Being So Well

My husband rang me this morning from his office and said the campus has been closed due to last night’s hail. According to his description, the scenes look pretty bad. Roads flooded, most of trees damaged and if there is any left, they keep falling down, Canberra High’s roofs collapsed, ice and snow still seen on the spot not melting yet, and basements got soaked in water, people evacuated from the campus and whole Civic and Canberra Centre emptied. When did the hail happen? We’ve only got big heavy rain last night in Queanbeyan, which made me soothing, but at the same time also worrying about the water getting into laundry again.

I noticed the difference since we had the first heavy rain one week ago. The grass is growing up crazily. We’ve never seen plants gone so green in the whole summer time. My colleagues complained that they have to spend time in weekend mowing the lawn. I suggested one of girls to let it be, but she stared at me and say “Do you want to see snakes?” Okay, just mow it to bald.

I’ve got photos sent by someone this morning recording the last night’s scenes in Civic. It looks like winter time. Mind you that now it’s just end of February, still in the middle of summer time over the other side of ocean in this island. It would be even too early to say it is autumn already.

My colleague was nice to me. She bought a bag of pumpkins on the highway from Bega to Queanbeyan. She lives down there, so she travels a lot and normally she would get up at 4am in the morning and drive 2-3 hours to here. Anyway, she is a lovely lady, funny, has big sense of humour and always generous to others.

The pumpkin she gave to me has a $2 marked on it. It has a lovely shape, chubby and cute, light green and grey skin, clean and smooth. I would rather putting it on my entertainment unit for a display purpose than peeling the skin and cooking it in a wok.

Gee! I do believe there are lots of good stuff in many country towns, even the pumpkins look different:-) My colleague suggested me to bake, steam or make a soup, but I feel that this pumpkin is too good to be any of them. It’s not been a long time since I started to learn to eat pumpkins, noticing the tremendous nutritious value in this kind of chunky stuff, I still couldn’t help linking them to a party or a festival costume.

Well I can only do stir fry slices, which also was told by somebody else. Maybe this time I will do something different, I mean being creative. But I don’t have to…..My husband was creative enough. He looked at the pumpkin and put it on the coffee table, saying “don’t touch it! Let it be there….” Okay, I see, the pumpkin decoration

I knew it!!!!! As long as in relations to ID photos, my husband would never trust a photographer from an ordinary shop. He always wants to do it himself. No, not himself, it will be me. I will be the one who’s going to take the photo for his passport or etc. Wow! That makes me very nervous.

But actually it looks fairly easy. Get people standing against a white wall as a background during the day time indoor when you can get perfect light, and put up the tripod and digital camera. Put person into the little window on your camera in the right position, but prior to that, you might need to do a bit make-up or brushing the hair or tidy-up the clothes. Then you seize the best moment when people have a natural smile…click….done!

It took me at least 40 photos to get one photo finally picked by my husband. He is fussy about this sort of thing. And I am a real bad photographer. I guess my husband trusted me just was because he can not do the same (repeatedly asking the photographers to take the photos) as he does to me. Who would buy him? One photo and one click…that’s all you will get mate!

I am a very casual person. Whichever the photo is, I don’t really care. It’s just a photo, who would stare at your ID photo and look at it forever? So I would never spend more than one hour working on that. 15 minutes are my maximum limits. That’s why when the photo graphic job has gone to the 30th minutes this morning, I started to feel exhausted and sick of clicking, and positioning and saying “smile” to my husband I was so glad that finally two batteries have gone flat.

We popped to the Officework after the lunch, carrying a USB and a SD card where the photos were saved. There was an instant printing machine available in the shop. So we almost printed it off right away. 49 cents were the cost for one photo, we printed 3. I was satisfied with mine, as long as it’s not too ugly. While my husband kept looking at his, and kept picking on the photos. I reckon he would never be satisfied with his photos, even he looks like Brad Pitt or the most handsome guy in the world.

At the end of day, he said “we will have to do it once again”. I was freaked out and just wanted to escape to the South Pole or somewhere he can never find me. Oh please, not again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!