Nimbin Life

Wind it up

2010-07-03T15:25:00.023+09:00

This is the final diary-style entry in this blog. I will post one more update next month listing links to our other web sites and new projects.
I have enjoyed keeping a public diary of our last 3 years' worth of life changes: Moving to a new country and a new climate, moving from the city to the countryside, changing careers, having our first child, starting our little company, becoming part of the convoluted (but incredibly awesome) social scene in and around Nimbin town, and best of all, making a whole new set of (incredibly awesome but I would say that wouldn't I 'cause too many of them now read this blog) friends.
Our little family now feels settled in Australia, and embedded (if oddly) in the Nimbin/Brisbane axis of queasle.
This feels like the right time to draw a line under this diary, as we move into the next phase of our life down under; there will be new (hopefully exciting) online projects, some within a few weeks - I will post links from this blog if appropriate.
If anyone has tracked me down here but does not have any other way to contact/find me, you can reach me using jay [dot] stephens [at] gmail [dot] com.

C's mum Rose has immigrated from Lancashire (smart move) and is moving this weekend to a flat in Iluka, the spare bedroom of which will be much abused as our beachside home-from-home this coming Summer, I suspect.

C is pregnant with what will be our second Australian in the family (the due date is January 6, 2011). As when she was pregnant with K, C has combined getting pregnant with starting a contract in Brisbane (with immaculate timing, given that we were both trying for a baby, and also trying to find her a good contract for over seven months) so for the next 5 months she is living and working in Brisbane's CBD (her contract this time is with Brisbane City Council) and we're currently seeing each other 3-4 days a week, depending on our schedules. And yes - I'm the one looking after K midweek!

Having promised that this entry would be diaristic, I better deliver.
I have learnt how to cook pavlova that doesn't suck (between that and getting the Don Bradman question right on the citzenship test, I reckon I'm a shoo-in for a blue passport now!) C has moved back in to the rental with Marina in Brisbane's West End (midweek) but this time she's downstairs - it's a fairly dark and primitive space (think something between "grungy squat" and "rumpus room") but it's incredibly central to Brisbane CBD and 1 minute's walk from the funky cafe/nightlife scene in West End, and also an absolutely gigantic space (2 huge bedrooms, a massive loungespace, separate french doors onto the back garden, plus own bathroom). This makes it practical for me to come to Brisbane for the weekend with K sometimes, rather than C coming back down to Nimbin every week, and allows it to work for us as a poor man's pied à terre when we have time off together. Not trivially, it also means C is within striking distance of nutritious food when she's eating for two and too tired to cook.
We have been to the Lismore Lantern parade (which was awesome compared to last year - no mud, and a great - tho scary for toddlers - contribution from the dinosaur exhibition that was in town the same week).

we have been on a steam train, we have walked along the waterfront at Grafton, we have paddled at the beach at Iluka, we have spent half a day at Out Of The Box, we have cycled along Brisbane's riverfront and drunk mochaccino in the sunshine by Eagle Street Pier's vintage paddle-steamers, and we made it to the first Blue Knob Farmers Market and purchased awesome fruit loaf, local sheeps milk brie, and insanely delicious local peperberry mustard.

Nimbin has two new shops on Cullen Street - the mechanic's workshop (NRMA) has relocated behind the servo, off the main drag, and all manner of colourful wares now spill out across what used to be the mechanic's forecourt. This has filled in what was a bit of a dead spot along Cullen Street, especially combined with the old bank building on the far side being transformed into retail space, the chemists opening an embedded cafe, and the e-bar making use of the off-street outdoor patio area for their tables.

Chain migration

2010-04-30T00:12:00.005+09:00

We drove to the airport to collect C's mum, who was arriving, for the first time, on an Australian resident's visa rather than as a tourist. En route, C got a call on her mobile to confirm she would be offered a 24 month contract with Brisbane City council.
We spent the day in brissie, and had dinner with Marina, who had set up a barbie in the back yard. Our ex-downstairs neighbour John was moving out, so the occasion was really a farewell for John (who has only moved about 1km towards Hill End). C will move into John's old digs midweek while she works her contract, and commute back to Nimbin for the weekends. Fairly silly, but there doesn't seem to be a sensible option.
Nej was very happy t see K again, and she took her away for ages, being "mum", which was even more fun for us than for Nej.
The following weekend was Mardi Grass. It was low-key compared to '09, which was probably terrible for the stallholders and shops, but made for a great weekend for ordinary festivalgoers: There were no queues, it was easy to sit down when you wanted to, and I was able to get to the front row to watch the Kombi convoy. With no plan defined, and this being our fifth Mardi Grass (and therefore lacking any sense of pressure to try to see everything), we simply wandered around for two days, soaking up the atomosphere, and enjoying the music, talks, live shows and carnival floats, with that particular smugness that comes from not having to sleep in a tent and use communal toilets, and having a "Local" sticker on your dashboard.

In the Market

2010-04-27T15:19:00.018+09:00

Having done the Lismore covered market and then Nimbin market the following week (which featured a great line-up of bands and solo artists on the stage as they're now drifting into town ready for Mardi Grass) we then hit Lismore again to check out the regional organic farmers' market on the following Saturday - something that's been on our list for over two years, but somehow never seemed to fit. It happens at the showgrounds in North Lismore, and it is a bit of a Range-rover and wellies event, but with plenty of yummy local produce (including cheeses and wines I wasn't aware of) making it worth a visit.
We also made time for the Nimbin Autumn Art extravaganza - not only does the standard of the local art keep getting better, but the gallery now boasts its own cafe with a fine balcony overlooking the Nimbin valley, which makes it much easier for us to appreciate all that was on show with a recalcitrant toddler, as we were able to take turns nursing a cappucino and helping K with some crayons.
I finally finished the fishpond, filled it with water,got the pump wired up, and put four bemused goldfish in it. We'll see how long they last. Getting the pond finished in the front garden had the pleasing knock-on effect of motivating C and me to finally shift the great-big-brush-pile from near the front hedge, where it had grown to visible-from-space proportions, and was threatening to become a fire hazard.
I also had an extremely nerve-wracking close call with my hard-drive. It failed gradually, causing BSODs and staying up progressively less long between mandatory reboots, and the replacement HDD I'd ordered (foolishly, as a trial order via US-based international delivery company www.shipito.com, which I do recommend, but which takes a little longer than you'd think) came through just in the nick of time.
This Friday we drove to Gold Coast and caught up with Bas and Jo at their time share apartment at Coolangatta (Beach, wine, pizza, catching up - it's 18 months since we last made it to NZ) and then on the Saturday we drove back for Nik's birthday party (which, quite properly, was an all-nighter, but C and I flaked out of at about 2:15am).
The bank holiday Monday was spent getting the house and garden ready for C's mum's arrival from the UK - though the downstairs flat was more or less set up because my mum had stayed there only a few weeks before.

36

2010-04-03T22:07:00.005+09:00

C needed a wisdom tooth removed, and we're still dentisting in Brissie, so we made a (somewhat painful for C) Friday of it.
K and I had great fun in the City - she somehow talked me into buying her preposterous quantities of junk food.
Rod & Cherdina had us over for dinner and wine and put us up (Cherdina is gonna be a mum, we discovered - she abstained from the wine) but of course K, being full of junk food, would not sleep. I gave up trying to sleep with a very awake and energetic toddler in the same bed at around four in the morning, jumped in the car, and drove round the corner to the river, and went for a walk with K over the Schonnel bridge, and round some of the UQ campus and back. Unfortunately, despite her running most of the way in both directions, she still had more energy than me when we got home.
Back in Nimbin I was able to pander to my (too often suppressed, these days) inner geek, as Phil organised a game of Paranoia - which was even more fun than I expected, and finished up as a sleepover. Unlike my student geek roleplaying days, we were all treated to fruit pancakes in the morning, and then we took a walk to the creek below Phil's place (great spot, steep hill coming back up though)!
Anja had organised a bonfire at hers on the Sunday evening. Unfortunately the wood was a bit too green to really burn, but that didn't stop us making an evening of it, with candles under the trees in her garden and cakes and a BBQ keeping us fed - early April is actually perfectly fine for evening outdoor events here in NNSW, even without a crackling bonfire.
This week, though, is my official "I'll only swim in the sea if it's a perfect day" cut-off point; in high Summer, I'll jump in at the beach no matter what the weather.
I kept my birthday quiet.
Last time I'll get away with that in Nimbin.

Marching on

2010-03-26T22:43:00.012+09:00

I was chuffed that the competition fellow (but vastly more professional) blogger Felix ran on his blog ended up with me fluking the second prize. When it gets here I'll put a review page up (New resolution: From now on, if I read a book purely due to a friend recommending it, they can ask me for a review on this blog).
Midweek (unusually) involved some physical exertion as I joined a few others in helping Phil roll (yes, physically roll) his two 5,000 gallon water tanks into position, using the Pharaoh's preferred methods: Shoulder-pushing and lowering by rope.
Friday involved yet another round of immigration paperwork for C's mum: This time the department concerned wanted signed bonds and documents relating to Medicare guarantees, so we shuttled between the bank and the Centrelink office until we had the requisite signatures and the appropriate forms in triplicate.
Saturday saw some minor celebrations as we joined Benny and a group of mates to celebrate them finally getting the Rocksview guesthouse launched. There is some serious competition, but that place might genuinely have the best views of anywhere you could stay in Nimbin.
The weather is (so far) staying warm and dry - we must take advantage of the Nimbin pool a bit more before it changes its mind and serves up another slice of wet season!

Here Comes the Rain again

2010-03-04T20:30:00.007+09:00

So we all got up at five am and piled in the car, dropped K with the babysitter (Chris of course) and drove Fran to Brisbane airport. Fran had spent her last day with K showing her how to recognise her Secondlife avatar, so in addition to Skype chats they can hang out in Secondlife.

After dropping Fran off, we caught APT6 at GOMA (really, really awesome - APT is my favourite mainstream art event; it almost makes me want to stop being a philistine, and some pieces even actually verge on relevance).
After taking that in, and two Ugees espressos, we headed to Naomi's new place in Holland Park to check out how they've got it set up. Quickly, is the answer.

As we had an excuse to be in Brisbane sans toddler anyway, and all our friends were going to a burlesque ball, we decided it would be churlish not to join in. Much sartorial fun was had, and despite the stage show being well below par, it was an awesome night. In fact, the stage show being pants might have actually made it better - the whole group spent more time chatting and interacting than staring at the stage. C and I said bye to our (far more hardcore) fellow burlesquers, and drove back across the Brisbane river to Naomi's in the pouring rain at five am, and slept for three hours. Five am is a horrible time of day when you see it in the morning, and then you see it that same night, without having slept in between. At eight am we got up, and realised Naomi and Bruce had left for work, leaving us alone in their house. We briefly considered trashing the place and getting the gang round for an impromptu beerkeg party, but decided to get eggs benedict at a Stones Corner cafe instead, and then headed South on the M1 to get back to our daughter (we need not have worried, as she'd had a great time for the whole 30 hours we were away - a new record).

Back in Nimbin, the rains had set in for real - there is now a steady alternation between drizzle and hammering rain, the sky is gunmetal grey morning and evening, and you can hardly leave the house without tripping over all kinds of delicious mushrooms.
Being severely out of practice, the weekend of driving and clubbing in the big city left us both destroyed - ten days of taking it very easy indeed ensued, which is actually rather pathetic. But I can be honest with you, right, blog-page? You won't tell anyone else? Good.

Sunshine in February

2010-02-23T09:33:00.009+09:00

Last week in February, and it looks like the rainy season is creeping around. I've chosen the start of the rains as the ideal time to kick off an outdoor project - replacing rotten timbers on the deck. Replacing boards on a deck 20 foot up has a whole set of interesting challenges when there's a two-year-old always eager to fall in any holes or gaps, or throw plant pots down them. Or hit me in the face with the end of the discarded boards that has the rusty nails protruding.

Of course, it wouldn't be February in Nimbin without a blackout. K loves powercuts because she gets triple bedtime stories by candlelight. I'm less keen because it makes getting my job done a real pain. I still don't have a proper UPS or generator system, but I'm now able to run my small camping inverter to power a laptop and modem, and if the phone line is out I can fail back to my WiFi modem too, so quite a few things have to fail at the same time to keep me from getting online.
We spent a quiet weekend at home, as it's Fran's last weekend with K for a long while, so it's been good to maximise play time for them. We've also finalised getting the downstairs tiled - we just have to come up with the money now, and then that's the last detail and we can start worrying about the part of the house we actually live in. Finalised is not quite true. We have a quote, and we know how long it will take, and the dimensions the tiles should be... But we have yet to actually agree on a colour.
Finally, this week marks the beginning of a long-postponed project: I'm going to abandon hotmail for gmail. I've got so many online accounts tied to hotmail, so may secondary accounts forwarding to hotmail, and so many never-check-their-email friends with my hotmail scribbled in their address book, that it's going to be a long process. The straw that broke the camel's back? The shit integration between hotmail and Outlook. If you pay hundreds of dollars for a product from the world's biggest software company, and it's crippled and missing basic functions when you hook it up to that same company's webmail offering, it's time to look elsewhere.

Nostalgia and South

2010-02-21T20:44:00.015+09:00

We took a trip to Byron Bay beach on Saturday, as Ben, a good friend from my London coding/IT-slave days last century, is doing a stint in Sydney, and had taken a weekend in Byron to try out the surf. We met up at the Beach Hotel, and caught up the intervening years over a couple of cold ones, while his mates kept right on surfing.
I had already promised Fran a trip South, so so the following Friday morning we bundled into the car at 6am, and hit the road. We decided to head to Iluka via Casino and the Summerland highway, as we hadn't driven that route before. The forest and landscape going that way are quite a bit drier than around Nimbin, and a good introduction to the more normal East Coast hinterland habitat. We came off the Summerland at Pringles Way, which led us past some amazing wetlands filled with cattle and flocks of white cockatoos, and then took the car ferry over the Clarence river to Maclean.
Fran liked Maclean as much as I did when I first saw the place, so we spent some time wandering along the riverfront, and drove up to the top of the hill to the lookout that allows you to gaze out over the widening Clarence, the whole coastal plain to Iluka and Yamba, and the Pacific ocean. After lunch we got on the M1 and doubled back North over the Clarence to check out Iluka. We stopped briefly at Shark Bay so Fran could get some photos and appreciate the scale of the national park where it runs North up the coast towards Evans Head. The beach had an amazingly strong onshore wind, but the ocean was gloriously warm and perfect for paddling (and for K, chasing seagulls).
The following day I sprang a Valentines' day eve surprise on C. Without telling her where exactly we were headed, I handed K over to Fran, and drove back with C once again to the beach at Byron, this time to a double room near the beach, and twenty-four hours of pretending to be carefree DINKYs. We did nothing special - grabbed a drink, grabbed a pizza, strolled through an art gallery at a snail's pace, wandered around the Byron Bay night market until it started closing up, and then got another drink. It's amazing how special time for yourself is once you only get a few hours now and again.
Having spent more than enough time driving across the range to the coast and back, the whole followng week was spent in the environs of Nimbin. We did a spot of gardening in the sunshine, hung out at the pool, and caught up on our movie backlog (The Road, Moon, Fantastic Mr Fox). Moon, I have to say, is bloody good. Why can't more people make that good a movie with that little cash?

National Parking

2010-01-27T08:25:00.027+09:00

We have been taking advantage of sunny days and my mum's remaining time in the country to do some camping and exploring.
Gheerula (North of Maleny) for rolling green hills, swimming holes, and forest walks, followed by a day at the beach at Surfers' Paradise.
Surfers is not somewhere I'd normally go, but I thought it made a perfect counterpoint to the joys of the hinterlands of Nimbin and Maleny.
The following weekend, we went camping again, this time high on the plateau East of Surfers', in Springbrook National Park. Our walks took in underground waterfalls, wildlife and cliff-top ocean views (not to mention a land mullet, two pythons, and a black snake).
Once back in Nimbin a friend invited us for afternoon tea at their place at a nearby MO community, and we discovered yet another great swimming reservoir - so big it's almost a lake, and beautifully warm - ideal for lazy afternoons on a lilo. It's starting to dawn on me that we are poor relations in Nimbin, in that we don't have easy access to a creek or a swimming hole, and most people we know do.
Not having enough of water, I also got stuck into repairing the broken ornamental pond in our front garden. It has not been usable since we moved in (in 2006) so I figured I should try to get it to the point where I can stock it with some fish. Many man-hours later, the bloody thing finally (finally) holds water. All I need to do now is rig up a pump and a filter, and then buy some fish. Photos will follow, if I ever get that far. If anyone has experience keeping cold-water fish in an outdoor pond, please get in touch - I have lots of noob questions (basic things like, how do you stop predators eating the fish, and how much do I need to feed them, and how big a pump do I need to keep the water oxygenated).

Solstice, Xmas, and New Year

2009-12-28T17:58:00.011+09:00

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

2009-12-23T20:05:00.008+09:00

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

2009-11-27T19:06:00.006+09:00

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.

2009-10-22T20:00:00.008+09:00

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

2009-09-25T23:41:00.019+09:00

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.

2009-09-20T19:53:00.008+09:00

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

2009-08-29T21:50:00.021+09:00

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

2009-08-08T22:50:00.009+09:00

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

2009-07-26T09:40:00.024+09:00

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

2009-06-24T20:13:00.014+09:00

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.

Local Market Forces

2009-06-13T19:55:00.008+09:00

I stumbled upon a haul of obscure SF paperbacks in a bookshop in Holland Park, as we were due to drive home in the tiny hire car I'd driven up from Lismore while the garage got on with fixing our car's gearbox. I ended up leaving the books at a friend's house in Brissie for collection upon my return. There are even a couple of Zelazny books I've never read before.
Back in Nimbin, there was plenty to clean up following the heavy rains - mudslips, flooded trenches and washed away logs, and a brief (but apparently Nimbin-wide) plague of native mice (antechinus).

Our log fire has been lit more or less constantly, as temperatures dropped to lows of 1°C and 2°C, and real frost has been crunching underfoot in the morning. Chopping the wood for the logfire is probably the most rustic part of our lifestyle in the bush here (as everything else in the house is electric or gas) but happily it warms me up both in the doing and through the resulting split logs. It is only as cold as this in winter when there are cloudless skies, so the days have been bright and wonderful, with the afternoons around the 22°C mark - more or less what I think of as "perfect" weather.
Probably because the temperatures only get down towards freezing just before midwinter, most of the deciduous trees in this region lose their leaves very late as well - often in mid-June, which means that the striking red and gold leaves appear at the same time as the bright blue sky days, as in this picture of The Channon's Sunday market. I have further developed my incipient obsession with SF literature by joining a local science fiction reading group. Neuromancer, Slaughterhouse Five, and the Tripods trilogy are the eclectic first three books read since I started going - I'm hoping the wide range continues, and hoping the group picks something I haven't read before soon, too.
Louis reminded us to attend the Djanbung Gardens open day on the third weekend in June - there were excellent walking tours, and Louis gave an interesting speech on globalisation and local consumption/trade patterns and possibilities. The following day, we engaged in two most excellent opportunities for local trade, by attending first the Dunoon Wide Garage sale, and then The Channon market. Home-made pumpkin soup was on sale as a winter warmer, and thus fortified, we trudged the length of Dunoon, scouting for interesting bargains and unusual nik-naks, while all around us ocker Aussies got into their utes and drove every thirty yard gap between people's stalls, loading their accumulated loot into the back and giving us strange looks for having the temerity to proceed on foot.
Naturally, I accumulated another handful of silver age SF books.

Panda

2009-06-05T18:26:00.007+09:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks, as the floodwaters have receded from around Lismore.
Heading in to Brissie in a low-slung courtesy car (a Ford Focus) to pick up C's mum Rose from the airport, we hit a "road closed" sign at Murwillumbah. The locals seemed to be driving round the sign however, so we risked following them, as the only alternative route to Brisbane is nearly three hours' extra driving. The water got deeper and deeper, until three of the four lanes were completely submerged, and then the fourth lane was underwater as well for about 30 yards. We could see from the cars ahead of us that it wasn't more than 35cm deep though, so we gunned the Focus and splashed our way across.
After collecting Rose from her red-eye special, we headed to Rod and Cherdina's to look after their spoilt (but lovable) dogs while they headed off to Bangkok for their honeymoon.
We took advantage of a few days in Brissie (apart from the morning markets and West End coffee houses, which go without saying) by taking K to the science museum to meet the dinosaurs (a huge hit) and driving up to Australia zoo. K was taken by the tigers, 'eleflumps', and koalas.
The rest of us, though, were blown away by a wee critter I'd never even heard of - the (apparently critically endangered) red panda. This photo is representative, but doesn't capture the cheeky fun these little guys radiated.
I got to check out the new West End offices that Gensolve have moved to (more space, and a great view across the river to the Brisbane skyline, from where the software development team sit). Inevitably, I was also party to Friday night drinks, but it seems pretty much the whole team now has young kids, so it was a muted affair compared to last year's impressively blind-drunk efforts.
Ridiculously, I agreed to three weeks of heavy overtime at work, and then immediately had to drive back midweek to return the courtesy car to Trevan Ford, and straight back up to Brissie again the next day. The entire experience would have been quite awful, except that Steffan and Iris saw my bedraggled state, and invited me home for falafel, fried haloumi, and a friendly evening - when what I'd been expecting was a cold, dark house alone on a winter's evening.
On the Saturday before we were due to head back to Nimbin, we dropped in on Marina (at the house we used to share in West End) and she made us a delicious lunch, and sprang a surprise: Mbweda was up in Brissie, and together they were putting on a fundraising evening for the community-sponsored afro.dot.net cafe in Moorooka (a major hub for the African community in Brisbane). We went along with Rose and Naomi and Bruce - all in a good cause! There was African food, a welcome in song from an Aboriginal elder, and then performances by the Brisbane African Womens' choir and a traditional Chilean group whom I recognised as friends of Louis's. We slept well that night, and headed home the next morning feeling we'd taken full advantage of our week in the city.

