A whole weekend off....far from friends, family and my beloved perfume workshop....
This morning I decided to fill it at lest partially by going to the gym. The gym is provided by Gemco, the impinging company, but we health staff get to use it too it seems....
I take the clinic hilux ( a little nervously after I managed to put a dent in the back door trying to park it quickly in the dark when I was on call the other night) and head on down....
The gym is basically a large shed on stilts with every kind of machine you could think of for torturing a body into better shape (and no, none of them go "Ping!"). I'm a tad nervous about entering into this primarily mans world on a bloke dominated mining island as a solo woman, but to my relief there's actually only two women in there sweating happily away on the treadmills...
some time later I've found out that I'm still fit enough to row for a whole kilometer and peddle a bike at reasonable resistance for another 2 1/2, and I've worked out how to use two of the machines to challenge my back and leg muscles with a reliable seeming weight, so I stagger back to the flat and collapse outside on a lounge chair to finish off Ernie Dingos wife's book on his family history.
I'm beginning to realize just how recent this all is....when I came to oz I didn't really understand that the stolen generation was really only barely my grandmothers...and in some cases my parents generation...not really even history yet...
And it makes me even more curious to find out my own grandmothers real story... It's pretty obvious from the family photos that she has a fair amount of aboriginal blood in her, but it's one of these typical Australian secret stories...and even my father didn't realize this till I actually pointed it out to him...and he knew absolutely nothing about where her mob had originally come from. I know she lived in Grafton before she came to Sydney so I guess I'll have to start looking there...
In the meantime, the late afternoon thunderstorm has come to visit, somive retreated into my caged in concrete verandah to write and smell the wonderful wet soil and spicy wet greenery smell it brings and watch the little grey geckos dashing up the walls....
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Comments
Post a Comment