Ice Cream Been

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

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

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

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

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




Andale, andale.

Import Namespace

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.

Bangalow, Byron, Brissie and Beyond

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.