Another case of "blogging under duress". Toddler energetic and frenetic. Painting and decorating the studio downstairs reaching that "last 10%" which always takes impossibly longer than foreseen. Brew club came to mine this month - IPA was brewed and bottled. It's still "green", but it tastes like ale, which is a bonus. The solar panel array is finally reaching 100% capacity for several hours on Sunny days - the buzz of the inverter as it feeds power back into the grid is a very satisfying sound. Our peach tree provided enough ripe fruit for a large crumble, and should do the same again next week.
I organised a presentation here in Nimbin by a guy from the Institute for Complementary Currencies (www.baroondollar.org). It will be a long slog to make a complementary currency actually enter circulation, but until something puts me off, I'll keep pushing the idea forward - it feels like something Nimbin should have. I am updating the progress of this side-project on twitter.
The sunny weather has warmed up the Nimbin pool - it's now a great temperature for just lounging in (and beside) on sunny days. In addition to the sunny days, there have been some great "storm season" nights: - I had always thought the expression "rolling thunder" was a turn of phrase. Last week though, I heard thunder that sounded as though a zorb the size of the death star had been filled with shrapnel, and then rolled around the ridge beyond the valley - it went on and on,getting neither louder nor quieter, but moving steadily, at around 100 kph, until it went out of earshot to the Southeast.
As Calvin & Hobbes might have it, the days are just packed - we've had a fancy dress halloween ball (I went as Rincewind, C went as Agnes Nutter). We've had 3 bub birthdays. We've had the Nimbin Blue Moon Cabaret (highlight: Rendition of the girl from Ipanema that blew that tune's elevator muzak connotations out of my mind). I've had book club, brew club, creative writing class, and . K has had her first ever swimming lessons and her first . I've made this year's batch of fresh chilli oil.
I rounded off the month with a climbing trip with mates Aaron and Jonas up Wollumbin. It's more a walk than a climb, but with my current fitness levels, I'm filing it under "climbing".
The panorama photos are views from the walk up Wollumbin.

Okie Weather

I saw the big Sydney dust storm on the news, and assumed it must've passed us by. But that same evening the sky darkened too early, and the next day there was wave after wave of gritty, chewy dust in the air, and deposited across everything, including my lungs. I'm still finding things that are covered with it and wiping them clean three weeks later.

Our genocidal campaign to rid the bottom of the garden of camphor laurels has resulted in an ever-growing view of Blue Knob and Sphinx Rock from the back verandah - I'l put a photo up once we can actually see the whole ridge of the mountain.
We have booked a local tradesman to insulate the roof, to take advantage of the federal rebate of $1,600 for insulation materials. With luck that should be done before the height of Summer, and should make a big difference to how long the house stays cool on Summer mornings.
We've been busier than ever at work - tackling multiple projects and keeping fingers in various pies, including our first ever local client - the excellent networking wizards at www.magedata.net.
I was very excited that our friends from Wisconsin, Alex and Linda, were sending us a present. Unfortunately, the Australian customs did not approve of the packet of (doubtless delicious) wild rice, and confiscated it all. Probably to make a risotto.
My latest improvement to my diet is learning how to make chocolate walnut liqueur brownies. The way I see it, at least I know what's in them (fat, carbs, and alcohol) so that's got to be healthier than eating shop-bought biscuits. There's a picture of K tucking into a plateful on her blog here.
The first weekend in October saw us at the Nimbin A&I show (what would in England be called a country faire - local crafts, farm produce, awards for best iceberg lettuce and so on). This was a rare opportunity for us to mingle with the "other" Nimbin - the respectable one. And extremely nice folk they are too.
Apart from the always excellent Perch Creek Family Jug band (shown above) the most interesting event was something I had always assumed would be very much in-your-face in Australia, but which I hadn't come across until now - snake education and awareness. Radoa did an outstanding presentation, and condensed into five minutes all the information required to not die when coming face-to-face with taipans, death adders, and king brown snakes, all of which are native to this area. Any doubts about the danger posed by the snakes the presenter was handling were dispelled by counting the fingers on his right hand. Later the same week, Ben, who is helping us sort out the studio downstairs, spotted a red-bellied black snake in a wood pile less than ten foot from the door (yes, yes, I know, I shouldn't have a wood pile ten foot from the door).
On the following Friday we took advantage of a very generous invitation from Marcus to share his campsite at Woody Head for a night (he had 2 large tents set up, and it was just him plus his daughters, so there was plenty of room). It only took an hour and 40 minutes to drive there, and it is the prettiest campsite I've seen in Australia so far, and far and away the best for a family camping trip, with a safe beach, rock pools, gum-tree forest down to the sand, and great facilities including a cook-to-order facility for those days whenyou don't feel like camp cooking.
When we got home, we discovered our mulberry tree was heavy with fruit, so we got busy picking the ready mulberries (K on a strict rota of one for her, one for the pot of course, followed by a very generous impulse to share the sweet black juice with all the soft furnishings in the house).
Now I must stop blogging and get busy making a mulberry and apple crumble. And custard.

