Solstice, Xmas, and New Year

Final new decade's resolution: Blog at least 45 times in the 48 weeks that are left of 2010.
Party season is more or less over, and not a day too soon.
Noven and Ngatina kicked things off - as pagans they have a jump on the christians (and the rest of us defaultarians) by having their big party on the solstice. They put on an amazing spread, and as C & I were able to leave K with my mum, much fun was had without having to worry about bedtimes or disrupted sleep patterns (except for ours).
K's birthday was next - C and F organised a toddlers' bash on the deck, and the kids were amazingly fun and friendly - nary a tantrum between them in over 4 hours, and actually sharing their toys and playing together on the swing and slide.
Last year our Christmas day was somewhat desultory, but this year Junior and Vanessa had us round to their new place. People were out in numbers, and Junior kept the braai turning out food at a rate of knots - it was a Christmas day to remember, not least for those adults kidnapped and held captive upstairs by the roaming bands of feral-child prison guards.
The next day, boxing day, Steffan and Iris had a party by the creek at their place, and again people were out in force (some of them, clearly, not having slept since the day before). The temperature was in the high 30s by the afternoon, so a swim in the creek was welcome.
Amongst our friends heading off to Woodford were K&C, keen to have someone look after their place while they enjoyed the festival. My mum volunteered to feed their chooks and keep their swimming pool in good order, and we took advantage by leaving K there overnight a couple of times - bliss. There were a couple of rest days, and then a full-on NYE party at Bishops Creek. No photos from that one, as this is a family blog and the theme of the fancy dress was "lingerie". Let's just say that Junior proved that tight lycra tutus are available in a size 26 in Australia.

Fuck CleanFeed

Stephen Conroy, apparently, wants some.
Mandatory blacklisting, nationwide?
We'll fight this, politically, technically, media-wise, and directly.
And we'll win.
I urge everyone to sign up to EFA and NoCleanfeed updates, and to help out, protest, donate, or all three if you can.
This is a line in the sand. For our (and our children's) freedom, this filtering plan must be stopped, and will.
The world noticed the groundswell of public anger that kept filtering off the agenda in NZ. Let's make the same thing happen here.
www.TheGiftofCensorship.com is a good start.

Urbeach, Real Beach

This is the longest gap I have left between blog posts in almost three years. The occasional hiatus is good - it teaches me a lesson.
We threw a fondue party for friends. It was great. People turned up with everything from specialty breads to spicy courgette sticks, and we made a traditional swiss-stye emmenthal fondue, and a chocolate fondue for afters. I had feared it would be an inappropriate summer meal, but the opposite was true: we put the fondue kit out on the deck, and people piled in with the fresh veggies and bread and so on, and then arranged the dipped sticks on their plate to cool, and ate them at their leisure.
The following weekend we headed South for a beach camping trip at Woody Head, and made side-trips to check out Yamba and Maclean. Maclean struck me as a very pleasant town, and it's twinned with Portree of all places (due to a history of settlement by highlanders and islanders).
progress on built-under has been swift due to Fran's imminent arrival - we have prepped and painted and sealed and sanded with gusto, and the place is now basically finished except that the cement floor needs tiling, a job which we're hoping to do the easy bits of ourselves, while paying a professional to come in and do the hard parts, such as the joins between different cement slabs.
Last Sunday I found a fruit bat stuck on a cactus on our deck. The poor thing must have flown into it at speed and got itself stuck. I freed it (being very careful neither to rip its wings, nor to expose myself to scratch or bite) and then fed it some peach, which it sucked rather than chewed. After a few minutes, to K's delight, it spread its wings and flew off into the trees. For all I know it may have died of its injuries later, but it certainly looked fine at the time, so I like to think it at least stood a chance of survival.
This weekend we headed up to Brisbane where we're picking Fran up from the airport. I had agreed to give Aaron two banana trees from my garden, so we met him and his family in West End, and he headed off with two large buckets each filled with loam and a banana tree, hopfully destined to fill his garden and fruit copiously.
We spent a morning with K on city beach. This was almost unbearably exciting for her - the noise, people, fountains, toys and city vibe left her completely unable to take her customary afternoon nap, and yet, bizarrely, in a good mood. Which goes to show you never can tell. We also walked along Queen Street with Oscar and Aida and Hannah and Samir - taking in the window displays and the George Square Xmas tree, and catching up on the big-city gossip. Finally, we caught up with Naomi and Behruz too...They have finally bitten the bullet and bought a house They have a nice little place near Holland Park - very tucked away and overlooking a bit of greenery, and convenient to the city and the freeway. They'll be seeing more of us in the near future.

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.