Rising Waters

2009-05-25T20:00:00.005+09:00

The extreme weather making its way down the coast finally hit us towards the end of the second week in May. We had relatively little strong wind, but fairly serious rainfall. My recently completed trench and wall work seems to have held out (thus far) but a lot of mud and gravel has been transported downstream, and there was some worrying gullying around the stump-pads that hold up the house.
Rod and Cherdina's wedding was scheduled for the 3rd weekend of the month, and they hit a lucky break in the weather.
We drove to the Gold Coast, in time for me to partake in the stag party chaos - a scarily typical stag-night (or bucks night as it's sometimes called in Oz) of beer, strip clubs, and getting barred from the casino due to the state of the groom (well, the dilation of his pupils).
For the wedding itself, I was MC, which involved nothing more challenging than some light banter on the mic, introducing the speakers, and playing the scheduled music during the various parts of the ceremony which called for it.
The waterfront house (venue for pre-nuptial party, wedding, and reception) was well appointed, The weather was postcard-perfect, and the beach was a 10-minute stroll away the next morning when we all needed to recover from the drinking and dancing - nothing to complain about.
The weather turned nasty on Monday when it was time to drive home, providing pathetic fallacy for our total gearbox failure. The car (just) limped to the garage in Lismore, and we then paid seventy bucks for a cab home, having been quoted a third of the car's value to get it back on the road.
The mad rain continued, and increased in intensity - we saw mudslides, and Steffan's driveway bridge was washed away.
C intended to catch the bus into town to pick up a courtesy car the garage had arranged for us, but with much of Lismore underwater the bus company cancelled all services, and C ended up first hitch-hiking into Lismore to collect the courtesy car, and then quite literally racing the floodwaters out of North Lismore to collect K from daycare, which was also shutting for the week due to flooding. She got back to Nimbin and picked K up allright, but the courtesy car (a Ford Focus) was too small to get over the Gungas road ford leading to our house, so they ended up waiting for two and a half hours until the waters subsided.
Apparently our car will be fixed early next week, so the plan is for us to head to Brisbane to meet C's mum off her plane, and then dog-sit for Rod and Cherdina for a few days, and when our car is fixed, I'll drive Brisbane-Lismore-Brisbane to pick it up, and the following weekend we can all drive back to home.

Our Fourth Mardi Grass

2009-05-13T20:41:00.009+09:00

Y'all deserve a proper blog post, with details of what we've been up to.
Well, I'm tired, so you're not getting.
We did the beach.
Found a cool cafe near Teven where they grow the beans for their coffee, and had fun at Mardi Grass, and now we're tired.
Enjoy the pics.

Your safety is our primary concern.

The Kombi Convoy was, as always, superlative. Bit short, though, compared to '08.

The Plantem lives. You can't kill an idea.

Horses like grass. No two ways about it.

Grass Vader.

The main field, as people are just starting to drift back up the hill.

Make stilt puppets, not war.

The staff from happy high herbs tell it like it is.

The Ganja Faeries - ominously well rehearsed this year.

Aboriginal Bundjalung elders. Righteous didge player, too.

Dachambo, fresh from Tokyo with fresh psy-dub stylin.

Tripped out by pretty colours.

Teddy lives in shoe. No, really.

Sunshine and Wattage

2009-04-05T16:44:00.010+09:00

It's been a period of mending nets, and this is therefore a short post. At least the rain has gone and the sun is out in Nimbin.
Last weekend there was a joint birthday for several friends at Tuntable community hall - this was our first time checking out the premises (confusingly separate from the community run Tuntable cafe) and I have to say, they've done really well at creating a social space that everyone can use - airy, spacious, and subdividable.
Meanwhile, our solar panels were wired up and are now delivering juice to the grid.
The tomato and chili plants continue to deliver.
The mandarines are about to ripen.
The overnight temperatures are falling fast now, and we've been firing up the wood stove in the evening all this week. some component has snapped off - but Vanessa recommended a boilermaker to us so hopefully we'll get it fixed up properly next week. The stove issue has come on top of a spate of hardware issues - broken washing machine, broken bread machine, storm damage to gutters (fixed singlehandedly!), broken car stereo, and ISP issues (in the sense of being unable to work for hours at a time).
Other news:
All our classes are off for 5 weeks for Easter break.
The drainage trench below the retaining wall is (finally) finished - but I still have to build a swale above the wall, put some 75mm ag-drain in the trench and gravel over the top.
Friday was spent with Rob from two doors up, drilling and poisoning the invasive camphor laurels at the foot of the garden. They are a pest, but they do smell wonderful. When they're gone (we'll cut them up after they die and dry up, in three weeks or so) our balcony will have a view to Sphinx Rock - there will be photos of the new Northerly aspect in June or July.
As a reward for our industriousness, we spent Saturday at Shelly beach, just North of Ballina - we have a new default spot behind the flags under the shade of a beach tree (though not a beech tree).
It's been a long week at work, and Easter meant less daycare for K (hence the babycinos). Also, C has been putting in long hours on a complex piece of print work, so it's been a time of little sleep. Proper service should resume on the blog front next week.
I can't let the Pirate Bay verdict go by without comment. My comment is this: Cory Doctorow is correct when he suggests the best way to make money in a world of infinite cheap copies, is "give cheapskates the tools to spend their time promoting... [content], and stand by with a commercial item to sell to the rich, busy people". Locking people up for publishing links won't hold back the tide.

Ice Cream Been

2009-03-27T23:18:00.017+09:00

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.

PV'ed but Unwired

2009-03-15T06:53:00.010+09:00

The solar panels are up on the roof. We have paid for them, and now we have to wait and hope the government aren't fibbing about the rebate.
The system is rated at 1.3kWh, and took the two guys from Rainbow Power Company about 6 hours to install, including setting up the inverter and all the wiring except for actually connecting the AC output to the grid, which is done separately by the electricity company.
They chose to lay the rack and panels flat on the roof, as this will maximise Summer output, at the cost of slightly reducing Winter efficiency, when the sun is lower in the sky. As we're grid connected, maximising the total fed into the grid over the whole year is the aim.
The forthcoming NSW feed in tariff for domestic PV systems will kick in in July, and should see us being paid somewhere in the region of AU$0.60/kWh, and should provide a full return on our investment (after rebate) within 36 months.
The panels are not visible from the ground, and come with a 20 year warranty. There is a separate system of federal and state rebates for solar hot water systems, and getting that set up will be next on our list - financially it is much less rewarding, and the payback time is longer (because the power gathered substitutes for low-cost off peak power used over night to heat the hot water tank) but the environmental benefits are actually greater than the grid-feed system, with many households using up to 70% of their power in water heating, especially if a lot of hot washes are being done in a washing machine.
On a more rock'n'roll note, we had our first night out without K this month - our neighbour Natalie kindly watched K for us while we went out to the Nimbin Blue Moon Cabaret. We enjoyed the jazz piano improv, the street poetry, the belly dancing and even the hip-hop, but for me the highlight of the evening was the physical theatre comedy duo The Pitts. I'd seen them before at the Auckland busking festival in 2005, but they've got more polished since then (and had a young son who plays his part on stage too, though he's only about three years old). We made a night of it - there were plenty of people we knew at the place, decent South Australian red to drink, and food both before the start and in the interval. My kind of show. Nimbin being Nimbin, the interval also saw many of the crowd leave the premises to spark up, after which a quite phenomenal haze wafted through on the breeze.
Rod and Cherdina have asked me to be MC at their wedding in May, so I need to memorise my cues for each tune, and make sure I've got the order of speakers straight in my head - but it sounds like an easier gig than being best man - and the place they've booked out on the Gold Coast looks a fantastic place to spend a few days.

The Idles of March

2009-03-08T20:04:00.013+09:00

There's nothing remarkable about these two views across Nimbin valley, But anyone who's visited our place in the past may be surprised to learn they were taken from the lounge window - the solid curtain of green is gone. There are a few more trees still to go in the front garden, but we're nearly done. All that will be left are seven or eight bangalow palms, two jacarandas, one large cocos palm, two eucalypts, an orange tree, a macadamia tree, an avocado tree, a mango tree, two frangipanis, two tree ferns, a (huge) japanese plum tree, two bamboo-like palms I can't name, and a few native shrubs. Once our tiny pond has been filled, there will be some small pond plants too. Frustratnigly, the branches stacked up from this week's chopping and sawing have re-filled the empty spot left after last week's wood-chipping session. Sisyphean.
Today has been a very long day. We got to the Channon market so early that we were the first customers at the Repentance Creek coffee stall. We hunted down the good fruit and veggies (and the best blackberry jam in New South Wales) and then caught up with Jonas and Tanya, who are back from an extended stay in Sydney, where they have family to care for Otto. Lucky buggers.
Otto is way bigger and looks (a) like a proper little bloke, and (b) scarily like Jonas. From The Channon we drove East to the Firewheel plant nursery, where they were holding an open day to talk about their rainforest regeneration projects - which are quite impressive considering they are only a side-project from their day job running the tree-nursery: They are clearing a length of creek on both sides, removing all the invasive trees and replanting with native trees and shrubs - already they have breeding koalas, platypodes and echidnas on the property, and the area around the creek will soon feel like the invaders were never there.
I have finally finished digging the seemingly endless drainage trench - now there's only block-laying, mortaring, back-filling and gravel-laying to do, and the rear wall of the downstairs will be dry even in the heaviest rains.
I have also spent a few hours up on the roof cleaning away twigs, leaves and debris - this has finally felt worthwhile, now that most of the overhanging trees are gone. C has continued the run of fixer-upper wooden furnishings as well; this week she sanded back and varnished up a battered old trestle-style blackboard, and it has taken pride of place in K's room alongside colourful chalks and crayons.
A note on the weather to wrap up this blog post: The contrast between the 8 week period from mid January to mid March in 2009, when compared to 2008, could hardly be more extreme. 2008's severe la Niña left us with over 700mm of rain in that period, whereas this year we've had a respectable 200mm. The latter makes for healthy plants and a pleasant summer, the former makes for plans to sell up and move elsewhere.

Import Namespace

2009-02-15T05:35:00.018+09:00

Sorry for the extremely late blog folks. C and I have been getting out more than at any time since becoming parents. I am attending writing classes, C has a weekly art class, and we are both doing a circuit class. The weather has been dry and warm enough to get us back into the pool as well. All in all, less time to blog. Well, that, and the time-sinks known as twitter and facebook. Sigh.
We have, however, had another big electrical storm, which left us without power for half a day - but we were better prepared this time, and none of our electrical equipment was damaged. We have had enough blackouts so that we are seriously considering adding the optional battery backup pack to our solar panel system (when it is eventually installed) so that we can have light, power, and internet during power outages.
Apart from the painful circuit classes, most of my exercise has come from the digging, wheelbarrowing, mortaring, and block laying involved in constructing the retaining wall for downstairs. that project is progressing well - the interconnected fire alarms are installed, the laundry area power has been switched to the downstairs circuit, the workshop area has been switched to the upstairs circuit, and I have very nearly finished digging out the drainage trench.
Djanbung Gardens and Nimbin Info Centre staged an interesting and participatory community sustainability forum in the town hall through the second weekend in February, and C and I attended and will hopefully have some involvement in some of the outcomes from the Forum, which may even include reviving the near-moribund Nimbin LETS scheme. here's hoping.
the ongoing tasks of keeping a car on the road were more onerous than usual this month, as I needed to grapple with Australia's convoluted state-by-state vehicle licensing laws to " import" our wagon from Queensland into New South Wales. In the event, the manifold had to be replaced, and once the various insurances, registration papers and taxes had been levied I was left with a bill that could have flown me to London and back.
Louis and Mbweeda got wind of a good local chef doing a "music and themed dinner" event on the fourth Sunday of the month at the Tuntable community Hall - and, even better the theme of this Sunday was Mexican, which is a firm favourite in this household. We hadn't been to the Tuntable community proper before, but we weren't disappointed - the community hall/shop is a pleasant space with awnings and tables around a patio area, which filled up with local diners and local musicians who provided a not-at-all-Mexican themed (but rousing good fun) background, while we consumed sangria, Mexican mains, and cheesecake, and caught up with several people whom we really should make more effort to stay in touch with. it will definitely become a regular fourth-Sunday event.
This week, K's day-care sessions have given her a cold, which she first shared with C, and then with me, so we have been a little slowed down. As luck would have it, the woodchip guy chose Saturday afternoon, when I was actually feeling pretty damn ill, to show up and get stuck in to the large quantity of felled trees that had accumulated in our front garden since November. I had agreed to help in exchange for a mates-rates price, and I somehow managed to stagger around the garden hauling branches for 90 minutes, but it left me destroyed.
On Sunday, we once again caught up with Louis and Mbweeda, as their little girl Luyando had her naming ceremony in a grove by the creek in the shadow of Wollumbin. As Louis is Chilean, Mbweeda is from Zambia, and they make their home in the heart of the Australian aboriginal Bundjalung nation, they logically enough decided on a Cherokee naming ceremony for their daughter (her totem, we learnt, is the Lynx). The celebrant, a Mr. Running Fox, made the ceremony both enjoyable and meaningful. I don't have any plans for similar ceremonies for our daughter, but being part of this ritual made me think that perhaps it's a nice idea.

There's Always Time for the Beach

2009-01-17T10:06:00.015+09:00

We've made another two trips to the beaches around Byron - our main discovery being that of the beaches in Byron proper, The Pass (which we spent an afternoon at with Louis and Mbweda) is good for family beach fun - uncrowded, plenty of rock pools and shallow water, shade from trees that run down to the edge of the sand, and a sheltered aspect from the prevailing winds because the point with the lighthouse offers protection.
Our other trip was to Wooyung - a much more remote beach, without any facilities except for a lonely campsite, and no lifeguards or flags indicating safety - and rips certainly were visible from shore. There is access to Pottsville's shops and cafes by road ten minutes to the North, and the place feels extremely quiet and secluded given its closeness to the madness that is Surfers Paradise just a 30 minute drive North. We met up with Rod and Cherdina and their boisterous labradors (who certainly were loving the endless empty sand) and made a slow day of it. Leaving in time to drive home before dark, we took a small country road we hadn't tried before - it cuts in from Byron Bay through the Mount Jerusalem National Park ( huge staghorn plants, a lazy carpet snake we had to wait for on the road, and a few kilometres of unpaved windings before Uki), ad still made it home for dusk.
That Sunday preceded Australia Day, so we celebrated with an extremely civilised dinner (and a decent red wine) at Richard and Lynne's (neighbours up the street).
I have also (finally) got some serious chainsawing done with Rob's help - we even untangled two large trees that were wrapped around our mains power cable and threatening to rip out the phone line as well. The frangipani trees near the front gate can't figure out what is going on now they're getting some light at last, and they have burst into bloom 4 moths late, which has confused our neighbours.
I've also glimpsed (but not yet photographed) two more animals in the garden that I haven't seen before - a black cockatoo and a bush turkey. Bush turkeys are common in these parts, but their presence in our garden is nonetheless a good sign in terms of the regeneration of the local bush.
This shot of several rainbow lorikeets feeding on a cocos palm in our front garden is (again) courtesy of Alex's dad's zoom lens.
The rest of our time has been filled with tasks of extreme mundanity - paving a new path down the Eastern side of the house, helping the roofing guy install roof insulation (which will be almost free after government rebate - and it makes such a difference to the temperature sat out on the back verandah; I am typing this at 2:45pm, with only a desk fan behind me, and I'm quite comfortable, despite a forecast high today of 41 degrees). Other news: I have signed up for a creative writing class, C is in week 3 of an art class, K is about to start daycare "visits" (where you don't leave, they just get used to the people and the place). In short, we're having a busy Summer, but there's always time for the beach.

Doof, Bats, and Coffee

2009-01-12T20:54:00.013+09:00

Nimbin was basically still shut for xmas till the third week in January (I'm beginning to appreciate why those in Lismore refer to "Nimbin Time") so we headed to the Exodus Festival in Tenterfield for a dose of doofing goodness, and to check out a bunch of local DJs we hadn't seen in action yet.
Tenterfield is the furthest from the coast we've ventured, so we stopped off a couple of times to explore - first at Casino, where the skies above the river were teeming with bats (in the middle of the day, oddly enough, though it was quite cloudy), but the town itself seemed strangely empty of locals - the only people we saw were others heading for Exodus.
We drove on a few Ks beyond the Exodus site and had a look around Tenterfield - a pleasant and relatively prosperous small town, happily bereft of chain stores and chain eateries, and blessed with a couple of decent cafes and a museum to its only famous son Henry Parkes - whom I'd always vaguely thought of as having engineered the federation of the commonwealth of Australia, but it turns out he never lived to see federation, but only "inspired" it. I've officially been educated.
Exodus itself was a hoot - the usual decor, and the usual chaos of generator failure and last-minute improvisation, but also unexpected goodies such as a hillbilly gospel folk country family band stomping it up on the only stage with electricity, long into Friday night. We ended up finding the whole "rave plus baby" thing simply too tiring to do for three days, so we headed home after two, tired but happy - though I suspect the venue's petting zoo was the highlight for K (Exodus is held at a park that is a forest campground for the rest of the year, and the petting zoo bit stays open for the festival); but she was gutted she couldn't actually take the lambs home.

Over the following week we fed our growing addiction to wooden furniture that requires work, and then spent several companionable hours sanding, staining, and varnishing - bedside tables, a kiddies chair for K's room, and some smaller bits and bobs all got the amateur treatment, and then stood drying on the deck for a couple of days. We have also (finally) sighted the goanna that lives in our garden - he's a bloody reclusive fellow for something about two metres long! Hopefully within another two years I'll manage to get a photo of him for the blog.

Into 2009

2009-01-02T19:32:00.019+09:00

Another case of forcing myself to blog. It's been a tiring xmas and new year break - only 3 extra days off, switching over to doing different things in my day job, lots going on with the house, the garden, and K. Trying to get in the swing of writing regular articles for the paper too - somehow I'm always up until 9pm on deadline night tapping away.
We've had another three big electrical storms, two leading to powercuts, and one knocking out my modem, router, and phone line as well... And, it being xmas, Telstra couldn't get anyone out for 10 days. Luckily we hit Brissie just before xmas anyway, so I could work from there, and hunt down a replacement modem and wireless router. Apart from the storms it's been sunny and hot, with much swimming at Ballina and Byron beaches, and general outdoor Summer goodness. The last electrical storm was also notable for its lightning - flashes of bright sheet lightning every few seconds for about 150 minutes, which is the most consistent I've ever seen. A few times it was like a club strobe light for 30 seconds at a time.
Anyway, here's a quick photo blog, normal service (hopefully) resumes next week.

K "helps" me weed the front garden.

Sunflower almost ripe.... They've since ripened and I'm drying the seeds now.

Weeding the back garden I accidentally disturbed a handful of reptile (probably lizard) eggs. I put them back, but I'm told they're unlikely to hatch now, so I feel guilty.

When TreeShape took out five of our six pollonias back in the autumn, they accidentally poisoned the sixth one too.... So they had to come back and cut that down as well.

The solar panels go up on the roof next month - so we had to get rid of the palms that shade the roof... There's something ironic about cutting down a load of trees in order to get greener electrical power.

Pre xmas Brissie, looking down Queen Street from by the Brisbane River.

This tawny frogmouth has taken up residence by the shed just over the fence from our kitchen door - I'll try to get a shot of him performing the unique frogmouth "defensive" posture, in which they flip themselves upside down and do an incredibly accurate imitation of a broken branch prutruding from a tree.... though it doesn't work too well when your perch is a metal shed.

