It’s so DARK in here!

Why is it always so dark?!

You know . . . it’s right on midnight, there’s no moonlight and your head’s shoved face-first into the warm, sweaty armpit of the world’s hairiest Gorilla.

Yeah, it’s that dark!

“Don’t breathe or it’ll hear us” I whispered quickly.

We couldn’t move, we were TERRIFIED . . . well Jared was, not me, I was as cool as a cucumber frozen in ice. I just pretended to be scared so that Jared wouldn’t feel so bad.

My hands were sweating, like the butt of a baboon, wrapped in an unshorn sheep in the middle of summer, as I took a little mirror out, cautiously, from my Super Awesome Bulravian Utility Belt. As I poked it gingerly around the corner, (the mirror, NOT my butt) I saw a reflection, a split second reflection.

TEETH!

REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BIG teeth and from what I could see, as sharp as a doctor’s scalpel.

How the hell did I get into this mess?!

Yesterday I was at home in our tiny little crap shack in the ‘sticks’ where nothing exciting ever happens during the daytime . . . come to think of it, nothing ever happens in Agnath at night time either. I’ve seen possums throwing themselves in front of cars to become road kill because they’re sooo bored. REALLY!

When we moved out here from the city I just thought it was Mum and Dad’s really dumb idea of a bad joke. I mean I knew we were moving out to the country but this was ridiculous. We’d been driving practically non-stop all day, the air conditioner wasn’t working either and it was the hottest day in summer in about a gazillion years.

And spending the entire trip whinging, screaming and drooling dribble all over me, was my always annoying new baby sister; little Miss Smelly Melly Princess Poopy Pants . . . who of course had her usual case of diarrhoea.

Yep, if there was a category in the Guinness Book of World Records for the ‘GROSSEST, SMELLIEST, PHLEGM-FILLED HUMAN BEING’, there would definitely be a picture of my sister . . . Miss Incrediblus Stinkus Poopus Buttocks Smelly Melly.

But when we finally left the four-lane freeway behind, then the two-way bitumen for a thin, windy road and finally pulled off the dusty, swampy, pot-holed dirt track we suddenly slid to a halt, spraying a mist of dirt across the bonnet of the car. Dad leapt happily out his door and before the red cloud of dust engulfing him had cleared, he announced proudly . . .

“We’re here!”

I looked all about, in absolutely every possible boring direction. There were ROCKS, DEAD GRASS, HILLS and WAAAAAAY more dirt, but absolutely, positively, definitely NOTHING else.

“Where?” I yelled completely dumbfounded. There was just nothing anywhere in sight . . . nothing!

We were standing on the side of a ‘GOAT TRACK’ beside a termite-eaten wooden post that had been shoved down into a mound of red dirt. L o o s e l y hanging from it was an empty, weather-worn, rust-eaten old milk can that was attached by a length of frayed rope.

“This is all ours” Dad said, proudly pointing along a rock covered dirt track that led its way up to something that looked like a very old, but very large DOG KENNEL.

“And this is our new letterbox” Mum added excitedly, patting the tin can just once, which then snapped the rope and dropped straight into the dirt below . . . CRASH!

Mum obviously doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘NEW’.

It was absolutely, positively and most definitely the worst day of my entire, crappy life . . . so far.

It felt like someone had just dropped a teensy weensy little mouse on top of me

. . . a teensy, weensy, little mouse, tap dancing on top of a furry green tennis ball, . . . a furry green tennis ball, balancing on the nose of a ferret, sitting lazily on a red bowling ball . . . a ferret lazing on a red bowling ball, balancing very delicately on the back of a turkey, performing ballet . . . a turkey performing ballet on top of a quiet game of chess between a fat donkey and a very overweight goat . . . and all on the back of an African elephant.

In other words; I was crushed!!

And of course, all of this was because of little Miss ‘I’m sooo allergic to everything in the whole universe’ Jelly Melly.

Apparently we HAD to move all the way out here for the ‘clean air’, the ‘space’ and the ‘natural remedies that only the purest of nature can provide’ . . . or so Mum reckoned.

WHAT A HUMONGOUS LOAD OF BULL!

What about me!?

I didn’t WANT any more space! I didn’t NEED any more ‘fresh’ air! And ‘Bombshel Butt’ was always rolling around without a nappy on and having little accidents everywhere. . . how much more ‘natural’ could she get!? Just because Mum had bought all these weird Hippie books on how to pick some dorky flowers and strange weeds and moosh them all together to make ‘herbal remedies’. What’s wrong with getting a tablet from the doctor and jamming it down her throat?! That’s what Mum does to ME!