So we drove into Lismore from the West (for once) and accidentally stumbled upon the Tender Centre. We'd been carefully ignoring everyone's recommendations for the place, but curiosity got the better of us, so we wandered in. The concept is basically a slow-motion sealed bids auction house - you examine the goods, write your offer for any you'd like to buy, and a week later they get back to you if your bid is the highest and meets the reserve. Where multiple items of the same kind are for sale, you can put a bid in for each, but only purchase the first one for which you are the winning bidder.
After tendering for several hundred dollars of impulse buys (mostly with unrealistically low bids thankfully) we made a long and relaxed day of it in Lismore.
On Monday morning I had a work meeting in Brissie, so I hit the road at 5, and came back the same evening, rolling in at 10pm. This behaviour makes for a long week.
The following weekend was Nimbin Blue Moon Cabaret Ball weekend. I now look forward to the Blue Moon cabarets with glee, and this one did not disappoint (though we didn't really participate much in the "ball" element).
The rest of the weekend was spent enjoying the sunshine in the garden, and trying to catch up on our book-keeping, which is getting ludicrously behind.
After a very full week (including brewing club, writing class, phone calls to Europe at antisocial hours, yet more book-keeping, and completely rebuilding an XP computer on Windows 7) I would have welcomed an empty weekend, but in the event a full one was much more fun:

Saturday was Rainbow Ridge Steiner school's open day, so we went along with K to get a feel for the place and meet some of the staff. My impressions were hugely positive - of the facilities, the staff, but most of all of the kids themselves. I am looking forward to K being able to go along to the playgroup there in the new year. After grabbing the leaflets (and coffee) we headed back to Nimbin, where C dropped me off at the youth club hall for Software Freedom Day. In the event this was as geeky (and as much fun) as it sounds. There was a (most functional) steampunk-style laptop running slackware, we played with phun, we gave out Ubuntu CDs, we demostrated the Wiimote whiteboard hack, we swapped open source ideas and tips, and most importantly we proselytized.
On Sunday Phil organised a roof-raising party to get the rafters up on the place he's building. I knew almost everyone there, and we had an absolute hoot - and the wood fairly flew up on top of the frame (with Phil carefully timing the distribution of caffeinated soft drinks, just as we were starting to slow in the afternoon). Once all the rafters were up, the crew were served wood-fired pizza and cold beer - altogether, a most satisfying day.

Python and PHP

In complete contrast to this time last year, the dry weather has now continued for over 8 weeks. In the last two weeks it has also gone from cold to hot during the day, with one day being hotter than any day was during last summer, by a good three degrees, which cannot be normal. The unseasonal weather has also brought the snakes out early, and they are very active as well - I've seen both adult and baby pythons around our house, and the one pictured here was asleep on our verandah table yesterday lunchtime. She left after I disturbed her, but in no great hurry.
We've taken advantage of the soil and undergrowth drying out at the bottom end of our block to get in and kill the invasive species - camphor laurel and pollonia trees mostly. The next step is to draw up a list of native shrubs and perennials to replace what we've killed, and do a big mission to Fireweheel nursery.
The dry sunny days have also made it easy to finish painting the new railings, and rip the defective ceiling panels off downstairs in readiness for the final touches to that space before the council inspector comes to give our efforts the yay or nay. To remove the panels, I used the orthodox new-dad technique of cranking up the manu chao on the stereo, then balancing on top of a stepladder with a toddler swinging off my jeans, squinting up into the falling masonry dust and prodding vaguely with a Stanley knife until each panel fell on me and toddler, and then picking myself and the toddler up and starting on the next panel. K has never giggled so much in one afternoon before in her life.
I've been drawn into the planning for Nimbin's Software Freedom Day too - I even did the notice in the Nimbin Goodtimes after swearing blind that there'd be "no more IT articles from me this year"! I'm looking forward to the event - it should be a fun social afternoon, and a good basic grounding to kickstart my almost nonexistent knowledge of Ubuntu (and apache, and PHP, and Perl, and all those other things I've scratched the surface of but nothing more).

