Mate/Poppy/Turtle update

What a crazy week last week was! The most popular character on this blog – Mate, the turtle – decided it was all too much.. actually, no, I’ll go back to the beginning..

A few posts back, I mentioned that K, the love, and I, had moved into a new apartment. And one of my concerns was that we have a balcony with gaps in the balcony that a silly little turtle could fall through.. So, I blocked up all of the gaps in one very busy afternoon – all the gaps around the bottom of the balcony.. (you can all guess where this is going). This was the only gap left:

The last remaining bastion of hope for my escapee turtle

Saturday, I went to meet a girlfriend for coffee and got a frantic phone call from K, saying, “the turtle is gone.” I thought he was joking but made my way home incase he wasn’t.. and he wasn’t. At all.

There was no other way for the turtle to escape than through the very narrow gap (we are talking – that turtle must have breathed in tighter than me on a Saturday night in leggings). The only problem being that after the gap – there is nothing but a 5 metre drop.. Straight down to the concrete below..

But there was absolutely no sign of him. Mate was gone. And no matter how much I prodded the grass around the pond near our building, I knew it was futile. There were tears. And lots and lots of guilt. But mainly, there was complete bewilderment: 1. How the hell did the turtle manage to get itself through the gap. 2. How did it survive the fall (as in – why wasn’t it a bloody mess at the bottom). And 3. Where did the little bugger go?

By about Wednesday, K had convinved me to put up some signs saying that we had lost our pet.. I was reluctant as was already feeling guilty enough – I didn’t want to put up a sign, only to get no response.. but I did. And sure enough, two days later – at 7.30 on Friday morning, someone rang.. they had found the turtle and taken it to the local vets.

So, long story short, a multitude of phonecalls later, we located the turtle – curiously, at a vet on the other side of the bridge, which happened to be about 5 minutes away from my work.. We went for a visit on Friday night, before being able to pick her up on Monday. You’ll notice, I said “her”… The vet let us in on a very interesting piece of information – and that was that Mate, our favourite “him” or “it”, was in fact “Materella” – ie. Mate was a girl-turtle.

(* I just want to say that I blardy always knew that – that turtle always had WAY too much attitude to be a boy turtle.. and the fact that it has incessantly been trying to escape – she was singing “I am woman, hear me roar!” as she was bungee-ing (sans rope) off the balcony!)

Anyway, the turtle is back – albeit a wee bit of it shell is not. Picture attached. And we have named her “Poppy” – because we got her back on Anzac Day weekend.. the Aussie-Kiwi Connection as well – for those in the know!

Here are the damages – thank the flying spaghetti monster that they aren’t worse!

Fun times at Sydney airport..

So I’m back in wet, rainy, miserable Melbourne – only kidding!! I wrote that to get a rise out of all you Victorians. Let’s start again.

So I’m back in fabulous Melbourne and it’s great to see Miss Loulou (who is a Sydney friend who happens to be here) and of course, flatmate-that-I-love (who is now ex-flatmate-that-I-love). V festival is going to be great tomorrow with a bunch of crazy chicks..

Anyway. My blog isn’t about Melbourne. It’s about Sydney. Sydney airport to be exact. And how I got there at 4ish yesterday afternoon for my 5pm flight.. At 5pm I was told to come back at 6.30 for an update on where our plane was.. At 6.30 I was told we would be leaving in an hour. At 7.30, same story.. The plane finally took off at 9.15. NINE FRICKIN FIFTEEN! I wouldn’t have minded if they had told me at 4 or 5 that it was leaving at 9.15. I could have headed home, plonked in front of the TV (probably with some plonk!) or I could have read a book on my couch, or I could have called a friend and hung out for a few hours, hell, I could have gone home for some self-lovin’!! I could have done ANYTHING with my 5 hours.. but no. Instead, I lugged around a laptop bag as I went between the bar and the departure gate waiting for updates.. which of course was as far away from the bar as it was possible to be!

By the time we got to Melbourne, it was late and all my friends (who I had planned to have dinner with) were asleep. AND because I’d been bored and chatting to every man and his dog during my 5 hour wait, the battery on my phone was dead. And the $60 cab fare back to the city is always a winner to top it all off. Oh hang on, to top it off PROPERLY, is the torrential rain that has poured all day today. Awesome. Love it.

My suicidal turtle

Mate, the turtle, made the journey with K (the love) and I up to Sydney. He hated the travel in the shoebox so much that he sulked for two week after we arrived – to the point where K was treating him like a teenage son: “Is that turtle going to get up today? It’s 11 o’clock?” or “Is the turtle going to grace us with his presence this afternoon?” or my personal favourite: “All that turtle ever does is sleep his day away! Doesn’t he have things to do?”

It took me a few days to convince K that in actual fact, the turtle did not have things to do.. see life is pretty simple when you’re a turtle.. You get up, you maybe crawl out from under the towel your very kind owner has put you under the night before, you mope around the place, going nowhere in a hurry, you eat some beef heart, or turtle tucker, or if afore-mentioned owner is being really lazy, pellets, you maybe do a poo, have a swim, and then go back under your towel for another 36-48 hours of sleep. It’s a good life if you can get it..

So why then, is mate the turtle now a little bit suicidal? We have moved into an apartment building and we have a balcony. (You have probably already guessed that we aren’t on the first floor!) And unfortunately for us, Mate can fit under the railings of the balcony… and doesn’t seem to have any qualms with stretching his elongated neck over the edge to see what is all those metres below – with me holding him tightly so he doesn’t accidentally stretch too far. I’ve had some friends staying (the Irish princes) and they suggested that surely the turtle was too smart to throw itself off the ledge.. but I don’t think so. Turtle’s brains aren’t very big, you see, and I don’t think their spacial awareness is as.. existant.. as ours. Besides which, even if hewas spacially aware, that turtle is a risk taker – I have seen it do some very, very dumb things..

So – I spent a very industrious afternoon making “turtle safety barriers” to go under the balcony railings – I’m not sure why you cant buy them, I’m sure there must be a huge demand for them.. and do you know what the turtle has done ever since I thwarted his kamikaze attempts.. that’s right – went and sulked under the towel – I haven’t seen him for days!!