa -- if I can just come up with a 300 word plot arc. Short story I'll try to come up with something after the memoirs, since the memoir deadline is earlier. Feel free to submit yourself I guess if you want, even though that means more competition for me ;) but I don't write poetry so I especially welcome you to have a wack at that.
Memoirs is an interesting topic one doesn't see in writing contests as often, I had to read through the memoirs in last year's edition to familiarize myself with the parameters -- it seems to be just a presumably non-fiction slice from the author's past that doesn't necessarily have a plot arc, just a general feeling of nostalgia is enough. In the case of this anthology it's almost all from the 70s in Australia, absolutely chock a block with Aussie slang. Now I'm not old enough to have any stories from the seventies (I didn't exist), nor is my memory good enough to come up with anything from the 80s. As to the 90s maybe if I really poured the shmaltz on I could have something from the family cabin in the foothills north of Los Angeles or the snow blanketed landscape of winter in Sweden, but I'm much better with more recent events (again, my memory is actually really terrible, if I didn't blog who knows what I'd even know about my past :X )
And so I decided to also conform to their memoirs-about-Australia thing and adapt the LJ Idol Introduction I'd written while in Bundaberg to be a memoir of that time (ambitiously pushing the mists of time all the way back to 2012!). I prefer writing in present tense even for past events but to emphasize the this-is-a-memoir! of it I'm trying to convert it to past tense (in the below you'll see this is kind of inconsistently completed, if it's in the past but the sun always rises does one still write about it in the past tense? Ties my brain in knots!)
We can make two submissions per genre so I will also be taking the piece about Guinea which I had shortened for the really short prompt of the last contestA and seeing what I can add back in. I might post that as well, though that would be basically the third time I've posted a version of that piece so you might be getting tired of it ;D
###
The sun, quite impertinently, refused to set over the ocean as I had grown up accepting as the only proper solar behavior. Instead it would hide its colorful daily finale behind the tangled branches of mangroves and eucalypts.
Not one to be out-witted by a giant ball of gas, I swam out beyond the waves and watched the sun set from there. As I slowly backstroked about in the warm water, the sky would fade through ever darker blues to black and a stunning array of stars come out. Huge flying foxes would begin to glide about above, eclipsing unfamiliar constellations. It's funny, I mused, how you take the stars for granted until you find yourself in a place where they're all different and you have no point of reference in the sky. Finally I would reluctantly leave the balmy water and walk the hundred yards to my house.
I tried to outwit the sun by getting up early enough for sunrise, but one step ahead the wily bastard actually rose over a headland which curves out into the Coral Sea, so the sun rises and sets without ever touching the water.
By 06:30 when I'd be headed to work it was usually already too hot for hot coffee. The first and often only human interaction of my day would be at the bakery, where I'd stop for a meat pie for breakfast. “How are you?” I'd ask the proprietress. “Thanks” she would say. “How was your weekend?” I'd ask, “thanks” she would say. “Hear about the storm they say is coming?” I'd ask. “thanks” she'd say. During the rest of my day I likely wouldn't talk to anyone. My phone wouldn't ring, and if I received any texts they'd invariably be a "special offer!" from telstra.
The beehives were mostly among the cane fields. Twenty-one trailers full of beehives, parked in twos and threes surrounded by solid walls of sugarcane like a hedge maze. It's rather like giant grass, like perhaps you've been shrunk to the size of a bee yourself. Then they burn it and cut it and suddenly you're working in open space ... for a few more weeks until it's back to where it was. In some places the fields are bordered by impassably thick forest, in which insects make a constant loud buzz like high tension wires. There was a bird that made a sound so much like someone whistling for your attention that I would turn around every time. There'd just be a four foot goanna giving me a wry look from the scrub as if to say, as if there's anyone else here.
