I have a job!

I am now training to be a till supervisor at Coles supermarket in Moranbah (www.colesmyer.com.au) !! It’s not the job of my dreams, but I have always enjoyed working in retail, and the pay is good for what I’m doing. It’s only 25 hours a week and they are flexible with the hours, they have also given me 3 days off in a row every other week so that we can still travel around and see Australia. It is the only supermarket in Moranbah, so I will definitely meet people! The company is huge and own lots of different retail outlets, including a posh department store called Myers.
The bonus is that we get a huge (?!) 5% off all our supermarket shopping, as well as at any of the other retail outlets that they own.

I have done a day till training, and it took me 8 solid hours to go through their training program! It was very impressive actually, I just put headphones on and training software on the till computer screen took me through all the theory, practise and tests! It even gave me a round of applause when I got my test questions correct! By the time I had finished, the toll of standing on my feet for 8 hours had got to me and I was exhausted!

Yesterday I did a four hour shift working on the till, it felt like a full day! It was so busy that I didn’t stop for more than a minute. There were customers with 2 trolleys full of stuff, people with every imaginable type of fruit and vegetable (which are a nightmare – however, the clever computer system actually has a lookup screen where I can do an alpha search, or search by attribute (i.e. green, hard, round) and it will show me all the photographs of what it might be!!). I didn’t do too badly though, and I had the “Hello I’m New” sign removed from my till after an hour!! The only thing I messed up was putting a cheque through the wrong way up!

I’m supervisor training tonight and then start my rota next week. I’m going to stick it out at least until after Christmas so I can save some pennies for our trip back to England in May!

Moranbah Rodeo (not the best photo, but it got dark just after this)

On the night we got back from our adventures in Mackay it was the Moranbah Rodeo! We hadn’t been to a rodeo before so we decided to just go for a couple of hours as Andy was at work early the next day. There had been events on all afternoon and they go on until late night. They provide free buses to ferry people to and from the event to allow everyone to drink which I thought was good.

When we got there I was amazed at how many people were there, all with camping chairs, blankets and cowboy hats on! The heat was incredible; it had hit 39 degrees during the day and was still 36 when we got there at 6pm. It was also very dusty due to there being no rain for months, so you had to concentrate on not sweating too much! A grass hill surrounded the rodeo ring so you could sit there and watch the events. We saw the junior bull riding which consisted of some teenager being tossed about like a rag doll on the back of a very determined bull, if they lasted 8 seconds they got to the next round. We also saw some events where the competitors came out on horse back and had to lasso the bull as it raced away.

It was good entertainment, watching other people being ungracefully chucked to the ground! There were proper cowboys there rounding up the stray bulls, with chaps, hats, boots and even chequered shirts on! I have never seen so many cowboy hats in one place; you could even buy them there! Apparently, there is a rodeo somewhere every week and a lot of the competitors just travel from one place to the next to compete.

Our hotel in Bucasia (15 mins up the coast from Mackay)

Chilling out on the settee with dad!

We were warned of the fact that a GA is dangerous for a dog, but because he is young and fit then he should be ok. After a few hours worrying that we were going to lose him all because of a cut on his foot, we got the call to say all was well and we could go and visit him. He was really drowsy when we got there and had a huge bandage on his foot!
Eventually at about 3.30pm we managed to get to the hotel where we were meant to be relaxing. We ended up only having a few hours by the pool because we had be at the vets the next morning to pick Ben up and take him home. He is on antibiotics and is not allowed to go for a walk for two weeks, which is a nightmare! Ben now is putting all his time and energy into removing the bandaging on his foot, which is driving us mad! We had to go and get it re-bandaged at the vets here, and he is halfway through removing that one as well. We have tried everything, but the more bandaging/socks/nasty tasting things we put on there, the more of a challenge it is for him!

Smiling for the camera (his other leg was shaved for the injection!)

When we arrived at the vets with our clothes covered in dark muddy sand and blood from where Ben had jumped up, with a wet, sandy, bloody dog they must have wondered what on earth had happened! The vet said that as it was a deep cut it needed to be stitched in case of infection. This meant Ben had to have a general anaesthetic, get his pad stitched and stay at the vets overnight. Ben, bless him, had managed to rack up another $520 (£234) of expenses.

The best moment of it all was when the vet tried to sell us a bargain deal of getting Ben castrated whilst he was under GA for his pad stitching!! I couldn’t believe it; the poor dog comes to the beach and ends up almost being de-sexed!! We told the vet that we didn’t feel that was necessary at the moment. Honestly, hard sales at the veterinary clinic, I just hope that sort of thing doesn’t start happening at the doctors…

The Beach of Doom (10 minutes before)

When it rains, it pours!

We decided to have a couple of days at the coast, stay in a nice hotel near the beach and put Ben in kennels after an initial morning run on the beach. Andy had had a tough shift and I had done my first few days at work (will discuss later) and was exhausted, so we felt we deserved a nice break.

Packing my things early on Friday morning I was actually thinking that I wouldn’t have much to report back to England this week, other than my new job. It was at that moment I think I cursed the next few days!

