Muster Musings

When Cyndi told me last week about her plans for pulling a 4WD on Sunday at the Ute and Truck Muster in Innisfail, I thought I'd be able to take some photos and write a blog post about the event. However, other mysterious forces came into play and conspired against me. I feel I didn't do a very good job on the photos and I thought I'd explain why. 

I woke on Sunday morning feeling very seedy. Yes, I'd had a few drinkies the night before, but not enough to explain the way I was feeling. Little old ladies have annoyed me for years with their inability to describe what "squamy" felt like after I'd been called to treat them as a paramedic. After Sunday morning I think I have a pretty good idea of what squamy feels like. 

It seems to sum up quite nicely the gurgling, churning, cramping,  just-about-to-vomit-feeling I experienced. I can't say if weapons-grade farts are part of feeling squamy but they are a part of drinking Guinness, so I'm not sure whether I can officially put that down under the confirmed signs and symptoms of squamy. However, I can testify that Cyndi wasn't the least bit impressed with my swamp gas aroma and banned me from doing anymore, anywhere in her vicinity. In fact, a suburb away was probably still too close. 

I rallied though. Cyndi dosed me up with her herbal remedies, and I eventually got my act together, sorted out my camera gear and off we went to the Muster. I have to admit though, my heart wasn't in it. The cramping had returned and I was more worried about accidentally opening up a very different aperture to the one on my camera. 

The announcer explained that Ty Williams, the footy player, would soon be parachuting in. I saw a photographer walking out to the landing zone to take photos and briefly considered explaining that I was a JCU journalism student hoping to get closer to the action. I then calculated the distance from the landing ground to the safety of the nearest toilet and decided against it. I wasn't wearing my brown pants and certainly had no intention of upstaging Mr Williams with a heart-stopping free-fall of my own.

For a nano-second, I even considered taking the ride in the crane to get a birds eye view of the crowd and the show grounds, but the same distance from toilet equation came into play, this time multiplied by a constricting harness and the fact that a crane driver, many metres below me would need to let me down, before I let myself down. The added danger, of course, was if the accompanying nausea got too much for me while dangling over the crowd. A family's day out could be ruined by an ugly incident along the lines of "Look Dad. Is it a bird or a plane?" "Neither son, it appears to be last night's garlic prawns and a couple of pints of Guinness".

So I just pottered about, taking some ordinary looking photos and cheering on Cyndi in the 4WD-pulling race. Oh, and to the bloke who started looking under his ute just after I walked by, your LPG tank wasn't leaking, that was me. Sorry.