Midwinter Lights

The main event in Lismore in June is the Lantern Parade. Somehow we managed to miss it in both 2007 and 2008, so we were lantern virgins (and somewhat miffed that we would never now attend the event as dinkys, with the attendant getting drunk and staying out late privileges. Despite unseasonal, torrential rain, we all had a great time, and K's adrenaline rush from all the lanterns was fully catered for by the fireworks which followed.

Later in the week we had to run back up to Brissie to drop Rose at the airport. We stayed at a hotel in Kangaroo point so that C could walk in to the CBD and I could walk to work in West End, and I did a couple of days in the office. We also caught up with Halim again at cafe Checocho - the place is going from strength to strength, a veritable oasis of chess, BYO Indonesian food, great coffee, books, live music, and pavement people-watching.

My ex-colleague Keith has upgraded his coffee machine to an even higher-end model. He asked if I could give his Gaggia Classic a good home. I didn't need to be asked twice, and it was also a good excuse to stop off at the Gold Coast for (good) coffee and a catch-up. I've paired the Gaggia with a Sunbeam 0480, and the first flat whites from freshly roasted Nimbin beans will be rolling off the production line tomorrow morning, in time to head off Mondayitis. No matter how good they are, I have resolved not to let them cut down on my time in the third place. Besides, working from home as I do, the third place is my second place. Or something.
Back home in nimbin, it's mandarine season again - there will be mandarine fool, mandarine compote, and mandarine jelly, as there was last year. This year, the new experiment is mandarine curd. As I write this, I have just bottled 2 kilos of the stuff, and we will discover tomorrow morning if it is delicious when spread on freshly baked wholemeal loaf.

Barely blogworthy: Many, many pieces of veranda rail have been strapped to the roof-rack, driven home, cut to shape, sanded down, stained, screwed into place, treated, and varnished. Soon now, we will have railings of legal height.
Much, much high quality red gum has been delivered and stacked on said veranda. The cool winter nights are banished by our blazing log fire. Much, much road-base was delivered at the foot of our driveway, and much, much shoveling was required to spread it. Many, many kilos of cement and breeze blocks have been stacked under the house, waiting patiently for me to transform them into the final stretch of retaining wall.

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.

Kick Out the (Mandarine) JAMs

July in Nimbin has seen several more frosty mornings. The silver lining is the complete lack of clouds - bright blue skies and warm afternoons in the sun. We have almost burnt through the $120 worth of firewood we bought in May - we wont make it to spring at this rate. Also, I've only noticed this winter, how very late it is that many trees lose their leaves here. I am too arboreally uneducated to figure out whether it's the native trees, or that European trees change their behaviour when planted here - several of the trees on our street lost their leaves in the last two or three weeks, which is the equivalent of mid-January.
More seasonally appropriately, the enormous mandarine harvest has continued; we have immune systems full of vitamin C, slight acid indigestion, an overflowing fruit bowl, friends politely refusing fruit, desperate (though tasty) inventions such as cottage cheese mandarine fool, and of course mandarine jam and half a kilo of candied tangerine peel.
Predictably, we didn't stick to our budget very well in New Zealand, so I've taken on an extra 10 hours a week for the next few weeks (which is a damned poor excuse for this update being four days late, but I'm sticking to it).
At the weekend we drove down to Bangalow market and met up with Jonas, Tanya and Otto. Otto is now crawling around like a little monster - it was a bit scary to see whats in store for us in the coming weeks!
We also got fairly constructive at the weekend, finally finishing off doing up the old meat safe - I won't be giving up my day job to renovate furniture, but it's slowly becoming a hobby I enjoy. Here are the before and after pics, showing it the day we picked it up, and now in it's place in the kitchen keeping our food safe from subtropical beasties.
I've also finally stopped procrastinating about the horrors of fixing up the utility room under the house. As well as talking to a bloke with a huge Bobcat (JCB), I've finally got off my arse and had an engineer round to provide a structural diagram of how an I-beam can be placed to hold up the utility room roof, got a builder lined up for the work, and in a fit of midnight studiousness, obtained my NSW owner builders' license - who knows, at some point some actual work might get started.