Twenty-four beehives per trailer. Five hundred hives altogether. Approximately thirty million bees. Commercial beekeeping smells of diesel and is caked mud on your boots. It is hard work in the hot sun. It is working for crotchety salty bosses as you slowly become one yourself. And yes, it is getting stung. A lot. My predecessor in this job had to leave after he lost his eye and half his sanity. I'm told he's still sighted around town on occasion, randomly, like a restless ghost.
My boss, the farm owner, if I may be so bold as to conjure an Australian legend, reminded me of Steve Irwin -- he had the same short boxy stature, the same exuberance, except in this case rather than for animals and conservation his enthusiasm was entirely directed toward profitably growing vegetables, and everything he'd say was peppered with the most shockingly profane analogies. I'd give you an example dear reader but you'd be unable to sleep for the next three days trying to work out if it were anatomically possible. Despite being one of the largest vegetable growers in the Bundaberg area, I have never seen him wear shoes. I generally got along with him fine, but he had this unnerving propensity to appear like an unholy genie the moment anything went wrong despite his properties being spread over thirty kilometers. Someone rear ends my work ute? Oh there's Trevor coming around the corner. Ute gets stuck in the mud in a paddock, oh look Trevor is just coming along.
A tropical storm (ex-cyclone ozwald) rolled through, amd for three days I could do nothing but watch the pounding rain on the windows, and the road in front of my house flowing like a river. Listening to the news I learned the entire area was flooding; in Bundaberg the water was over the roof of the grocery store, and 17 helicopters worked overnight to evacuate 7000 people from roofs. My seaside community of Moorpark Beach had become an island. Then the power went out and I had no more news, just rising water around me. Quite disconcertingly, in the middle of the night I was jarred awake by my smoke alarm going off, but it was merely because the battery had died. When I finally awoke to a beautiful sunny morning I called Trevor to see how things were going but he informed me the water was still then rising around his house and he was at the moment standing waist deep in it trying to rescue what he could, and sure enough, despite the sunny weather the water continued to rise over the next three days, and all we could do on the now-island of Moorpark Beach was stroll around and collect coconuts on the beach, since the ocean itself had become contaminated with all the outflow.
Every evening I would walk out to where I could see what used to be the surrounding cane fields and road to Bundaberg, now a vast inland sea, to confirm I was still on an island and wouldn't have to get up for work in the morning. As it happens, when the waters finally fell it fell all at once overnight and I was caught off-guard at 6am with someone pounding on my door, I jumped out of bed to answer it and there was Trevor, shoe-less as always, and barely had he expressed that the waters had receded than his eye hit upon the smoke alarm hanging open and he immediately launched in on a truly remarkable feat of extemporaneous composition with an extremely creative story about how without my smoke alarm working my house was going to catch fire, and burn down, and I would die, and the fire brigade would arrive but they wouldn't care, and neither would he, and then they'd be burying my body, because there weren't batteries in my smoke alarm. I can't even begin to do this fascinating spontaneous piece of speculative fiction justice, I think there were several more unlikely but compelling twists in it, but I'd been awake for thirty seconds, my brain was still trying to catch up with that he was standing here before me and, what's this about a smoke alarm??
A surreal scene was revealed in the formerly flooded lands, with tin skiffs tied to telephone poles miles from the sea, and a house in the middle of an intersection in Bundaberg north. I found dead fish on the ground all around my beehives, and a waterline on the trailer wheels, but by stunning good fortune the hives themselves had survived. I do tend to, without even thinking about it, locate beehives on rises so they have a maximally clear line of sight to the surrounding countryside, and this may have inadvertently saved them all.
After this interlude it was right back to sixty hour weeks in the “bee mines.” Even in summer, sometimes the sun was already setting by the time I'd be headed home. Around 5pm, already the forests were bathed in a warm golden light slanting in from the side. The sun sets over the sea of sugarcane as a giant orangish-red fireball. If I was running the honey extracting machinery I wouldn't emerge from the corrugated metal extracting shed until after 11pm, whereupon I come into the fresh night air covered from head to foot in honey, to find the world illuminated by the moon as if by a floodlight. Just the cane fields and the metal shed under the moon and stars, I'd contemplate it could be a hundred years earlier and it would look the same.
