Winter warmers

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

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

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.