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.

Kiwi Lurgy Hiatus

I have no excuse to offer. This second hiatus of the Nimbin interblag in as many months is inexcusable. Three people have now complained.
Since my last post, we had a one-week holiday in New Zealand. It was fantastic to catch up with our Auckland friends, and we narrowly missed out on a triumphant return to our pub quiz team of yore - we were one point away from tying for first place, but instead lost (again....) to long-time arch rivals.
Unfortunately, about 20 minutes after stepping out of the plane into the frosty Waikato midnight, and scraping the frost off the hire car's windscreen, I came down with the world's most evil viral flu (or, man-cold as Jo dubbed it, until she caught it herself...)
The rest of the holiday passed in a blur of fevers and flu and long car journeys with a sick, screaming baby.
My work contract at the moment specifies that if I take holiday, my hours must nett to zero over the following weeks, so as soon as we got back I began working longer weeks to make up the hours - which was tough at first as I was still quite ill.
By last week, I was feeling much better. Bas and Jo, over from New Zealand to visit Jo's father in Cairns, stayed with us for a couple of days and we showed them around Nimbin and spent a sunny morning walking up to protesters' falls.
And so three weeks of semi-convalescence have passed, and most of my time has been relatively non blog worthy:

We bought low-key lampshades and other assorted "the Gap of home wares"-style basics from Ikea on our way back through Brisbane.

Some time has been spent restoring our 1930s Tasmanian meat safe - this is a labour of love, which is just another way of saying it's taking bloody ages to get what should be a small simple piece of furniture looking good enough so I'm not embarrassed to put it in my kitchen. At this point, there is 'only' some planing, sanding, painting, varnishing, replacing of hinges, tacking, and wire brushing left to do.

Less frustrating, but also less constructive was last week's effort to connect the Wii to the interweb. After a fair amount of profanity, I gave in, and removed both WPA encryption and MAC address filtering from my wireless access point and was finally able to connect with the Wii. Our neighbours are too distant to be able to piggyback on our WiFi, but I wouldn't be surprised to trip over a bunch of Nimbin wardrivers in beaten up VWs with solar powered laptops out the back one of these mornings.
The last 10 days have been crisp, clear, sunny and still. Also, bloody cold by Australian standards. The enormous crop of mandarins in our garden only serves to rub in the fact that at night time at the moment, it's dropping to what I consider Christmas temperatures.

Today is C's birthday, so we drove to Byron and had a day at the beach. The water was much too cold for swimming, but just lying on the beach and paddling in the water rocked, and we wandered round the back streets of Byron and discovered a few little shops and cafes that we didn't know about, including a toy shop that only sells wooden and plush toys, and an interesting looking vegetarian restaurant.
Given that my plans for the foreseeable future consist of staying at home and chilling out for the portion of the week when I'm not at work, it may be somewhat boring, but none the less normal service interblag-wise will be resumed from next week - namely a weekly blag of our exploits such as they are, and some photos - some, perhaps, even relevant.