At night the narrow muddy tracks amid the cane truly do feel like a labyrinth. When I get home to my empty house, if I were to go online all my friends back home in California have long since gone to bed, so I'd often make myself something quick to eat and walk out to the beach, where I'd sit in the sand under the stars, watching the lightning on the horizon as I eat. Sometimes I'd think I had it pretty good. Sometimes I thought I might be in hell.
###
Known Issues:
(1) I know the tense is still inconsistent. Though feel free to give me advice about what you think can still be kept in present tense. I seem to do better writing from scratch but trying to change the tense of an already-written piece I get bogged down in, well this whole thing is past but this was then-ongoing and/or the sun always rises so why would it be past tense etc.
(2) I know I'm using the Imperial system of measurement, this is all part of the American flavor of the piece.
(3) I know also that I don't actually say I'm from California to nearly the last line nor do I spell out much else about the location explicitly. You can tell me if you hate this style but it's how I've come to rather like to write. No one likes exposition, I'd rather fit facts in in context then slam them in, and I'd rather keep the reader piecing things together
(4) I knowingly avoided some obvious Australian slang, like the tin boats would obviously be "tinnies," but words like that just don't come naturally to me. It's a god damn tin boat not a tinny god damn your eyes.
(5) It bothers me a little bit that I have the sun set twice. But I like my start and I really liked the format of the original entry as it kind of followed my day (the biggest change from that format is I added the whole flooding incident, which had come after the original introduction was written). Also I feel like the sunset behind the mangroves from the beach and the sunset from the extracting shed are distinctly different (and hey the sun is finally setting over the sea, just a sea of sugarcane! -- actually that just occurred to me, I use the word ocean in teh first sentence I should make them both either sea or ocean ::strokes beard::). Anyway, thoughts?
Unknown Issues:
(1) Obviously I don't know them, please let me know ;)
Pointedly Unrelated Picture:
And here's another picture by the amazing Jakub Rozalski, even though I have plenty of pictures pertinent to the above story I want you to evaluate it the way the contest judges will, without accompanying thematic photos. Also I wanted to share this picture ever since I was goingh through this guy's portfolio for last entry ;)
Addendum: Oh what do you reckon I move the second sunset to occur as I'm watching the sun set over the floodwaters that are at that point to my west, possibly with a wry comment about getting what I wished for? Maybe something more subtle, the connection must be subtle enough that some people will make the connection but I hate un-subtle things.
MASSIVE FLOODS - News Photo Roundup
Jan. 29th, 2013 07:57 am
I'm presently effectively on an island. Bundaberg --which is my link to the rest of the world-- is currently undergoing a massive airlift evacuation involving 12 helicopters (as well as a lot of little boats).
I called my boss and he said it's waist deep at his house, he's presently in the act of saving what he can and evacuating.
This is what the Burnett Railway Bridge usually looks like:
And this is what it currently looks like
As to the bees, its pretty flat out there so its hard to say what's high enough ground and what isn't. There are three trailers near the house which I'm sure are fucked. Most of the other trailers are in other fields in the area. Also the extracting shed and the stores of all the honey we've extracted already might be fucked. If all that is FUBAR, I'm not sure I'll even have a job anymore after this.
Anyway here's an article from the Bundaberg newspaper about the floods in Bundaberg. ("nine meter floodwaters!")
The hostel crew (AKA the Easter Bundies) at the local pub.
I wish I had the necessary photoshopping skills to unpickle the colors in this one. If the colours were alright I think it would be a neat picture due to the identical hand gestures. d:
Anyway in the above picture the three Canadians are in dispute because the one on the left said he'd shave a circle on top of his head if they could get five rum-and-coke's in front of him in under five minutes. They did it but then he started arguing about technicalities which he hadn't mentioned before as to why he didn't have to go through with it. Shameful!
