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Today is Australia Day, an excuse to get drunk around a barbie and eat lamb chops. Good times.

What is Australia to me?

It’s singing Waltzing Matilda at the top of your lungs with mates and eating charred lamb chops with your fingers, while the woodsmoke gets in your eyes.

It is feeding the dogs the scraps.

It is the high summers and the smell of bushfires on the wind.

It is the freezing winters and black ice on the roads.

It is letting your lawn die because there isn’t any water for frivolities.

Showers over 1 minute are a frivolity.

It is having no mobile phone coverage in my back yard.

Or broadband access either.

It was having an outside dunny when I was a kid.

And eating raspberries straight from the garden.

It is soaring petrol prices. ($1.49 per litre? I mean, really)

It is wearing the flag with pride. (Except! if that is all you are wearing, you better be extremely good looking or else I might be annoyed. Or blinded.)

It is tolerance for EVERYONE, because we are ALL immigrants except the aboriginals.

It is drought.

And flood.

It is playing in the sunshine.

And worrying about the ozone layer, as we slip, slop and slap.

It is saying Mummy, not Mommy and humour and metre and litre. Centigrade, not farenheit and kilometres, not miles.

It is making fun of songs at the top of our lungs in the car (Amy is going to be so embarrassed when she is bigger).

It is not worrying about terrorists, because hello? What good is Tassie to them anyway? Do you want our APPLE ORCHARDS? Egads! Blow up our proposed Pulp Mill? Why CERTAINLY! Half of the state will help you with that.

It is worrying about the lack of environmental protection in my beautiful state.

It is clear felling, fire bombing and poisoned animals.

This

is going to become this?

And then they will do this to finish up.

It is so sad and so scary. 90% of the logs go for woodchips. WOODCHIPS for goodness sakes. *sigh*

It is having the right to write whatever I want. And fighting for that right, because I don’t want my internet filtered at an ISP level.

It is being able to get political on my blog, even though I rarely do.

It is going off on a tangent.

And coming back. Hello there!

Being Australian is a whole bundle of things. Mostly for me, it is being who I am and believing in what I like.

Happy Australia Day. Have a beer by the barbie for me, okay? And a chop. Is lamb, is good.

Stay with me here, I am all blogged out for today, so I present to you one of my very favourite Monty Python sketches.

(Opening Scene : A tourist dressed in a business suit approaches a shepherd. The sounds of sheep and the outdoors are heard.)

Tourist: Good afternoon.

Shepherd: Afternoon

Tourist: Ah, lovely day isn’t it?

Shepherd: Eh, ’tis that.

Tourist: You here on holiday?

Shepherd: Nope, I live ‘ere.

Tourist: Oh, good for you. Uh…those ARE sheep aren’t they?

Shepherd: Yeh.

Tourist: Hmm, thought they were. Only, what are they doing up in the trees?

Shepherd: A fair question and one that in recent weeks ‘as been much on my mind. It’s my considered opinion that they’re nestin’.

Tourist: Nesting?

Shepherd: Aye.

Tourist: Like birds?

Shepherd: Exactly. It’s my belief that these sheep are laborin’ under the misapprehension that they’re birds. Observe their be’avior. Take for a start the sheeps’ tendency to ‘op about the field on their ‘ind legs. Now witness their attempts to fly from tree to tree. Notice that they do not so much fly as…plummet.

(Baaa baaa… flap flap flap… whoosh… thud.)

Tourist: Yes, but why do they think they’re birds?

Shepherd: Another fair question. One thing is for sure, the sheep is not a creature of the air. They have enormous difficulty in the comparatively simple act of perchin’. (Baaa baaa… flap flap flap… whoosh… thud.) Trouble is, sheep are very dim. Once they get an idea in their ‘eads, there’s no shiftin’ it.

Tourist: But where did they get the idea?

Shepherd: From Harold. He’s that most dangerous of creatures, a clever sheep. ‘e’s realized that a sheep’s life consists of standin’ around for a few months and then bein’ eaten. And that’s a depressing prospect for an ambitious sheep.

Tourist: Well why don’t just remove Harold?

Shepherd: Because of the enormous commercial possibilities if ‘e succeeds.

Thanks to this website for supplying me with the transcript.

We ate tea tonight and like always, Amy smeared it all over herself. Unlike other nights though, tonight’s tea was sticky (and delicious) and it required more than a facewasher to clean her up.

As I was running the bath, it struck me that I do this all the time without thinking about it. It has just become part of who I am without me thinking about it.

I cleaned up the puddle of wee on the bathroom floor and plonked Amy into the bath. I sat down beside her in readiness to wash her hair, and realised I had sat in the ONE dribble of wee that I had missed cleaning up.

Typical.

I washed her hair, we played and I sat thinking.

Wow, this is who I am now. Here I am, sitting in a puddle of wee while my daughter examines herself using a toothbrush.

I absent-mindedly removed the toothbrush. I threw it in the basket to be microwaved later on. It wasn’t my toothbrush after all.

(What?! Microwaving does so remove the germs.)

Amy slithered around, let me soap the bottom of her feet and nothing else.

I think on.

I wonder how I do this day after day? It’s all the same really isn’t it? Lather rinse and repeat? Day after day. Will this eventually drive me mad? I don’t think so. But still, how did I, the anti-routine person, end up in such a predictable place?

SPLOOSH!

Amy tipped an entire container of water over me.

Predictable? HA!

Don’t make me laugh.

Except for those few HUGE things.

Firstly a huge thing. Lotus? You all know Lotus right? Sarcastic Mom? She has been nominated as a finalist in the 2008 Bloggies. For best new blog no less!

Do NOT walk, RUN over and vote for her. All you need to vote is a valid email address. Oh and a computer.

Go on, we will wait. I promise.

Okay, you are back? What ‘s that you say? The bloggie page is all wacked up and you can’t read it and the buttons are in the wrong spot? Yeah, it was like that for me too. *sigh*  If you hold your cursor just over the top of the photo a URL will show up on the bottom of your page, where your page load bar thing is (does that make sense?). This should tell you who you are voting for.

To cast your vote with the wacked up, skewey voting bar (which is totally in the WRONG spot on my browser) then click just above your favourite blogs photo. This will put the vote in the right spot. Promise.

Also, if you have a spare email address, go and vote for Alli~Mrs Fussypants in the same category as Lotus. Read her post here. She is lovely and funny and totally deserves your votes as well. Go on, I’m not going anywhere.

Any more questions? Right-o then, moving along.

See my sidebar? On the right hand side of the page? See those pretty buttons? Go and vote for me. The Bloggies failed to recognise my supreme talent as a teen blogger, (heh, ah well. I suppose teen bloggers aren’t really mummy bloggers anyway) so you can console me with a vote for Hottest Mummy Blogger/Best Parenting Blog. If I get more than one vote there I will be happy.

Here is where I have to admit to what a bad person I am. Have you tagged me for a meme lately? Or given me a bloggy award? Please, can you let me know? Pretty please? So I can give you the linky love that you deserve you know.

I am terribly forgetful and I am sure that I have been tagged for more than one meme.

Thankyou. I love you, you know that right? Good.

Now go and vote.