So last night I didn't drive the eliminator, but was on the sidebuster instead. Pretty macho names, huh? A sidebuster is a ripper that busts the sides out of the hills (hence the name), then pulls the hills back up instead. As there is a lot of load on the tractor doing this, it is only a four row rig instead of the eight rows that the in-crop implements are. It still keeps the tractor down to about 4.5 k's though; this, coupled with the fact that nothing goes wrong with it and it is pretty much self-steering means that you get pretty bored. You might say that your mind wanders, even after you take over an hour to find and repair a wiring fault. My mind wandered to blogging - and suitable subjects to post about. I started off with a subject I am going to post about (not tellin'), from there it drifted off to a girl I knew when I worked at the CQ swimming pool, the first aircraft my father saw, another girl I knew at the pool, how to win back ex-girlfriends, animal welfare, a third girl I knew at the pool and on and on. The only common link in all of it was the pool and more specifically the kids who were there at the time. Therefore I'm going to tell you a few stories of my pool daze. The first one will probably get the attention of the paedophiles and their hunters.
It must have been late September or early October because I don't remember anybody using the two outdoor pools except for a girl about twelve years old and her younger brother. I don't remember their names but they were regulars. Good kids, loud and energetic, happy kids, very polite. In the wading pool was a fountain made of stainless steel about 700mm high, one jet of water going straight up about 1200mm and a circle of smaller jets coming out sideways around the top.
The kids had been playing around for about half an hour when I noticed the girl behaving..., oddly. I thought that I must be putting an incorrect interpretation on things, so I went into the manager's residence - which was attached to the kiosk/office and got the manager's daughter; who was the wife of the vet, to come and give me a second opinion. I didn't give any hints, just got her to come and look at 'something' for me. She came out, took one (un-hinted at) look at the young girl and Vet's Wife's eyes bulged out, her jaw dropped, her eyebrows shot up, one hand covered her mouth and she didn't breathe for at least thirty seconds.
The young girl was in the wading pool, standing over the fountain, occasionally adjusting her position so that the main jet of water was spraying on her - in the words of Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction - holiest of holies. Every now and then she'd go off and play with her brother, usually after he had splashed her, then it was straight back to the fountain.
After a couple of minutes when Vet's Wife had got over her initial shock and had subdued the urge to burst into laughter she said "I know one little girl who isn't so little anymore."
Then followed a long discussion about masturbation in general and female masturbation in particular. Vet's Wife never took her eyes off the young girl the whole time. Eventually VW said "You know, I don't think she even realises she's doing it. She couldn't, or she wouldn't be so blatant about it."
Me: "What should I do about it?"
VW: "DON"T FUCKING TELL HER!"
There was a girl in the swimming club, K, who started High School the first summer I was at the pool. K was - and still is - the prettiest girl I have ever met. Nice kid to go with it, probably also the best behaved kid I have ever met, too. In fact K was so pretty that one Sunday evening I was at the local Leagues Club with my mad Scottish next-door neighbour, to whom I spoken about K but who had never met her, when he said "That girl you told me about is here in the restaurant with her boyfriend. I was up on most of the swimming club kid goss and didn't know she had a boyfriend so I wandered past the restaurant to check him out. It was her Dad, who still looks like he's about thirteen. The point is, Jock knew who she was just because she was so good looking.
In the first year of high school, all the kids were put through their Bronze Medallion. Part of this involved 'rescuing' somebody and towing them back to shore, fifty metres each way. The P.E. teacher (actually, it's H.P.E. these days) explained this to the assembled class, then told the kids to split into pairs and take it in turns rescuing each other. A fist-fight broke out between the two boys nearest to K over the right to rescue her. K, in the meantime, had partnered with another girl.
There was another girl in the swimming club (there were boys, too, but most adolescent boys are much less likely to: a) do anything interesting, b) go near an adult or c) not be annoying.) who, were I about six or seven generations younger, I would have chasing her around like a dingo bitch on heat. L wasn't all that pretty (she was kind of cute in that Martina Hingis/chipmunk kind of way), but she was intelligent, quick-witted and had the physique that comes from six or seven years of increasingly intense physical training. Over the time I was at the pool L and I became pretty good mates. Actually I became good friends with a lot of the kids. One of them joined the Navy and served in the Gulf. Once during a swimming carnival a lady from another town came up to me, pointed at L, who was doing a few slow laps in the indoor pool, and said "You'll have to stop her doing that, it's just not right."
Me: "What, warming down?"
Lady: "No, that other thing, it's just not right." Look of stern disapproval, then she went back outside, leaving me confused. When L had finished swimming I told her what the lady had told me. L laughed and said "OK, I'll stop."
"Stop what?"
"Giving your phone number to all the good looking women I see."
"What did you do that for?"
"Well, you know... You haven't had a regular woman since you got rid of (ex-girlfriend), I've got brothers, I know about urges and there are lots of women out there. You should be grateful."
What could I say, she had good taste. A couple of the women actually called, but only to let me know what happened.
OK, boy story. During another, smaller carnival, the mother of one of the boys in the club came up to me and told me that her boy had got a gumnut caught in his bellybutton. I didn't bother asking how he had managed to do this, it seemed pointless. I tried a few tricks, nothing worked. I also made a suggestion which was rejected, so the boy was sent over the road to the ambulance station. They handpassed him on to the hospital, where my suggestion was taken up: they drilled a blind hole into the gumnut, inserted a screw into the hole and - using the medical equivalent of a pair of pliers - grabbed the crew and ripped the gumnut out.