Anyway . . . how much ‘SPACE’ and ‘AIR’ does a baby need in a day? They can barely move, so what sort of space do they need to roll from side to side occasionally? Their lungs are about the size of a sponge and because they’re barely doing anything, then surely they don’t need to breathe too much either?!

I tried explaining to Mum and Dad how I’d scientifically figured out that if we put little Miss Painful Puss into the fish tank with a lid on top to keep out the ‘DIRTY AIR’ . . . then that would be heaps of space and air for her.

It wouldn’t have any fish in it of course . . . that would be CRUEL to the fish and they’d die from her smell for sure. So there was no need to move house; we could keep her on the coffee table.

For some reason they both got really crabby with me . . . I don’t know why, I was just trying to help!

Anyway, at least I had one good mate in Agnath. If Jared’s family hadn’t moved here a short time after us, I would have died from total boredom, or ‘AgnathIUM’ as me and Jared call it - DEATH BY Agnath! - because the only other kids around here are . . . hmmm . . . what’s another word for extremely boring and dull?

Oh and I almost forgot. Of course there’s the town CRAZY person. Every town has one loopy, NUTSO FREAK-A-ZOID. Pick a movie, any movie. Where there’s a town, there’s some weird, CREEPY, loony old man, or wart-faced old woman that everyone thinks is a WITCH. Usually they’re living in some really old, crappy, wooden shack that seems to scream its agony as it creaks and groans in the wind, with filthy broken windows staring out like EVIL eyes at everyone who passes by and the whole house falling apart around them. They usually hide behind the twisted ROTTING door until some unsuspecting, innocent little kid comes along and if that kid dares to come anywhere within earshot of the old fruit loop’s precious little crumbling pile of rubbish called a house, THEY POUNCE! Suddenly, they strike like some giant ferocious, venomous snake . . . yep, completely and utterly loopy, round the twist, Whack-job, ‘not playing with the full-deck’ nut-job and all-round total SPAZ.

So naturally Agnath had to have one of these weirdoes as well.

Me and Jared have to ride past her crappy old ‘STABLE’ on the way to and from school every day. Actually, I guess we could go through the paddock just up from my place. I reckon that way is definitely shorter, but we pretty much just love annoying the absolute crap out of the ugly old ‘toad’.

Anyway, we call the old loony’s place ‘THE STABLE’ because there’s an old nag living in it . . . HER! She has these BIG, thick, SQUARE, bright, yellow-rimmed glasses balancing right on the end of her very wide ‘butt-nose’.

Anyway, her glasses kind of match her pale, yellowing, dry, wrinkled skin. Jared reckons she looks like a knobbly old stick that’s been wrapped really tightly in a couple of layers of that plastic that Mum wraps my sandwiches in . . . and then had all the air sucked out of it. But I reckon she looks more like a kangaroo carcass that’s been mooshed into the road by a heap of trucks and then left there for a couple of weeks. . . YEAH, practically bald, really flat and a pale, wrinkled skeleton.

But rain hail or shine, every morning and afternoon without fail, she’d be out the front of her shack sitting on her pile of old broccoli boxes. And from the very first moment that she sees me and Jared riding along the road and coming towards her, she starts screaming at the top of her lungs in her world record, ear-drum-shattering pitch . . .

“Get out of my town! You don’t belong here . . . you’re all tourists. My family built this town! This is my town . . . GET OUT OF MY TOWN!!” . . . rant rant, rave rave, blah blah blah.

She even has her very own little weather pattern happening around her shack. As soon as she opens her mouth, she spits out these toxic, greeny-grey clouds as her breath begins to waft about and hover around her head . . . that’s when you know it’s about to ‘RAIN’.

It always starts as a light sprinkle of her disgusting saliva that you can actually see glinting in the sunlight, like a mist of fine rain, and very quickly, the storm of spit droplets shooting from her mouth as she raves on and on become larger and larger. Suddenly it’s a full-on hail storm as great globs of her disgusting liquid PHLEGM fly towards us and hit the ground like machine-gun fire . . . ppttt ppttt ppttt . . . ppttt ppttt ppttt . . . sending up tiny mushroom clouds of red dust all about us.

And the old goat is managing to send them further and further all the time.

Just the other day Jared rode just slightly too close to her side of the road and . . . SPLASH . . . she scared the crap out of him when she sent a really good-sized saliva globule rocketing towards us and it splashed straight into Jared’s bike tyre. It only just missed his leg by a couple of millimetres . . .EEWWW!

