The Horror Continues in Hobart

Lottie

I wake at crazy o’clock (otherwise known as 8am) and as I stagger out of bed I am met by a frozen wall of icy cold air. My first task for the day is to get the wood fires stoked up and roaring so that I don’t freeze to death. I am to spend the next three weeks here in a 110 year old house with five very draughty chimney’s, that not only let the freezing cold air in if not roaring but also the rain, the birds, flies and the odd bee.  ‘What have I walked into’ I ask myself as I shiver uncontrollably.

My mother had just received a new delivery of wood a few days before I arrived which was good, but it arrived split in halves instead of quarters which didn’t fit into the fireplaces, which was bad, for me, as I was informed that it was my job to split it into fireplace friendly pieces.... faint... was she mad!

Now you have to understand that I don’t do things like this. I don’t clean the house, I don’t wash the cars and I certainly don’t split the wood. What was my mother thinking? I am a lady, not the local handyman! What will splitting this wood do to my nails for goodness sake and if I get blisters she will never hear the end of it. What if I chop my foot off, I have heard of all sorts of nasty accidents when it comes to playing with wood. I am not in the best physical health either. I have an illness, the consequences of which results in me being in pain every day, and I am weak. My back is bad, it goes into spasm if I climb stairs, so how on earth was I to wield a heavy log splitting axe about like a lumberjack. But my step father has recently died, my mother has a chest infection, probably bordering on pneumonia, due to the lack of heat in this igloo of a house and there is no one else to do it.

So out I go, out to the huge stack of wood in the back yard, to attempt to split one piece of wood, that was my goal, one piece. I have no idea what I am doing but I pick up the splitter which I can barely lift and attempt to hit the log. The upwards stroke was ok, the downwards stroke was ok, and it even hit the wood, which was ok. But it bounced off the wood with no more than a tiny indentation and landed half buried in the ground in front of my feet. I do a quick check of my limbs, yes they are still intact, so I give a huge sigh of relief, then prepare for a second swing. This time I hit off centre resulting in the piece of wood crashing to the ground as a little chip went flying through the air and the axe thingy landed sideways on the ground under the wood. ‘This is going to be a long day’ I say to myself as I pick the piece of wood up and study it to see if I had cracked it or split it or done anything at all to it. I hadn’t, other than making that little chip fly through the air the wood looked just as it had before, with that faint indentation from my first attempt. I put that piece of wood aside, after making the assessment that it just can’t be split and look for a new piece of wood. I find one with a crack in it and I think ‘ahh, this one looks easier’, and I take aim for my third hit.

The pile of wood

And what a great hit it was too, I managed to connect with the log, I managed to penetrate the surface, and I managed to get the splitting axe thingy firmly stuck inside the piece of wood never to move again!  ‘Oh dear’ I said to myself, ‘at least my limbs are still attached and my back seems ok, but how on earth do I get this splitter axe thing out of the piece of wood’? I attempt to lever it out to no avail, I attempt to counter lever it out using my foot as the counter lever but still it won’t budge, so I throw my arms up in the air and walk away.

After focusing, and figuring out how to detach the splitter from the wood, I manage to actually split my first log which gave me the biggest sense of accomplishment I have had in years. In fact I was so proud of myself I decided to split another piece of wood and started looking for the perfect piece to chop.

I found what I thought was the perfect piece of wood and naturally it was at the back of the wood pile, but that was not going to deter me, and I lean over and  pull with all my might and the log obliges and allows me to drag it free. Now just a warning, this is where things start to go drastically wrong.

As I am pulling on this piece of wood to bring it forward, it dislodges a second piece of wood and both pieces fall towards me. The ‘perfect piece’ was not so perfect after all because as I lift it up, it is far too heavy for me and I lose my grip. As the wood falls towards my waiting foot, the second piece of wood tumbles into my other leg, bouncing off and landed on my mother’s brand new tiny 4 month old puppy which had chosen this bad moment to run over to see what I was doing.

I was unaware of the dogs presence until I heard her scream (yes she screamed like nothing I had ever heard before), I looked around to find the back half of her body hidden beneath the huge log of wood. I totally freaked out and let out an involuntary scream when I saw what I had done. I was frozen there for what seemed like an eternity, screaming as I watched the puppy trapped there, as the realisation hit me, that I had just killed my mother’s puppy.

But then I realised that the puppy was still screaming and I was still screaming right along with her. I grabbed the piece of wood and flung it off her as she continued screaming and as she looked right in my eyes with so much fear that tears started to well in my own eyes. I picked her up, as we both continued to scream, and I ran towards the house, towards my mother who was inside. 

My mother was so calm, she took the puppy from me and said ‘It’s ok, I thought Lottie was inside with me, we will take her straight to the vet’. But the moment the puppy was in her arms, she stopped screaming, she calmed down and she wagged her tail. Mum placed her gently on the floor and she jumped up and ran straight back to my mother’s arms. I thought I had broken her back, I thought I had crushed her, I thought I had killed her, yet here she was running around and wagging her tail. We checked her all over, there were no broken bones, there was no blood and she could move every limb. She could bark and she could eat and she jumped up to my mother’s lap.

From the bruise materializing on my shin, it appears the piece of wood not only hit me first but that I had also taken the whole weight of it so it just came to rest on the dog in such a way that no damage was done. I started to shake, I couldn’t get the image or sound of her screaming out of my head for hours afterwards. I was in no condition to attempt to split any more wood that day, I just found the smallest pieces of wood I could and we made do the best we could.

