Category: Uncategorized

Of course, the idea of continuing a Married to a Country Cop blog when you’ve permanently moved back home to the coast doesn’t really sit well with the rest of the posts. So I’ve decided to hang up my writer’s cap and devote all future rants to Facebook News and Chats sites. What better way to have a good, incognito whinge? ……… Just joking.

However, followers or not, I actually enjoy writing these posts and while I’m tempted to keep writing I have to wonder what a blogless life might look like.

For a start, I’d have more time to devote to the many home improvements necessitated by our recent 5-year hiatus – think sanding / painting windows, shovelling thousands of river stones to reduce the height of the pool area gardens and, hopefully, avoid the pool filling up with mud in the next climate-activated deluge, culling overgrown clumps of Golden Cane palms (Who knew that they should never be planted next to a pool???!!!XX!)

Although far from finished, we’ve hopefully solved the backyard flooding issue and can move on to the pool. Here’s what we’ve done so far………

Before

During

After

In 2007 when I started the Blog (and both I and the new house were a lot younger!) it was actually in the form of emails to friends and family regarding life in the back country. Nigel hadn’t been long in the job (3 years) when we discovered that there was a way to “jump the queue” and transfer to our newly-built house on the (highly-sought-after) mid north coast in two and a half years, rather than the usual wait for retirement / death.

Surprisingly, or not, we loved everything about special remote policing and, over time, the emails and photos morphed into a blog to encourage more police to “go west”. With the rat race of city life behind us, we embraced outback living to the extent that we ended up doing two more outback tenures, even though the first was enough to secure a transfer to our new home.

During these tenures, Nigel went from being a “rookie cop” to working mainly as a single unit – responsible for all aspects of the day to day running of the station and then eventually to joining the highway patrol.

Back track to 2007 and I doubt that anyone could have predicted that in 2023, he’d be leading the Cobar ANZAC Day parade. And just in case this is my last post (minus the bugle), let me just say that, despite HR’s mistakes (intentional or otherwise) we’d do it all again.

And just for fun, who can relate to this meme  found on Facebook?

Q: HOW MANY FACEBOOK GROUP MEMBERS DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHT BULB?

1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed.

14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently.

7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs.

17 purists who use candles and are offended by light bulb discussions.

6 to argue over whether it’s ‘lightbulb’ or ‘light bulb’.

Another 6 to condemn those 6 as stupid.

22 to tell THOSE 6 to stop being jerks.

2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is ‘lamp’.

15 know-it-alls who claim they were in the industry, and that ‘light bulb’ is perfectly correct.

19 to post that this page is not about light bulbs and to please take this discussion to a light bulb page.

11 to defend the posting to this page saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts are relevant here.

24 to discuss the merits of LED/swirly fluorescent light bulbs

44 to claim LED and fluorescent bulbs will kill you.

12 to post F.

8 to ask what F means.

7 to post ‘Following’ but there’s 3 dots at the top right that means you don’t have to.

3 to say “can’t share”

2 to reply “can’t share from a closed group”

36 People to post pics of their own light bulbs.

15 People to post “I can’t see S$%^!” and use their own light bulbs.

6 to report the post or PM an admin because someone said “f÷×$”

4 to say “Didn’t we go through this already a short time ago?”.

13 to say “Do a search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs”.

1 to bring politics into the discussion by adding that (insert politician of choice) isn’t the brightest bulb. This usually takes place within the first three comments.

50 more to get into personal attacks over their political views.

5 admins to ban the light bulb posters who took it all too seriously.

1 late arrival to comment on the original post 6 months later and start it all over again.

Before I reminisce about fun and games over the last month, let me say that we’re now firmly ensconced at our new/old/new/old….you get the idea…… permanent address. After 3 outback tenures, it’s time to pull the plug and be gypsies no more!

Two months ago, we were officially informed that our 4-year tenure was coming to an end and the transfer date would be the 10^th of May (almost 5 years after the date we arrived but who’s counting?)

In preparation for the move, clothes, gardening equipment, furniture and appliances were sorted then either donated, sold or packed up and, as much as I’m not a fan of Facebook, Cobar Buy Sell Swap became my ‘go to’ web site. In fact, I suspect I met more people in that month than I had in the 5 years previously – such is the life of a gypsy hermit.

After the sorting came the cleaning. Now I’ve always considered myself a clean freak, so when the End of Lease cleaning quote came in at $580 – for 10 hours work – I must admit I rather arrogantly spat the dummy announcing that I would do it cleaner, faster and obviously cheaper. Of course, “I” so often translates as “we” and once Nigel had finished work, he came home to, “can you please move this lounge (or “absolutely enormous computer desk”) so that I can clean behind it?”

And did I mention that removalists no longer transport flat-packed items because they apparently disintegrate in transit so our options were ‘ take it apart or take it yourselves’. Plan B involved two extra trips to the coast plus a fair bit of carrying flat-packed furniture (think book shelves, chests of drawers etc) upstairs by ourselves. Taking into account the myriad of change of address utilities forms, it all made for a rather hectic last month.

What’s that they say about pride? Yes, yes okay I DID boast that, being old hands, our sixth move would be relatively easy!

To be honest, not only did mopping floors, vacuuming blow flies from window sills, scrubbing ovens etc take much longer than 10 hours but climbing ladders, bending to clean skirting boards, helping to move furniture to get to tiny marks on walls etc all took a particularly hard toll on my back and any savings on the cleaning bill were probably lost on medical bills to address the three “bulging discs” I developed.

So celebratory drinks with friends and neighbours were replaced with appointments (minus drinks) with radiologists, pathologists, doctors and acupuncturists. Not quite the homecoming I’d imagined but thankfully the pain is subsiding.