It’s the same thing every time she spots us or anyone else that happens to pass by her shack. Sometimes me and Jared just ride up and down past her ‘home’, back and forth, back and forth, just to see if we can get her to run out of spit. Then it gets really interesting . . . you can actually see her face starting to shrivel up more and more as she dries out . . . sort of like taking a dried out old sponge and then strangling and twisting and wringing it out with every bit of strength that you’ve got.

Yeah, we reckon she’s definitely got a broomstick parked somewhere in there.

Mum says she’s like old milk . . . sour, yellowing and getting thicker every day. No-one actually knows where she really came from or who she really is. Jared reckons she’s sort of like the dung beetles that we learnt about at school last week. Probably hiding underground for years and years with no-one knowing she was there. UNTIL one day she just popped up and started shoving her poop around, except that her dung comes from her mouth. Then when she’s pushed enough of her saliva-covered verbal poop around, she just disappears underground again.

Apparently she just turned up out of nowhere one day. Sitting there on her broccoli boxes, ranting and raving at anyone and everyone that passed.

What a completely loopy NUTSO FREAK!

One day, me and Jared decided to hide across the road from the old ‘BAT SHACK’ and spied on the loony old hag for a while, but first we had to make sure that we both put on our ‘double strength, ultra dark, security glasses’ to protect our eyes from her totally disgusting grossness. We were pretty certain that if we looked her straight in the eyes our lips would turn inside-out, our nostrils hairs would burst into flames and our eyes would end up looking like a couple of extra juicy grapes after a pile of bricks has been dropped on them.

Once we were totally protected, we took out our way cool, mini fold-out, Ultra Awesome Bulravian Secret Binoculars. We were going to watch her all day to find out if she’d trans-form back into some really gross, ugly ALIEN LIFE-FORM, which wouldn’t be much of a change really, because she was already a really ugly, gross . . . ‘SOMETHING’. It’s impossible to figure out just what ‘THING’ she might have evolved from because me and Jared have spotted about five different features from five different animals already. Yep. She’s got the nose of a bulldog, the butt of a hippo, the teeth of a wart-hog, the lips of a leech and the hair of a sloth. Actually I reckon she’s just a slobbering, sucking, slimy alien, but Mum reckons . . . “She’s just a poor old bat.”

Yeah, a DING BAT!

We were really hoping that we might catch her flying around on her broomstick or something equally interesting, but then we saw something through the binoculars that made us want to hurl chunks and take-off faster than puss leaving a freshly squeezed zit. The old bag had one of those HUGE scabby wart-like moles just below her nose. Actually she has HALF A DOZEN but this one was absolutely humongous and had four long, wiry hairs poking out of it. Three of them had grown so long that they were hanging all the way down past her top lip. They curved all the way into her mouth like thin grey straws and every time she began to flap her gums, ranting and raving, she was actually chewing on them. yukk!

EEWWW! It was SOOO gross! Hilarious, but definitely gross.

So whenever she wasn’t screeching at people passing by, which was never, two of the hairs hung around to bounce and dangle about, near her chin with a big globule of yellowish drooling saliva hanging onto them, but one of the gross hairs just stayed in her mouth . . . getting SUCKED ON! It was the fourth, smallest hair that was the funniest though. It was twisted like a miniature spring and dangled about near her top lip. So with every breath (or any other kind of wind) this gross, GREY, wiry thing bounced about and ever so lightly touched her skin. Brushing against her prune-like face as gentle as a feather, on the lip, on the cheek, anywhere it could reach with a spring. And she obviously thought it was a mozzy or a blowfly or something, because every couple of seconds she’d be flapping those wrinkled twigs wrapped in glad-wrap called fingers and swat-ting at it. She was constantly slapping herself on the cheek, whacking her ear, belting her nose and SMACKING herself all over that ugly, twisted face.

We were cacking ourselves massively. No wonder she’s so totally loopy, but those hairs in her mouth . . . EEWWW!

Jared had NIGHTMARES about it for ages. He kept seeing the long grey strands of hair coming to life and growing out of control. They’d twist and stretch and then suddenly come s h o o t i n g o u t from her wrinkled, yellowing face at the SPEED OF LIGHT. They’d begin to wrap themselves around his throat, tighter and tighter until all of his zits popped like a thousand tiny volcanoes erupting and spewing their yellowy lava puss into the air, EXPLODING like fireworks and squirting all about the room.

