The totally off-topic thread

[JohnK]

US consumerism is very offworld.

They love their calories.

 

[Quickstatus]

Pre peeled oranges

 

[Denali]

Pre peeled oranges

View attachment 126937

Package watermelons fingers.

 

[Bindibuys]

Gotta love renovations..... at least I have room to store it until bedroom is finished.

 

[Denali]

That looks like my bed!

 

[JohnK]

That looks similar to many beds.

 

[Bindibuys]

just 1 bed, super king size (2030 x 2030) the base is split into 2 sections.

 

[JohnK]

Didn't realise how bad some of the modern shower heads can be.

The shower head we had before was ok but needed to be replaced. The landlord replaced it with a shower head that I can only get to 45° and if I turn the water to high the water sprays halfway up the shower screen and is effectively useless. If the water handle is on medium there is no water pressure.

The shower head is the hand shower type which my wife loves and I hate as I prefer a fixed shower head. Need to ask the landlord for a shower head that sprays water vertically not sideways and delivers with adequate pressure. I'm prepared to pay and can see some cheap options at Bunnings.

Is it rude to ask the landlord change shower head?

 

[Bindibuys]

Passing_on_water_charges
You may want to have a read of this JohnK

 

[JessicaTam]

Bleedin' windows, it wants to download 3.2gb of updates over my hotel wi-fi connection, surely they can't be serious. How do they think this affects most people, obviously they don't care. I'm being pushed closer to the dark side!

Come on over. You know you want to!

 

[Flying mermaid]

Is it rude to ask the landlord change shower head?

absolutely fine. . If it is not working properly you have every right to request a change and it sounds like you are even prepared to pay for the new one, so any decent landlord would agree to do it.

 

[JessicaTam]

Raclette is more or less Regional french, I believe.
Never found Raclette in Paris.

It was easy enough to find in Paris, just a bu@@er to buy!

 

[OZDUCK]

Philip Roth - author of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” plus plenty of other works like “Goodbye, Columbus” etc has died aged 85. Portnoy was certainly a cause célèbre in my youth. I have read some of his novels and enjoyed them

 

[Quickstatus]

It was easy enough to find in Paris, just a bu@@er to buy!

What? The cheese? , the grill, the experience? or the dish?

I’m still confused

 

[drron]

Just for Denali.As you can't take to frequent Japanese food I have found the perfect restaurant in Tokyo for you.It is a steakhouse but this sign outside caught my eye.

.
Yes not only BYO wine but BYO cheese.

 

[JohnK]

absolutely fine. . If it is not working properly you have every right to request a change and it sounds like you are even prepared to pay for the new one, so any decent landlord would agree to do it.

Thanks. Need to try and work out which shower head is best. I'm a big bloke and need water pressure otherwise shower takes a long time and I want to be in and out of shower quick.

 

[juddles]

...

Thanks for sharing. May we get a part 2?

It is a cool night. Late May when it starts to get actually cold.

Am in Guanaqueros, IV Region, Chile.

This sleepy fishing village has just recovered from yet another influx of visitors – was a “long weekend” due to celebrations of some ancient naval deeds, so over the weekend many came here – to eat fish mainly – the sea is already overly cold for swimming.

I was mildly irritated at the influx – I only search for peace. But given the weekend finished yesterday on the Monday, and tonite is Tuesday, it is all suddenly back, as I like it. Quiet.

I ate a simple evening meal – pasta and onion and bacon to be precise. (with some olive oil and garlic, just to be swish) Just chilling.

The pasta was almost overdone when I rescued it – cooking at sea level still catches me up. Too long in the mountains. But I had found some local bacon during the day that made it all very good. Huge chunks, not sliced. Chilean bacon I loved a million years ago – just now sporting huge mandatory labels proclaiming it “high in sodium” and “high in calories”. For cough’s sake, it is bacon!! J

But when the night hours started I felt like a drink. Nothing in the house.

I live just a couple of hundred metres from the town “centre”, and the wharf. All was nicely quiet this evening. No sounds that were not nature. Not a car, not a radio nor TV. The waves never cease, but that is somehow wholesome and reassuring. Had a small earthquake yesterday – but in a twisted way that made sense and actually eased me.

I pondered for a while just going to bed. Long days, much to do tomorrow. But I couldn’t. The thought of that simple lap of walking to the infallible small bottleshop near the wharf, and the wharf itself, beckoned.

Decided to walk, and yet again harm my body with less sleep, and yet more life. I always chose life over everything. Not in hours or days, but in being, in living, in feeling. So off to the wharf and bottleshop I went.

The town has changed. Back when I was a teenager no one lived in this part, out of summer. The fishermen and their families lived clustered around the wharf. Us, 300 metres away, were in a suburb that only had people in those summers. Now I have two neighbours. Because of this, and the dead silence of the night hours, I tried to remove the chain on the gate without too much noise. Made me remember when I was a kid and sneaking out of home. “Muscle memory” never dies – I did this with barely a clink of metal on metal. It is the same gate, the same chain, the same lock, as 30 years ago!! This climate allows longevity.

But one creature heard the chain. My dog.

I do not have dogs anymore, despite a life of having them. Guanaqueros is infested with dogs, almost as many as the cats, which are another story. But as far as the dogs, it is still a mystery to me how they survive here. Dry desert. Dirt. A transient summer holiday population of people. For Christ’s sake, where do they even get water??

But they do. They (some) survive. And I do love them all.