We got to the beach in good time; we had decided to go to the City Beach due to it being nearer to the kennels. This beach is one of the southern Mackay beaches where the tide goes out for miles and it is very flat. The tide was well out when we got there so we let Ben off and he raced across the sand in search of the sea. There were lots of small pools along the way where Ben would race into and get himself as wet as possible. Then I noticed him lift his front paw up and thought he must have something stuck in his foot. When we got to him there was blood dripping from his paw - his back pad on his front paw had been sliced in half, and it was a very deep cut. We needed to get him straight to the vets so we turned back and headed straight along the sand to get back to the car. Ben was being so good, he kept laying down and licking the blood wondering what it was. There were bloody footprints all along the sand!

The beach had areas of darker sand which just looked as though it was still wet from the sea. In the photo above you can see Andy is walking on the edge of a patch of darker sand. We headed right into the middle of one of these patches. As we were racing along our feet were sticking slightly in the sand (a bit like the muddy Glastonbury experience this year!), we kept on going but then it got worse and we were sinking past our ankles. We decided to turn and go across to some dryer sand about 15-20m away, but it just got worse and worse and we eventually were just past our knees when we tried to walk. I was absolutely hysterical by this point and was screaming from sheer terror, one of my worst fears is being buried alive and I seriously though that was going to happen. There was nobody at all on the beach apart from us, so I had visions of us sinking until just our heads were showing and then the tide slowly coming in to finish us off! Poor Ben was flapping about with blood pouring from his foot not understanding why we had decided to bury ourselves in the sand, I was screaming and Andy was crawling along. Eventually we started hitting dryer/firmer sand and pulled ourselves to safety.
It was the most terrifying experience I have ever had and I just burst into tears when we got out of it!

The Huntsman

Andy was hosing the car last week when the biggest spider we have ever seen in the wild raced out from the top of the car bonnet and sat looking at us. No matter how many times someone has said to us that the huntsman is a good spider and won’t hurt you, when you are looking at something as big, hairy and fast as what we were then it was difficult to feel any calm.

The following information is from a few websites I looked up following this event (thanks to http://www.termite.com/spiders/Huntsman-Spider.shtml and http://www.amonline.net.au/factsheets/spiders.htm to name a few) :

Huntsman spiders are a non-aggressive group of spiders. They are very timid and will try to avoid and when encountered can move at lighting-fast speed to escape human contact. The bite of Huntsman Spiders is of low risk to humans. However, a large individual can give a painful bite. Size - the size of an adult varies greatly around 15 mm in body length, and has long legs extending 160 mm outstretched top to bottom.

The ensuing drama, as we decided that the best plan would be to move the car down the drive and then try and knock the spider off the car (so it wouldn’t run straight into the house), must have been quite an entertaining few minutes for our neighbours. Andy decided that he would be best reversing the car and I could knock the spider off with a bit of coconut palm leaf (how gallant of him!). I managed to get it off on my second swipe and watched it hurtle along the road as Andy continued reversing and unknowingly ran right over it! We were actually sad that we had killed it as that wasn’t intended, and we felt it was enjoying watching us try and remove it. I just hope all his relatives don’t come looking for his killer with pitchforks and shovels…

I'm a DJ!!

Oh yes, I am the saviour of Australian radio!!
I had seen a sign asking for voluntary DJ’s at the local radio station (96.9 Rock FM! Strange how the frequency is the same as my "favourite" radio station back home - that is an attempt at sarcasm concerning a Brit awards competition and Viking FM, a few people will 'get' it!) so I plucked up the courage and went in to see them about a month ago.
The lady in charge sat me down and said if I loved music then I would love the job and get along fine. Absolutely no problems there then!! She asked me what music I was into and I think I staggered her with my taste from Opera through to heavy metal!
I have now done two training sessions. During my first training session I got to look through all their CD’s and operate the CD players. I just mixed music together for 2 hours. Only after I had sat down ready to start playing did she tell me it would all be going out live on air as they have no training studio!! My very first song on air was Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit!! I had discussed this with C the night before and we agreed this was the song that just had to introduce me.
My second training session was yesterday and I learnt to mix in adverts and community announcements. Andy was listening on air and said I was great (of course!). I have not introduced Moranbah to my dulcet vocal tones yet, although that is pending in the next few weeks…
It’s fantastic, I can play absolutely anything I want as long as there’s no swearing in it!! I must try and get to know some more Australian music though, I only know Kylie and Jet at the moment!! The radio station covers a fairly big area, about 200 miles diameter so I guess a few people will hear me! I will keep you informed of my progress, Chris Moyles watch out!

Oh, funny story for any SITS employees/ex-employees who were in the pub at North Ferriby that fateful day I played the pan-pipe version of Gwen Stefani's 'What you waiting for' song on the jukebox... Kaz I think you may remember that?!?
Well, after getting into the right mood with tunes such as Extreme - Get the funk out, Poison - Unskinny Bop and Aerosmith - Walk this way, I pressed play on a song dedicated to Caroline - Bon Jovi - Living on a Prayer, only to my horror finding that the airwaves of Moranbah had the very very slow acoustic version playing. It seemed to go on for ever too, haha!

