Lucky for me that I am used to reading some Arabic which has no vowels at all, or I'd never found the hand sanitiser when I visited the Commonwealth Bank to draw out some money to pay off my mate Troy who's helping me with the treehouse.
It's raining today which makes for a welcome restday. I spent time in the pool, and then rescued some more books from my favourite op-shop: a beautiful hardcover edition of "Australia - as painted by Percy F.S. Spence and described by Frank Fox in 1910"; "Mount Buggery to Nowhere Else - The Stories behind Australia's Weird and Wonderful Place Names"; "The Accidental Billionaires - Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook" by Ben Mezrich; and a lovely UQP edition of "Norman Lindsay on Art, Life and Literature" which I had never even heard of before.
Oh, and I almost forgot because I had already started reading it in the car coming home (Padma was driving!) which is where I had left it: "The Art of Belonging - It's not where you live, it's how you live" by Australia's well-known social researcher Hugh Mackay, the very same who also wrote "Advance Australia ... Where?", "Reinventing Australia", "What Makes Us Tick?", and many more. Read some of them on archive.org.
I could've spent all day inside the op-shop as they were playing the old songs: Marianne Faithfull's "As Tears Go By" (echoes of Namibia; are you reading this, Karl-Heinz?); Neil Diamond's "Hot August Night" (back to Camp 1 at Panguna); and "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" sung by Lobo (which took me back to # 7 Komin Kochin Avenue in Rangoon).
Anyway, I'm back at "Riverbend" now and it isn't half-bad. As Hugh Mackay so rightly wrote, "It's not where you live, it's how you live."
