UFO

I was too tired to work on Thursday, so I came home and made it a five day weekend. Much fun was had completing our little veggie patch for C to sow some hardy annuals into, and she supervised and took compromising photos while I attacked the old glassfibre bathtub with a large pick-axe. We now have lots of empty space in the bathroom, and some fair sized holes in the fibroboard cladding.
Every time we drove from Brisbane to Nimbin, we thought we must be particularly wussy, as the road really is quite bad to drive. It was a relief to see an article in this month's Nimbin Good Times revealing that car manufacturers have started to release their cars to test drivers on that very road - because it's regarded as one of the worst in the country.
It rained a fair bit this week. Most of the night most nights, and a good bit of the day too. It was interesting to see that the soil in an area like this just drinks it up - no floods, and no mud in most places. I've seen some 12 foot high flood markers around Nimbin - it must rain bloody hard for a bloody long time for the little creeks to get up to those levels. It is a rain forest after all.

Easter Friday was my first full day chilling in Nimbin - we headed to moody's cafe and listened to an amped-up roots band for a bit, and tried out their toasted foccacia - fresh and well prepared, and feeds two if you're not too hungry.
Stefan and Iris organized an Easter Saturday brunch, and we met a few of the locals, including Chris and Lou who run the excellent Nimbin Rox backpackers - and they invited us to a shindig at their place for the saturday night - featuring another amped-up local group doing covers and soul/groove numbers. I'm told most local bands are pretty fluid, and its more like a pool of performers which briefly coalesces into bands and groups before reconfiguring and re-emerging - but I like what I've heard so far.
As we drove into Lismore on Monday evening on the way to put me onto the Brisbane-bound coach, we saw an extremely large, and extremely bright object burning up as it fell to earth. I'm not sure if it was a meteor, a piece of space junk, or something else again. It was just after sunset, and it was not dark enough for any stars to be visible, but the object was intensely bright, and burned orange, then green and blue, and then orange-white again before disappearing from view to our South - probably plunging into the sea a few tens of K's southeast of Ballina. It looked like I would imagine space-junk on re-entry would look, and we were only a few minutes of arc away from this near miss - but I can't find anything in the local news, and have never seen anything similar to compare it with, so I'm unsure what I saw.
Finally, two examples of good people that make me happy. First, our american mates (yes, american, but they live in a blue state, mm-kay?) Alex and Linda's newsletter arrived in my inbox today, with news of how they're leveraging their cafe's customer base to do their bit for environmentally friendly power (quite imaginatively too!) and second, a happy example of just how kind people still are in Australia, even in the big cities: The driver of the coach taking me to Brisbane had never driven the route before, and he got lost at Beenleigh. So, he stopped at a petrol station to ask the owner how to get back on the northbound M3. "Don't worry mate" came the reply, "I'll hop into my ute and you can follow me there" - and he hopped into his car, and (at 10:30pm) led our grateful driver through the (quite complex) route back onto the motorway, and headed home with a cheery wave.