Storm

2008-11-22T15:18:00.018+09:00

We had an insane storm in Nimbin last week. There was a power cut, and when I went out with a torch, I saw an overhead electrical cable trailing across the road directly in front of our gate.
The rain stopped, and it turned into quite a social occasion, as people from up and down the street came out to survey the damage, we ended up taking turns to park a car with hazards flashing in front of the cable, and comparing the damage to our gardens, roofs and trees.
The following days saw much chainsawing and lugging of branches and broken stuff to get things back to shipshape. Luckily, the largest branch to hit our house (a 7 metre long chunk of Pollonia weighing in at about 50 kilos) struck the main keel of the roof first, and then just slid to the ground - no damage done.
We finally located the Hanging Rock swimming hole - it's as big as an Olympic size swimming pool, and has a 3 metre waterfall over vertical rocks. The depth of the main pool is effectively infinite, as it sits on an ancient volcanic vent - those with strong stomachs can climb up the side of the pool and rope-swing into the centre from 20 metres up. It's a cool, shady pot for those sticky summer days, and half of Nimbin gathers there on some afternoons. Best of all, the Wadeville store (ice cream, coffee, affogato) is less than 2km up the road.

We have received two bits of good news from the postman:
Our citizenship tests went OK, and we both passed despite a lamentable knowledge of historic cricket batting averages. This means we are now free to apply for passports with pictures of kangaroos on the front (and, somewhat offensively in my humble opinion, tiny little aboriginal flags embossed way down towards the bottom). It also means we are now very near the end of the treadmill of expenses and paperwork that began in London back in 2001.
The other bit of good news was the approval of our solar power rebate for panels on our roof. This means we can go ahead chopping down the offending palm trees, getting the insulation under the roofing sheets, and having the panels installed in time to catch the summer sun.
We have now experienced the weirdness that is the Nimbin fashion show - a bizarre and at times terrifying mix of the local-yokel, Sydney/Byron high-fashion, and latex fetish wear. It made me feel very proud to be a Nimbin local, especially as it became obvious some of the local designers were the most imaginative (and wearable) - I should no longer be surprised at the range and breadth of creative talent around this little town, but I still am.
This weekend we're heading to the beach at Ballina for a couple of days to get away from the Summer stickiness and get some swimming in before Christmas is upon us - it looks as though the new year is going to be busy with guests and family and more building work and overtime, so we're going to chill out while we still can.

Island Vibe

2008-11-01T18:38:00.011+09:00

We trundled up the road to Brisbane once again, and caught up with Marina, Bruce and Naomi, and our ex-flatmates Oscar and Aida. K loved the big city this time around - she wanted to investigate everything she saw and heard. C took her around the Roma Street parklands, the central toy library, and the Queen Street malls, while I had a couple of days working from Gensolve's West End office.
That week over, we took the ferry to Stradbroke island, found our campsite, and got set up. All was well until 3 am, when a drunken Frenchman got into an argument about his girlfriend, and half the campsite joined in. The next morning, fortified by much caffeine, we headed to the Island Vibe festival site and registered as volunteers.
We got an excellent deal - free weekend tickets in exchange for three hours work per day, and best of all, the other volunteers in ticketing weren't even reggae fans, so no-one objected to us swapping our shifts around to catch the headline acts. Katchafire (naturally) rocked. Schoolfight were also rather toptastic. I can't even make up an adjective to describe Olmecha Supreme's efforts... Perhaps bizarrific comes close... I didn't even know you could overdrive an acoustic tin whistle. But you can.
We ate unhealthy, fatty foods. We lay on the beach and paddled in the warm ocean. We were desperately tired and wished the baby would sleep. Our own fault, I guess, for disturbing her routine.
Before heading home we put K in the backpack and did the hike to the blue lake. It's a beautiful spot - if it had been sunny I'd've swum for ages there, and even cloudy, it's peaceful and unique.
Back home in Nimbin we've now had two weeks of sunny weather, so the village pool has been much patronised, and the garden is slowly getting less cluttered as I work my way around it with the chainsaw, pruning shears, axe and machette. I need to call the man with the woodchipper before the pile of branches entirely obscures our view of the road and prevents us getting through the gate with the car.
This week we sat our aussie citizenship tests. I think we passed, but the staff couldn't operate their computers so they printed the tests out and will have to mail us the results in a couple of weeks' time - the usual chaos.
We're keeping busy over all - I'm now writing a series of articles on internet freedoms for the local paper in addition to compiling their crossword, C's list of local clients for her web-design services is ever growing, Gensolve want me to do more work than I already am, and there's plenty of paperwork left before we get our passports - the main things getting squeezed are sleep, and blogging time.

-

Hotting Up

2008-10-14T20:12:00.006+09:00

The mornings are still chilly, but the afternoons are getting uncomfortably hot for Northern European types.
The kookaburras and lorikeets have decided it's definitely spring, and they're partying. Loudly.
Our Colombian ex-flatmate Oscar got his Aussie residence (PR) this week. I drove up to Brissie to help him celebrate. Unfortunately, he (and colleagues) were intent on celebrating a little too hard for me. Oscar had turned up a bottle of Colombian Aguardiente, so we had a few shots of that before heading out into West End, and following it up with lager and malt whiskey. We headed on to a West End restaurant (Tukka), but I became (strangely) extremely ill. After some vomiting, a bit of gratuitous falling over, some unexplained bruises and cuts, a disturbed night's sleep, and an enormous fry-up, I decided all was well and drove back to Nimbin to nurse my headache and curse those lorikeets and kookaburras.
Despite my pounding head, I've made good headway with the garden - hammering in a few more fenceposts and stringing up some chicken wire around the edges of the raised beds in a (probably doomed) effort to keep the wallabies away from our veggies.
Excitingly, the downstairs expansion project is finally in the "putting things back together" phase, so I've been able to help Bruce here and there with wall panels, lifting and carrying, and some measuring and marking. We're about three weeks away from the building work proper being complete - I'll try to get a photoset of the work up on photobucket at that point.

We're now girding our loins for Island Vibe festival, a week in Brissie beforehand, and of course, a long, hot Summer. In a good way.

Bloggito ergo sum.

2008-10-07T19:38:00.007+09:00

Officially forcing self to blog.
We had a (wonderful) day at the beach at Byron bay with Jonas and Tanya.
We tried to find the hanging rock swimming hole, but got lost in the car and ended up in Border Ranges national park, so we had a picnic there instead.

The Nimbin pool is open and the weather is now hot, so we're swimming most days in the morning before the rush (I can squeeze this in in the morning as I work 9-5 Brisbane time, and the clocks have gone forward here, so as long as I'm at my desk by 10 I'm OK).
Bruce has finished building our carport, so the car is all snug and out of the rain.
Steffan came round today and helped me, Bruce and his crew lift the five metre I-beam into place which will hold the house up, once the rest of the stumps are removed from the downstairs studio.
Monday was New South Wales Labour day (a bank holiday) and Iris celebrated her 31st, so we headed to Steffan and Iris's place and drank cold beer and swam (and dipped K) in their creek for a few hours until a rainstorm hit.
Last week Rob invited us to a Barbie at his place - they overlook a few acres and are set up on a nice hill out of town with a view of the Nimbin rocks and have a lovely little pad with plenty of artist studio space for both of them to work in peace and quiet.
This last 3 weeks we've planted rocket, sweetcorn, basil, strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, leeks, sunflowers and spinach. We planted so much, in fact, that we used up the sunny part of the raised bed, and had to trim the gigantic mulberry that was shading the rest.
Incredibly, there was a whole, mature apricot tree underneath the gigantic mulberry. I wonder what else lurks in the overgrown depths of this garden. Time (and our chainsaw) will tell.
C is working quite a bit now, and getting back into the swing of browser incompatibilities and buggy CSS rendering. Ahh, the joys of other than parenthood.
Have blogged. Can I sleep now?

Bookshop Crawl

2008-09-08T20:12:00.016+09:00

Somehow this blog has drifted into a fortnightly update. I require less slackness. I'm even not working overtime now, so I've no excuse not to keep it up to date.
My priority for the springtime is R&R. I need to recharge my batteries, get outdoors a lot, and spend quality time with C and K rather than hunched over my keyboard tapping away like I am now.
Last weekend in Lismore turned into a bit of a bookshop crawl, and next time is likely to be even worse, as we discovered that the municipal library hands out an official Lismore bookshop-crawl pamphlet (which is a bit much really, in a town where you can count the independent bookshops on your fingers).
Nonetheless, There has been much contented reading (and re-reading) this past couple of weeks - some LeGuin and some Greg Egan has really cheered me up. I still need cheering up. It's now 12 weeks since I got the flu, and I'm still a bit under the weather. I keep dithering about starting exercise - I disastrously went running a couple of times after 6 weeks and made myself very sick indeed, so I'm now overcautious and nervous about resuming some exercise.
The man from the council came and examined our cement formwork and pronounced it acceptable, so we have booked the cement truck to do the big pour on Monday, assuming the weather holds - the only caveats were that we also have to find some way to raise the railing round our balcony by 6 centimetres as it's not quite legal height, and we need to install mains-powered smoke detectors both upstairs and downstairs.
Amidst the brilliant sunshine we had one and a half days of torrential rain, starting last Thursday - the creek burst its banks and we couldn't drive into Nimbin - I stood by my car on the near bank along with a crowd of neighbours and joined in the communal tut-tutting and shaking of heads before executing a very soggy three-point turn and heading home.
We have now been in Australia 24 months, so we rang up to book our citizenship test (yes, they really do ask you questions about Don Bradman). Just because he's probably the most outstanding player of a team sport in history, there's no need to rub it in.
The big task this coming weekend is to take a chainsaw to the row of big palm trees on the north side of the house that steal sunlight - much as we like them, they are incompatible with the planned solar panels on the roof, and a couple of them are starting to lean ominously over the deck as they grow too. If it gets any warmer, I'll also be packing the logs away and retiring the woodstove for the summer - and that's a very happy thought!
On a less happy note, I can't let the Sarah Palin thing go by. I am aghast. No, that's not strong enough. I'm dumbfounded that her selection as McCain's running mate has led to a poll bounce for the GOP. Frankly, much like the Italians with Fini and Berlusconi, if the good citizens of the USA vote for someone who had to apply for a passport when her job as governor took her abroad, then they deserve what they get and may Cthulu preserve the rest of us. Seriously, I don't usually blog into this territory, but it's gone too far.

• Palin believes the world was created in 7 days by a sky pixie
• She's convinced man made global warming is a hoax
• She's convinced evolution is a mistaken theory and would like creationism taught in schools (She's backtracked, but check her quotes before she was on the ticket)
• She's against abortion
• she's against sex education in schools
• When newly elected mayor, she approached the town librarian with a query about how to go about banning books
• her position on healthcare: "...less regulation, more competition..."
• She's as pro-guns as you'd expect from a moose huntin' lady
• She openly campaigns to have the remaining wildlife sanctuaries in Alaska (and offshore) drilled for oil
• She's sharing a ticket with a septuagenarian with a dicky ticker - if he pops his clogs, she's CiC and her finger is on the button of the world's second largest nuclear arsenal.

My fingers are crossed, but I've got a bad feeling about this one.

Monotreme!

2008-08-28T19:26:00.007+09:00

Make room! Make room! This is the way to make more space - dig and dig and dig! The Bobcat only just fit under the ceiling, but had enough space to maneuver between the walls and get the soil out to the foot of the garden. Once Mr. Bobcat was done, there was less than an hour's spadework to get the ground ready for the new cement slab. There will be so much space - I think I'll just keep digging until I've built my own empire down there!
Apart from the "dig out downstairs" project and all the usual early Spring gardening fun, we've been appreciating the wildlife as it comes out of hibernation. Monty the Python is back in action - slithering up the garden of a Tuesday morning, and as I was going up the outside stairs on Monday I spotted a new visitor to the garden - an echidna. I got a photo, but he's just a spiky ball, and you can't see him quivering in a photo so I haven't bothered putting it up here. Unlike me, C had the patience to stand stock-still next to him with K until he calmed down and poked his very handsome snout out to have a look around.
I still haven't shaken off (what I'm hoping is only) the winter blues - I'm still coughing and spluttering my way round the house, and am heading to the doctor tomorrow; I've never been to the doctor before just 'coz I've got a cough, but it's getting ridiculous - I've been only half-well for over 2 months now. Even little K is getting more sleep than me, and she's the one waking me up at night!

This has been a high "screen time" week too - as well as a long week at work I've been succumbing to long online Mario Kart Wii sessions, and I finally got dragged into Facebook (yeah, I know, I swore it would never happen, whatever...I'm still holding out against Twitter and MySpace...) my monthly crossword for the local paper seemed to take forever to finish somehow (actually, I know why - it's because I boxed myself into a corner and refused to just rip it up and start again, which would have been far quicker)... and what am I doing now? Why, I'm sat here typing my blog when I should really be playing with my daughter before she goes to sleep.

Cold Cold Sun

2008-08-17T20:39:00.015+09:00

Nimbin has, if possible gotten even colder and sunnier. At the moment, we're not making any use of that sunshine, other than as a source of vitamin D. Hoping to change that, we attended a meeting on Thursday evening organised by local residents who are clubbing together to arrange a cheap package deal on grid-feed solar systems for locals from the Rainbow Power Company. This was pretty informative, and we discovered that the current generous federal government rebates for residential grid-feed PV installations are about to be reduced (madness of course, given that Australia will struggle to meet even the revised-down Kyoto target, and PV cells generate electricity with around 30% the carbon footprint of coal, which provides most of Australia's baseload) . Hopefully, we will manage to book in an install of panels on our roof before the rebates run out. Also on Thursday, C had her first girls' night out in Nimbin - dinner at the Spangled Drongo with friends , while I looked after the young beast. I didn't have it too tough looking after K though - the excitement of a hall full of people discussing solar panel federal rebate details had quite tired her out.

We had such a good time at last year's Island Time Reggae Festival, that I have been badgering that crew to make sure we get onboard again this year. They are finally up and running for Island Vibe 2008, and our names are down to be the "meet-and-greet" team for the artistes. I can't wait to be back on the island, and have been furiously downloading dub reggae to get myself in the mood.

C, on the other hand, has been getting creative in her own right - she's doing the graphics and posters for the annual Nimbin Film Festival this year - when she's not busy making ridiculous quantities of mandarine jam or baking the chocolate-chip muffin recipe she's just discovered. I actually don't think that its possible for our lives to get any less rock and roll.
This weekend, the priority has been using the lump-hammer to knock through the walls downstairs that block access for the Bobcat which is coming next Thursday to dig a tonne and a half of soil out from under the house. We have done the whole job except for the cleaning up, and it didn't take too long... But now I ache all over and it hurts to breathe. I'll keep a photo diary of the work, starting next week. Somehow, I have a feeling it will drag on for several months, but I'm very excited about all the extra living space we'll have at the end of it.

We had an unexpected invite this morning; Rob rang us with a second-hand invite to a proper aussie barbie at his friend's place right under the rocks (I took this photo from their back garden - lucky buggers)! There were more Nimbinites that we know there than we have ever seen in one place before - it's slowly starting to feel a bit less lonely downunder.

Picnics, Markets...Almost Springtime

2008-08-07T21:03:00.011+09:00

The new look 2oz is here. The only content addition is my list of recently read books (by the amazing LibraryThing) under the clock in the left-hand column - everything else is as it was before (the archive at the bottom right has changed to the drop-down style, but all the previous posts are accessible as before). The three columns are pretty much full up already, and the idea, when I have time, is to keep the current look and feel but add a fourth column for links, photos, feeds and other content. By the way, I would love to hear from any regular readers (whether I know you or not) - the stats are showing several loyal readers in parts of the world that I have certainly never been to, and in which I don't think I know anyone - flick me a comment if you are one of those readers, especially if you have a blog of your own, and even better if you live somewhere more obscure than Nimbin!

Another long week, the second of four with 10 hours overtime. We headed over to Dunoon on August the second, and had a picnic lunch at Jonas and Tanya's. Their lawn is much less "bush" than ours, and the experience of sitting on a picnic blanket in the shade on a sunny day tucking into yummy food made me realise, that we don't really use a garden as we should.

We made it into Lismore on Tuesday, and went for our first skin cancer checkup. Australians have their skin checked like Europeans have their teeth checked - every 12 months is recommended, and sensible people go back to their skin specialist if ever they notice anything unusual. While in Lismore, we also finally got around to joining the library. They have a great scheme where the little ones get a free party-pack with book, DVD, and learning materials at at 4, 12 and 24 months, to make sure that they get the reading bug.

I have also, finally, started wielding the chainsaw to do more than just cut logs. With C's help, I cut down, and then cut up (" bucked" - see, I'm learning the lingo) two fair-sized trees that were blocking a lot of light to the raised beds in the garden. While digging over the raised beds in preparation for spring planting, we also dug up the potatoes that we planted a few months ago. It was hardly a bumper harvest - just enough for two portions of fried potatoes... but it was our first attempt and I'm confident we'll get 10 times as good a crop next year.

The weather in Northern Rivers has continued its run of perfect blue sky outdoorsy days (I am relatively confident that the end of this perfect run will coincide with the end of my overtime at work). This kind of weather makes it easy to dig the garden and cut down trees and sit on the deck drinking tea and coffee, but much harder to do indoor stuff - and by Friday, it is making desk work seem like torture. I will be gutted if the weather switches to cold and rainy just when the outdoor swimming pool opens in September.

Today we went to Channon market again, but much later in the day than we have in the past. The market stalls set up quite early in the morning, and pack away shortly after lunchtime. However, early afternoon is, in some ways, when things begin - drummers and dancers assemble around the chai tent, and by three o'clock the circle of drummers is 20 feet in diameter and there are a hundred dancers and spectators - it's an energising atmosphere, and something we should really turn up to every month. Maybe it's the trance-head in me coming out, but I still find that there is nothing as effective as an hour of repetitive beats to blow the cobwebs away and leave me ready to face the week.

Kick Out the (Mandarine) JAMs

2008-07-30T20:13:00.012+09:00

July in Nimbin has seen several more frosty mornings. The silver lining is the complete lack of clouds - bright blue skies and warm afternoons in the sun. We have almost burnt through the $120 worth of firewood we bought in May - we wont make it to spring at this rate. Also, I've only noticed this winter, how very late it is that many trees lose their leaves here. I am too arboreally uneducated to figure out whether it's the native trees, or that European trees change their behaviour when planted here - several of the trees on our street lost their leaves in the last two or three weeks, which is the equivalent of mid-January.
More seasonally appropriately, the enormous mandarine harvest has continued; we have immune systems full of vitamin C, slight acid indigestion, an overflowing fruit bowl, friends politely refusing fruit, desperate (though tasty) inventions such as cottage cheese mandarine fool, and of course mandarine jam and half a kilo of candied tangerine peel.
Predictably, we didn't stick to our budget very well in New Zealand, so I've taken on an extra 10 hours a week for the next few weeks (which is a damned poor excuse for this update being four days late, but I'm sticking to it).
At the weekend we drove down to Bangalow market and met up with Jonas, Tanya and Otto. Otto is now crawling around like a little monster - it was a bit scary to see whats in store for us in the coming weeks!
We also got fairly constructive at the weekend, finally finishing off doing up the old meat safe - I won't be giving up my day job to renovate furniture, but it's slowly becoming a hobby I enjoy. Here are the before and after pics, showing it the day we picked it up, and now in it's place in the kitchen keeping our food safe from subtropical beasties.
I've also finally stopped procrastinating about the horrors of fixing up the utility room under the house. As well as talking to a bloke with a huge Bobcat (JCB), I've finally got off my arse and had an engineer round to provide a structural diagram of how an I-beam can be placed to hold up the utility room roof, got a builder lined up for the work, and in a fit of midnight studiousness, obtained my NSW owner builders' license - who knows, at some point some actual work might get started.

Kiwi Lurgy Hiatus

2008-07-19T22:07:00.010+09:00

I have no excuse to offer. This second hiatus of the Nimbin interblag in as many months is inexcusable. Three people have now complained.
Since my last post, we had a one-week holiday in New Zealand. It was fantastic to catch up with our Auckland friends, and we narrowly missed out on a triumphant return to our pub quiz team of yore - we were one point away from tying for first place, but instead lost (again....) to long-time arch rivals.
Unfortunately, about 20 minutes after stepping out of the plane into the frosty Waikato midnight, and scraping the frost off the hire car's windscreen, I came down with the world's most evil viral flu (or, man-cold as Jo dubbed it, until she caught it herself...)
The rest of the holiday passed in a blur of fevers and flu and long car journeys with a sick, screaming baby.
My work contract at the moment specifies that if I take holiday, my hours must nett to zero over the following weeks, so as soon as we got back I began working longer weeks to make up the hours - which was tough at first as I was still quite ill.
By last week, I was feeling much better. Bas and Jo, over from New Zealand to visit Jo's father in Cairns, stayed with us for a couple of days and we showed them around Nimbin and spent a sunny morning walking up to protesters' falls.
And so three weeks of semi-convalescence have passed, and most of my time has been relatively non blog worthy:

We bought low-key lampshades and other assorted "the Gap of home wares"-style basics from Ikea on our way back through Brisbane.

Some time has been spent restoring our 1930s Tasmanian meat safe - this is a labour of love, which is just another way of saying it's taking bloody ages to get what should be a small simple piece of furniture looking good enough so I'm not embarrassed to put it in my kitchen. At this point, there is 'only' some planing, sanding, painting, varnishing, replacing of hinges, tacking, and wire brushing left to do.