Every day as we passed by her shack a shiver ran up my spine and we both just about hurled veggie chunks as she spat her dribble through the air, all the while sucking on those ‘OLD GREY STRAWS’ like she was having a drink and sucking up her own phlegm.

Yep . . . living in Agnath is like living in the Dust Bowl University of Useless Information, Blowflies and Old Goats. And I’m not talking about my Aunty and Uncle’s goat farm.

One time, me and Jared were camping out in the back paddock at his place for the weekend. So we decided to jump onto our bikes in the middle of the night and head out to the town limit to do a little ‘art work’. We thought the Agnath town sign needed a little ‘make-over’. It took over a month before anyone even realised that instead of . . .

‘Agnath – GOLD DIGGING IN THE MUD’ it said;

‘Agnath – GOATS DRINKING IN A PUB’.

Yep, ever since we’d moved to our ‘CRAP SHACK’ in the country, I had to make my own entertainment to try and stay SANE. And ever since Dad went out to the old shed and just disappeared off the face of the planet I had to be “the man of the house” and “far more responsible”.

Yeah righto mum, WHATEVER!

For me and Jared it was worse than for the other kids though. In the city there were always a zillion and one things to do, all the other kids around here are ‘YOKEL’ locals. They get excited when they see a cow with more than two spots.

The most exciting thing to happen around here is the annual ‘Day Of Rural Kindness & Support’ held every Easter. D.O.R.K.S. for short.

This is the biggest social event of the year in Agnath and talk about thrilling! BULL!

All the farmers come into town with their families and the townspeople all frock up in their best tracky-daks and t-shirts. Everyone heads down to the creek where a paddock has been mowed just for the big event. Then the adults all sit around on hay bales at the bar, also made of hay bales, drinking and discussing the exciting world of animal parasites and drenching.

The way some of the kids around here are scratching all the time, mum reckons that most of them could do with a damn good drenching as well.

About the only difference to any other day is that the guys have all got clean singlets on. So it takes just a little bit longer for the blowflies to gather around their heads, but not too much longer.

The kids are either sitting around chewing on grass and trying to count their fingers, or they’re trying to take off around the back of the dunnies to sneak a half can of beer that they’ve just nicked from a table when no-one was looking.

And just like all the great big fantastic fairs that I’ve been to in the city, there’s WICKED spinning rides that make you want to throw-up, heaps of AWESOME GAMES to play and win HUGE prizes and loads and loads of extra special lollies and disgusting, sugary food to pig out on . . . NOT!

This is Agnath. So the only ‘fun spinning ride’ that there is, is to climb onto the back of the old faded red fire tanker that’s just about rusted through and hold on for DEAR LIFE while one of the ‘older’ kids takes everyone for a spin around ‘SUICIDE PADDOCK’.

It’s called SUICIDE PADDOCK because it’s actually the old town garbage tip that’s been covered over by a couple of handfuls of dirt. So every now and then a HUGE gaping HOLE just opens up and swallows WHOEVER, or WHATEVER, happens to be on top of it at the time.

Booga Boris reckons his cousin was driving a ride-on mower, getting the paddock ready one year, when a humongous hole just suddenly opened up, sucked him down and closed over again in an INSTANT. He was swallowed, mower and all. No-one ever found even a sign of where it happened, he was just gone, but Jared reckons he overheard his mum talking to Booga’s mum and they said something about “Eight years in prison orta sort him out.”

WHEEZY REESE told us that his parents reckon that’s where all the kids are ‘DROPPED OFF’. If they’re ‘good’ then they’re safe, if they’re ‘naughty’ they get swallowed, never to be seen or heard from ever again. ooohhhh SPOOKY. WHEEZY'S such an idiot!

Anyhow . . . the only games that happen at the D.O.R.K.S. fair are ‘WHO'S DOG CAN JUMP THE HIGHEST’, ‘BEST DRESSED COW POOP’ and ‘TOSS THE PET’. Actually it’s ‘BEST DRESSED PET’ and ‘TOSS THE COW POOP’, but I reckon my way would definitely be WAAYYY more fun! I tried to suggest it but no-one thinks I’m serious.

I reckon I could toss Fluff Butt, at least a hundred metres or so. All that hair would act as a sail.

Fluff Butt DID win her section in the ‘DOG HIGH JUMP’ though. I WAS SO PEEVED OFF!