Our friends Louis and Mbweda have moved to near the Tuntable community this week as well, so we should be seeing a lot more of them - and when we went to the monthly Tuntable hall dinner, there were at least 30 people there we knew, so we're starting to feel more part of the Nimbin community, at long last.
I'm still pursuing my plan to get a complementary currency established in Nimbin, but am also still coming to appreciate the amount of inertia that will have to be overcome. The Nimbin sustainability forum were keen when I described my plan, and one of the organisers of the Maleny complementary currency scheme (Baroon Dollars) is going to come to Nimbin to give us a presentation and hopefully provide some pointers for our next steps. Rome wasn't built in a day, and the sestertii probably weren't minted that quick either. No quantitative easing or fiat notes either. Progress.

Soiled and Bitten

At our second attempt, we managed to actually book a babysitter, get in the car, drive to Lismore, and watch a film. The film was Bruno - it is not unamusing.
There will be no photos with this month's post - K has hidden the SD card from the camera. Well, we hope she has hidden it. If went in the bin, or was fed to the neighbour's dog, then we've lost a couple of months of baby photos and our record of this Winter, which would be a shame. SD cards really are annoyingly small.
The diversion trenches I've dug under the house, on the other hand, were annoyingly long. I have had enough of being covered in soil and bent double under a low floor shovelling rocks and grit to last me a lifetime. The trenches form the belt in my "belt and braces" approach to keeping water away from downstairs, with the retaining wall and the ag-drain forming the braces. If enough rain falls to knock holes in my diversion trenches, overwhelm the ag-drain, flood the gap behind the retaining wall, and seep into the downstairs, then we'll probably have other things to worry about anyway, like buoyancy aids.
Our home-front coffee renaissance, kicked off by Keith's gift of a Gaggia Classic, has continued apace - our barrista skills, long atrophied since our days working in a North Shore Auckland cafe back in 2004, have been polished up, and I have abandoned flat whites for caffè macchiato and long blacks. Having a coffee machine at home can become a bit like being a bedroom DJ - you're dying to show off your improving skills, but because you've no-one to get a reaction from, you're also constantly doubting whether you're actually getting any better. We quickly discovered that the tamper that came with the machine was not up to the job, and invested in a proper weighty and glistening stainless steel tamper - this cost $50, but delivers a perfect puck every time, baby. I also succumbed to a certain nostalgia for hazelnut syrup - I don't even like the taste of the stuff, but it brings back happy memories.
I shall be brewing more than my morning coffee soon enough. Despite never being a great drinker of alcohol, I'm now the newbie at a local (informal) brewing club. I have the suspicion that I may be the first member to produce a batch of something that is not even recognisably beer - but it will certainly be a fun learning experience. Like any new thing, the numer of variables seems overwhelming at first - the ratios of the ingredients, the temperature, the preparation and proper disinfecting of the container, the addition of pellets to add carbonation to the finished beer and so on. Of the other club members' efforts I've sampled so far, none were bad, one was genuinely tasty, and, worryingly, all resembled (to greater or lesser extents) beer. Oh dear.
Also a learning experience, but far from fun, was getting bitten this week by a paralysis tick. I didn't get paralysed, or infected - but the doctor said I was quite lucky to escape unscathed. The little bugger bit me on the eyelid, and the eye swelled up to the point where I couldn't comfortably open it. At the hospital they removed it with tweezers, and gave me strong antihistamine. "Take 2 of these and don't drive". I thought, yeah, I've had antihistamine before, it's not that drowsy, then 10 minutes later, sat in the passenger seat as C drove me home, the pills hit and I was like a puppet with its strings cut. If I'm bitten in the eye again, I will go to hospital immediately, now I'm aware how serious it can be, and how quickly swelling can develop, leaving you with only one working eye.

Railing Against

Mandarine Waster
1. Strain the juice of 3 large, chilled mandarines into a blender.
2. Add 3 tablespoons of chilled full fat yoghurt.
3. Add 1.5 measures of chilled Cream Liqueur (2.5 if in a hurry). Baileys or Feeneys work well.
4. Blend on high for 90 seconds.
5. Pour into a chilled highball glass (no ice).
6. Decorate with a dab of fresh yoghurt and a curl of mandarine peel.
7. Dispose of the pips, peel, and fruit pulp in the compost, because while the object is to use up the mandarines as quickly as possible, we don't want to add to landfill, kids.