My street is sleepy and almost unchanged since the 80’s when I first came here. And there are the same number of dogs now as then. No one could say who owns them, who feeds them.

There is a dog down at the corner, who is jet black and doesn’t like to move for cars. It sleeps day and night in the middle of the street. You drive around it, normality. It is outside a house that is in perpetual construction. The walls and roof are in, but the yard is a construction zone. It has been like that for 30 years!! And in all that time, there has been a sluggish black dog outside.

Me being me, I woof at it from the car window as I pass. It expresses surprise. I sometimes feel this beast is a million years old.

But at my house, there are no dogs at home. We moved on. Our dogs too. But now, today, new ones moved in to fill the void. Some of them seem to hang out outside some of the houses that now sport permanent tenants, but another seems to have no fixed abode.

I recognize her, in that she no doubt comes from the same gene pool as my first ever dog.

My family (as in when I was a kid) always had dogs. When we moved to Guanaqueros from Australia we were suddenly dog-less. Very strange for us. But when we moved to Guanaqueros this changed. There was a small cough that was in the street. No owner. As you see when you live somewhere like this, you work out how an animal survives. This one survived by stealing chicken feed from a house up the road with chickens. My father respected that dedication, and over time adopter her. She was our main dog for many years.

But the next dog, I have no memory how he came to be ours. But we ended up with a second dog, which became “mine”. No specific breed. Or rather, the cross that survives here. Slight, medium sized, a mix of many things that could undergo hunger and desert and yet survive. We named him Pocho.

I grew up with Pocho. I know his form, his essence.

So when 30 years later I saw a stray dog outside the gate, I knew that somewhere there was a common linkage, they were related.

This stray dog is a female, a cough. Still young, maybe 9 months. She hangs out at the plot of dirt next door where people are building a new house. She is skinny, ribs showing.

I am not permanently here. And I have no desire to gain an animal that I cannot look after. But this dog is Pocho in reincarnation. It started, as it always does, with me dropping a piece of old bread for it when taking the rubbish out.

Today I drove 40 km to the city and went to a butchers. 2KG later of ribs and I was happy. Got back home, and sure enough when the metal of the gate made its noise, the dog appeared. I forgot my shopping, my other pressures and urgencies, and carved up some meat and bones. Had to explain (I talk to dogs) that this was fresh meat and was really good. I had chosen fatty bits as this dog needs this. She had clearly never seen real meat before. But she got the hang of it very quickly.

I am only here every so often. My goal is to give her the reserves it needs to get better and survive when I am not here. But I also don’t need a dog. Don’t need the tie, the responsibility. So I am going on a knife’s edge between love and reality. I will probably fall on the wrong side and pay with misery, but I accept and see that, even before it happens.

Anyway, tonight I ventured out. Yet more tucker for the dog at my gate.

Then strolled down into the silent town.

All was quiet. Such a change from the weekend. I liked this. But suddenly had the feeling of despondency that any alcoholic has when the bar is closed – would my bottle shop be open? I walked the silent street. Smells. Cars long gone. People that had pissed. Rubbish. The cats and dogs. And like a divine wind, (to me), the smell of the wharf. This is an art, or rather experience. By that smell I knew that they were not catching sardines, nor mackerel. A few boats bringing in smaller catches. All this with the whiff of a nose.

Sure enough I got to the wharf. A single boat unloading their catch. The wharf cold and quiet. In the glare of the fancy new wharf lights I could indulge in watching the seals. They scare me. Sheer torpedoes in the water. I kicked in a lump of seaweed, just to be nasty. Sure enough, out of the darkness, four white shapes appeared, spearing in, before detecting the falsehood and stopping. Me smirk, but getting further from the edge……

The seals are new. In the old days you could kill them. Now they are part of my wharf. I will get used to them, someday.

The sky was bland, the cold air and clouds making such ponderings useless. But the water was clear, I imagined falling into it. That sort of thought that is beautiful but tempered with reality. It is cold, so cold.

Within minutes got bored with the wharf. Beautiful but not what I needed. So I went up to the bottle shop. An outlet two meters square. And it was open.

Cold comfort in a bottle of cheap rum. Apparently from Venezuela. The owner and sole staff member has not changed. He sold me cheap spirits those 30 years ago. But despite him being in such a shallow pond, such a small village, he understands life as well as anyone. He gets me, he gets everyone. He does not know my new bonding with my dog, but he has seen human pain as well as anyone. He senses that in me, just as he does with his usual clients, the fisherman.

I rejoice in those scant minutes with him. It is so hard to find somewhere, someone, that both does not judge but senses the underlying pain. He manages that. I find that there.

I shuffled home in the night. Cold. Dirt.

I got to my gate and my dog was not there. Surely she has retreated to whatever hollow that she finds warm. I ponder that at her tender age this may be her first winter.

I dream, awake, that I could invite her in and she could feel real love. Sleep on a warm bed with a true master.

I know this will not happen. So much out of my control. But I wish it.

Life so far from perfect, but beautiful.

I feel.

 

[JessicaTam]

What? The cheese? , the grill, the experience? or the dish?

I’m still confused

Haha. The cheese was easy to find. Difficult to buy.

See, I told you it should be when we next cross paths. Much easier to explain in person.

 

[Denali]

AFFers be like...

Airportag on Instagram: “Who can relate? ♀”

 

[Quickstatus]

have accumulated 7 bottles of concentrated dishwashing liquid cos they were on special whenever I go woolies.

Should I get some more tonight in case we run out?