TOFFEE THOMAS had been going on and on at school for weeks about the incredibly amazing mega awesome prizes. He reckoned the dog’s owner of each section was gonna get a huge bag of really yummy stuff that we couldn’t get anywhere around here, so I begged Mum to let me enter Fluff Butt, then I spent every spare second trying to teach the STUPID MUTT to jump. Every day, morning, afternoon and night, I pleaded with her, yelled, PULLED, pushed and then just two days before the festival I finally found something to make her jump . . . my secret stash of biccies. Yep, the only decent biccies in our house that aren’t made of ‘bird-seed’ or ‘good for you’. The only ones that I actually like. So of course from then on Fluff Butt would sit on her hairy backside until I gave her one of my biccies, then she’d jump once and sit back down again. . . it was SOOO painful. I even tried to save a few biccies for myself by breaking hers in half, but then she wouldn’t budge an inch until I gave her the other half. . . STUPID DOG.

I figured it would all be worth it though. I could just imagine rolling about in first prize . . . delicious choccies, sugar-coated lollies, chocolate-coated sugar, sugar-coated chocolate and heaps of other disgustingly delicious stuff that I was not going to share with anyone else, not ANYONE!

After all I did have to train Fluff Butt all by MYSELF!

On the big day, when it came to her turn to jump, she just sat there like a BIG, WHITE, HAIRY beanbag, so I took out the last three of my favourite biscuits and got her to jump. . . three times. It was actually pretty cool.

She won so easily . . . and they gave me a huge bag of really yummy stuff that you couldn’t buy anywhere around Agnath . . . a really huge bag of really yummy DOGGY TREATS!

Oh CRUD! I was NOT amused.

Anyway I figured that the whole ‘DORKS’ fair is so totally crappy that surely they’d at least have some good stuff like fairy floss, toffee apples, Pluto Pups and heaps of other teeth-rotting, gut-melting, diarrhoea-dumping, sugary, sweet stuff and other yummy foods, because everyone knows that’s what fairs are all about. . . right?

Wrong again!

This town’s version of ‘special food’ is the latest great recipe invention concocted by the locals. You know, brilliant stuff like ‘CHOCOLATE DIPPED GOATS BRAIN ON A STICK’ . . . ‘EYEBALLS ROLLED IN HONEY AND CRUSHED COCONUT’ . . . ‘COW KIDNEY ICE CREAM’ served in fresh goat hooves . . . mm mm mmmm!

Yeah, I reckon they’re just 'SIMPLY HORRIBLE ICKY TRASH' . . . or ‘S.H.I.#’ for short.

And they actually eat this stuff!!

Ruley truely!

IT'S DISGUSTING!

All the kids around here reckon it’s fantastic. Crabby reckons the ice cream is a bit ‘chewy’, but the kidneys give it a nice pink colour.

These guys are SOOO weird.

Of course this wonderfully exciting fair is held over Easter. So they find the local that’s had far too much to drink and then dress him up in a pink bunny suit that’s three sizes too big . . . and by the smell of it, it’s never been washed. He then runs around the paddock and tosses little choccie eggs into the long grass for all the kids to find.

WOW, how great is that . . . a big pink grubby bunny with really bad yellowing ‘BO’ stains under his furry armpits, stumbling about and tossing little chocolate eggs into a paddock full of cows. Cows with that same, long grass going in one end and leaving out the other, still sort of green but a whole lot mooshier and warm, so fresh that the steam is still rising from the new ‘parcels’ all over the ground. With the kids all running along behind the gross, stinky ‘bunny’ and diving face-first into the long grass to make certain that they get their share of the eggs. Then to make sure that no-one tries to nick their eggs, they shove them straight into their mouths with light-ning speed. Me and Jared have seen a couple of the little kids with STEAM coming out of their mouth and we know what that’s from. . . EEWWWWW!

Yeah, so me and Jared decided to give that little game the flick too.

But, the main attraction for the day, the one thing that all the locals have been talking about for months, the one thing that they look forward to more than anything else in this entire ‘waste-land’ . . . is the ‘COW POOPING COMPETITION’.

Yes you heard it right!

As if they didn’t have enough to do with cow poop already. I reckon they should change the name of the fair from ‘Day Of Rural Kindness & Support’, D.O.R.K.S. to ‘Cows’ Really Awesome Poop’, C.R.A.P.

I reckon if one of the locals could find a way to dry it and wear it, they would.

