Although I’m mostly on holiday while I’m here in the Southern Regions of the World, I’ve been doing a bit of work for my mother-in-law as well as a few other people. Some of that work was today, helping do concrete slab pouring for our friends Paul and Bec in their new bathroom, along with their fathers, Alex and Colin.

This consisted of lugging twenty 40kg (88lb) bags of concrete mix into a mixer, adding some water, dumping the sloppy Man’s Playdough into a wheelbarrow, huffing it down a sidewalk, backwards up some steps, and into the house to dump it in the bathroom where it was smoothed by Alex. All in all it went very well, we used up all the bags but got the slabs exactly done right, and the job was finished a bit after lunch.

This all might seem a bit strange for you folk back in the Homeland, as we don’t do this sort of construction for a bathroom, since we have wood beam floors and so forth. Here, there are no basements, and there’s usually little or no crawlspace, either. Rooms, such as this bathroom, are literally built right ontop of the dirt and solid concrete floors are poured ontop of that and tile or other flooring ontop of that. Pipes and wires and so forth are routed inside the slab or inside the walls, which are usually solid brick, mortar, and plaster, if not gypsum board (sheetrock) or cement backerboard.

So, to redo the bathroom floor, they removed all the fixtures and used a jackhammer to break out the old floor and break out the walls surrounding the pipes, then removed it all, replaced all the pipes into the floor (dirt) and walls, and then we poured the cement slab down today, right over the pipes. All the pipes are on the outside walls and head directly outside, where the supply and the hot water heater is, as well as the elbow down into the sewer. Of course, since it rarely or never freezes here, water heaters and piping is all outside the home instead of taking up space inside. You also don’t have to worry about burying pipes deep enough or any of that, as nothing is going to freeze, anyway. (There are also no furnaces in any houses — maybe a gas heater, but not very often. If it gets cold, it barely hits freezing, if ever, and people just deal with it.)

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Now, for some pictures:


Yesterday I finally got into the liquor store at Woolworths (liquor and beer are in separate stores, like Minnesota) and purchased a lineup of beers to try. I went for ones I haven’t had yet and tried to go for some smaller breweries, although things like Coopers are obviously larger. I’ll give another posting with a rundown of all of them once I’ve drank them all.





This little sweetpea of a critter is an “inch ant”. These darling cuddlebugs come out at dusk, walking very quickly around on their huge legs, and have a temper like an unglued WWF participant. Supposedly they are all looking for uncovered and unsuspecting toes to sink those pretty fangs into, illiciting a hovering of said victim some feet from the ground and quite possibly a trip to the hospital if you are prone to anaphylactic shock. I have yet to be bitten by one, but Sam describes them as a very bad bee sting, and I’ve read reactions that range from that description to something akin to a hot needle through the genitals. I am, at this point, postponing that experience for some other time, perhaps when I’m really, really high on something toxic. This particular gentleman we found on the sidewalk, along with 5 others of his sort, and shortly after brandishing his ass in my direction he came to an untimely end on the bottom of some Birkenstocks that just happened to be in the neighborhood.




An equally fun but much more impressive creature here is this fellow we found on the patio door last night. The picture doesn’t show the entire story, as this guy has a legspan equal to that of a fucking DVD disc and probably weighs a good pound or two, dripping wet. My relatives found him and immediately yelped at me to snatch the camera; of course, upon seeing the bugger, I immediately swore and started looking around for his family, expecting them to be cornering me into the side of the patio at any moment.

I’m serious — this old boy was BIG. He had MEAT on them there bones. You could have easily skewered him and put him on the barbie next to the tomatoes and mushrooms. Of course, he became mobile almost immediately, crawling down the patio door like he owned the place (which he mostly did, as nobody was about to stop him).

My wife, thankfully, came to the rescue as soon as I got my pictures of him (for evidence that monsters of the jungle really DO exist here in Australia) and bravely disposed of him. You should have seen it — like an Amazon warrior, she first soaked him in a goodly amount of bug spray and, when he tried to escape, nailed him between the eyes with it. (Easy enough to do, given that there were 8 of them, but — still. You have to credit the woman with a fast draw.) He curled up into a ball and I figured him for dead, but our wild Aussie heronie knew better, and knew that if we left him like that, he would only wake up later, creep into our beds at night, and lay eggs in our eyesockets or something equally nauseating. So, with a donated Birkenstock (they’re getting a lot of mileage, I tell ya), she flicked her wrist in a time-tested move and reduced the horror to little more than a smudge on the Astroturf of the back patio. Yolanda: 1, World’s Most Dangerous Critters: 0

(We think it is a Lace Web spider, or maybe a brown “garden spider”, although some people have called it a Huntsman spider, although we don’t think it matches the coloring and shape. However, I think Big Fucking Nasty Spider fits it pretty well.)