Sun & Snake

After weeks and weeks of rain, we finally have glorious blue skies and clear weather, just as the polonia trees lose their leaves for Autumn and the temperature dips down towards 5 degrees overnight. Still, we're enjoying walking around town and getting out on the deck for lunch in the sunshine.

Just when things should have been calming down, as per usual, an interesting piece of work came along. Never one to pass up a masochistic opportunity to pile on an extra side-project, I've teamed up with mates in Auckland and Brisbane to take on a development project for a UK software firm. Obviously, the time difference is not conducive to project management at sensible hours of the day.

Similarly overenthusiastic, young-mum C has been discussing a marketing project with a local small business, volunteering weekly at the Nimbin Community Technology Centre, looking after baby and keeping up her previous freelance commitments. We love it.

To Europeans and North Americans in their snug, centrally heated homes, "dipping down towards 5 degrees overnight" probably sounds fine. However, most Australian houses, and certainly ours, are basically large wooden shacks on stilts. Within 30 minutes of turning off the heating, the temperature inside matches the temperature outside, and I don't like getting out of bed when its 5 degrees Celsius. So this week, we've been chopping wood and lighting the fire in the lounge - a good month earlier than we had to last year.

In an unrelated threat to my free time, those evil buggers at Nintendo went and released Mariokart for the Wii. Now every nerd has their breaking point - and that's mine. Luckily, I was not organised enough to get the correct cabling to wire it up in my lounge, so I have a pretty white brick in the room.

The time that would have been spent perfecting my lap times with Mario and Princess has instead been wasted mowing the lawn, potting out baby plants, weeding, and applying wood filler to the gaps in the bathroom floor so you can't see through to downstairs anymore. Shame.
Desk with No Snakes
Today was threatening to break the pattern and become quite constructive. However, an unexpected visitor soon got things back on their usual chaotic track. Walking into the office, I surprised a small snake which had been basking in the sunshine on C's desk. "That's OK" I thought, "I'll just open the window and encourage it to leave." Somehow, in the 5 seconds it took me to open the window, it completely disappeared. It was small and (probably) not dangerous, but nonetheless I don't like my office to have hidden snakes in it. We searched high and low for 90 minutes, and couldn't find the snake.




I'd even started to persuade myself that it might have somehow wriggled the length of the desk, jumped onto the floor, gone right past me and then across the room and out the door in the few seconds I took my eye off it to open the window. An hour later, C spotted the little critter. It'd crawled through one of the holes in a decorative vase and gone to sleep curled up in a ball. I carried it out and it slithered off into the long grass quite happily.