But anyway back to the competition. One poor cow is specially chosen, apparently it’s a very high honour to have your cow picked for the big event. Then it’s fed ‘extra special’ food the day before the fair to cause it to ‘block-up’ so that it poops big and solid on the ‘BIG DAY’. At the fair, an area about the size of a basketball court is fenced off and grid lines are painted across the grass to form squares about forty centimetres by forty centimetres. Then each square is numbered so that the locals can bet on where the cow’s very first steaming ‘dump’ of the day will land.

On the morning of the fair the cow is led into the fenced-off area and right there with everyone watching it closely, the cow is expected to poop. This can take all day . . . but let’s face it, if you had that many people watching you try to go to the bathroom, you’d probably hold it in too. When the cow finally does drop its steamy load, everyone gets all excited as they wait to hear the final results . . . BUT . . . if the great dump of dung even touches a grid line, which it nearly always does, then the judge has to get down onto his hands and knees to scoop every little bit of it up out of the grass from each of the squares that it’s landed in.

First the judge uses a silver spoon to collect all the poop inside each square, into a bucket labelled with the square’s number. The assistant judge then checks the grass patch closely to be certain that no poop has been left behind. He then stays right behind the official judge to make sure that the buckets aren’t ‘TAMPERED’ with. But before the weigh-in can happen the assistant judge has one more, very important job to do . . . the very close inspection of ‘the steamer’ in each bucket. Yep . . . to make sure there are no rocks, or other ‘STUFF’ in there, causing it to weigh more than it really should. With everyone watching closely the assistant judge breaks apart the dung and mooshes each little bit between his fingers before returning it to the bucket. And he’s not allowed to wear gloves either, that way he can’t hide stones or anything else in there to sneak extra weight into the dung.

Booga told us how someone had been cheat-ing for years by sneaking into the paddock and sprinkling gravel in the grass of their square. That way if there was any dung dropped there it would stick to the gravel which then added more weight to their dung pile. It was finally figured out when one year it was a ‘liner’ and the judge weighed each amount. Even though there was obviously way less dung in one square than the other, it was heavier. TOFFEE'S dad reckoned it was a complete coincidence that there was not one tiny bit of gravel anywhere else on the field, only in his square. What a LOSER!

Anyway, so since that year, they now rake the field before the cow goes in and the official assistant judge inspects every tiny bit of dung. The judge then carefully weighs the amount that he’s gathered from each of the squares to find the winner.

WOW . . . talk about EXCITING, it just doesn’t get any more thrilling than that.

Apparently a couple of years ago though, there was a HUGE scandal in Agnath. Someone actually snuck in another cow’s poop and dropped it onto their own square to win the prize money.

What I can’t work out is how anyone could have figured out that it was another cows manure. Even worse, why would anyone want to look at it THAT closely!?

Around here they reckon a good farmer knows which cow does which poop. It’s so they can inspect it for bugs, worms and every other type of disgusting parasite there is. RATTY HARRY reckons he’s nearly as good as his dad at identify-ing whose poop is whose . . . I’m pretty sure he means ‘the cows’.

They go out and collect the manure while it’s still fresh and warm. Then the first thing they do is to roll it around between their hands checking it for texture and softness, then they start sniff-ing it for stomach gases and other gross stuff. Finally they take it apart, bit by bit, to closely inspect the whole lot and work out exactly what the cow has been eating and how digested it is, picking out any worms and bugs that they might find along the way.

WOW! The dorks’ fair . . . I mean, the D.O.R.K.S fair, sure is exciting!

At least Jared’s got five brothers, talk about lucky. They all look the same though, skinny, tall, 29 red hair and zillions of freckles. If you lined them all up they’d look a row of ‘Pluto Pups’ that happened to be standing around when a bottle of tomato sauce exploded.

Most of Jared’s freckles are actually zits though.

I reckon we could use his face as a DEADLY WEAPON. Like in those really, really OLD WAR movies that Granddad watches. Jared could be the machine gun and I could aim him. We could shoot his deadly puss bullets at the girls as they’re leaving the school dunnies . . . WICKED!

But I’ve only got my snotty nosed little sister, Miss ‘I’m sooo perfect’ Yelly Melly.

She’s SOOO PERFECT! Just ask my Mum, she’s always boasting to everyone; Melly’s hair . . . PERFECT, her eyes . . . PERFECT, skin . . . PERFECT manners . . . PERFECT really, really, really annoying snot bucket . . . PERFECT

She’s perfect blah blah blah blah blah . . . aaahhhhh!!

Actually she’s a perfect pain in the . . . well you know what I mean.

Mum’s always ranting and raving and going on and on at me . . .

“Set a good example for your sister Sam, you’re older than her.”