An early morning pose after one too many shots!

I don’t know what time it was when we finally called it a day, but it was the small hours of the morning and the photos taken at this point were a surprise to me when I switched my camera on the next morning! C will recognise my drunken, trying to look sultry but not quite pulling it off, look!! Andy and I had serious hangovers the next day and were both fairly useless. We recovered slightly with the old burger and coke cure, Hungry Jack’s saved the day (which is what we know as Burger King – unsure why the drastic cheesy name change?!).
It was a great night though, we all had a good laugh and spoke Yorkshire all night which was so refreshing after speaking the Queen’s English for months so that people understand us!

Andy with the girls - he hated it!

A taxi-ride into town allowed us to show Kelly and Charlie the sights of Mackay’s modest CBD (central business district – this term is used frequently over here, I suppose it’s the Austrian term for city centre – you see, what did I tell you about this obsession with acronyms?!!). We weren’t too hopeful about there being much happening on a Wednesday night, but it turned out it was quite lively. Went to a few bars and clubs and drunk copious amounts of alcohol, particularly a shot Kelly had been introduced to called a Cowboy, which consisted of Baileys and Butterscotch, tasted like toffee and was dangerously nice!!

A tale about me and my visit to the hospital…

In true Helen style, I fell over in one of the clubs coming from the toilet and badly sprained my wrist and ankle! I soldiered on through the night, but by the next morning I was in agony! I couldn’t move my wrist so was worried something bad might have happened to it and thought I’d get it checked out. We ended up at Mackay hospital, which was a barrel of laughs, just 3 hours waiting to get a crutch and a prescription. I ended up walking, or should I say limping, out before they brought me the crutch, I was furious! Interesting thing I saw, that you don’t see in York hospital every day, was a man in bush-attire clutching a big plastic bag containing the snake that had just bitten him!! No wonder they don’t have time to see someone with an injury as trivial as a sprain!! So I have had my first visit to an Australian hospital, I’m sure there will be many more to come!

Meeting up with Kelly and Charlie in Mackay

Well, I certainly didn’t think that within 3 months of me leaving SITS I would be meeting up with Kelly and her friend Charlie over here in Oz!! I don’t think Kelly did either! It was so strange when she called my mobile saying she was in Sydney, even though it’s still a few hours flight away, it was the nearest anyone I knew had been to me for what seemed like eternity. Kelly and Charlie were flying straight from Sydney up to the Whitsunday’s airport near Airlie Beach, spending a few days there and then driving their way down the coast back to Sydney to fly home a month later. Andy and I had originally planned to meet up with them at Airlie, but it dropped on that his shifts meant we couldn’t do that. So last Wednesday Andy, Ben and I drove to Mackay early in the morning. We were going to have a day sunbathing (or sunbake as they call it, rather more appropriately, here) at the hotel and then meet up for a meal and drinks later.

A tale about Ben…

After a quick dip in the sea and run along the beach we went to drop Ben off at kennels I had found in the Yellow Pages. There isn’t a great deal of choice in the kennels department round here, which is odd considering that every second person seems to have a dog. I had gone for one that was also an animal refuge/animal ambulance as I reckoned they would have good standards somewhere like that. When we drove past a rubbish tip, a water works and found the kennels situated next to a cemetery then things didn’t seem as idyllic as initially hoped. When the mulletted man opened the gate to us, alongside a co-worker with blood oozing from a bite on her hand and a tea towel wrapped round it, we were starting to wonder whether our darling beloved pooch would be ok here. They showed Ben to his cage for the next few days which consisted of a tiny run and a wooden pallet for a bed, there were dogs incessantly barking next to him. The lady with blooded arm said they never stop. We commented that we were looking for a place for him to stay for 3 weeks when we come back to England next year and here’s the clincher, she said, “I work here and I wouldn’t leave my dog here for 20 minutes, it’s not bad when me and mullet-man are working, but the guys in tomorrow don’t care at all”. Obviously, this isn’t really the re-assurance you are looking for when you are putting a $6000 dog into kennels. We went back to the car silently with Ben sat watching us as we left to make us feel even worse. “He’s not staying there”, we both said the minute we left. We decided to go to the hotel for dinner and the afternoon and then find somewhere else to take him for the night. We phoned one that was about 20 minutes away but said it was new, which sounded hopeful. I phoned her and told my tale of woe, she said to bring him there straight away. We rescued Ben with some excuse that Andy had been called back in to work and drove to his new kennels. Well, they couldn’t have been more different, the owners were lovely, it was up in the hills with amazing views and the dogs even had televisions! We happily left him there and decided whatever the cost that is where he will stay from now on. Turned out it only cost a few pounds more than the Alcatraz one.

After a chaotic day with probably only an hour spent sunbaking, we got ready and met Kelly and Charlie at the Mackay Marina which is the new, trendy area with nice bars and restaurants, the best hotel in the area and a fair few boats about too. We had a really nice meal at a restaurant there and didn’t leave there till 10ish.