Bits and Bobs

 1. About ten years ago Virgo gave me a cymbidium for Mother's Day. It has flowered every year since in May. This year it seems to be a little confused. As you can see from the photo below it's opened its first flower today.

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2. A CT guided nerve root injection is not something I want to have done again. (I would, though, if the one I just had works and I was in that much pain again.) At the moment the jury is out as to whether it was worth the treatment because it can - so I'm told - take up to a week before you notice much difference.

3. Resetting the SMC on my laptop hasn't worked. It - the laptop - has developed the irritating habit of shutting down when the battery is still well charged - and the advice was that resetting said item would solve the problem. Nope.

4. While I was cutting back the leaves of my red hot poker plant - surprisingly for a plant from hot climes  it turns out not to like 40° C plus temperatures - I discovered a glorious rich lemon yellow fungus in the pot. Didn't think to take a photo - duh - but it looked something like this although the colour in these photos isn't anywhere near as vivid.

5. I went out to water the veggies and found that one of the pak choi plants that bolted to flower before I could use it has left me a gift. Eleven healthy looking little plants have come up.

6. Tomorrow we go to vote in our State election and Pisces is getting rather too excited at the prospect of a democracy sausage. For those from other parts of the world this is because most of our polling places are local schools and the P & C (Parents and Citizens Association) will be taking the opportunity to raise money by having stalls selling cakes and other items. One of these is usually a food stall where you can buy a grilled sausage in a bread roll or wrapped in a slice of buttered bread. Some places even offer you onion and sauces! This, my friends, is a democracy sausage. It's such an established custom that folk say they're going to get a democracy sausage instead of that they're going to vote.

 

Australia Votes Today

It's election day here in Australia and so we're all casting our votes. Because voting is compulsory it means all the adult population (those who haven't voted early as I did) are off to their local polling place along with their kids and sometimes their dogs.

As the majority of polling places are based at local primary schools the enterprising members of the P&C (fundraising associations of teachers and parents whose children go to the school) are out in force. At most schools there are cake stalls where you can buy a yummy home-made goody - or two and, of course, the obligatory sausage sizzle. This is, at its most basic, a sausage cooked on the spot on a barbecue (usually by one of the fathers or a male teacher) and topped with a slurp of tomato sauce served in a long, white, soft bun - but these days they are often much fancier. Pisces has just come back voting and brought with him a sausage sizzle bedecked with fried onion and mustard and I've heard there are places where a fried egg can be added. Gasp!

Things have stepped up a notch this year with someone coining the term Democracy sausage for these offerings and there are even websites - www.electionsausagesizzle.com.auhttp://www.electionsausagesizzle.com.au/ and www.democracysausage.org  are two - where you can go to find out which polling places have sausage sizzles - including what they offer - and where you can add details of your own sausage sizzle. Twitter is all twitterpated about it, too.

Democracy sausage has really caught on and Facebook is full of posts from people who instead of saying they have voted say they have their Democracy sausage and maybe be posting a photo of it.
All this might seem a frivolous approach to an election but in reality it's not. We have to vote, we do vote and we take it seriously but there's a long wait in the queues - Pisces was away for nearly an hour - and these things make the waiting less onerous - and, if you've had to drag the kids with you, it's a welcome distraction.

Voting closes at 6:00 PM local time this evening and because of time differences, the first of the eastern states votes are already being counted before polling closes here. Most times the result of the House of Representatives is known by mid evening although the Senate takes somewhat longer. Sometimes, though, it's close, too close to call before the last postal votes stragglers come in during the week following the election. Then things can get tense. Elections can be unpredictable so all we can do is wait and see.

wait and see