Ice Cream Been

We've got rid of the big jacaranda and ice-cream bean trees by the back verandah - there will be sunny winter afternoons, hopefully also involving hot tea and buttered choc-chip muffins. Currently it's rainy season, so we only venture onto the deck to dry clothes really.
In an unexpected twist, clearing these trees away has allowed some Telstra signal into our back garden, so I can now get 1 bar on my phone, and can tweet without having to be within WiFi range.
We've also suddenly got about 300 bananas to eat (and give away!) now that the banana trees are getting sunlight and they're all ripening at once. The birds only seem to go for the top fruit, and they seem to have ripened pretty well without being bagged up or otherwise assisted - my favourite kind of crop.

Last week was a long week at work, and also involved plenty more chainsawing, breeze-block laying, and trench digging. I ended up staying up till midnight to get the crossword in for the local paper, and I was very pleased that I'd decided to take a break from doing an IT article each edition as well. C has been equally busy - as well as finishing off a commission for logos and artwork for a local business (Subject to the usual 300% bloat on the original requirements) she has also taken over responsibility for the monthly Nimbin events calendar, which is distributed to thousands of local homes, and keeps the village abreast of all the upcoming events and functions... I'm expecting to be on the inside track for any local gossip.
Despite the rush-rush, there has also been a sense of respite - it was also our first week with K in daycare all day Thursday and Friday - she seems to love it, and gets home pretty tired, which is, frankly, quite wonderful.

I've noticed that there are lots of flowers in mid Autumn here, almost like a second spring. I'm pretty ignorant about such things, but I'm guessing a lot of the plants here hedge their bets by flowering a second time for the migratory birds heading North, which are also very abundant around the autumnal equinox.

Our friend Amanda's 30th more or less coincided with my birthday this week, so we made her party the focus of the weekend - She and her partner John have a lovely place up at the Tuntable intentional community, and they threw an impressive bash complete with DJ. We usually seem to visit Tuntable at night - must get up there when it's light to check out the gardens and the views.

With the heavy rains, all the tree-stumps of the recently cut trees in our garden are sprouting little mushroom patches. When we turned the lights off for earth hour they seemed to glow white in the starlight.




Andale, andale.