“Show her how to wipe her bottom without her fingers going through the soggy paper, you’re older than her.”

“Show her how to blow her nose without her fingers getting stuck up there, you’re older than her.”

I’d really like to show her how to go and annoy someone else for a change!

I don’t see why she can’t just use her sleeve to wipe her runny nose like everyone else?! Here I am trying to do the right thing for the environment, you know . . . REDUCE – REUSE – RECYCLE.

REDUCE . . . the amount of trees being cut down and being made into tissues.

REUSE . . . sleeves. Because there’s room for at least fifteen good snot blows on each one, and . . .

RECYCLE . . . yeah, recycle the hundreds of soggy, snotty tissues by scrunching them up to use as ammunition for a game of ‘snot splatt’ at school.

Jared and me made this wicked catapult that can fling a ‘soggy snotty’ for miles, but for some reason, mum just doesn’t want us to recycle the used tissues and be environmentally responsible.

But it doesn’t seem to matter what I do, I end up getting into a heap of trouble even when I do try to teach Smelly Melly the right thing. Like when I taught little Miss ‘annoyingly perfect’ Melly Poopy Pants NOT to draw on the walls with crayons, mum yelled at me! She reckoned that somehow it was my fault that Melly Dopey Daks went and used textas all over the walls instead. And like the time I taught her that whenever we go out you should always turn off the switches to save electricity. So how come I was the one that got into trouble when we had to throw out all of the food from the fridge and freezer because Jelly Belly Melly had turned all the switches off.

What a major stink-o-rama that was!

We’d been away at Gran’s for a week and when we got back, PEE-EWW!!! You could smell it all the way from the letterbox. At first Mum thought our new inside dunny had exploded and erupted all over the place like some great sewage volcano!

But it was far WORSE.

You should have seen it. Puddles of flavoured ice cream mixed in with the blood of thawed out meat to create swirling rainbows of creamy colour. Chicken and corn soup swam amongst soggy nuggets, and chips flowed all the way across the kitchen floor and headed down the hallway in a river of spaghetti and spicy casseroles. Warm jam, liquid butter, rotten eggs and soured milk were throwing a party all over the place and everything in the fridge was invited. And absolutely everything was covered in a carpet of greenish grey cobwebs of fungussy mould. It was totally disgusting. It looked as if a Tyrannosaurus Rex had come along, lifted up the roof, chucked-up massively throughout our entire house and then replaced the roof and left. It took all night and the next two days to clean up the gross mess and I was holding back from chundering the whole time. But of course, as usual it was somehow all my fault.

I’m just glad Miss Prissy Perfect Melly isn’t going to school for a few years yet. I’ll never be able to get away from her then. Jared has to put up with two of his older brothers at school, the twins DUFAS and DORKY. They’re always acting like JERKS and try to make it look like they’re smarter than us.

Which they definitely ARE NOT!

The schools only got about thirty kids and most of them have never been out of Agnath. For maths they go outside and count the legs in a herd of cows. They get really confused if a cow moves. For literacy they read the instruction books for drenching and worming, but once a year the school gets to go on some really lame little excursion for a couple of days.

Yeah they’re HUGE all right.

One year they camped out at Itchy Mitch’s farm and learnt how to shear the sheep. Itchy reckons his dad saved a fortune on shearers, but spent a heap on sheep bandages that year. Another time they went to Mad Magda’s place where they learnt how to dig a dam. Woo hoo! But last year they camped at RATTY HARRY'S and learnt all about how to move rocks and pull out the paddock weeds that cattle don’t like to eat.

WOW! Moving rocks and pulling thistles by hand from an entire hill all weekend just so the stupid cows don’t trip over. That must have been sooooo exciting . . . NOT!

Gee me and Jared can’t wait to see where we’ll be going this year. Maybe we could learn how to dig a well using plastic teaspoons. . . yeah that would be FUN, or find out how to remove blood sucking parasites from around a cow’s butt using buttered chopsticks, oooooh how educational.

Mum reckons this year’s excursion will be AWESOME, but then again, she thinks weed-ing the veggie patch, or taking out the garbage is ‘awesome’.