And with the urgency of solving our drainage problems high on our “to do” list, we’ve even managed to pull up and give away hundreds of plants and cuttings, plus a garden shed in preparation for digging trenches, laying ag pipe, erecting two new fences and returning the gardens to some sort of manageable size.

So, what shall we miss about life in the outback?

I guess camping trips (Cobar really is on the road to everywhere “outback”) would be high on my list and definitely our lovely neighbours. Then there’s the fire pit (one of our first installments on arrival)  which took the chill off a Cobar winter.

Nigel will definitely miss the freedom to choose where and when he patrols and/or does RBT as well as the Border Patrols where he got to catch up with the other bush cops, plus the fact that his wife did the rosters so we could always scrape together 4 or 5 Rest days in a row.

And what won’t we miss?

Definitely the flies and stray dogs……. and maybe the Summer heat. But would we do it all again? I’m pretty sure we would!

Addendum: For anyone interested / still awake, here’s the official Vacate Cleaning Guide.

Notice that last bit about keeping the bond? Well a few months into the tenure, and for reasons way above Nigel’s pay grade, the 4 weeks’ bond was paid back to our account…. And not just for us but apparently for all police residences owned by the public. Also, when Nigel tried to contact Police and Teacher Housing (the name on the key ring they gave us) they didn’t seem to exist, nor did anyone particularly care that we were vacating.

Then, interestingly, two weeks after moving back to Paradise, we received instructions in the form of a government departmental email, to say that we had to sign in to vacate and, BTW, ‘make sure you leave the house clean’.

Having never registered in the first place, it was even more intriguing that the said department’s system wouldn’t allow us to vacate until we signed in but then wouldn’t allow us to register either. And round and round it went until Nigel emailed back to say that we’d already moved and could they please check with the property manager, who declared that the house was in better condition than when we arrived. We’re still waiting for a reply. Donna??????

Addendum 2

It was quite a surprise, a couple of weeks ago, when I met a lovely pathologist and gave her my details, including that I’d just moved from Cobar. After a reflective pause, she announced, “I know you!”.

As it turned out, she was one of the (very) few people, who follow my Blog. Not only was she following it but we seem to have been living parallel lives – she and her (police) husband moved into the Enngonia residence after we left and were planning on applying for the Cobar transfer when health matters put a stop to their plans.

A future catchup is definitely on the cards!

Addendum 3

For those who’ve already read this Blog and are wondering why all the changes to what was there yesterday, you’re not imagining things but it seems that my brain is reacting to the myriad of To Do lists in my head and has gone into panic attack mode –  Will we get the drainage work done before it floods again?  Will the neighbours agree to their share of the new fences? Will the AEC stop threatening that I’m breaking the law because I haven’t gotten around to completing a Change of Address form yet ?

And if you think that’s bad, take a look at the Animal Companions Change of Address form – a $680 fine if you don’t submit it within the first two weeks.

So apologies for the last two Blogs that I probably changed way too many times to correct facts and/or mistakes. You’ll be pleased to know that my brain has a clever plan for slowing me down when I start to unravel. It basically points out that I’m an idiot – as happened recently when I added washing up liquid and white vinegar instead of water and white vinegar to my sweetened grated carrots. …… perhaps a new version of Bubble and Squeak? 

Although, in my defence, the dispensers are quite close together🙄.

So after weeks of failing, only to “come good” the minute anyone arrived to fix it, our ducted evaporative cooler has finally died.

In a stroke of good luck (in a weird kind of way) it actually failed while the last repairman was here. With no way of diagnosing the problem until it stopped working, he was about to write down his phone number – with instructions to ring him immediately it happened again – when low and behold, it stopped. What are the chances? I’m crediting that to Divine intervention!

Said repairman (Mick) also warned us not to turn it back on “in case it catches fire”. Hmm……… not quite what we were hoping for!

So in the meantime, while we wait for the landlord’s decision on whether she should spend the money on repairs or invest in a new air conditioner or two, the property manager has given us a window version, which needs to be dragged from room to room and window to window and works great if you sit immediately in front of it…. or possibly on top of it.

With temperatures regularly in the thirties and forties, the problem is that one small air conditioner just doesn’t cut it….. Hmm I may have been slightly hasty with my New Year’s resolution and there it is!!! Did you notice? I went from no complaining to “Woe is me!” in a matter of weeks. So much for the New Year’s resolution!

Speaking of cutting, and on a much happier note, my cancerversary went a lot better than my last panicked appointment (Note to self: Dr Google doesn’t necessarily give the best medical advice when you think your cancer may have returned!) In fact, if all goes well, then in two check-ups’ time, I’ll be declared cancer-free and, according to Dr Otton, he’ll “cut me loose” …. is that a surgeon’s joke?

 

Just in case there’s anyone that Nigel hasn’t contacted this afternoon, I can finally announce that his transfer is about to be processed.

The officer that he’ll replace has been given his LDS (Last day of service) as the 30^th of March, which means that Nigel’s transfer should happen in either late April (after Easter) or possibly May. Time to start the inventory!

Have you ever tried to do an accurate estimation of how many cardboard moving boxes and wardrobes (Yes…. cardboard wardrobes) would be required to transport a houseful of food, furniture, clothes, crockery, cutlery, tools, yard equipment and bric a brac from one side of the state to the other?

Well, the first 2 or 3 times may have been daunting but this (sixth) time will hopefully be a piece of cake.

Once HR notifies us of the date and the removals tender has been chosen, I’ll start  the liaising process while selling off unwanted furniture, completing change of address forms, notifying medical and dental services (Cobar Primary Health actually transfers all your records to your thumb drive) and perhaps celebrating with a wine or three.

All I can say is…. Bring it on!!!!!!