Less frustrating, but also less constructive was last week's effort to connect the Wii to the interweb. After a fair amount of profanity, I gave in, and removed both WPA encryption and MAC address filtering from my wireless access point and was finally able to connect with the Wii. Our neighbours are too distant to be able to piggyback on our WiFi, but I wouldn't be surprised to trip over a bunch of Nimbin wardrivers in beaten up VWs with solar powered laptops out the back one of these mornings.
The last 10 days have been crisp, clear, sunny and still. Also, bloody cold by Australian standards. The enormous crop of mandarins in our garden only serves to rub in the fact that at night time at the moment, it's dropping to what I consider Christmas temperatures.

Today is C's birthday, so we drove to Byron and had a day at the beach. The water was much too cold for swimming, but just lying on the beach and paddling in the water rocked, and we wandered round the back streets of Byron and discovered a few little shops and cafes that we didn't know about, including a toy shop that only sells wooden and plush toys, and an interesting looking vegetarian restaurant.
Given that my plans for the foreseeable future consist of staying at home and chilling out for the portion of the week when I'm not at work, it may be somewhat boring, but none the less normal service interblag-wise will be resumed from next week - namely a weekly blag of our exploits such as they are, and some photos - some, perhaps, even relevant.

Toowong Time

2008-06-11T22:21:00.008+09:00

I have spent the last couple of weeks taking advantage of being in Brisbane rather than in the bush - everything from the mundane (dental checkups) to the cultural (West End’s second hand bookshops) to the tempting (the Greek stalls’ halva and pistachio creams) gets sorted, and indulged in more after a period of relative rural isolation.
I have also been catching up with my friends and colleagues at Gensolve, and we even arranged a beer and pizzas afternoon last Saturday and a load of our friends and ex-housemates turned up.
I have used the two weeks to break out of the cabin Fever syndrome but does eventually set in from working at home day in day out. It's made quite a nice change to work from the office a couple of days this week and last, and commuting by ferry on the Citicat reminded me of commuting across the bay back in Auckland.
When we looked after the same house last year, I went running two or three times a week and each time I varied my route slightly. The outcome was that each one took me past a different section of the North West Brisbane suburbia. This year, I took up where I left off - I continued to explore the network of suburban cul-de-sac roads and paths. On my very first outing, I turned left, left, and left again - and Kapunda street led me into a large tract of urban parkland that sits in between the Western Freeway and the bottom of Mount Coot-Tha. Somehow, I had failed to discover this strip of eucalyptus trees and jogging tracks last year, even though they form a crescent behind the dead end street the house we're staying at sits on.
We have dealt fairly well with the housesitting - we have fed and pampered the cats, supplied them with the correct vittles, hot water bottles, electric blankets, reverse cycle air conditioning, and C even lets them sleep on her tummy. We have also fed the white parrots, and more or less kept the place shipshape. Having animals around does remind me how much I miss having pets, having grown up with both dogs and cats. At the same time though, it reminds me how much hassle it is trying to find someone to look after them when you go away, or even worse, the horror of putting them into kennels. We have been very close to adding a dog to the family several times in recent months-it will probably happen quite soon now.

Blue Shells, White Paint, Black Bags

2008-05-31T17:01:00.018+09:00

It feels like we've made progress on the paperwork front recently - K has her Australian passport, and our home-office is now fully legal, displaying the requisite business name licence upon the otherwise bare wall.
When we first looked at our house in Nimbin I can remember that two of the things we said to ourselves were "it's a little bit tired, but nothing that a coat of paint won't fix", and "ooh, look at those lovely exposed beams". During the phase of falling in love with a new place, mental maths about ease of renovation come quite a way down one's list; but, now that we have got to the point where I am perched on a stepladder, applying masking tape and then renewing paintwork 15 foot up with paint dripping into my eyes, the reality has struck home fairly hard - if a room is three metres by three metres, and only a plain dado rail separates the wall from the ceiling, then prior to painting the ceiling, you have to apply 12 metres of masking tape, and then you have 12 metres of edging which needs to be painted carefully. Our lounge-cum-kitchen has eight exposed beams, squiggly dado edging around the beams, and a main beam through the middle upon which all the others rest. It is approximately seven metres long and four and a half metres wide. Even ignoring the squiggles, this results in 87 metres of masking tape and careful edging required - several times as much work, in other words, as edging a plain ceiling.
Prevaricating about painting walls and ceiling has become significantly easier since we bought a second control of the MarioKart. I only have one complaint about the game, which is that C seems to beat me too often. For the occasional gamer such as I (as opposed to the hardcore gamer) the balance, playability, learning curve and fun factor are simply superb.
This week, we are taking a break both from MarioKart and the joys of house painting. We are housesitting once again for a South African who has temporarily returned to her native land to run an ultramarathon. Being in Brisbane next week will be very convenient, as we are flying to New Zealand to catch up with friends in Auckland, and this way we will be able to get the train from the city to the airport instead of facing a three hour drive. Driving up on Thursday though, we had a pleasant surprise - the Tugun bypass is finally complete, routing through traffic behind the Gold Coast airport, and cutting 15-30 minutes (and a lot of stress) from the Nimbin-Brisbane drive, depending on traffic.
Having won a design competition for the town's sports kits a few weeks ago, C has gone one better this week, and has scored a deal to swap some design skills for a weekend yoga retreat in Mullumbimby next month.
I have been tired and grouchy because the side project I took on last month has dragged on, eating into my evenings, and turning out not to have been financially worth the time and effort invested (by a long chalk in the end). If I count in the lessons learnt, it was probably a worthwhile venture - but, being honest, one of those lessons is "never do anything like this again".
In our moving from being full-time employees to forming a partnership for our freelance contract work, there have been many lessons both big and small - and one of the hardest to learn has been that not all chunks of time are equal, and that it is very important to remember that, if the chunks of time when one is alert and wake already spoken for, then any work that one takes on that will have to be done in the remaining parts of the day will have a disproportionate impact on one's energy levels. Yes. That's a roundabout way of apologising for being late with the blog.

Winter warmers

2008-05-18T18:10:00.012+09:00

Apologies for the blog hiatus. Nothing particularly noteworthy has happened in the last week or two, so my dear readers have not missed out.
After many hours working together using wedges, crowbars and lots of bloody mindedness, C and I have rolled the trunk sections of the felled Polonia trees into a lozenge shape on the Western side of the house, and gravelled a path through the middle of it diagonally. This neatly solved the problem of what to do all with those trunk sections that were far too large and heavy to move more than a few metres, and what to do with the large empty section of garden between the driveway and the trunks.
We have also got the bathroom floors sanded and varnished at long last, so we no longer have to be terrified of getting even a drop of water on the floorboards! Both of us had extremely long, hot, environmentally-unfriendly showers to celebrate.
One of the reasons we are making great strides and getting on top of both the garden and the necessary house repairs, is that K can now hold her head up and absolutely loves to ride in the backpack. This opens up whole new realms of possibilities for interaction, and simply getting on with my life. There seems to be hardly any activities which K is not delighted to be involved in , by being put in the backpack. She now coos and gurgles happily away behind me whilst I potter around the garden in my middle-aged way trundling up and down with the wheelbarrow, potted plants, and bags of NPK fertiliser. I'm probably the only inhabitant of Nimbin putting this much hard yakka into not-for-profit gardening!
We had a huge autumn storm last week. The usual torrential rain, ominous cracking sounds from the surrounding eucalypts, and towering black clouds. What was amazing though, was the aftermath, which happened during sunset - for the first time in my life I saw that "sunset through thunderstorm" tropical glow I've seen photographed so much. My pictures didn't come out unfortunately, but it's an awesome thing to see. Basically, the sky glows bright octarine.

We are now set up for winter - the logfire crackles away every evening, we have a good stack of logs, and we have mastered a cheesecake recipe. I'd say little is lacking for a cozy and secure hibernation until about September!

Mardi Grass 2008

2008-05-08T21:36:00.013+09:00

Last year, we partied for two days and then went to the doof after mardi grass. This year, we fed the baby and went to sleep.
The carnival parade was better than in '07 or '06 though, and overall the event feels more successful than those previous years in merging the political with the personal. On this note, I was amazed to hear that Albert Hoffmann had died. I saw no obits anywhere - it's as if he'd never existed. Maybe it's just in Murdoch-land, but the lack of any media reaction to his passing seems downright creepy to me.

There were several reasons making this one a big mardi grass - it was the 35th anniversary of the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, and one of the Nimbin's Icon's, the Plantem, died recently, and his image adorned the publicity for the festival. As usual, the town was packed for a week leading up to mardi grass, and as usual, most everyone was smiley, happy, and having a great time.
We finally got around to checking out the Bush Theatre, which reopened a couple of weeks back - it's got a great little auditorium and a rocking sound-system, so there should be some mashup events there if they use the venue right. It's such a perfect space, nestled over the bridge by the river, half in and half out of town - it seems impossible it was ever closed, yet also impossible to see how it can be truly profitable; I hope very much that either I'm proved wrong, or the community finds away to keep it open without it having to make a (monetary) profit.
On the home front we've been making steady progress back to normality in the aftermath of the chaos caused by the tree-felling and termite treatments: We have developed a low-tech system for maneuvering the tree stumps around the garden - I roll them a few inches at a time, and C follows up immediately with a chock to prevent them rolling back. It's slow and annoying, but it works. I've been swiftly chainsawing up the piles of older wood, and it seems to multiply as you chop - I've been chuffed to realise we actually have more than enough fuel for the wood-fire to keep us snug all winter!
Our cacti and capsicum plants have both produced babies, which we've potted out. I'm going to have to find some capsicum recipes for the spring, or we'll be overwhelmed! We also have a few kilos of tangerines coming along, a couple of kilos of lemons, and probably a fair few bananas - the lesson for next year is, if it doesn't rain heavily in February and March, water the bloody trees!
Ah, yeah, and I got my Wii hooked up.

Sun & Snake

2008-04-30T21:27:00.013+09:00

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.

Settled At Last

2008-04-22T22:08:00.004+09:00

So, we're settled. I'm settled. We've gone bush.
Hitting the ground running in my new job has still been tricky though - no sooner had the tree surgeons ridden off into the sunset (leaving me wondering what I'm meant to do with all those sections of tree trunk) than the termite control guys showed up to sort us out.
We hastily arranged to borrow Steffan's trailer, hitched it up and ferried two trailer-loads of gravel from the sawmill up the road to our place, and I got up at 5am on the day to dig trenches around our stumps and fill them with gravel - we're planning to have gravel around most of the perimeter, so the news that we couldn't move any soil after the poison was down was something of a kick up the arse in that department.
The main man reassured me that the chemicals he was using were quite safe (though I noticed that he didn't remove his breathing apparatus, eye protection or thick gloves at any time - nor did he go anywhere near his junior assistant, who was actually applying the poison). We decided to be out of the house for the part of the operation where the workmen drilled tens of holes through the cement slab in order to inject litres of organophosphate solution into the soil - so we went to Lismore for the day.
My good intentions of keeping my hours low and staying chilled have been somewhat compromised by stereotypical newbie-contactor fear of turning any work down. C has started getting busy again too - she has chunks of freelance work, and she's volunteering at the Nimbin CTC - which is both in a good cause and a very good way to meet people in the village.
Our random element this week came from Stefan and Iris heading off for a mini-break, and needing someone to look after their goats. We fed them, we watered them. I even scratched them between the ears. Still don't really like goats though - all they're good for is making delicious cheese.

Back down South

2008-04-01T19:48:00.020+09:00

We went round to a friend's place in Holland Park for earth hour. They had bought candles to light the place up for the big lights-out at eight pm, and apparently didn't see any irony in sitting in their spa-pool on the balcony (which they said had pushed their last electricity bill to $700) to watch Brisbane's lights go out. It seemed churlish, as guests, to point out that there might be a contradiction there, so we relaxed with a glass of bubbly and enjoyed the evening instead. Why's the planet going to hell in a handbasket again? Oh, yeah...
Next morning, we had breakfast together in a Gabba cafe and headed into the CBD for yet more provisioning, before meeting up with Oscar and Aida, who wanted to see K again before we headed South.
My last week at work flew by, and we met up with my colleagues in town on Tuesday - because they wanted to say hi/bye to K as well. We also ended up trying to pick up the Tasmanian meatsafe twice more before it was finally ready, and even now there are bits of the original paint sticking stubbornly to the metal mesh. Getting the thing to a presentable state is becoming a labour of love.
After putting it off for a couple of years, I finally bought a walkman last week. I'm much happier with music in the background when going about everyday tasks, and should remember to never leave myself stranded without it, even for an hour or so - it can make the difference between a dark mood and a light mood, especially when alone.
The final packing and drive South was something of an adventure - tessellating all our possessions from our West End room into the car took me 4 hours, and unpacking everything at the far end took almost as long - so the packing and unpacking altogether took three times as long as the drive from West End to Nimbin. Foolishly, we decided to get a meal out in West End rather than trying to cook before heading out - our food took 90 minutes to arrive, and we ended up not hitting the road till after 9 Brisbane time, and getting home at 01:15 NSW time. Feeding the baby at 5am was even less fun than usual on Friday morning.
On Saturday we headed over to Nimbin sports ground for the first time ever. I'm not a great follower of any of the football codes they play in these parts, so I'd never thought to go along. On this occasion, it was because C had won a design competition for the Headers ( the local football-with -a-round-ball team) and three of her designs will soon figure on various bits of Headers merchandise. Once T-shirts are on sale, pictures will follow.
On Sunday we did the Lismore car boot sale - it's an unlikely venue for a great market, but I like markets and I'd venture that Lismore car boot sometimes verges on being a great market: It has live chickens, rednecks selling Eureka flags, a good selection of unhealthy fried food, and in excess of 50 stalls that sell absolutely nothing I could ever imagine being of any use to anyone, ever.
The first two days of the week back in Nimbin should have been all about getting ahead in my new job. Instead, both days were taken up almost entirely by felling trees. I'd negotiated a price on the understanding that I'd pitch in as a second groundsman while the chainsaw guy cut the trees down and the chipper bloke reduced the branches to wood chip. I'd expected the whole thing to be full-on, but I was surprised by how much bloody fun it was. I was also amazed at the speed and professionalism of the guys with the chainsaws - if you live in Northern rivers and need trees removing or shaping, I highly recommend the Treeshape guys. Not only did they take down four huge polonia trees and a large cocos palm, and reduce the whole lot (bar the trunks) to wood chip in less than a day and half, they also reshaped a fifth 30 metre tall Polonia to reduce the shade it cast and make it safer in high wind.
That's all done with now though, and I'm currently dealing with the more mundane issue of finding enough space around and about the place to dry out about a metric tonne of polonia heartwood - as I'm reliably informed it will only be good to use as firewood after next southern winter, in 2009.

Up the Road One Last Time

2008-03-28T20:08:00.014+09:00

On Saturday we turned up for Stefan and Iris's party. Which was great, except that the party was scheduled for Sunday. They took advantage of our fuckwittedness to take a break from their chores, and we had a good chinwag and catch-up over tea and biscuits. Who says I'm getting old?
There was an eight-foot-long snake above our breakfast spot on the balcony outside our lounge on Sunday morning. It looked like a carpet snake to me. I hope it was a carpet snake anyway. It was friendly and relaxed, and seemed to be looking for somewhere to bask. It slithered off and lay on the roof for a bit, and when I went back to check a couple of hours later, it was gone. We packed the car for the last ever Brissie commute, and then hit Stefan and Iris's party on the way. Their dutch-themed Easter-egg hunt, beer, and superlative spicy apple cake parties are definitely a fixture in my calendar. I had a couple of beers and caught up with people I hadn't seen since the last one, so poor C was designated driver as far as Murwillumbah. The post-easter traffic was fairly light to my relief, and we were back in West End by seven thirty, which is a good start to the week.
Knowing this is our last week in Brissie for a while, we've been frantically doing things that are easier and/or cheaper in the city than in the bush: We took the car to the garage to get a towbar (and discovered a rather excellent cafe on Logan Road while we waited); we've put the food safe which we bought two weeks ago into one of those "dip'n'strip" places in the Gabba, but the guy's still battling the (probably lead-based) 1940s Tasmanian paint a week later; we've got Kaara's photo for her australian passport; we've showed our faces at the annual ITG contractors' shindig at The Fox in West End (and fluked a friend's babysitter for the night so we could actually go together!); and, we've rung round most of Northern Rivers' insect exterminators - and the termites' days are now numbered - I've booked a pest guy to come at the end of next week and use the powdered arsenic and maybe more long-term chemical solutions as well. No more Mister nice householder.
Mostly, though, I've been finishing off at one job while ramping up at the other, and helping C stay on top of the nappies and the entertainment of an increasingly easily-bored little girl.
A final piece of frantic background activity: This cookie-cutter template was chosen back in 2006 in a desperate attempt to avoid choice of (and tweaking of) a template from becoming a displacement activity as I tried to shirk the weekly blogging. A new (and less playschool) template is on the way. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of this blog.

Penultimate BrisVegas

2008-03-10T19:07:00.015+09:00

So we were back in BrisVegas en-masse for what should have been the final time, but is now the next-to-last time.
My (over)persuasive boss sweet-talked me into working an extra two weeks - so I've had to recruit C to help out with all the crap I've now committed myself to doing over the next four weeks. Idiot.
Nonetheless this week's will be my penultimate drive up to Brissie - and I'm pretty excited at the thought of getting rid of that weekly 340 kilometre round-trip! I drove the other way this time - imitating C & Fran's detour via the famous Lions Road, but going straight at Dairy Flat for the most direct inland route from Nimbin to Brisbane. It' s a nice drive, if perhaps a bit too scenic at times, and doesn't take any longer than driving via Murwillumbah and the Pacific Highway. I had to work on Friday, so Fran took the Citicat all the way along the Brisbane river from the Port area right up to the UQ campus out West, and hopped off to look at the New Farm park around the Powerhouse. Saturday the four of us had a great chilled day exploring Latrobe terrace (that's me above at cafe pandemonium) - I never tire of the old junk shops and nik-nak places in Paddo; this time, by ridiculous coincidence, I stumbled on a 1983 pen-and-ink drawing of the house 3 doors down from our place at Besant Street in West End (which is way across the other side of Brisbane and over the river from Paddington) and even talked the lass at the shop into giving it to me for $20, which I reckon is a bargain. I'll put a photo of it up next week, it's a nice sketch.
On Sunday we spent the day at the Mount Coot-Tha botanical gardens, then I drove Fran to the airport for 11pm, as she had a 2:30am flight for Brunei. I was sad waving her off, but I knew she was even sadder leaving her granddaughter on the wrong side of the world.
After (many) hours of digging and shifting soil around the perimeter of our house, this week I have finally found termites around a stump. This is actually a major breakthrough as the stump in question is directly below the wall I already knew they were in - so I've pretty much located their entry point. Friends in the area have all advised that I should use chemicals myself rather than call out a pro to use chemicals for me at a massive surcharge, so I'll soon be blogging about my experiences with various arsenic based insecticides. I hope.
I've also used a large chunk of my time this week setting up my profile on The Content Wrangler community site and starting a group for "work from home" tech writers - somehow it seemed more important than work and more fun than digging soil away from the house. To all ye hordes nipping at my heels about my lack of a MyFace, or SpaceBook profile - have patience! As well as the Content Wrangler, I am LinkedIn, I keep my work site pretty up-to-date, and I'm fairly active on most of the relevant forums - so, the only way I'm going to get myself set up on the social networking sites is by making absolutely sure that I'll have no extra maintenance to do on my new profiles - and that takes time!
The shenanigans surrounding the company lease of my car (now that I'm leaving my permie job and going contracting again) have been enough to make me pine for my car-free London days: It seems the change in status from leased to hire-purchase somehow involves me filling in forms in triplicate for the HR department at work, the licensing guys, the road tax people, the finance company, the tax office, the insurers, and Bob. And Bob's Dog. And its fleas.
We have a four-day weekend coming up for Easter, which means more time to battle the termites, and (with any luck) more time to sleep.