Hostel Territory
Dec. 30th, 2012 09:50 pm
Been spending a lot of time in the East Bundaberg Backpacker's Hostel. As you can see from the writing on the pole above it wasn't always much beloved, was formerly much like the rest of the hostels in town. But Christine has been managing it for just over a year now and currently everyone there agrees it is by far the best place in Bundaberg.
So I've been there typically on Friday and Saturday nights so I can hang out with actual people and go out to the bars and not have to drive 20 kms to get home. The backpackers staying there are all pretty awesome and we have a great time.
It's interesting to compare the groups from different places. 90% of the backpackers seem to be from one of three places: Germany, Italy and the British Isles.
Most of the Germans spend most of their time speaking German and I never even learned many of their names. Recently most of them left though and we got three more who actually do talk to everyone.
Most of the Italians didn't interact much with the non-Italians either, but they had one who was universally acknowledged as their leader, and known as "the Don." Also the three Italian girls are all smoking hot. The Don is actually extremely laid back, always seems calm and collected, and everything he does he does "like a boss." On Christmas day when we were all at the beach he was wearing a speedo and santa hat, like a boss. Most of the Italian guys left before Christmas.
The third major group consists of people from England, Wales and Ireland. Whereas the other two groups are both mostly guys, the British Isles crew seems to be about 50/50 male/female. The guys seem particularly fond of playing devilish pranks on eachother and others. Recently a showerhead was unscrewed, filled with powdered soup, and screwed back on, so someone got a chicken soup shower.
Three Canadians recently showed up and seem to have attached themselves to the German group. They are fond of competitions and being proudly Canadian.
Many people left before the holidays though, both to be somewhere more exciting than Bundaberg for the holidays and also I think the vegetable picking/packing is at a temporary lull, so the population is at a nadir. When I arrived dozens of us would be going out every night, but by this weekend there were only maybe barely a dozen at the bar on Friday night and not enough people going out Saturday night for anyone to bother going out at all. And about five of the guys, including some of my favourite people, shipped out today to spend the week out pruning citrus somewhere far enough away that they'll stay out there during the week. Not that I'd be there much during the week anyway, but this morning as I too packed up to leave the mostly empty room I'd been in there, it definitely felt like everyone was leaving it deserted.
Driving home I thought about all the peace and quiet I'd probably missed out on that it would be nice to experience for a change (been at the hostel since Monday) ... and walked into my house to find four Indian guys asleep on the kitchen floor and beer bottles all over the place.
This evening there are six of them hanging out here. I think I miss the peace and quiet of the hostel.
And here's a cheery mural which pretty much sums up life in Bundaberg.
Weekend in East Bundaberg
Dec. 2nd, 2012 11:55 pm
42 queen bees showed up on Thursday morning. I hadn't been expecting another load of queens, and when they arrived I wasn't sure I'd be able to find a use for all of them .. we didn't have terribly many queenless hives left and not enough boxes to make terribly many splits (ie, making two hives out of one original, for which you of course need a new queen, as well as a bottom box). And we're getting these queens for $12.50 I guess, which is a really good price, but that's still $525 in queens and one doesn't want to waste a number of them.
And it only occurred to me a little later that if I hadn't found a use for them all by the end of Saturday, I couldn't take the day off on Sunday -- since they don't do well when not installed in a hive there's no way I can take a day off leaving queens yet to be installed somewhere.
And thus began a frantic effort to inspect as many hives as possible to find places to put the queens. And I thank my lucky stars I didn't have to see Greg all of last week because he probably would have just used half of them to kill and requeen hives that weren't doing terribly well -- but the thing is the queen is by no means necessarily the problem with every weak hive and a lot of good queens would be wasted that way. So anyway I was able to pile through hives by myself to sort it all out.
Saturday morning I still had 12 queens left. I skipped "smoko," the mid-morning break you get even if you don'[t smoke, and I skipped lunch, and by around 3pm I had used them all and added four or so more splits to the growing line of new hives (26 this week).
