Month: February 2018

The Power Rangers Learn About Play Center Safety

indoor play centre in PerthIt’s not every day that you see an episode of ‘Power Rangers’ that takes place entirely indoors, but sometimes to save on funds you need to do an episode with a bit of cabin fever.

Well, it’s a show for kids, so less cabin fever and more…’cabin slightly higher temperature than usual’. You know, everything kept child-friendly. As one of the few adult fans who realises the true appeal at the heart of Power Rangers, the educational drama that depicts some park rangers with powerful quads trying to make the world better place.

This week the rangers were hiking through Perth- as one does- and they found themselves trapped in an indoor play centre near Perth by a freak hailstorm, as are common in that part of the world. The hail was predicted to fall for hours, so the rangers decided to put on an educational show for all the children in the place, as they often do. Then they realised that inside a play centre and not outside, a lot of their survival skills don’t really apply. They couldn’t build a fire, because it was indoors. They couldn’t teach how to responsibly get rid of waste, because it was inside (and there were facilities for that anyway).

That was when the evil Pita Repulsive (that’s the villain, a woman who sadistically tries to convince people to bring pita bread on camping trips, thus causing them to consume bad carbs and produce environmentally-unfriendly rubbish) arrived on the scene and tried to convert all the kids to her evil ways.

But as it turns out, this was also a birthday party venue, Perth’s finest, meaning that there was cake and finger food to go around and no one was forced to eat any pita bread. Even though they were forced inside the play centre by the weather, everyone had a jolly good time, and the day was saved. Hooray!

Even adults can learn from this wise wisdom.

-Howard

That Gardening Smell

driveway rock toppingRavioli, ravioli, give me the fresh cannoli.

That’s what I keep telling Mum, but she always pulls them right out of the oven, so all the delicious smells waft all over the house, and then smacks my hands when I try to take them. They’re for the family, she says. I have to wait until everyone arrives, AND we’ve had the first course. What a tyrant.

The smell of freshly-made cannoli is one of my favourite things as well, alongside mown grass and vanilla-scented candles. In fact, I just like gardening in general. The Hawthornes next door are having some landscaping work done, mostly driveway toppings. Berwick has quite a racket going on for that stuff, so I often pass by places having their hedges trimmed, or fresh concrete laid for a driveway…and oh boy, it’s great. The Hawthornes don’t actually know it, but sometimes I just like to sit on the other side of our front fence and inhale the wonderful smell of gardening and industry. You know how some people are really visual, so they go to art galleries, and some people are aural, so they go to music concerts? I’m like that, but with smell. Nothing weird, I just really like nice scents, sort of like everyone likes the scent of a candle, except I seek them out instead. There’s nothing quite like the smell of crushed rock in the morning. And I will literally go down to the garden centre and drink in the scent of all the garden products. That place is just SO rife with goodness. Building supplies are similar…although it’s really the smell of the garden that has the edge.

This may sound a little bit weird, but really, it’s just pleasant. Maybe I should’ve been a garden landscaper or some such thing. Then I could drive along every day to somewhere like Cranbourne, garden pavers being my target. I’ll load up my ute with stone pavers, lay them down somewhere, turn up the earth, and be surrounded by the lovely scents of garden work every day. Then I wouldn’t even give a second thought to stupid old cannoli.

-Lui

Lemurs With a Taste for Metal?

roof racks and barsLemurs!

Just…lemurs, everywhere. I don’t even particularly like taking jobs in Keymore; never have. Creepy place. Everyone smiles like they know something you don’t, and too much stuff happens there, like it’s a weird magnet. Thought things would be better when they replaced the old mansion with the school, but now the school has shut down.

Still, the lemur sanctuary sounded like fun. It’s on the edge of the town as well, so it doesn’t seem to have been sucked in by all the weird, even though a lemur sanctuary is pretty weird in and of itself. Well, not until I was servicing the heating and a few of them escaped, getting into my ute and just clean chewing through the roof racks and bars. The folks there were almost too apologetic, so that was nice. Still…wow. Those racks were made of solid aluminium. What exactly are they feeding those lemurs, that it takes them less than half an hour to bit their way through solid metal? Are the visitors even safe??

No one has been bitten yet, they say. And they’re paying for me to have new roof racks and bars fitted, plus some extra under tray draws for my trouble. So that’s fine; the people running it seem like good people. I’m just thinking about what it would’ve been like to watch a handful of escaped lemurs climb on top of my ute and just gnaw their way through one of the toughest things on it. Like it was a challenge.

I was lucky that I wasn’t using them that day, AND that I’d brought in my toolbox to fix the heating, or they might’ve gotten inside. The people there said that the lemurs like to steal things, and then also chew them. So that’d be my gas bottle holders or aluminium accessories being used as chew toys, and I’m pretty attached to them. They need someone to fix the enclosures…preferably with titanium and bullet-proof glass.

-Jamal