Waterfalls, Rainbows and Mist

2008-03-03T16:59:00.028+09:00

Fran picked me up from the Brisbane train for the last time on Thursday morning.
Thursday and Friday were rainy, indoorsy, fruit cheesecake, movie and coffee kinds of day. Apart from my day job the only constructive thing that got done was sanding and varnishing the magazine rack which C had found on last month's Nimbin market. It looks great now, and fits in with the default-early-settler look our place seems to be acquiring whether we like it or not.
During a brief sunny interlude I did manage to rip the ancient, collapsing roof off the chicken coop. Obviously, this is only the first half of a job - but now the lack of a roof on the structure is very noticeable and it should (at least in theory) spur me into completing the task!
Saturday was taken up with a mission to Lismore to get a wheelbarrow and a load of breeze blocks. I've made a start pulling up the railway sleepers that retain the raised beds in our garden and substituting breeze blocks: The horizontally placed sleepers are held in place by vertical wedges of sleeper that are jammed three feet into the ground, and can only be removed using extreme violence. Laying about one such vertical wedge with a large mattock, I managed to hit myself in the eyelid with a flying splinter of railway sleeper, and my eye was inflamed and swollen for three days. It's on the mend now, but still tender.
On Sunday we drove to Protestors' Falls and walked to the waterfall. This is a magnificent walk, which more than made up for my disappointment over the other local rain forest walks: The trees are great, the river valley which the path follows up to the falls is pretty and varied, and the falls at the end are impressive despite being quite small and not (at the moment) having that much water.
This walk was also my first successful use of the hug-a-bub baby sling in the "bub-facing-you" configuration - the verdict: very comfy for both dad and bub!
There was a rainbow over Nimbin when we got back from the waterfall - arching right above the town when viewed from the North.
Apart from replacing the sleepers with breeze blocks, the other task that has been a very high priority since learning that we have a termite infestation is that of clearing all the wood and building materials that the previous owners had left stacked under the house. This was a horrible job because the space under the house is not quite high enough to stand up straight in - so I had to stoop while I lifted and carried armload after armload of nail-studded wood through semi-darkness. In doing this I found more termites at the bottom of the woodpile - but I'm still no closer to figuring out their entry point into the house... They're cunning little buggers!
On Monday, for the first time in Nimbin, I was able to do my morning's work over an espresso coffee while watching the world go by on Cullen Street. The e-bar is working getting wireless broadband set up, and I was able to plug into their LAN - I find doing some screen-time in a cafe environment makes a pleasant change from working at home from time to time, if only because of the interaction and background noise, which is more human in the third place than in a home office. We were in the village because Monday was K's 2-month inoculation day. C took her to the GP and they administered all the standard shots. Once recovered from the initial shock and pain, she alternated between grizzling and screaming for most of the rest of the day - which didn't leave me in the best of moods for my (last and final) 2:45am alarm call to catch the Kyogle train in to work on Tuesday morning.

Termites!

2008-02-26T18:23:00.007+09:00

The good news is... I'm moving on from my Brisbane job. I'll be upping the hours on my home-based contract, and cutting out the weekly 6-hour round trip. Expect more sanity, more feedback, and more photos on the blog.
This has been a particularly busy week, and has really brought home how much I need to cut back my hours - I've been up late this evening doing the crossword for the local paper, I was up late yesterday proofreading a friend's thesis, the night before that I got up at 2:45am to catch the train to Brisbane - what I really hate is that I'm starting to let people down because I'm too tired to concentrate on the things I need to get right.
The bad news is... we have a termite infestation in our house. The buggers are eating our bedroom floor. A professional will be coming along in March sometime to inject arsenic into the wood along with some other toxic stuff I don't want to think about. Embarrassingly, it's the same guy who did our house inspection 18 months ago - and have I done all the termite-risk minimisation work on the garden he advised me to do? Have I hell.
Fran has got our garden pond to within a few hours' work of finished - we drove together up Gungas road to collect large stones to cement around the edge, and Fran re-pointed the bottom of the pond itself - we should be filling it with water and seeing how it goes within a week or two - expect excited posting of boring fish when that happens. The gardening energy levels were fairly sustained all week - herbs were planted, pots were purchased, weeds were pulled up, and trees were earmarked for destruction. I'm excited about how much we'll be able to get done this coming winter when things grow a bit slower and we can get ahead of the bush. We even (finally) made a call and called the tree guy to confirm we wanted his team to come in and chainsaw down our five "problem" trees - that will be a manic and exhausting two days, probably in April some time.
I was tired from driving to Bangalow and back for the market, so I took the train to Brisbane this week - now I'm here I'm realising that I'm gonna miss the little city pied-a-terre. Onwards and upwards.

Free Association

2008-02-17T22:04:00.007+09:00

I'm pushed for time with this blog, so I'm going to scribble down the week's doings as they come back to me.
I put the car into the garage, and miraculously they did the bodywork same day and I picked it up that evening.
Fran has finished her painting of K - a photo will go on the blog once the fixative has dried.
The tree surgeon came and quoted on sorting out our invasive tree problem - they're Polonias, not Camphor Laurels - Stefan had already told me they might be Polonias - should've guessed he'd be on the money. All five trees cut, logged and chipped came in just above $1,500, so I reckon we'll go for it as it will sort out our garden and give us lots more breeze and sunlight in the winter months.

The channon market featured a lively samba band.

I was less lively for much of the week.

We've had Cockatoos and Wallabies around the garden as the sun has started to come back out.

Fran wanted to see Woodburn and Evans Head, so we drove down on Saturday - impressive piece of national park, and beaches that surpassed my expectations - though it was too rainy for swimming that day.

We spent this morning consuming unlikely quantities of caffeine and then wandering round the market and Nimbin art gallery with Fran - and I picked up a load of good SF books for 50 cents a pop, including some Harlan Ellison I've never seen before (slaver, slaver...)
Jonas and Tanya came round this afternoon with Otto - he's become huge and much more of a person in his own right... It's amazing how quickly new babies' personalities start to shine through!
In a final burst of constructive energy, I have used some free time this evening to go through the enormous pile of clothes which C has been intending to sell on eBay for the last 2 months, and take a picture of each one before bagging them up - so the enormous clothes drift no longer threatens to topple onto me while I'm sleeping and crush the air out of my lungs.
Things are afoot. News is imminent. Watch this space.
Keep watching.

Rooted but Proactive

2008-02-03T19:23:00.001+09:00

We have been extremely proactive around the house and garden in the last couple of weeks. Our 5.1 surround system in the lounge is now fully wired up (after a bit of clambering around in the crawlspace under our lounge) as is the tumble drier. Sounds in the office are halfway there. I've climbed up on the roof and cleaned the leaf mulch out of the guttering. I've cleared the encroaching bush from a sizeable vegetable plot. I've mowed the entire road frontage. The garden as a whole has taken a beating - between me and Fran we have planted out a root vegetable plot in the newly cleared space, trimmed back two large native figs, and completed a survey of the trees we will have to finish off with a chainsaw and a tub of glyphosate. On the garden-fixing front, while getting my coffee fix at the Rainbow café, I bumped into Junior, our affable South African professional-diver-cum-cook-cum-project-manager friend, and it turns out that he also has his chainsaw licence (as though he didn't have enough hats already!) When he gets back from his annoyingly glamorous stint diving in the Red Sea off the Yemen, he will come and have a look at the camphor laurel problem in our garden, and, with a bit of luck, get rid of the problem trees for "mates rates". Some of the work on our garden has made me realise that I still have some serious thinking to do in terms of reducing the amount of ongoing work that it generates. For example, Fran not only dragged the dead palm leaves off the lawn and onto our brush-piles, but even cut off the dead palm leaves that were still attached to palm trees in our front garden, and there is now lots more light coming through the kitchen window. There must be a way (other than killing all the palm trees) to cut down on that - I just need some ingenuity.
There has been more light generally in the last couple of weeks, as the preceding weeks' constant rain has been broken up by quite a few sunny days. We have used the good weather to get into Lismore and explore the town with Fran, to go swimming At Nimbin pool, and to spend a day around Byron Bay. I had to work for half the day in Byron, so I ended up heading to a WiFi cafe for a few hours (and getting twice as much done as usual - probably due to more regular doses of caffeine). Fran, K and C had a great day on the beach, and we met up afterwards and headed to the Hari Krishna restaurant for dinner. Before driving off, just before sunset we witnessed something I hadn't seen before - flocking lorikeets. These birds are pretty alone or in pairs, but they looked like hundreds of flying jewels as they spiralled around the pines above the Byron beach in the evening light. They are quite small, and fly (and flap their wings) quickly though, so you'd need a top-end video camera to capture the scene.
Before we got back to our house in Nimbin last week, I had been very worried about possible water damage due to the severity of the rain we'd had previously. In the event, our house stood up very well to what was, really, an unusual and severe climatic event. The most noticeable effect of the severe rain has been a jump in the number of spiders and insects, and of course in the lizards, frogs and presumably snakes that feed on them -though I haven't seen any snakes yet since the rains. Another, much more enjoyable effect of the severe rain is to make our friends Steffan and Iris's little creek swell up to the point where it is a veritable river (though not in flash-flood mode like it was three weeks ago) which means that the bigger of the two swimming holes on their property is now about three metres deep and 30 metres long. We went along with a bottle of wine, and had a fine time - all that was missing was a lilo, and I'll make sure I bring one next time!
We are learning to sleep when the baby sleeps, and K is now often sleeping 4 hours per night, which is making it a lot easier to get up for work in the morning. Nonetheless, last night, which I spent in Brisbane for work, was my first night of uninterrupted sleep since December 21, and I don't believe that it is coincidence that it is this evening I have finally found the energy to write this blog entry.

Awake

2008-01-20T23:06:00.001+09:00

we've done much, but little that's blogworthy.
K is now a month old, hale, hearty, and loud.
We've spent a couple of weeks in Brisbane, and shown Rose the sights to some extent - trundled the pushchair round Lone Pine Koala sanctuary, taken the Citicat down to New Farm and looked round the Powerhouse, shopped for nik-naks along Paddington's Latrobe Terrace, and gone out for wine and pizza in West End - which is not bad considering we've got a month-old bub in tow.
Work has proved pretty tough with my reduced sleep ration, and working from home has, in practice, meant putting an eight hour day in, in smallish chunks between 7am and 11pm.
Though it hasn't got any sunnier, it has got hotter and more humid, and in the last few days it has become harder to work from home - I'm training the fan directly on my face, and trundling over to the fridge for iced water every 5 minutes or so.
C's mum has flown back to the UK, and my mum has arrived from Portugal, in a fairly efficient tag-team operation which will ensure C doesn't have to cope with bub by herself in the first four months. I've become conscious of the looming logistical nightmare that will be taking a toddler on two 25 hour flights to the UK and back to meet the relatives - even though it's a year or so away, I should start solving the problems while I've got thinking time to spare...Now if only I could get enough sleep to think straight.
Next week is Australia day, a Mondayised bank holiday, which I've extended to take as a week off, so I will catch up properly with the blogging, upload some of our Brisbane photos, and maybe get around to replacing the picture of me enjoying the cigar of fatherhood in the sidebar, which is getting a bit tired. Apologies for missing a week last Sunday - I'll not let it happen again any time soon.

Cabin Fever

2008-01-06T14:58:00.000+09:00

An even rainier week!

To see just how rainy, check out this video our friends Steffan and Iris took (from their blog vos2oz.com). The first half of this video shows what is normally a very small, placid creek on their property. The second half shows the adventure that driving to Lismore has become!

My grand plans for getting ahead on the garden have been stymied by the continual downpour. Even most indoor work is impossible because the wooden structure of the house is too wet. Looking on the bright side, it has enforced a degree of rest over the first couple of weeks with the new baby, which is probably a good thing - especially for C.
When we have gone out, it has been indoors - we've spent a fair amount of time at the Rainbow cafe.
Given that our tumble dryer died, and the rain has been more or less constant, the most rock and roll element of my lifestyle has been the daring early morning trips to the laundrette. In order to keep up with the demand for clean, dry nappies and bunny rugs, I've been driving through knee-deep water to the village and back whenever we've got behind on the nappies. The guy at the Spin Cycle shop in Lismore promised us he would be able to fix our tumble dryer this week, but when we drove into town on Wednesday to drop it off, we found that he had extended his Xmas holiday. These small details can really change the shape of your week. And lose you someone's business.

As the four of us have been experiencing slight cabin-fever, cooped up in our house, we have avoided driving straight home from the village a few times, and today we took a 10 minute detour up Gungas Road to take a look at the normally peaceable small creek that runs though Steffan's yard. Not only had the creek been transformed into a eight metre wide torrent, but there are waterfalls falling directly onto Gungas Road itself, and Gungas Road is cut off to all but the ruggedest all terrain vehicles at the point where it fords the creek to go up the hill. its a bit of an adventure in the rainforest right now.

And Baby Makes Three

2008-01-01T14:50:00.000+09:00

As K was born by C-section, C had to stay in hospital for three days after the birth. Each morning Rose and I drove into Lismore, and we helped C look after K during visiting hours, and ran errands in Lismore during the ward's "quiet time".

We organised an xmas lunch on the patio in front of C's hospital room. On Boxing Day we packed up our stuff and brought K home to Nimbin. She seemed to enjoy the car ride, which was a relief, and has so far settled very well to life at home. Obviously at this age she is not very interactive yet - but she takes notice of some of the wildlife and rainforest noises around her, and, though she can't focus her eyes yet, she definitely tracks things of interest using her head.

As K has not cried very much (only for food or nappies in the main) we have had time to finish off a few of the chores that got left as loose ends when we headed into Lismore for the birth. I shinned up the Jacaranda tree in our back garden and lopped off five or six large branches. I took out the in-window air conditioning unit which we had set up in the bedroom in readiness for C to labour at home. C and I moved the crib into our bedroom and surrounded it with mobiles and pictures (entirely unappreciated as yet, of course).

We also had a second xmas after we got home - polishing off the food C didn't eat when in hospital, opening the rest of the presents, and C having her first "post-tot" tot of Baileys after eight months of strict abstemiousness - K slept very well that night.

For much of the week we've been trapped indoors by heavy rain - being used to having the run of the garden, we're all getting cabin fever. Nonetheless, we have managed a quick walk in the Nightcap Ranges national park, where little K had her first alfresco nappy change. We have also made it out to the weekly Saturday market in Nimbin, and the monthly Sunday market too. At the Sunday market, C was able to relax with a hot chocolate at the chai tent, where K happily fell asleep in her lap to a local folk/harp trio.

The new baby lack-of-sleep thing isn't bothering me so far (especially as K has cried very little) but I expect that will change next week when I have my first 7:30am meeting.

Won't someone stop that evil man - not only is he blowing his carcinogenic cigar smoke into his baby daughter's face, but he's clearly drunk in charge, oblivious to the feral lizard just waiting to strike, and to top it all he's exposing his newborn's face to the antipodean sun.

Hold On....Hold On.... You Can Let Go Now.

2007-12-23T21:03:00.001+09:00

It started as another week of waiting.

We have a very large web about 4 metres above our back door. It belongs to a St Andrews spider.

I have been experimenting in the garden with the hand saw to discover how thick the biggest branches I can safely trim off our trees are, and how high up I can get - so I can figure out how much of the pruning, pollarding, and glyphosate-tree-genocide I can get done before we have to call in a professional to finish the job. It's surprising how big a branch you can saw off in 5 minutes with a handsaw after a bit of practice.
C has experimented with some Flash and ActionScript coding. She's picked an unlikey time to start tuning up her Flash skillset - but it seems the hormones help her concentrate (on a single, continuous task, at least - the stereotypical "nappy brain" absentmindedness has definitely affected her as well, when it comes to
switching between tasks).
I've had particularly fierce and persistent carpal tunnel and RSI pain this week,and I'm not sure why. I have resolved to go back to the GP in the new year, and make an appointment with the recommended physio as well. The pain from the carpal tunnel has kept me awake two nights running, which is a worry as I'd hoped to be fresh and rested when needed as support during C's labour.
Through the week we've driven in to Lismore 4 times for (IMHO) pointless "monitoring" - where everything is obviously fine, they strap C to a monitor for 20 minutes, tell us everything is fine, and make us promise to drive the hour round trip again the following day. Another $100 in petrol and 36 wasted man-hours thanks to the home birth falling through. (Further pommie whingeing censored by the boss).

The birth itself was an unpleasant botched caesarean section. Less said the better.

However, mum and bub both came through great, and we have a beautiful addition to the family! K was born on Sunday at 22:38 Sydney time, weighing 3180 grammes. Both she and C are doing great, and C is in an airy, light en-suite with good access to the nurses and all facilities.
Rose and I stayed in Lismore last night, Rose at a motel, me mostly with C except for snatching an hour's sleep in the car here and there. I am feeling pretty tired today, but not exceptionally tired - because the nurses on the maternity ward have taken such good care of C, and have done the lion's share of caring for Kaara during the night. For me, the most exhausting time will probably be the first two or three days after we get K home.
I will be interested to see whether next week's blog entry is longer or shorter than this one.

Water water all around

2007-12-12T14:39:00.001+09:00

Well, this has been a very rainy week in the rain forest.

On Monday and Tuesday, it rained so hard that the ford connecting our street to Nimbin was too deep to ford in our Ford. Luckily, we had plenty of food in, and by evening the water was low enough so that we could get into the village. The rain continued to hammer on the roof into the night, though, and a visitor we have had before returned - clinging to the outside of our kitchen window was a tiny, bright green tree frog. I think it's great, and he is obviously not stupid -the light coming through our kitchen window attracts moths and other small insects, and I'm sure the frog is now twice the size that it was when I last saw it about a month ago.

On Wednesday, C went into Lismore base hospital for her full term check up. Everything is proceeding well, but the baby shows no sign of wanting to come out into the big wide world. C and Rose made a day of it in Lismore, and we really are running out of things to buy for baby now - we're even stocked up on things like replacement covers for the booster seat, and loads of those little sterile plastic bags in which you can hygienically store the feeding bottle teats. I confidently predict there will be hundreds of things it will seem obvious we should have bought, stocked up on, and/or prepared, within a couple of days of the baby being here.

The weather turned around completely on Saturday, and we had a bright hot sunny day after a full week of rain, so we took advantage by driving to the coast and showing Rose around Cape Byron and the Byron Bay shops - she has been getting a little frustrated trying to find everyday souvenirs of Australia in Nimbin and Lismore (we are more on the backpacker tourist trail than the sunbird tourist trail). We made the happy discovery that the Byron surf lifesaving club position shade umbrellas on the beach, which anyone can use for a gold coin donation - so we were able to have a great picnic lunch just a few yards from the high tide line, watching the surfers and the breakers beat against the rocks around Byron lighthouse.

As I write this, I am feeling achy but happy, as I have finally got round to doing a few things in the garden that I have been putting off for a while - and the real killer is building raised beds. Well, it's not so much the building the walls, as moving the soil into the raised beds that is tiring - but I know it will pay off later, as everything will be so much easier to control. Or, that's what I'm telling myself now.

French Connection

2007-12-06T14:35:00.001+09:00

The closer we get to C's due date, the more things we remember we should already have done. In the main, it's knock on effects and tasks caused by other tasks that I've forgotten to account for. For example, I had allowed cupboard space for a load of baby gear, but I had not accounted for the time and effort required to rearrange and repack all of my stuff into what was left of the bedroom.
It's looking like Christmas week itself will be very busy, so I have broken with Stephens family tradition, and set the tree up in the lounge in the first week of December.
Rose has had an interesting first week in Nimbin - as we got home on Monday evening, there was a large lizard caught in the wire fence next to the carport, and I must have looked hilarious as I gingerly cut it free using wire cutters - they are only a foot long but those claws look vicious. Luckily, the poor thing was too terrified to do anything except freeze up, and it didn't even scamper away until I had cut its neck completely free of the fence. Later in the week at Nimbin pool, she got to observe at first hand how I react when bitten in the foot by a large Australian red ant, which is probably even funnier. I think.
At the end of the week, Tity finally turned up - he managed to make it all the way from Auckland to Nimbin this time, making up for our complete failure to hook up when he and Morganne were in Australia on holiday earlier in the year. He almost didn't make it again, as his alarm didn't go off, and he woke up after the Kyogle train was due to leave - luckily, the train was delayed by almost 2 hours!
Given how tired we are at the moment, it was lucky that Tity was up for an extremely chilled weekend. We pretty much reverted to type; showed Tity round the strange architecture of the village, made sure he got some good souvenirs from the candle factory, got coffees, got cold beers, and chilled out on the deck watching the sun go down. I am fairly certain that Tity will be our last pre-baby guest! It was fantastic to catch up with the old bugger, and he certainly seems to have enough plans to keep him busy for the next few years - and with a bit of luck we might even catch up with him in Montpellier sooner than he expects!
Talking of babies, Ian and Eri in Tokyo have just had their son, Louis. As Eri did not look as big as C, and her due date was a week after C's, it's quite a surprise that she got there first!
Though today has been a very full week, it will be a very short blog post as at least 90 per cent of my time has been taken up with mundane crap that is best forgotten.
Forgetting stuff - ahhh... something I do well.

