Maiden Voyage

Well - it begins here. As a relative newcomer to the joys of broadband, and subsequently blogging, today marks the early adolescence of my journey into bloghood. Hence there will be much fumbling, posturing - pretence that I'm more experienced than I truly am - and a few attempts to get past the kiss goodnight on someone else's blog. I'm remarkably optomistic - I've got a bagful of opinions, and I'm often part of the demographic targeted by so much of the current research - so I've got plenty to rant about. And after some mild blog trawling, I know I'm bound to encounter as many aligned opinions as against - so it's all very promising.

So who am I, beyond the pretentious efforts on the profile. Perhaps this is as good a time as any to show my spots. A private hell for me is dealing with engineers. Now don't get me wrong, individually I like them, but just like bible thumpers, meeting a group will automaticaly start my teeth grinding. Its my problem, I know. I'm a scientist - therefore, I'm principally an observer. I might postulate a few theories, test the existing theories, and occassionally manipulate observations and record test results, but observation is key to my findings. If I go sailing at the beach, I'm enjoying the whole picture - wave theory, carbon cycle, Einstein's theory of Relativity, Darwinian survival of the fittest- and I'm especially enjoying that I get it - that I'm living and seeing the practical application of hundreds of years of classic scientific thought.

But an engineer will sit on the sand find the nearest animal, take it apart, examine the pieces, and with an "I thought so" push it back into a squiggy semblance of togetherness and move on, looking for the next deconstricution - or worse bring another engineer over to look at their handywork. You see, the differences are subtle, but they're there! Scientist work to understand the world and how it works or impacts on man - engineers enable man to impact on the world.

So as you can imagine, when I got out of bed two weeks ago, to take seven engineers on a site visit, I intrinsically knew that it was not likely to be one of my finest days. Hence when two engineers arrived at my house, ready for transporting, rather than let them in, I closed up the house and joined them outside the fence, apologising along the way - "sorry, I would have let you in, but by the time you got past the three dogs, you would have had to dodge the vacuum cleaner and we would be out again."
"What's the vacuum cleaner doing?"
"Its a robotic........vacuum cleaner" My heart sank. There was only one place that this could go. "Yes, its a robotic vacuum cleaner." Now what you need to understand at this point, is that this statement, to an engineer, is like declaring to a Christian that you've just discovered the original blueprint for Adam and Eve, complete with handwritten amendments - and they've never heard before that any existed.

Thankfully we were in the car before the dissection began. "How does it clean, why does it stop at stairs, how does it remember where its been, what sort of memory does it have, what type of technology is it running on, what technology was used in the space program"........you get the idea. After 20 minutes of chauffering these two in the car, I was knackered, and we still had eight hours to go. And it just got better. We picked up one more, and suddenly I have three men (two approaching 70) in the car. What a treat! No subject was sacrosanct, and as a thirty something mother with two children, I pretty much represented the antithesis of everything these men believe in. So inbetween the backseat driving, child rearing advice, tax minimisation, superannuation and rehashing of university days, make no mistake, I was a little worn from the trip, and for the first time in a long time, distinctly aware of a generation gap.

Well we got there. And I spent the next four hours apologising to the site operator for the nosy and imperinent questions. It was like disturbing an ant's nest - engineers spilling out all over the site, getting into every nook and cranny, relevant or otherwise. And advice! My word, you'd think the site operators were novices! Our two youngest engineers had the misfortune of being trained on site - by all engineers present. I've seen less display when two peacocks meet up for a show and tell on feathers.

So by the time I got home, ditched my travelling companions and settled down for a cup of tea, I was rather pleased to see two of my dogs playing tug of war with a piece of rubber, especially as they're more often blewing with one another. It wasn't until five minutes later, that I went racing out the front door...........and found they'd progressed from tug of war to "making a wish" with a scrub turkey.

And here I should explain. If you live in Queensland, on the eastern coast, you'll be familiar with the rather industrious black turkey with a red wobble, known as the scrub turkey. These birds are notorious for ruining gardens by building mounded nests the size of small mountains on whatever site they deem fit. While the bane of many a gardener, these birds are protected and therefore often unwillingly endured. For myself, we have six scrub turkeys in our yard - and despite that we live on acreage, find these birds in the bloody front yard, usually scratching on the roof from around 4-9pm every evening. And to date, other than a mutual game of chase, the dogs have ignored the scrub turkeys. Suficient to say, the abuse hurled at these birds, since they moved from the back into the front yard, has been loud, often - and frequently makes reference to terms like 'baste' and 'barbecue'.

So as I inspected this scrub turkey, one of the young ones, you'll no doubt find it amusing that I became quite distressed. I rang the vet - and although I didn't think the bird would last long, was determined to take it to the vet. As I maintained with my husband later, I wasn't about to reward our mongruels for their efforts.

I remained somewhat distressed over this development for days. I refused to speak to the offending dogs, and dreaded walking through the gate in the evening for fear of finding another bird. And the scrub turkeys disappeared.

Well, a few days later they came back - and the dogs returned to ignoring them. And this was pretty much the status quo. Until Sunday, when I caught the filfthy bloody ringleader trying his luck with one of my chickens. I'm outraged - sullying the modesty of one of my layers!

..............so naturally, I'm thinking about asking one of my engineering "mates" to help me design a trap to get rid of the bloody mongruels!