It has been a week since the accident and Lottie is just fine. She is running around like nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened to her. She is as cheeky as ever but she tends to stay well away from the wood heap now, and hasn’t chewed off any pieces of bark to play with since that day. I don’t go near the wood myself unless she is firmly locked inside the house behind not one but two closed doors. I have manage to split a few more pieces of wood as the days go on, but I have also learnt how to squeeze huge logs of wood into a little fireplace and I have only burnt myself once so far.  I am here for three weeks, my first two days were a disaster, surely things can only get better from here on in.

Cheeky Lottie

Day one of 3 weeks in Hobart

The alarm rudely wakes me at 7.30am and I stumble out of bed and straight into the shower to wake up. My husband shouts from the bedroom as he opens the curtains that there is a blanket of thick fog outside. I wonder why he is telling me this but answer ‘oh is there’ and rush to get dressed and finish packing my bags so we can leave on time. I move slowly in the mornings, especially at ‘insane o’clock’.

Racing out of the house we manage to leave for the airport on time. As we approach the top of the hill just outside of town and enter the freeway, we see beautiful fog laying low in all the valleys of the pastoral landscape beside the road and I think to myself ‘Wow, if only we had time to stop and take photos’. It was so spectacular that I couldn’t have wished for a better morning as far as photography was concerned. I mentioned this to my husband as we drive over a bridge giving us an awesome view along the river disappearing into nothingness, ‘that I had never seen such magnificent fog’. And he answered, ‘Yeah, it’s amazing what you can see when you make the effort to actually get up in the mornings’. This ‘dig’ at me was the result of my very late nights of recent times spent on the internet resulting in me missing most mornings.

I was oblivious to the fact that this thick pretty fog was seriously threatening my departure just over one hour from now.  I didn’t realise this until the last possible moment, until I was walking to my plane on the tarmac (I was flying with Jet Star) and I thought to myself, ‘wow check out that fog, that reminds me of that TV show where the airlines are grounded because of the fog’. Then I thought ‘Fog, oh no, this could ruin everything’.

You see my schedule was far too tight in reality and had no room for errors, none at all.  My plane was to leave at 11.20am and was due to arrive at 12.35pm, my mother was picking me up from the airport and we were to drive straight to the hospital to drop her off as she had to be there at 1.15pm. She was having an operation, that is the whole point of me being in Tasmania, to look after her. The drive from the airport to the hospital would take 20 minutes if all went well so we had a twenty minute buffer zone up our sleeves.

Of course 20 minutes was, in reality, nothing. Although my plane boarded on time it didn’t leave on time, it left 15 minutes late. The door to the pilot’s cabin was open and I could see them looking at maps while a member of the ground crew looked on, it didn’t look good. I was thinking, gosh if they don’t know the way by now, we are never going to get there on time. I was getting nervous but we finally managed to get off the ground and the flight seemed to take forever. Usually on the one hour flight you barely get to finish reading the in-flight magazine, but I finished before they informed us at the half way mark that we had started our descent into Hobart and that decent seems to take even longer than the ascent.

As we were landing I could see snow out of the window all over the mountains and valley floors, well it looked like snow. I had to ask the man sitting next to me, ‘excuse me, is that snow out there’? To which he replied ‘Yes I believe it is, and I am told it is only 5 degrees in Hobart also’.  This shocked me as I really hadn’t given any thought to how cold it would be in Hobart, it just really didn’t cross my mind. I mean I knew it was the last stop before Antarctica and I knew it was always freezing down there, but it just never entered my mind that I would be cold down there and I certainly never thought there would be snow.

So as the reality sunk in that it was snowing down there and I was in nothing more than a long sleeved t-shirt, it dawned on me that I really should have given this trip a little more attention.  But now was not the time, now, it was too late.

So the plane lands 12 minutes late and I forgot to allow time to grab my luggage. I try to phone my mother but there is no signal in the terminal. I look around and everyone else is having trouble and holding their phones up in the air to look for a signal also. The luggage finally starts to come out and I will my luggage to be one of the first out. Miraculously it works and I find super strength and grab that case like it was a tissue box and I am out that terminal door in a flash.

By this time it is 12.55pm and my mother starts the dash to the hospital. Somehow we get a good run and make it to the hospital only 5 minutes late. Don’t ask me how everything managed to work out but it did. Gosh remind me to never cut things that close again, it was far too intense.

But the drama was not yet over, I had to drive my mother’s car home, alone, a car I had never driven before. Find my way to her house, which I had only visited twice before, in a city I had never driven in before, down all those crazy one way streets. Then, I had to find my way later that night, in the dark, back to the hospital to collect her again.

Amazingly I navigated the roads well, found the house, released the dog into the elements and unpacked my bags. Then, I was alone, in that huge ancient, 100 year old house with nothing to do. The silence was overpowering, being alone was so foreign to me, I am totally out of my comfort zone and I don’t like it at all.

Hours later after dusk it is finally time to venture out and retrace my steps back to the hospital to collect my mother which I do surprisingly well. Mum is doing well but her pulse is only 45 so we have to wait around for it to rise a little. At last we can go home so I walk my mother carefully to the car which I have parked as close as possible to the entrance of the hospital. We climb into the car and I start the engine and put the gear into ‘drive’ to reverse out of the car space.

CRUNCH, as I look through the rear view mirror the car surges forward into the garden bed in front of me and as I slam my foot on the brake I am shocked to realise what I have just done. Mum, who is still under the influence of the anaesthetic, says ‘woops, never mind, try again’, and I quietly freak out as I select the correct gear and timidly leave the hospital carpark. Welcome to Hobart, Daisy.