The principal, Mrs Duckson, is really big and muscley. Her neck is like a concrete watermelon with veins that stick out like worms wandering all over her throat, just beneath her skin. She wears these big, black, army-type boots and skin-tight tracky dacks, she looks totally dorky. The only other teacher, Miss Croonarc, is like an annoying big sister. She looks about eighteen and is straight out of Teachers’ College. No-one really knows her age though, because every time we have a holiday Miss Croonarc comes back with a smaller nose, smaller butt or bigger chest. Mum reckons she has way too much plastic surgery and that if she has her face ‘lifted’ just once more, then she really will have eyes in the back of her head! Jared’s brothers, DUFAS and DORKY, are all ‘lovey dovey’ over her. They’re always drooling and sucking up massively to her . . .

“Can we carry your books Miss?”

“Can we clean the whiteboard Miss?”

“Can we pound on a few kids for you Miss?” . . .

suck, suck, drool, drool. Crabby Abbey follows her around everywhere too. She’s like the biggest school snot nose to ever live and she’s always trying to get me and Jared into trouble. We know that she’s only sucking up to Miss Croonarc so that she can dob on us all the time.

“The boys are throwing dead bats into the girls’ toilets Miss Croonarc.”

“The boys are sitting in the wrong spot Miss Croonarc.”

“The boys didn’t wash their hands after they went to the toilet Miss Croonarc”

How does she even know that!? I mean, it’s true . . . but how does she always know?

She’ll say anything to get us into trouble. Just because one time we ‘accidentally’ dropped slugs into her hair and another time ‘somebody’ put tadpoles into her cordial. She didn’t realize until the end of the day when she found three of them swimming around in there.

We didn’t tell her that there should have been eleven.

We’ve tried hangín’ out with some of the local guys, but they’re soooooo slow. Talking to Booga Boris is pointless, we can never understand a word he says, because he’s always stuffing his face with chocolates and any other food he can lay his huge mitts on. When he does talk, he spits food all over everyone. One time Miss Croonarc asked him a question and when he answered he SPAT a piece of chicken straight into her mouth like a rocket. She went soooooo green and was spinning around desperately trying to huck it up, but it was TOO LATE, she’d swallowed it all the way down. She ended up having to run out of the classroom for a while. Me and Jared reckon she went to the toilet to chuck. So now no-one is allowed to have any food inside, but Booga still does, we’ve seen him sneaking stuff into his mouth under his desk.

How dumb is Miss Croonarc? Booga ‘accidentally’ drops his pen every five seconds . . . but he’s actually stuffing his face secretly under his desk.

RATTY told Jared and me how they don’t have a dining table at Booga’s place. Apparently he eats faster than his mum can serve it, so they have a conveyor belt! His mum just unlocks the fridge door at meal times and starts chucking food onto it while Booga stands at the other end shovelling down his throat. They used to have a pet hamster, but RATTY reckons that one day it made the mistake of wandering onto the conveyor belt at meal time . . . it was never seen again, so every time Booga belches, me or Jared do a little ‘squeak’ just to freak him out.

Most of the other kids are just sooooo boring.

In class they can barely stay awake. Some of them spend so much time sleeping I reckon they don’t answer the teacher because they can’t remember their own name.

TOFFEE THOMAS is the school turkey, dork, nerd . . . you know, every school has one, and he’s like the gold medal winner champion turkey of turkeys. We call his big sister Tia Tantrum because she’s always chucking a sooky and whingeing over absolutely anything and everything just to get attention from the teachers. She spends so much time squealing . . . “eeeee, a blowfly landed on my nose” . . . “eeeee, that branch is pointing at me” . . . “eeeee, the leaves are jumping off the trees and attacking me”. So now whenever the teachers hear her squeal, they quickly go inside and pretend they haven’t heard her. Mum reckons whingeing kids are usually from whingeing parents and everyone around Agnath knows that TOFFY and Tantrums’ parents are the biggest whingers in town, but they have to live in Agnath to get a free dirt hill. A couple of great grandfathers ago they bought a heap of land around here. I think they grow rocks on it because that’s all there seems to be. Giant hills with giant piles of dirt, giant piles of boulders and giant piles of cow manure!

Me and Jared go sneaking onto their property all the time. We go exploring for hours, even whole weekends. We’ve found a heap of bones and old mining stuff laying around amongst the giant boulders high in the hills. Most of the BONES are really big so Jared reckons they could be from dinosaurs. Yeah, Agnathasaurus . . . extinct because it died of BOREDOM.

We’ve also overheard some of the kids at school saying that bush-rangers used to hide out in the caves somewhere in the hills around there too.

We did find one small cave only a few weeks ago and we know there has to be more, but with all the boulders and the masses of head high prickly weeds and wild blackberry bushes almost completely covering them, they’re really hard to find . . . BUT WE WILL.