Waterfalls, Rainbows and Mist

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.

ANZAC Picnic

This Wednesday is our first ANZAC day. It's a public holiday commemorating the poor buggers the Brits sent to Anzac cove to try to knock the turks out of the first world war. I'm too lazy get up for the dawn service tomorrow, but I will try to treat it as more than just a day off - it really does mean a lot to Australians, many of who have a grandfather (or great-grandfather) who was involved in the fighting in Turkey. Also, the meaning of the day has grown to encompass all Australia's war dead, which should give us pause for thought as Howard once again ignores common sense and the will of the people by doubling the Australian contingent in the illegal occupation of Iraq.
From a selfish perspective, ANZAC day falling on a Wednesday means I'm spending the whole week in Nimbin, and will only head in to Brisbane for the day on Thursday.

Saturday was a glorious day, and Nimbin is starting to get quite busy with tourists now that it's only two weeks until Mardi Grass, so we decided to take the car over the hill to the dam near Dorroughby, and have a look around. We stopped at a roadside honesty-box and grabbed some fresh bananas (5 cents a pop, and some of the best I've ever tasted!) and got the other ingredients we needed for a fine picnic at the dairy in Dorroughby. The lake formed by the dam for the water reservoir is really pleasant - there are flowers round the edge, and well cared for walks have been marked out around the dam and below. Apparently duck-billed platypodes are quite easy to spot in the waters below the dam, but we weren't quite patient enough (though we did spot an extremely chilled-out sunbathing turtle amongst the flowers).
As we ate our humble picnic, we were also treated to the sight of two large white parrots (Cacatue Sulphurea) having an (extremely loud) territorial dispute above our heads.
On Sunday I finally made good on my repeated resolutions to start taking a morning run - and 7:30 is a great time to get out near Nimbin; the sun isn't too hot yet, the clouds are still hugging the hills, and the locals are in a cheery mood (unless I was mistaking a succession of "get off the road, you idiot" gestures for friendly waves). We replaced the calories at the Rainbow cafe, and then went to the Nimbin skip to buy large rectangular pieces of fibroboard (to repair the holes I made in the walls when removing the bath with a pick axe) and drove cautiously back through town with the fibroboard sticking a good 5 foot behind the back of our li'l car. With what energy we had left after a morning run of at least several hundred yards (stop sniggering!) we also tackled the old, lantana-covered chicken coop halfway down the garden; hacking our way through the lantana roots, and using a combination of pick-axe, crowbar, wood saw, brute force and ignorance, in about three hours we cleared the structure right back to the underlying breeze-blocks. I know I want to do it up and get it weatherproof, but beyond that, I'm not sure what to do with the space - once cleaned up, it might make a good den or retreat (it's about the right size and distance from the house) or we might end up getting chickens of our own and using it as a chicken coop once again - the hard part is now done (except for fixing up the structure's roof) and I'm immersing myself in the Earth Garden Building Book's "Simple Roofs" chapter, and learning words like skillion, sarking, birdsmouth and truss. Another new world - funny how each and every one I discover has dafter vocabulary than the last.