Smashes and Dashes

2007-11-28T20:32:00.001+09:00

The week began inauspiciously - just as I was turning into my street in West End, I was rear-ended by a tired, late commuter. This meant a further dose of insurance/leasing company/garage paperwork, accompanied by a side-order of hold music with every step - it's becoming the soundtrack to my life.
There was better news on Tuesday though, when C rang to say that the scan she had been sent for due to concern at bub's small size had come back with the all clear, in fact more like a "what are you worried about?"
Also on a brighter note, this being my last week in work before working from home in readiness for my daughter's birth in the next couple of weeks, there were lunches with colleagues, and, more unexpectedly, gifts for the baby and mum-to-be. So many gifts in fact, that they almost left me unable to pack the car at the end of the week. People here in Oz have been remarkably supportive, helpful and kind over the last few months, which has made it far easier than it otherwise would have been to start a family so far from home. Somehow I suspect I may be too tired, when the time comes, to send individual thank you cards - so, thanks, everyone - it's really appreciated!
On the Friday, I drove to the airport in the morning to meet C's mum, Rose, off the plane. We got lunch at the Gunshop, and Rose spent the afternoon exploring the South Bank and the Expo '88 site. Once I had finished work for the day, Rose accompanied me on a very important mission - to West End's Cuban Cigar Shop where the suitably mustachioed proprietor Filip Pilioras talked this cigar newbie through his options, eventually settling on the award-winning and aptly named Bolivar for the big occasion.
As I have with every 12 hour jet-lag, Rose woke on Saturday at 4am. As I was up by 6, we took advantage and picked up some fresh produce at West End market before meeting John, our ex-flatmate who is taking over my room while I work from home. Before I could get away in the car however, I was recruited by Marina to saw branches off the fir-tree in the back garden for use as an improvised Christmas tree. This left me a bit knackered for the drive down to Nimbin, but it was still a nice drive - showing Rose the sights of the Tweed Valley and Wollumbin.
We spent Sunday perusing the covered market at Lismore - because it lacks local colour, I have ignored it this past year but it's packed with bargains and interesting nik-naks, and I came away with useful, good value purchases, and no regrettable impulse-buys.

2007-11-25T07:44:00.000+09:00

I have a tip for those with a floor to varnish. Close the windows and doors, wear the cheapest mask, and use the thinnest polyurethane varnish you can find. With a bit of luck the visuals persist for 3 hours, and the subsequent headache can be controlled with a carefully measured dose of pina colada.
The countdown to baby continues - C has been sent for yet another ultrasound scan as the midwives are concerned that the baby is small for 37 weeks.
C had some freelance book cover design and web-page work come in this week, which bodes well for building up the home-based work over the next few weeks and months. It's beginning to seem that some of the connections we've made in Brisbane were fortuitous when it comes to "seeding" word of mouth recognition.
Our friends Naomi & Bruce drove down from Brisbane and stayed over in Nimbin on Saturday night. They gave me a hand catching up on the garden - we trimmed and pruned the trees around the driveway, and weeded the banana patch, then cut up last year's trees and stacked them above the green shoots of the new ones. Naomi also discovered a whole section of paved patio in the back garden that I didn't know existed, and uncovered and cleaned it using a shovel.

We also heard from our ex-flatmates John and Sanghi. They're coming back to Australia (again) en-route to New Zealand. John will stay in a spare room in the Brisbane house for a few weeks, and with a bit of luck they'll both get to see the baby before they head home.

Election Special

2007-11-24T21:19:00.001+09:00

Readiness and Seeing Red

2007-11-18T20:07:00.000+09:00

I'm sure that even if everything were completely perfect and ready for a new baby we'd still be rushing around inventing endless tasks we need to get completed "before the big day". As it is, I have left myself a fair amount of renovations work that I really do have to get done in the next couple of weeks - not just because it will be necessary for a new baby, but because having torn the bathroom apart, living here is really inconvenient until I put it back together again.
I've spent much of the weekend sanding, detailing, plumbing, and fitting an in-window air conditioner to the main bedroom, so that C has an "emergency out" if she goes into labour when it is ridiculously hot. After months of prevarication, I have also wired up the amplifier and a couple of speakers, and bought (but not yet used!) a lawnmower. We also picked up a tumble dryer, having learned the hard way a couple of weeks ago that when living in a rainforest, it is very unwise to rely on the weather to dry one's clothes.
In short, this was the week when we gave up looking for bargains, "finding the right model", and hunting around for exactly what we need, and decided to grit our teeth and get the rest of the stuff that we need to at least keep the household running when the third person arrives.
Doing a few hours of renovations work two days running has been good for me - I am still so unfit that 20 minutes of moderate exercise leaves me out of breath, and also so unused to practical work (as opposed to abstract computer based work) that extremely simple sequences of events, such as sand, fill, sand again, prime, and paint require almost painful planning and thought before I can begin. Whilst two days is not enough to increase my fitness at all, I have noticed that it is enough time to improve my ability to think through a series of real world steps - which is a healthy, if basic, ability to have.
Our major news this week was that due to legal problems our midwife will no longer be able to attend for our home birth. It's probably boring to read, but it's going to make me feel better to vent how annoyed I am at this turn of events:
- We have wasted hundreds of dollars in ante-natal classes (hospital ante-natal classes are free) and almost everything we learnt is relevant only to home births, as the knowledge and learning that the classes had in common with a hospital birth is contained in pamphlets and videos which we would have had access to any way for free.
- There is also the time and effort that I have put over the last few weeks in order to attend a Monday evening class in Nimbin, whilst working Tuesday to Thursday in Brisbane - I was jumping in the car when the class ended at 9.00pm, driving till after midnight, getting to sleep at 1.00 AM and then getting up to be at my desk for 7:30 the next day. For six weeks.
- Then there is the matter of the timing: Our midwife has known about her legal problems for at least six weeks, but has only now (with C 36 weeks pregnant) told us that she cannot provide the home birth service that we had agreed on from the start.
Now, having put ourselves through all that, given that there are no other midwives in the area who provide a home birth service, we are still faced with everything that we have put in all that lost sleep and cash to avoid - the birth will be attended by midwives whom C has never met, they will be rostered on and off through her labor, and obstetricians rather than midwives will be in charge.
While the the maternity ward at the local hospital is very nice (especially compared to the NHS wards in London) the contrast between the hoped-for birth situation in the rain forest with the reality of a hospital ward literally next-door to a building site where they are jackhammering up the cement to build a new psychiatric wing is fairly extreme.
The best laid plans, and all that. We will make the best of it, and I'm sure everything will go well.

2007-11-09T21:46:00.001+09:00

Early this week we finally got round to visiting our neighbours two doors up the street, Lynne and Richard. They have a few acres of land, running down to the creek at the foot of the hill, and have dug in a dam to catch some of the runoff, have started to terrace the steepest part of their garden, and made real progress reverting to native plants and removing invasive alien plants and weeds - the pay-off was clear to see: A happy family of wallabies bouncing around their bottom paddock. Also, they've only been in Nimbin for about as long as we have. Richard's industry in the garden definitely gives me a complex, but the bright side is, he has a wealth of knowledge and is happy to give me cuttings!
We have also heard from the our ante-natal classmates Jonas and Tanya - they're doing fine (despite Dunoon -only a few kilometres away- suffering a mini tornado last week) But Tanya's baby is yet to arrive, though she's five weeks ahead of C. I'm dreading the imminent period of some 2 to 5 weeks when the baby might arrive, quite literally, at any minute.
After an almost unbearably sweltering week, the temperature dropped suddenly to the mid twenties and we had a week of intermittent but persistent rain. This has made for a really nice late Spring, with the Nimbin and Tweed valleys even greener than usual, and the blossom staying on the trees later than it did last year. It has also made us see reason however - given that C could go into labour as late as mid-December, we have decided to invest in a "backup plan" window-mounted air conditioning unit, just in case we are really unlucky with a heatwave.
The upside for me was that I had a reason to get some work done indoors, given the rain. I had completely run out of excuses and I had all the tools necessary to press on with the bathroom, so after prevaricating for another day and a half, I got in there with the dust mask, a belt sander and lots of attitude. The results so far have been better than expected - the floor is never going to come up beautifully flat and shiny, but the planks are a very rich red-brown colour, and in fairly good nick for an almost 20 year old tongue and groove floor, so I'm optimistic that the end result will be worth the effort.
We had a tough decision at the end of the week, as we'd planned to stay in Nimbin until Tuesday, but due to leaving it very late to book a Christmas party venue, my work in Brisbane ended up organising their Christmas do for Friday November ninth.
In the end, I decided to drive back up to Brisbane on the grounds that, working from home, if I don't go to some functions I'll never get to know the people I'm working with. the works do turned out to be a good laugh. It was at the Merthyr bowls club by the Brisbane River In New Farm - it was your basic Australian works do: Dress up as sheilas, then spend the afternoon doing something competitive under powerful antipodean sun, while consuming weak lager and competing to be last to the kharzi. All great fun if you keep a certain detachment! Once a state of sufficient dehydration was achieved, we retired to the boss's pad in West End, where it turned out he'd set up not only a DJ and cocktail bar, but a full-on play-money casino setup, complete with blackjack table, roulette and two croupiers. All great fun if you keep a certain detachment.
Somehow, our Brisbane house mates colluded to have an impromptu barbecue in the back garden on the Saturday, and that, along with our mad dog decision to walk all the way from west end to Paddington in the noonday sun, put paid to any lingering hangover, and should ease us into next week.

Conventional wisdom

2007-11-03T20:16:00.000+09:00

The hardest thing about blogging consistently is not the sitting down each week to tap it out, but the going back to it a fortnight later when when you miss one. Apologies.
Two of our house mates - Ili and Conrad, have got their own place round the corner and have moved out of our Besant Street house in Brisbane, so we are only sharing the place with Marina & Co. - which has immediately made it feel less like a student shared house and more like the poor man's pied à terre that it is.
C's extended contract finished on the 26th with doughnuts but sadly, no beer, given she's 7 months pregnant.
My long-anticipated weekend in Nimbin was not to be, as an unexpected offer of a bursary to attend the ASTC's Novacon in Sydney was impossible to turn down. With only a few days to arrange everything, I booked the cheapest flights and room I could find. I ended up not only flying from the Gold Coast rather than Brisbane airport, but also at inhuman times - I had to set my alarm for 2.45am to catch the return flight. The conference was smaller scale than I expected but with several high-calibre speakers from industry and academia, and excellent opportunities to chat with communications professionals from other parts of Australia. The conference also helped me develop a clearer idea of the tertiary courses in communications studies on offer in Oz - I'm considering enrolling in a communications course over the next year or two.
The art of conference attendance, of course, is skipping the right sessions to maximise your free time. I didn't get it quite right, but still managed to check out a good chunk of Sydney's China Town, Liverpool, Surry Hills and King's Cross districts. I also made my way back to Circular Quay, where C and I spent New Year's Eve 2006/2007 with Dom and Michi, and this time I made it into the Museum of Contemporary Art! Ah Xian's remarkable busts which had delighted me in Brisbane were on display here, alongside some new ones. MCA's highlight for me though, had to be Julie Rrap's Body Double - a great, memorable, un-hectoring, political exhibition!
Gold Coast airport is next to the motorway as you drive South from Brisbane. C picked me up on Sunday morning en-route from Brisbane to Nimbin, and I had my first full week in Nimbin - which seems to have passed in blur of work, except for the two wonderful thunderstorms which we enjoyed from the deck, and the friendly young wallaby joey who joined us for lunch most days.
Somehow this week ended up being a "tie up loose ends" week, so on top of my two day-jobs, I caught up with the stuff I'd promised to do for my Kiwi mate's website, got my mum's B&B website back online and finally got around to installing the IDE and source control software on my PC that I've been meaning to install since August.
The bathroom project continues apace - a snail's pace that is - and as I write, we've got to the point where we can begin sanding the floor tomorrow. I'm still getting a lot of satisfaction out of getting the details right, and the fact of doing work that's less abstract than my day job. Nonetheless, it's starting to feel like the project that will not die.
Its been a great week in Nimbin, and best of all I've got another ten days straight here.

Island Time!

2007-10-22T20:28:00.000+09:00

This week, our house mate Illy told us she is pregnant. The next day, our other house mate, Marina, was up at three am to catch a last minute six am flight to Newcastle to see her sister who had just given birth to a baby girl. Its baby-tastic in West End!
I knocked off early on Friday so we could get the two pm ferry to North Stradbroke Island. It's a half hour drive across town and then a one hour ferry across Moreton Bay. The island is nothing special compared to Auckland's Waiheke for example, but for what it is, a low-lying sand island, it's remarkably pretty. We bumped into our West End neighbour, Chad on the ferry and were able to follow his conspicuous truck to the Island Time festival site. Once there, the most conspicuous thing was the complete lack of organisation for the volunteers. I pitched in, while C pitched the tent. C ran me back to the campsite for dinner, and we saw a dolphin couple playing in the Moreton Bay sunset.
After a traditional Minjerribah welcome ceremony, the festival proceeded in a friendly, small scale vein. None of the acts were stand-out to my taste, but I enjoyed the vibe very much. I didn't have much work to do as a volunteer (they never did get my name on the rota) and the Adder Rock beaches, less than five minutes walk from the festival site, are absolutely spectactular - tree line down to the beach, pristine white sand, picturesque headlands and the Brisbane lights in the distance after sunset.
On Saturday, We used a lull in the program to head inland to Stradbroke's Brown Lake. So called because of the colour of the water due to the infusion of tea-tree oils from the tea-tree plants around the edge, it made a good picnic spot, but seemed in part to be populated by refugees from the reggae festival, who were regretting booking their family camping trip to coincide.
By Sunday morning, we were having such a good time on the island that we drove to the ferry office, and changed our tickets to Monday so we could stay an extra day and catch Chad on stage with SchoolFight, sneak in some body-boarding and (of course) the obligatory post-festival doof on the beach.

No floor!

2007-10-17T20:18:00.000+09:00

On Saturday, we were up and about quicker than we have been recently at the weekend, and managed to hit the road shortly after 9.00. It was a perfect spring day, and we had a really relaxing drive taking the Murwillumbah road.
During the week, Ellen had been in touch from Thailand of all places, because she was worried we might have suffered in the extreme hailstorms that Lismore experienced! Though we had rung Stefan and Iris, and they had reassured us that there had been little hail in Nimbin, we were still a bit worried about what we might find when we got home. In the event, there was no structural damage, and all the trees in our garden were still standing.
The electrical storms had knocked out our trip switches however. This entailed a couple of hours throwing away the food in our fridge and freezer, and scrubbing out the interior of both, and all the containers - but we got off lightly compared to the denizens of Lismore.
During the cleanup, we found an injured lizard hiding under the bean bags. I don't know enough about lizards to tell whether he's just happy in that space, or is unwell and has crawled there to die. He seems friendly, and definitely eats insects -if it's the former, then we seem to have adopted a new pet.
The building supplies place at Nimbin keeps quite strange hours -it's open Wednesday Saturday and Sunday, which was good news for us as Sunday was pencilled in as DIY day: We ripped out the rotten floorboards in the bathroom, and have now positioned the replacement boards over the gap - they'll need to stay there for a couple of weeks to get acclimatised, before they are fastened to the beams and battens. Despite the frustrations, one part of me is definitely enjoying the bathroom renovation project - it will be a good feeling to complete a project where absolutely every aspect of the visible room has had my hand in it.
We had a trial run putting our new tent up - it's relatively simple to put up, and even better, it has 1/2 assembled mode, in which it can be transported in the back of a car, and only requires the addition of one pole to become tent shaped.
We also made it to the Channon market for what must now be the fourth or fifth time. At the Monday evening ante-natal class, we discovered that Jonas and Tanya had also been at the market but we didn't see them there. Both in Brisbane's West End, and also in the Nimbin area, we have started to get to know a few people, but still not enough so that we routinely bump into them when we head out. This contrasts strongly with how quickly we settled in Auckland - by the time we had been living in Devonport for a year, we couldn't walk down the high street without seeing familiar faces, and stopping for a chat every couple of 100 yards. The alienating effect of working in two places and living in two places is stronger than I had surmised - and I begin to understand how it can be that dormitory towns become soulless even once there is as little as 30 per cent of the population commuting.
Instead of driving back to Brisbane late at night on the Monday, I took Tuesday off work and we made our way up the road leisurely on Tuesday afternoon. We took a random detour off the Murwillumbah road, and found a delightfully tranquil valley with a little stream running through it in which to have lunch - it was the perfect setting except for the insects.

Dub Hammer

2007-10-05T16:25:00.000+09:00

After an eight hour day at work, and a three hour antenatal class, the three hour drive back to Brisbane left me absolutely shattered on Monday night. Unfortunately, I had a relatively busy week lined up - I met up with Oscar at Lock'n'Load on Thursday night for some tapas and beers (and to pick up a rather crucial supply of warez). We also went out for a meal at Jazzy Cat and then on for beers at the West End pool hall with Rod and Cherdina (who was our London housemate back in '02) on the Friday night.

We decided to take it very easy on Saturday morning, and had a lie in before bumming round west end buying tropical fruit, drinking flat whites and putting up adverts for our old car. By happy chance, our neighbours across the street were having a yard sale, and we got talking to them as we browsed amongst their cool T shirts and other stuff - it turned out that the T shirt seller (Chad) is also a proprietor of the reggae cafe at the end of the street, which is called Rudekat Records, which is in turn one of the promoters of the Island Time reggae festival on Stradbroke Island in two weeks' time. We'd been hoping to go, but couldn't really afford the tickets. Chad said there were some volunteering places left, so it looks like I have a free ticket for some dogsbody work, some fire-juggling, or perhaps both.
Back in Nimbin, having stopped off en-route to pick up a jackhammer, a tent and a bicycle, we saw that our mama wallaby was back in the garden to feed. She now has a little joey in the pouch, and as she hid behind the sheets on our washing line and picked off the tastiest leaves from the trees, the little guy would occasionally pop his head out to have a look around. Thanks to the zoom lens Alex sent me, I was able to get a shot of the joey, doing "watching me watching you".
When not wildlife watching, we got busy with the bathroom renos, having hired a pneumatic jackhammer, which I used to break up and remove the cement slab which had supported the tiles in the bathroom. This was tiring, dusty, unpleasant work, but a big part of a job which the plumbers had quoted us $3000 for in total - and which we should finish ourselves for $500 and bit of sweat!

Spring

2007-09-28T12:21:00.001+09:00

Officially, this is the third week of spring. To us poms, it already feels like the height of summer, and the wildlife of all descriptions is certainly stirring. On the drive back to Brisbane we spotted an echidna - we pulled over, and walked back to where we had seen it. It saw us coming, and curled up into a tight, quivering ball. They look bigger than hedgehogs, but I think that's just because the spikes are longer.

In Brisbane, just after we had turned out the light and were settling down to sleep, we saw the shadow of a possum projected on to the wall - he was feeding on the leaves and shoots of the trees just outside our window, and behind him on the pavement was a lamppost - so his shape was perfectly outlined on our wall as shadow theatre. We crept to the window, and looked out - possums are very common in Brisbane, and they are pretty much treated as pests. Nonetheless, I hadn't yet been close to one that was feeding as though unobserved, and it's fascinating to watch how close to the tips of tiny branches they can get in search of shoots and leaves to feed on - when they need to move from one branch to another, and the target branch is only just large enough to take their weight, They hang by their tail, and gradually transfer their weight to the fore legs, and then the hind legs as well before finally finally releasing their tail from the branch where they started.
We drove back down on Saturday morning, and, with the weather so much warmer, we stopped off at the Gold Coast's Bilinga beach, and had our first beach day of 2007 - though it seemed thousands of Brisbanites had the same idea, so we ended up picnicking on an unpatrolled beach to get some quiet, and just paddling and mucking around in the surf rather than going for a proper swim.
The bottle brush tree in our garden is now in full bloom, so we have the bright red blossoms up against the verandah when we have breakfast, and flocks of rainbow lorikeets swooping in to get the nectar. The final piece of wildlife this weekend is yet another enormous huntsman - we've got to the point where we just let them be if they're less than two inches across, but this one was more like three inches, and quite hungry looking, so we've popped him in a box and will drop him in a field tomorrow.
With only 2 days down in Nimbin, we've had an unambitious Sunday, wandering round Nimbin market (usually monthly on the second Sunday, but they do an extra one when there's a fifth Sunday in the month) and making plodding progress on the bathroom renovation front - basically, enjoying our last 10 weeks without baby!

Torrential Rain

2007-09-19T08:35:00.001+09:00

This week I've become addicted to blogger play. It's like the web used to be in the 90s - a stream of pointless human creativity. It also reminds me that not everywhere in the world is having as much rain as Nimbin right now.
Sadly, we seem to be in a phase of endless work rather than pointless creativity.
We drove down on Wednesday arvo for our first ante-natal class. It's definitely unnatural for blokes to take such a close interest in the process of pregnancy and birth, but I'm gonna decry the "is=ought" tendency on this one - it might not be natural, but, as usual, more knowledge leads to better awareness, communication, and sympathy - so it's all good. Besides, I never knew that a pregnant woman's heart almost doubles in size, and rotates through almost 90 degrees to fit in the remaining space as the ribcage is lifted. So I consider myself of educated.
Late on Wednesday night there was a fairly strong wind, and a 20 foot bottlebrush tree in our garden snapped at the base of the trunk, and crashed across our fence into the neighbour's garden. We got some thick rope from the hardware store in Nimbin, and used the car to pull the tree back upright, so we could saw it up without destroying what was left of the fence or trampling the neighbours' plants.
On Friday I checked the mail, and there was a card saying I'd missed a package I needed to sign for. We defected from our usual midweek Rainbow-Cafe table, and got coffee at the e-bar instead so we could pop across the road and pick up the parcel while waiting for our flat whites. The package was from Alex in Wisconsin, and consisted of a party-pack of his dad's Pentax lenses, including a fantastic zoom that makes the Nimbin Rocks look about a kilometre away from our front door! These will be put to good use shortly, and many pictures of the Tweed valley and Nimbin surrounds will result - but first of all I must get a tripod to go with the zoom lense - my first attempts to shoot distant scenery without a tripod have made me realise I should cut down on caffeine!
On Saturday evening, we were invited to a party at Steffan and Iris's place - to celebrate Iris's 30th birthday. Once again, they had arranged a slap up feed, and several musicians from the village provided the entertainment, including Mark the local GP, who plays a mean bassline. It rained torrentialy, tropically, and non-stop, which meant that the barbecue area which Stefan have prepared by the creek was a non starter, but in a way that made the proceedings more fun as everyone had to crowd indoors for the food and the music. After about 5 hours C got tired and I ran her home, but after returning to the fray, I was too knackered to continue myself after one more hour - and one more stubby of VB - and ended up heading home to bed at about 10.30!
I've had two small changes to my working environment that make it more social recently - first, five or six of my friends simultaneously got themselves on Skype, which has been great, and now C's desk is set up in our office space, it is quite companionable when we both have work to do - with the door open, the music playing, and a pot of tea to share, it hardly feels like working at all - which is, I guess, how it should be.

