Railing Against

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.

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.

Picnics, Markets...Almost Springtime

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.

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.

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.

Termites!

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.

Water water all around

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.