Unfortunately, by the time I HAD eaten and showered and recovered from my day, I wasn't in Bundaberg itself until 6pm. I was once again intent on staying overnight in a hostel in town to be able to go out and drink and socialize with people other than my alcoholic roommate and crotchety coworker.
Unfortunately nearly all the hostels' receptions closed at 6pm. In one of them there was still someone sitting at the reception desk but she pointedly ignored my tapping on my window and finally waved me preemptorially away (the hostel staff in this town seem to be infamously callous and rude).
It was beginning to look like I might have to just head right on back to Moorpark! A whipped out the laptop and broadband modem and started calling down the list of hostels, starting with those with the most stars. Most didn't answer.
One near the top of the list I had skipped over because it was just a bit out of town -- East Bundaberg Backpackers. They actually answered their phone, and said they don't usually take one nighters but if I came right over they'd fix me up. Long story short, having to resort to calling them was the best thing to happen to me in that town -- Christine, who manages it with her husband, was and is soo nice, and all the backpackers actually seemed really happy there (as opposed to the "serving time in the gulag" atmosphere in the other hostels I'd been in in town). Everyone was all hanging out together for the Saturday night and a whole bunch of us went out to the one club in town (the Central). Altogether it was just fantastically fun.
Also they had a young cat hanging out on the premises. I forget his name though. I miss having a cat about.
Sunday morning I called the guy about the room for rent in town... but it turns out someone already took the room. So instead, after having breakfast in town, I spent the day driving around the area being touristy. First I headed up to Port Bundaberg / the Port Bundaberg Marina to look at the boats, then followed the coastal road up to Burnett Heads, where the Burnett River meets the sea. Walked around the jetty there, and saw a sailboat with tanbark sails that tugged at my heartstrings.
From there my plan was to head clockwise around the "peninsula" -- it's not really a peninsula but as there's no bridges across the Burnett past Bundaberg, and the sea is on the other, it, well, sort of is. Passed a turnoff for the Mos Repos turtle rookery and decided to check it out. No turtles were rookering, since I guess they do that at night, but it had some very nice beaches (pictures tomorrow maybe).
Continued on to the town of Bargara. I called that fellow who lives there who I'd met in Brisbane but he was busy. Had lunch there, and determined that they didn't seem to have a nice beach. The beach in front of my front door may well be the best one in the area!!
From there I headed back to Bundaberg, but stopped at "the Hummuck" on the way -- apparently it's the remnants of an inactive volcano, and is the reason this whole area sticks out from the sea.
Arriving back at my place in Moorepark I was immediately reminded why I wanted to move out -- I walked into the house and immediately wanted nothing more than to get out again. It was hot and stuffy in here and Sam was running his rice cooker again, a thing which seems to take hours and makes a constant loud hissing noise.
I stuck around just long enough to drop my stuff and change into swim trunks and I was back out the door again. Walked down to the surf, wasn't sure I was going to go swimming, but the water was so warm and inviting I just kept walking out until I was floating in the surf beyond the breaking waves. Probably swam around out there for at least an hour, maybe closer to two. The sun was just setting when I went out, slowly did the backstroke watching a trilobite shaped cloud turn yellow pink and orange and findally dissipate amid the stars and giant fruitbats of the night sky. Was reminded why I don't want to move out.
I am seriously considering moving into the East Bundaberg hostel though. It would be a 20 minute commute as opposed to my current 4 minute drive, and rent would be $160-170 a week as opposed to 100 here, but it seems like it would be such a fun place to live. Wouldn't be able to go on random sunset swims anymore though.
Also found myself actually NOT dreading another week of work starting tomorrow ... until it was confirmed I'll be working with Greg again tomorrow. Its not even not getting along with him so much as things don't get done right when he's around. He doesn't understand that I'm supposed to be in charge, and he doesn't seem to understand a lot of important things about good effective efficient beekeeping. It drives me insane the amount of time that gets wasted working with him and things that get done wrong. Though Trevor did give me permission to say that he (Trevor) said anything I'd like to pretend he said about what we need to do, so that should help.