Busy Busy Busy

2007-09-16T20:27:00.002+09:00

So, it's been a mad couple of weeks. Mostly, it has been mundane stuff - climbing up onto the roof, and cleaning the guttering. Assembling and plumbing in the new sink and vanity unit in the bathroom. Selling our old car and buying a new car. Probably the biggest single piece of time this week has been given over to fighting off the evil paperwork caused by needing to register a car in Queensland, whilst residing in New South Wales, and at the same time needing to renew my driver's license in the UK. Kicking off a new project at Gensolve Ltd, and wrapping up a long, ongoing project at Mincom have also featured high on the list.
Some of it has been only half mundane - I have taken the first few steps towards organizing a reunion of the UCL alumni who live and work in Brisbane. It looks like there will only be a handful of people at first, but it should be interesting meeting up with folks of various ages who have UCL backgrounds and have emigrated to Queensland. Also, we have had the component parts of C's new desk sitting around in the office for months. this weekend, we finally got around to assembling it - it came from Ikea, but it's pretty cool - the height and angle can be independently adjusted, and the entire top is a massive sheet of glass, divided into two separate lightboxing areas. Not that C will be able to reach the desk to do any lightboxing, or indeed, any work at all, if her belly gets much bigger - she already has trouble reaching the keyboard. Being able to rest her elbows on her bump hasn't stopped her from extending her contract though - she has reduced her hours to 17 per week, but will now continue working at Queensland's Department of the Cabinet and Premier until October 26.
Our first spring in New South Wales continues, and the entire driveway was covered in white blossoms when we arrived home this week. The next morning I walked out into the garden and looked up. I don't know the names of any of the trees that are in bloom yet - but there are at least three different species of white blossom in the garden. With our continued weekly absences, it seems the wallabies are getting bolder as well - though perhaps I see them more because I have tuned my eyes in a little bit better to the life in the bush around our house, which definitely starts to teem in September!
We had to drive back to Nimbin last Wednesday, because I didn't have too much confidence in my plumbing - but all the connections seen to be watertight, and there are no leaks in sight. Unfortunately, our ante Natal class has been postponed by one week, and will now run on Wednesdays starting 19th.
The fact of being only three months away from fatherhood has not sunk in yet - and it probably won't until I meet my daughter! On the other hand, the lists of things that we want to get respectively started, and finished between now and December are decidedly real. It looks like the garden, which by necessity will be a lower priority than the house, is unlikely to be tamed unless we can find someone to help us. Hopefully, we can find a couple of backpackers willing to pitch in and tidy it up in exchange for food and board for a couple of weeks - we have put up adverts around Nimbin, and will do the same in Brisbane this week.

Badger, badger, badger, badger......

2007-09-02T20:34:00.000+09:00

The first week back after holiday should be easy in theory. In practice it can be a hard week to get through. Spring officially begins on September 1 in Australia, and I can see why - many of the trees are already in bloom, the lowest temperature at night has probably climbed by five or six degress in the last three weeks, and the midmorning sun is something to be afraid of once again. After the horror of 41° in the shade in Kyoto, the weather here seems pretty perfect however.
As we had to drive down to Nimbin on the Saturday, but were not in a hurry and didn't have too much to do, we decided to vary our usual route down the motorway, and instead swing inland at Nerang, and take the tourist road that cuts through in between Lamington national park and the coastal plain. As soon as you are out of Nerang, it's a really pretty drive, as the road climbs up almost to the level of the Lamington National Park plateau and then the view opens up across the Tweed Valley all the way to Byron Bay. It probably takes about an extra 40 minutes to get to Murwillumbah, but if you're not pressed for time it's definitely worth it. Oh yeah, and there's a cafe with home baked fudge cakes on the way.
We were looking forward to a reconfigured and functional bathroom at home, but it turns out that I hadn't quite asked the plumbers to do what I thought I had. I thought that I had asked for the shower and sink to be plumbed in, and that that would mean both would be assembled and connected to the water supply. Unfortunately, I wasn't specific enough in my email, and I now realise that the quote we received was to assemble and plumb in the shower, but only to run pipes to the sink, and not assemble it or plumb it in. Fortunately, the Ikea flat pack sink unit was quick and fairly intuitive to assemble, and by this morning, we had it set up and at least ready to plumb in to both the waste pipe and the water supply. We need to buy a couple of pipes and connectors, and we should be able to finish the job in a couple of hours.
Having been away in Japan, the house and garden and deck were all a bit of a mess, and there were off cuts, and pieces of fibroboard left by the workmen and the plumber which needed to be tidied away. This was sweaty work, which meant that we had to test whether the new shower was working properly. It's pretty powerful, and there's room for two.
In our absence, the local wildlife has taken up residence. As we arrived, we saw a large spiny lizard, sunning itself in the last rays of the sun, and several too-large-for-comfort spiders ran away as I loaded things into the basement. When we drove into the village to get bread, the joey that we saw two months ago with his mother was back, by itself this time. It has grown to almost 3 foot high, and developed a shiny silver pelt on the front. It's also more paranoid than before, pounding off into the bush as soon as it becomes aware that you're watching.
On Sunday morning, C went to clear some of the lantana away from the chicken coop. As she was working, she heard something rustling in the bush next to her - and when she looked, she saw a fair size snake moving through the grass towards her. Once she figured out it was no threat, she called me over with the camera. It seemed it was attracted by the scent of the chicken coop - which is quite incredible, given that it hasn't contained chickens for almost three and a half years! We watched it sniff its way along the ground, and then once in the centre of the cement chicken coop, begin to follow its nose up the wall, to exactly where the roosts were positioned. After a few moments, it figured out there was nothing to eat, turned around, and continued on its way into the neighbour's garden.
Disconsolately, we tidied, and packed, and drove off, back to Brisbane.
Our weekend however, was not entirely over. When we got two Sphinx rock, there was a local band playing of the cafe, and a fair crowd had gathered to watch them. They were called Channel Free; a funky five piece playing rootsy psy-dub, with an amped up didgeridoo, and a synthesiser doing interesting percussion effects. We sat in the late afternoon sun, on the grass by the creek - and didn't care that we'd get back to the city a bit late.

My Otaku Haj is done

2007-08-26T22:12:00.001+09:00

Wherever we go, we always seem to find the aquarium. Osaka's aquarium was only two blocks from us, and we needed an easy day, so we thought we'd go early to beat the rush.
It seems, the rush is earlier in Japan than in Australia. We were through the gate and gawking at stingrays by 9.00am Sunday, but already the place was so crowded, that we had to fight our way to the glass to see anything. The rays, sharks, and jellyfish were impressive. More impressive however, was the stoic determination of the young salary men and their kids and wives, queuing for upwards of 2 hours in 35° sunshine to see them. Once we discovered the studio Ghibli shop, we happily killed the rest of the day choosing Ghibli memorabilia and consuming iced coffee.
Next morning, we checked out of the pleasant Ryokan, with many good wishes from the friendly couple who run the place, and boarded the bullet train for Tokyo. We made it to Shibuya without any problems, and Ian met us off the train and we got the subway to his place in Setagaya.
It was still light, and Ian's wife Eriko is, like C, still at work at five months pregnant. Ian took us to a viewing gallery near the top of a skyscraper in the district where Eriko works, and we met up with her when she knocked off, and watched the Tokyo lights come out before getting dinner at a restaurant round the corner from Ian's in Setagaya.
On Saturday morning, I left C sleeping, and went with Ian to meet Marcus and Basia who were catching the red eye from Bangkok. They're on a particularly adventurous honeymoon, covering South and East Asia. Poor Basia had been a very ill with e.Coli in Thailand, and considering she had only had four days to recover, and then had an overnight flight to Japan, she was looking pretty well. Marcus was very confused when we met him, but seemed to be having a great time.
Ian had arranged for us to meet some friends of his at a fireworks display on Saturday evening. It turned out to be very impressive, lasting over an hour with over 12,000 fireworks released.
Bizarrely, all the spectators sat in one enormous park, and there was a fireworks display at each end. I was impressed by the shaped fireworks - there were bursts shaped to look like numbers, rubber ducks, flowers, and five pointed stars.
Ian had booked a table for all of us at a nearby restaurant just after the show - I've no clue how he pulled that off, given the tens of thousands of people crammed into the park.
Next day, we checked out Harajuku and Akihabara, and gawked at the rori-goths and cosplay maids. Once we were shopped out, we headed back to Setagaya for some cold beers, and a great Japanese dinner cooked by Eriko - I was both intrigued and impressed by the udon noodles served with ice cubes; perfectly refreshing in the 35° heat! Ian was back to work on Monday morning, and we would have to catch the bullet train back to Osaka, so After a final rummage through the local bookshop for some Japanese design mags and books, we turned in.
it was an amazing three days - both surreal and enjoyable to be wandering around in a group of four UCL bods in Tokyo, 2007. With Marcus and Basia tying the knot, I am the last person from our shared house to remain unmarried, but I am on track to be the first to be a dad. C and Eriko both being pregnant was also slightly surreal - none of my close friends since school except for Alex have kids yet.
Marcus and Basia woke up in time to see us off on Monday morning, and we stopped off for coffee with Ian at Tokyo train station. As a financial journalist, Ian is going through a busy period right now, as markets around the world get the jitters from the knock on effects of U.S. subprime of mortgage lending. Nonetheless, he makes time to show us the English language bookshop before rushing back to his desk, and I pick out Murakami's dance dance dance as my homeward bound shinkansen and aeroplane reading.
We spend our final day in Japan strolling up Midosuji dori in Osaka, sheltering from the heat in snazzy air conditioned cafes, Shinto temples, out of our league shopping arcades, and in one particular desperate instance, the hard rock cafe Osaka, where we sat beneath one of Ozzy Osbourne's less favourite guitars, and joined in the applause following a cute 6-year-old's happy birthday chant.
C has enjoyed herself in Nippon, but the heat and humidity were pushing the endurance limits for her 5-months pregnant state, especially coming from Southern midwinter, and I know she's looking forward to being back in Nimbin full-time next month!

Bonsaiiiii! Oh, err...

2007-08-16T16:00:00.000+09:00

In Brisbane this week It's the Ekka. This is a sort of big country fair, and people come from miles around to take part in cheesy musical shows and buy plastic bags full of nasty corporate merchandise for ten bucks a pop. The Ekka is also famous as the time when everyone in South East Queensland swaps their germs, and the latest flu bug does the rounds. In the days leading up to our holiday, our housemates started coming down with the flu one by one, and we became resigned to a nine hour flight with headaches and temperatures... But in the event we got away with it, and arrived in Osaka knackered but healthy.
We picked up our little hire car (I wanted to pet it, not drive it - it looks like an extra from a Miyazaki film...) and headed for historic Kyoto. Coming from the Australian winter, the humidity and heat were a bit full-on, but the evening by the river was still fairly pleasant. The sultriness and long evening twilight added to the feeling of being abroad, and slowed us down a bit - which helped appreciate the Japanese weirdness to the full. The restaurants display detailed colour photos of all their dishes (with prices) on plastic menus and big boards by the door. The hostess bars and brothels display detailed colour photos of all their prostitutes and hostesses (with prices) on big boards by the door. We passed a geisha house in the old town, which also displayed colour photos of the available geishas (but without prices) on big boards by their door - and we saw a couple of Korean gentlemen strolling through the back streets of the old town with geisha companions on their arm. Things are no better in the bookshops or on the billboards, where dodgy proclivities are unavoidable.
Kyoto's sight - seeing highlights were the tomb of the unknown soldier, the Kiyo Mizu Dera temple, and the hall of 1,000 Kannon statues.
As I wound down from work (and C remembered that she's five months pregnant!) we slowed the pace to match, and spent the next couple　of days checking out the Nara temples within easy-hitting distance of Osaka, and the nightlife around the Kita and Minami parts of the city. It can be tough to　judge which places are the pricy ones - we had salmon, blue cheese croquettes, some tapas, steamed beans, beer and two soft drinks in a nice little restaurant, then felt knackered after walking to the other end of the mall, stopped off for tea and a slice of cake - and it came to the same price as the previous meal. Next week we're kipping on Ian's floor, and things will be getting messy in Tokyo... I hope.

Frost!

2007-08-07T21:32:00.001+09:00

We were back in Nimbin this weekend. In our absence there had been a severe frost. All tropical plants and most of the subtropical plants, including everything growing in exposed areas and plants in shaded hollows that trap cold air, are dead. For annual plants like the banana trees, this doesn't matter - they will have offspring next year. Unfortunately, it looks like all our pineapples are dead, and in Nimbin village, some of the old trees, and many of the plants in the main communal garden, are either dead or dying. The minimum temperature was only minus six, but the last time it fell that low was the mid 1980s, and people have planted a lot of tropical plants since then. In our garden, the strangest thing was the carpet of dead leaves blanketed every open area and make it look as though the grass itself had been killed frost.
Despite the plumber showing up on a Saturday morning to hammer in a few large pieces of fibroboard to the bathroom and make a start assembling the shower and vanity units, it was still a much more relaxing weekend than in Brisbane. There is a new weekly Saturday market in the small lane that runs between the Rainbow cafe and the museum, and this features all sorts of naughty local goodies like fudge, jams, preserves, biscuits and cakes. There is also an amazing amount of local craft on display - jewelry, clothing, woodwork, and completely unexpected things like bonsai trees. Hopefully this new weekly market will grow and grow, and eventually rival the monthly market in both size and variety. What makes the weekly market special is that so far the organisers have restricted stalls to local residents.
On Sunday morning we caught up with Jillian, C's midwife, and C was able to swap the books which she borrowed two weeks ago, and we confirmed that dates and times of the antenatal classes that she is organizing. The more of Jillian's books she reads, the more reassured C seems to be - Not only is she now keen on trying for a home birth - she's even decided to book Jillian's warm-water birthing pool!
On our way through Nimbin afterwards heading for Brisbane, we stopped off for the first time at the candle factory by the creek. We spoke to the owner and explained that we are hoping to set up a candle themed campsite at this year's Splore festival, and hopefully Nimbin candles will be able to give us some interesting candles for our campsite. We were treated to the standard guided tour, which includes the impressive pyramid room, filled with multicoloured pyramid shaped candles. The highlight though is undoubtedly the replica medieval dipping mechanism. Wax is built up on the candles by dipping them many times into hot barrels of melted wax. The process itself is little different from any other candle factory, what is unique is that the entire process is water powered. With a twist of a tap, nearly 800 wicks can be dipped at once.
We drove back to Brisbane tired but refreshed once again, facing one last week at work before a well earned break!
PS - please excuse the American spelling; I haven't figured out how to attach the Vista dictation software to the locale's Australian dictionary, even though MS Word and my browser default to it...Ah, the mysteries.

Nearly Holiday Time

2007-07-27T15:02:00.001+09:00

I've had carpal tunnel this week. It's fucking painful. I understand it hits different people in different ways, but in my case it's been a constant, sharp pain centred in the wrist and radiating out to the hand and elbow. As well as making it hard to do my job, it has kept me awake at nights a couple of times. The doctor has prescribed a combination of topical and ingested anti inflammatories, and a sling to remind me not to use my bloody arm.
We are going to get a third baby scan done this week. This will be the last medical intervention before the birth. C is now frantically buying baby clothes by mail order (mostly from eBay and stereotypical cottage industry makers of organic hemp nappy type products). She had so many boxes at the post office this morning, she had to make two trips to carry them home.
We are also into the final preparations for our holiday. this will be my first break longer than a long weekend since September, which may go some way towards explaining why I've been getting RSI in my wrist. We're not really making time to learn any japanese however, so I reckon we'll have some fun getting around and communicating once we're there (so far, I can say "gents' toilets", count to four, and crash my Instant Immersion japanese DVD). our friends from New Zealand, Morganne and Tity, are coming over for a touring holiday up the East coast. We're going to meet up with them in Lismore and show them around Nimbin, NNSW and Brisbane for a couple of days.
I finally have my new toy. And I'm finally in the 21st century - I have USB-2, a webcam, and a battery that lasts more than 40 minutes! In terms of hardware it's a massive step up from my old laptop, however I have had a battle getting to grips with Vista. Unsurprisingly, most of the configuration and hacking that I've had to do has been to get the system to run legacy software (don't get me started on having to download the WinHelp engine and SMTP server, or having to uncripple my admin rights by enabling the local admin account...)
I had also forgotten how customised my browsing experience has become - after installing Firefox, I spent a good couple of hours getting things set up by the way I like them: Adblock, filterset-G, Flashblock, the Metal Lion theme, Forecastfox, Foxmarks, IEView, and the tiny URL plugin was a start - but all this week I've been noticing things I need to tweak.
As part of my regimen of enforced rest for my carpal tunnel, I have also been getting to grips with Vista's voice recognition software. I went to try out Dragon's Naturallyspeaking, but it costs over $1000, and the version that works with Vista is only available from Dragon's website. I have dictated this blog entry from start to finish - it has taken me about twice as long as it would have to type it, and I can't see myself doing too much of my work this way. On the other hand, it's surprising how quickly I have improved, and the software seems to be learning my voice very quickly.
Hopefully the car will come back this week with a fully rebuilt gearbox. This will be just in time for us to thrash it again by transporting approximately seven tons of nappies, baby clothing, and furniture across the border to Northern New South Wales. I am also looking forward to trying out our brand new shower-it should be a bit more comfortable than the old 1980s model. Next update will be from Nimbin... Stand by!

Insanity

2007-07-26T18:32:00.001+09:00

Last week was insane. After four busy days, I shoehorned in the Nimbin Good Times crossword in a single evening, with C helping me frantically complete the last few clues and email it off before the deadline. I'm almost certain there'll be at least one embarrassing typo.
With our car at the garage having its gearbox rebuilt, the plumbers we've been chasing to plumb in our shower for four months finally rang back to say they needed to start on Monday.
To keep costs down, we are redecorating and retiling the bathroom ourselves (or "doing renos" as they call DIY in Oz - it rhymes with the French car, not the city in Nevada). We're only paying the plumbers to make the fixtures and fittings watertight at the seams. The problem was, as we needed to keep using the shower, we couldn't start tiling until the plumber called and gave us the go-ahead. So we were in Brisbane on Friday, needing to have the bathroom stripped and retiled by Monday. I rang 4 car-hire places before I found one that could rent us a small car on short notice, then threw some weekend gear into a bag and hiked across town to meet C just before the Europcar office closed at 5:30, so we could pick up a car and sit in rush-hour traffic for two hours. Once we made it to the Southbound transit lane we did better, as it seems everyone in Brisbane is alone in their car - but it was still nine O'clock by the time we got home, and after eleven O'clock by the time we'd mixed up and poured a load of self-levelling compound and turned in. The next 48 hours passed in a daze of hammering, sawing, and dismantling of all the old fixtures, and dealing with all the tricky things like sawing through and sealing up copper pipe that we disconnected, so that we still had water in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. By Sunday night we had the floor retiled and ready for the plumber, and we checked the time before turning in - half past two in the morning.
There have been ground frosts round Nimbin this week, but we've kept ourselves warm all weekend, and not had to light the fire once. We also got our broadband reconnected, and I've finally hooked Skype up properly - email me if you're on Skype but don't have my Skype!
This week some of my team (and my boss) are over from Denver, so I've been catching up with them, and we went together as the dreaded all-IT couple to another drinks night organised by our contractor management company in Brisbane's West End. It's shocking to see how many poms are in the IT game in Brisbane!

