Island Vibe

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.





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Cold Cold Sun

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.

Island Time!

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.

Dub Hammer

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!