Mr Happy

The esteemed P.C. gave me a sage piece of advice the other day when I was bemoaning my fate. In between draughts on his golden can he said "So what are you going to do quit ? You can quit your job fair enough, but you can't quit being a son, or a husband, or a father. You can't just say "nuh-uh too hard" & bail. So accept you've got some shit on your plate and harden the fck up sunshine."
I hate it when that smug bastard is right.
I countered that positive thinking was sciematiffically proveerised to be bunk  eg cancer survival rates- no statistically significant difference between time diagnosis to death for the happy thoughts brigade VS glum bums across a hundred 'n forty leven different cancers. It also places a burden on the family of those who don't make it, implying that the patient didn't Believe enough or whatever.
He said I was a pratt, was full of crap and should harden the Fk up.
I hate it even more when he gets personal and is right. and from a fourex gold drinker!
So. Positives eh?
Righto.

For the first time in five years since initial boot camp I recieved some training that actually had value to me in doing my job. I've done first aid refreshers, Govvie credit card & moral rectitude sessions (stealing is bad, bribes are bad mmkay!) but this was the first time that an expert turned up and ran through stuff that I will actually need in the performance of my core duties. I'm not going to discuss the hows, why's or effectiveness, just take it as fact we have a new S (for shark) fishery in Qld. This means that instead of every commercial fisher having a go, now only S endorsed fishers will be permitted to fish for the flake market. Fins are still in the too hard box for now & are treated as value adding, despiting being worth up tp 20 X per kilo what the flesh or barrel is worth. So, how does this affect me? well theses S guys have to report in what they have caught and where they are landing it, I'm required at ramdom intervals to inspect their catch to ensure they are reporting correctly. Now I consider myself a pretty smart guy and can count well past 20 without removing my shoes, but I wouldn't know the difference peween a silky or blue shark, a river whaler from a pigs eye shark or whatever. How am I supposed to check for compliance when I don''t know what I'm looking at? Well this super shark guru turned up with a chest freezer on the back of a ute. From it he pulls out a dozen different species of baby shark. Just as a baby human has physiological traits the same as a adult, so the baby sharks have fin placement & profile, nose shape, tooth shape and tail profile identicle to it's mummy, just smaller. So this bloke didn't try to teach us each shark, he just showed us the key features used in identification, but with real sharks as teaching props. Pretty cool. Same went for the new changes in trawl net design, turtle excluders and bycatch reduction devices. Again instead of power point slides delivered by some gormless beige pilock, we got The Man with full sized real examples of the nets. Excellant.

Dad is profoundly unwell. His stroke has seriously degraded his visual processing. As a result he can't drive. Mum's eyes have alwys been weak and the cataract surgery a while back didn't improve that, so now they are down to about 1.5 eyes between them. Not such super happy fun news, but the positive is that the oncology team believe he is strong enough to start a course of radiotherapy. I believe they'd give his appointment to another patient if the 12 Year Old Dr's thought he was on his way out, so take that as a positive. The biggest positive is that this treatment is delivered as outpatient in a hospital local to Mum & Dad's home, so mum can look after him, drive him around and return home to dogs, chooks & Furphy Tank each night. Compared to the Brisney land thing this is a big improvement. They still can't stay in that house long term due to amoung other issues the bushfire risk, but we'll leave that for another day.

This Pollyanna positivity piffle eats ass.
One last try.

The Blue Helmets reported a distinct calming of tensions between the BLA insurrection and the massive crushing power of the state (her parents) over the past few months. It would seem that this was largely as result of the idyllic lifestyle of a teenager on school holidays & when the school load returned (oh the humanity getting up before noon) so did the I'tude, complete with door slamming, driping sarcasm, $140 spike in phone bill in one month, ignoring being asked to do something like feed pets with "I'm just..." [ unsaid; doing something far more important than whatever it is you want me to do], the I'm-so-hardly-done-by muttering and (this sh!ts me the worse) through actions shouting not only are her parents entirely without ideas worth listening too but even feigning polite disinterest is far to bothersome to warant. So I've been taking off the red cross red crescent apolitical 3rd party hat & joining in the iron heeled oppression. Anyway this kind of crap is insufferable and things were boiling up into open insurrection and brutal suppression when she went to yoga with her godmother (leaving the bedroom a tip, her clean laundry not put away & animals hungry.)  She came back 90 minutes later a different kid. Like fire is differnt to water type different. Courteous, willing, able to appear at a dinner table when called, taking her plate to the kitchen after dinner without being hounded, self motivated to do her study, pleasant to be within 10 feet of, the list goes on. This difference was unbelievable. I checked  to make sure GM brought back the right kid. I suspect I'm going to put on a faceade of "it's all stinkin hippy sh!t" as if I endorse it she'll drop out tomorrow. But that qualifies as a win in any language.

The weekend at Evans Head (not Lennox as previously advertised) was great. Really really fkn wet but great. I realy needed it.

Ok, so my charkras need work and my visualisations may not be what they could, but I'm making an effort to focus on the positives and the things I have agency over.

And if you see a little ginger haired Irishman who answers to PC, punch him in the head for me.


P.S. remember the arseclown who begged & pleaded for me not to give him a ticket for his expired flares? Well he wrote to the minister. Apparantly I bruised his petal like feelings. Just another memo to write on company time,

Ciao, shalom and go the Wallabies.