Mandarine season is upon us, and with it our predictable panic and lack of preparation. In addition to the above recipe, we have had great success with mandarine curd, and also marmalade - though a combination of citrus is required for this.
After a chance meeting in town, Lynne and Richard showed us a place that does a good flat white in South Lismore, cunningly hidden in the garden of a furniture shop. There is a tiny sign on the road, and you have to walk through the furniture shop and almost into the garden at the back to get to the cafe area, where seats are arranged amongst the plants and garden furniture, looking out over a pond and the woods to the West. Not only is the place on our way out of town, but almost unique in Lismore in having somewhere outdoors to sit which overlooks some countryside. Richard also walked me around the native plantings he's started on his block, and I took copious notes.
Now that Winter is here, I've made a start on planning the native plants which will replace the invasive camphor laurels at the foot of our garden. The emphasis is on smaller plants which won't stop the breeze coming up the hill, or block our view of Blue Knob to the North (which was completely obscured by the 50 foot tall camphors). I'm also hoping to find a mixture of colourful flowers, winter berries, and interesting leaves, but most of the more colourful varieties are native to parts of Australia a bit North of here, and I'm unsure how much leeway I should give myself. Climate change could see the more Northerly plants moving into this region in my lifetime anyway.
Stefan and Iris have had a beautiful baby girl, Nala, and we have taken K around to meet the new arrival. She spent the next two days pointing at every picture of a baby and grinning manically.
The project (literally) around the house this month has been replacing the railings on the balcony - this photo shows one of the three stretches of railing we have replaced (and some of the old uprights in a pile). I didn't really think through the number of uprights in the structure, and in hindsight, I should have invested in an electric screwdriver, especially once we'd decided to go with hardwood for the new uprights. The new toprail has one massive advantage over the old one however - it is wide enough to stand your beer on.
When not rebuilding the verandah, coddling the toddler, doing my day job, or lying in a dark room listening to whalesong, there has been time for a little partying - not least of which was a rather excellent do at new friends' Chris & Kirrily's place; Kirrily's Alice-in-wonderland themed 40th birthday bash. I just wish I'd thought to undercut the other hatters by pricing my hat at 10 shillings and fivepence.

Midwinter Lights

The main event in Lismore in June is the Lantern Parade. Somehow we managed to miss it in both 2007 and 2008, so we were lantern virgins (and somewhat miffed that we would never now attend the event as dinkys, with the attendant getting drunk and staying out late privileges. Despite unseasonal, torrential rain, we all had a great time, and K's adrenaline rush from all the lanterns was fully catered for by the fireworks which followed.

Later in the week we had to run back up to Brissie to drop Rose at the airport. We stayed at a hotel in Kangaroo point so that C could walk in to the CBD and I could walk to work in West End, and I did a couple of days in the office. We also caught up with Halim again at cafe Checocho - the place is going from strength to strength, a veritable oasis of chess, BYO Indonesian food, great coffee, books, live music, and pavement people-watching.

My ex-colleague Keith has upgraded his coffee machine to an even higher-end model. He asked if I could give his Gaggia Classic a good home. I didn't need to be asked twice, and it was also a good excuse to stop off at the Gold Coast for (good) coffee and a catch-up. I've paired the Gaggia with a Sunbeam 0480, and the first flat whites from freshly roasted Nimbin beans will be rolling off the production line tomorrow morning, in time to head off Mondayitis. No matter how good they are, I have resolved not to let them cut down on my time in the third place. Besides, working from home as I do, the third place is my second place. Or something.
Back home in nimbin, it's mandarine season again - there will be mandarine fool, mandarine compote, and mandarine jelly, as there was last year. This year, the new experiment is mandarine curd. As I write this, I have just bottled 2 kilos of the stuff, and we will discover tomorrow morning if it is delicious when spread on freshly baked wholemeal loaf.

Barely blogworthy: Many, many pieces of veranda rail have been strapped to the roof-rack, driven home, cut to shape, sanded down, stained, screwed into place, treated, and varnished. Soon now, we will have railings of legal height.
Much, much high quality red gum has been delivered and stacked on said veranda. The cool winter nights are banished by our blazing log fire. Much, much road-base was delivered at the foot of our driveway, and much, much shoveling was required to spread it. Many, many kilos of cement and breeze blocks have been stacked under the house, waiting patiently for me to transform them into the final stretch of retaining wall.