Days Getting Longer

2007-07-14T19:02:00.001+09:00

Our little Holden Barina's automatic gearbox has finally given up the ghost. That'll teach us to load up a city-runabout with furniture and blat up and down country roads month in month out. It's not quite a write-off, but the repair will cost well over half the value of the car, and it will take ten days or so to get parts, so we're stuck in Brisbane this weekend and will have to make our own entertainment.
Our ex-flatmate John is in town for a couple of weeks, and we met up with him on Saturday morning in West End market. He'd bought C a bouquet of white roses, and his girlfriend Sanghi called up on his mobile from Seoul to congratulate C about the coming baby- what a lovely gesture!
My boss came through with the promised two weeks unpaid leave, which was agreed when I decided to go permie, and then some synchronicity came into play and pretty much decided our holiday for us: First Tiger airways entered the regional battle, and the other players lowered their fares to compete, then we heard that Marcus and Basia (whose Northern spring wedding in Poland we missed) are on holiday visiting Ian and Eriko in Tokyo at the right time, and finally John and Sanghi will be on holiday at the same time, so we're planning to meet up with them in Kyoto as well. The timing couldn't have been better for our last ever adventure unencumbered by kids - we've been promising Ian and Eri that we'd visit for nearly four years now, and Eri is also pregnant and expecting at the same time as C, so it's the last time we can use their house in Tokyo as a base too.
I'm still surprised by how cold Brisbane winters are. I guess I should have figured it out by looking at a map really - though we're a thousand kilometres north of Auckland, we're on the edge of a huge landmass, and I'm used to London's and Auckland's relatively warmer, wetter island winters. I love this weather though - C has suffered a bit with the cold, but the crisp days with blue skies and a light breeze are exactly what I'd order. The days are getting noticeably longer this week too, and when I walk home from the CBD at half past five, the sunset is just starting to turn the sky orange above the Brisbane river as I get to the bridge to cross to West End.
Work-wise, I've started taking advantage of being in the heart of West End - now that I've located the cafes on Boundary street that serve up reliable wifi and a decent long black, I'm doing some of my mornings from the third place, which is very civilised. I'm intrigued by possible networking possibilities amongst remote-workers that these venues open up - there must be a business opportunity there somewhere, if only I could see it. More mundanely, spending some time in cafes around other telecommuters is a useful education in the techniques and technologies that other remote workers use to juggle jobs and maintain their boundaries in a gadget-filled, 24/7 working world. And the baklava rocks.
I usually try to keep my work out of this blog, but this week I want to plug Flare. Anyone that spends a significant portion of their time writing technical documentation to the web is mad, in my humble opinion, to use any other product. I'm finishing projects at least 30% quicker than I was with AuthorIT.

New Person!

2007-07-05T13:58:00.002+09:00

Our big news this week is that C is pregnant.
The new person is due to arrive in mid/late December, and she's a little girl. She doesn't have a name yet, but she does have a working title - Lil (as in "lil girl").
We said hello to her image on the scanner (darkly) last week, and she was pretty shy, but we still got a good look at her sleeping face before she hid from the camera completely. Figuring the dates, we're fairly sure she was made in New Zealand, during our trip to Bas and Jo's wedding on South Island.
Much of our time has been taken up getting ahead on the baby-kit. Four months out might seem a bit early to be buying a cot, a car-restraint, and a jogger - but the price and choice we've got in Brisbane is many times better than around Nimbin, so we should save ourselves hassle by stocking up on all the essentials right now, during our remaining few weeks in the city.
We drove down to Nimbin for the weekend, partly to deliver some of the bulkier items home before we had more than would fit in our little Barina, and partly because we were starting to really miss the place... And now I'm back in the city I'm suddenly very sad that I'm not down there to stay for another 2 months or so, and suddenly aware of all the ways city life compresses and distorts my priorities and personality.
C's job is plodding on, both my jobs are plodding on, and I'm still appreciating the extra time at home and away from the psychologically toxic office environment - it's making me more anti-social, but also saner. As C put it - now we've seen outside of the rat-race, we're very keen to get out as far as possible.
I had a strange working-from-home moment today. I lit the gas stove-top to make myself some rice for lunch. I was wearing a cotton/nylon jumper. As I lit the stove, the flame jumped inexplicably, about 50cm to my chest, and the front of my jumper was suddenly on fire. It was not hot - a cool, yellowish flame, standing in the air about 1cm above the surface of the jumper. I stepped back, well away from the stove, and tried to smother the flames with my arms - with the result that the flames jumped onto the arms of my jumper, which gave me a better view of them - small, yellow, not very hot. It's hard to smother your arms with any other part of the body, so I took the jumper off and sat on it. After a moment the flames went out, and I examined the jumper - not a mark on it, and seemingly good as new, though it did make a crackling, static-electricity type noise as I took it off. I googled for the phenomenon and came up with nothing.

Mending Nets

2007-06-26T20:30:00.000+09:00

It's been a strange few days. First a week of British weather, during which I suffered a debilitating and sometimes agonising inner-ear infection, characterised by alternating feelings of in-skull pressure and then white-hot shooting pains in the eustachian tube. In despair I visited the doc, and she said... cut out coffee, drink truckloads of water, and you'll be right in a couple of days. Depressingly, she was spot-on, and after a simple rehydration regimen, I felt great. How can I be so deaf to my body's signals, that I drink so much less fluid than I need that I leave myself in severe pain?
The weather then turned on a sixpence, and for the last five days, we've had the most glorious winter days, bright, calm, blue and perfect - this couldn't have come at better time, both for the pathetic falacy of my sudden freedom from ear-pain, and to coincide with my being at home five days a week.
Unfortunately this week has been a busy week of early morning meetings and teleconferences with the rest of my team in Denver, and the final frantic "going permie" negotiations with work (yep, I'm officially a wage-slave again from Monday - the only consolation being that I'm at my desk just 2 days a week) all this meant Monday-to-Friday chaos, and the weekend has been no better: Anne, the Souh African ultra-runner we've been cat-sitting for, decided that driving down to Surfers Paradise to take part in a 42k road race immediately after flying back from competing in South Africa's 90k Comrades ultra-marathon wasn't the wisest thing to do, so she changed her plans and asked us to vacate her place on Friday so she could sleep for 72 hours.
This worked out fairly well, as it meant we had the weekend to get ourselves settled in to our nice little room in West End - our abode for the next ten weeks or so. We got all our stuff unpacked, sorted out a little desk and a few other things we'll need to get by - as I'm working from home 3 days a week, the place is both our room and my home office until September! Our housemates have interesting CDs to rip, and interesting books to read... And it's fantastic to not be in a cultural desert like Spring Hill or Toowong - from our new place, it's a two minute walk to the venue where Concord Dawn are playing in two weeks' time, and a cornucopia of random and alternative weirdness... We're right at home.
Today we took advantage of the glorious winter weather to head West to Ipswich (as our final "we're checking out West of Brissie" destination) - no offense to the place and its redneck populace, but it's almost an archetypal nothing town - the most interesting thing we could find to pass the time was to wander along the riverbanks under the town's newish bridges, and read the bronze plaques explaining how the older bridges had been washed away in the massive flood of 1974. Another three or four metres of floodwater, an you'd wash the rest of the place into Moreton Bay too.

Missing Nimbin

2007-06-18T20:29:00.001+09:00

Week two in Brisbane, and we're both missing Nimbin already. We checked out Paddington, the only central Brisbane district we hadn't explored yet. It's reminiscent of Parnell in Auckland: Climbing up a hill, and with pleasant converted queenslanders all in a row selling retro nik-naks and overpriced (but delicious) spiced hot chocolate, flat whites , lamingtons, and Queensland cakes. After buying some retro nik-naks (really, there's bugger all else to do) we had flat whites and a preposterously large slice of Queensland cake.
Sunday morning, we took advantage again of being on the West side of town, and drove round the corner (less than 5 minutes, in fact) past the botanical gardens and up to the Mount Coot-Tha lookout. There's a popular cafe and picnic spot at the top, as it's the highest point in Brisbane, and you get a great view of the skyline and beyond to the ocean. From there we walked into the park and followed an aboriginal art trail for a couple of kilometres - at a leisurely pace, of course.
On Sunday afternoon we scored a real win. Knowing we'd need a room in Brisbane for about 9 weeks after our current house-sitting stint ends, so that C can see out her contract, we'd (fairly optimistically) put up posters around West End, in the hope there'd be a friendly house-share with a spare room. A lass phoned us on Sunday (the only phone call we got, after putting up 10 posters around West End) and we're going to move into a very cheap room in the heart of West End - there's a beautiful, quiet back garden, broadband access in the room, and fun, progressive housemates... We'll soon see if there's a catch!
My contract with Gensolve starts next week, and not only are the sterling chaps there allowing me to do all my work from the comfort of home, they are also supplying me with a snazzy new laptop, and latest versions of the software I need (this should keep my inner nerd well fed and happy for a few weeks). Switching from software development to technical writing, despite the inevitable paycut, is working out more or less as I'd hoped thus far - there is lots of demand, few good people in the game, no chance of my role being outsourced to a non-english-native-speaking country, and a good 20 years' worth of Moore's law before any significant chunk of the work can be automated away. The only catch is that paycut...

A Break From the Bush

2007-06-10T23:51:00.002+09:00

We have a 3 month break from going bush, it would seem. Anne, a friend of a colleague, needed people to house-sit (and cat sit...) her place in Toowong, and I figured it would be a good fit for me, as for the next four weeks or so I'd've rented a room in Brisbane for three days a week anyhow. C was well up for a city break after 3 months in Nimbin, and the plan also cut short the time we'd have to spend half the week apart by nearly a month - a win-win. Once in Brisbane, C logically enough decided that she may as well look for a short-term contract. Her first interview was for the Queensland office of the Premier, and she decided to sign up for a 3 month contract working on their websites.
Anne is an ultrarunner, and is heading over to her native South Africa for three weeks, to compete in the annual Comrades Marathon - 90 kilometres of sunburnt craziness. Anne's place is a pleasant queenslander, set back from the road in a very quiet street in a quiet part of Taringa. You can tell she's the South African on the street - it's the only house surrounded by a bloody great wall, and with a closed, locked gate at the front. Her cats (Cleo and Slinky) are friendly and affectionate, and at 14, too old to be any hassle - both of them live to eat, and spend their day directly in front of the heat ducts, and hunting the sunny spots in the garden - hard life. We now have a couple of tricky problems to sort out - Brisbane accomodation for July and August, and how to make time to get down to Nimbin during that eight weeks. C's job doesn't start till next week, Monday is a bank holiday in Queensland, and I work from home on Fridays, so we have six of the first 10 days to chill here and to explore this part of the city together. Toowong and Taringa themselves are your average suburbia - there are quite a few old-style queenslanders here, some in very good nick indeed, but other than that there's nothing of interest.
The state botanical gardens are a five minute drive up the Western motorway however, so we checked those out on Saturday - they'll be more impressive once they're more mature, but the range (and arrangement) is pretty impressive, and they seem to be keeping all the plants alive despite the drought, through an extensive system of tanks and reservoirs.
Monday is the Queens Birthday here - a bank holiday, and therefore a long weekend. We took advantage of being back in Brissie, and headed down to the Powerhaus - they have an exhibition of press photography from around the world. I enjoyed it, but was slightly disturbed by some of the images, such as Iraqi babies killed in the war and Lebanese residential districts blown to smithereens, and much more disturbed by the flippant attitudes to the images that several groups of Aussies displayed - I've never been to an exhibition of photoreportage before where it seemed to be the done thing to joke about the images.
The long weekend has felt like a well-deserved holiday, and made me realise that I need to schedule a proper break quite soon - I've been working for 10 months without more than 2 days off in a row, and most of those have been wrapped around weekends and pressed into service to do things that don't really fit into long weekends like fly to New Zealand and back. I'm looking forward to another 3 weeks during which I can think about all the things that need to be done to the house in Nimbin, but without the threat that I might actually be called on to do any of them.

Bangalow, Byron, Brissie and Beyond

2007-06-06T20:03:00.001+09:00

I missed a week. My beautiful blog is ruined!
On Friday May 25 my Auckland-based mate Casey came over the Tasman for a long weekend in Brisbane and Surfers. we headed to West End and shared good pizza and a bottle of decent South Australian Pinot Noir at Halim's Cafe Checocho on Hardgrave road (Halim took us seriously when we asked for stacks of jalapeños, and the result was spot on) before walking back across the Brisbane river to Central Station in time for the last train to Surfers.
On Saturday Ellen, a good friend who was a house mate in Bologna in '95, flew in to Gold Coast. We drove down to meet her flight, and as Casey and his mate Bilal were still in Surfers, we all met up for a generic meal and beer at a plastic-tablecloth tourist-trap place on the main drag at Surfers, and I got the rest of the gossip from New Zealand - looks like I got out just in time, as Interactive Technologies, where I worked with Casey, has undergone a sort of reverse management buyout event, and the development team have been let go and (the lucky ones) re-hired at a lower rate. We drove the 100 km back to Nimbin and turned in, in the wee small hours.
We had searched the papers and the local listings in vain for colourful nearby markets and events to explore with Ellen, but somehow she had timed her visit to coincide with absolutely bugger all going on in Terrania shire.
Undeterred, we decided on a Sunday trip to the coast, stopping off at Bangalow market. The market was a surprise - bigger than I expected, and featuring a good range of local crafts and produce, and a good-fun band belting out some classic covers. We pressed on to Australia's easternmost point, the peninsula South of Byron Bay topped by the lighthouse, and walked out onto the peninsula and down to the beach.

The weather was picture-postcard-perfect (as usual round here in these drought-stricken times) and we spent a while sitting on the sand, watching a pod of happy dolphins play in the breakers and taking in the panoramic view of the Pacific and Byron Bay, before grabbing dinner in Byron. I got the impression that C and Ellen's dishes were, as they say in these parts, pretty average. I got lucky with a really rather wonderful mild tofu satay lemongrass curry - I will be attempting to clone that in my kitchen lab for the next few weeks!

On Monday we drove the other way (and a fair bit further than I remembered it) to Mount Warning national park, and trekked up the summit track. None of us made it to the top (we were a bit lax in the morning, and had left it too late to get all the way up and back down) but Ellen left me and C behind, and at least trekked high enough to get a good view of the coast and the Tweed valley - We will go back soon enough and make it all the way to the top!
I had to work on Tuesday afternoon, so we didn't have time for a lie in - just a quick coffee in the village, and the three hour drive up the motorway. C and Ellen checked out a goodly part of Brisbane over the next couple of days - and to my slight consternation, Casey and Ellen both seem to like the city better than I do. Perhaps I judge the place more harshly because I'm living here, or perhaps I'm just mean.
Back at home last weekend, and we inched forward our bathroom renovation project. I have always fought shy of any kind of cement pouring - but we this time we mixed, and we poured, and the results are looking pretty good - we should have no trouble getting a smooth surface prepared to tile the floor. Getting the splatters of cement out of my clothes and hair is another matter - I'm just glad C didn't take any photos of me using the electric mixer attachment to mix the cement!
Our injured adopted magpie, Cripple Boy, was noticeably thinner this week - and we were only in town (and thus not feeding him pine nuts and bacon rind) for three days. I have a horrible feeling he now relies on us for his nutrition, and will starve to death over the three weeks we're spending in Brisbane in June. More likely it'll do him some good and force him to actually be the bloody early bird and catch some worms.
Garden update: we have harvested the first bunch of bananas from our garden. They're still a bit green, but they should ripen on the shelf, and they look rather delicious...Of course, they'll ripen all at once, so we'll have a week of fried bananas, banana fritters, fruit salad, banana splits, and homage to first Zimbabwean president the reverend doctor Canaan Banana.

Green Fingers

2007-05-22T23:04:00.001+09:00

It's all been about the garden the last couple of weeks. No, not that kind of gardening - I haven't gone that Nimbin native - yet!
To the South (facing the road) we have now finished cutting and clearing around the pond - but I've realised that it's a bigger project than I first thought to get the pond wired up to the mains (even assuming I do it all myself - illegally, rather than getting in a licensed electrician to wire everything up to meet New South Wales standards for external wiring, it's going to be quite an expense too) and then getting it oxygenated, and a pump to keep it all moving, and at least one light, and some fish and a couple of plants will add up to hundreds of dollars and a good few man-hours. So, the pond project has been relegated to the bottom of the pile. Also to the South, C has done a great job planting small ground-cover plants and herbs near the front deck, and we're slowly learning which things can thrive on a shaded South facing bit of garden (and which things either rot or turn crispy).
Driving back from Lismore we scared the cars behind us by performing an excited U-turn across oncoming traffic and screeching to a halt in a farmer's driveway - he had 2 bags of manure left, and a sign asking for 2 bucks in his post-box per bag. We've seen many such signs, but demand seems to outstrip supply most of the time, so there's the quick and the dead.
We're fortunate in having the "Nimbin sawmill" about 500 yards away as the crow flies (and one minute away as the Holden bounces along pitted country lanes) - a friendly local hardware store stocking bottled gas, garden supplies and a variety of obscure things we've discovered we urgently require at odd times through the week. This week we got a big bale of mulch, reinforced the raised beds with a few extra stakes, and then decided to skip the weeding completely and lay a thick layer of mulch and water instead: Hopefully very few weeds will push through that, and we can pick off any that do. The raised beds are fun (though small, they somwhow feel like "real" gardening) but we're growing things we could have grown in the UK - cauliflower, strawberry, broccoli and so on.
The most exciting food crops for me are the things that still (for the moment) seem impossibly exotic: We have a big bunch of bananas ripening just beyond the deck, a row of (thriving thus far, but time will tell) pineapples, and our lone mandarine tree, that produces about two impossibly delicious mandarines every week - they're so good I want to run out there and focus mirrors on the green ones to speed it up! On a sadder note, it seems we have a couple of large carob trees in the garden, but that, due to our ignorance of the seasons here, we left it too late to harvest the beans (there would have been, tens, maybe hundreds of kilos - they're big trees) and they have turned to mush on the tree. We'll be ready next year!
I'm enjoying growing some of my own food immensely, but there will be wails of anguish when the wallabies from last week's post discover all the delicious delicacies in our raised beds - it doesn't really matter whether they eat them or just bounce all over them, the result will be just the same. I'm somehow loath to take protective measures until things attack (backwards though that may sound) for the simple reason that I'm SO ignorant of the threats and dangers, that i'd almost certainly be wasting my time. Famous last words...

Boing boing dot not

2007-05-15T17:56:00.001+09:00

We've had a few more wallaby visitors this week. Two of them are the same mum and joey we saw six weeks ago - except that the little guy is definitely too big to hop back in now! You slowly get blasé about these creatures, but they really are great - like jackrabbits on steroids and pogo sticks. They're nervous, like rabbits or deer, and can be persuaded to ignore you even though they know you're there - if you're quiet and still. As soon as you move or make a noise, they startle as if they hadn't seen you in the first place, which can be disconcerting if you're up close - that first startled hop is like a six-foot tall spring going off.
I suspect the reason we've had more pouched visitors is that we're looking after Suzie from downstairs's dog, Bruce. Bruce is so lazy that he's hardly ever wandered downstairs into the front garden while we've been looking after him, so the wallabies feel it's a safe place to bring their joeys for a feed. He's an often dumb, often irritating, and always predictable beast, but he's also loyal and affectionate, and his (sometimes pathetic, but incredibly earnest) attempts to understand what you want him to do have reminded me how much I miss having a dog around the house. Must. Get. Puppy.
We thought the region's biggest monthly craft market at The Channon, 20 minutes' drive South would be a good day out with Bruce. We've been along most months since we moved here, but hadn't noticed was the strict "no pets" rule (it's a good idea, but I think it's the first outdoor market I've ever been to that does not allow pets) so we drove there, but missed out on the market, and poor Bruce had to jump back in the car and sit in the back seat again all the way home with us casting him resentful glances. Next time we go I'll post some photos from the Channon - it's a unique place.
The rest of my Nimbin time was spent pottering and being generally unproductive. This week's DIY SNAFU was my attempt to build a simple step from garden path to patio - after a couple of false starts and quite a bit of head-scratching, I ended up leaving the job and setting aside time to think about it instead: Even the smallest jobs can be harder than it seems to do well, and a step is no exception. I can think of ugly solutions, expensive solutions, and very longwinded solutions - but thus far no simple, cheap, elegant solution.
We are at a difficult stage as we struggle to transition from monolithic full time jobs to multiple smaller sources of income, where we have to remember to budget time for all the additional factors involved - the networking, the tax and compliance crap, and the time-juggling between different clients and jobs. All my other pieces of work (put together) are about to overtake the time I spend doing my "day job", which is a crucial psychological milestone for me - even though it would pull the rug out from under me if I were made redundant tomorrow, it somehow opens up possibilities and options that weren't there before, from the obvious (I can work more hours some weeks, less others if I want) to things I hadn't previously considered (if I'm doing work for six clients at any one time, the chances of making interesting contacts through work are about six times greater - and if the average duration of a piece of work is only a third as long as I used to stay with one employer, it's about 18 times greater).
There is a related factor I didn't foresee about my current weekly commute to Brisbane too - basically I'm jealous of C; because she's in the village all week, she is more involved in local life, and she's making connections and getting involved with local groups and clubs... while I still feel like I'm a commuter-belt villain. But I'm working on it!