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.

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.

Cabin Fever

An even rainier week!

To see just how rainy, check out this video our friends Steffan and Iris took (from their blog vos2oz.com). The first half of this video shows what is normally a very small, placid creek on their property. The second half shows the adventure that driving to Lismore has become!

My grand plans for getting ahead on the garden have been stymied by the continual downpour. Even most indoor work is impossible because the wooden structure of the house is too wet. Looking on the bright side, it has enforced a degree of rest over the first couple of weeks with the new baby, which is probably a good thing - especially for C.
When we have gone out, it has been indoors - we've spent a fair amount of time at the Rainbow cafe.
Given that our tumble dryer died, and the rain has been more or less constant, the most rock and roll element of my lifestyle has been the daring early morning trips to the laundrette. In order to keep up with the demand for clean, dry nappies and bunny rugs, I've been driving through knee-deep water to the village and back whenever we've got behind on the nappies. The guy at the Spin Cycle shop in Lismore promised us he would be able to fix our tumble dryer this week, but when we drove into town on Wednesday to drop it off, we found that he had extended his Xmas holiday. These small details can really change the shape of your week. And lose you someone's business.

As the four of us have been experiencing slight cabin-fever, cooped up in our house, we have avoided driving straight home from the village a few times, and today we took a 10 minute detour up Gungas Road to take a look at the normally peaceable small creek that runs though Steffan's yard. Not only had the creek been transformed into a eight metre wide torrent, but there are waterfalls falling directly onto Gungas Road itself, and Gungas Road is cut off to all but the ruggedest all terrain vehicles at the point where it fords the creek to go up the hill. its a bit of an adventure in the rainforest right now.

And Baby Makes Three

As K was born by C-section, C had to stay in hospital for three days after the birth. Each morning Rose and I drove into Lismore, and we helped C look after K during visiting hours, and ran errands in Lismore during the ward's "quiet time".

We organised an xmas lunch on the patio in front of C's hospital room. On Boxing Day we packed up our stuff and brought K home to Nimbin. She seemed to enjoy the car ride, which was a relief, and has so far settled very well to life at home. Obviously at this age she is not very interactive yet - but she takes notice of some of the wildlife and rainforest noises around her, and, though she can't focus her eyes yet, she definitely tracks things of interest using her head.

As K has not cried very much (only for food or nappies in the main) we have had time to finish off a few of the chores that got left as loose ends when we headed into Lismore for the birth. I shinned up the Jacaranda tree in our back garden and lopped off five or six large branches. I took out the in-window air conditioning unit which we had set up in the bedroom in readiness for C to labour at home. C and I moved the crib into our bedroom and surrounded it with mobiles and pictures (entirely unappreciated as yet, of course).

We also had a second xmas after we got home - polishing off the food C didn't eat when in hospital, opening the rest of the presents, and C having her first "post-tot" tot of Baileys after eight months of strict abstemiousness - K slept very well that night.

For much of the week we've been trapped indoors by heavy rain - being used to having the run of the garden, we're all getting cabin fever. Nonetheless, we have managed a quick walk in the Nightcap Ranges national park, where little K had her first alfresco nappy change. We have also made it out to the weekly Saturday market in Nimbin, and the monthly Sunday market too. At the Sunday market, C was able to relax with a hot chocolate at the chai tent, where K happily fell asleep in her lap to a local folk/harp trio.

The new baby lack-of-sleep thing isn't bothering me so far (especially as K has cried very little) but I expect that will change next week when I have my first 7:30am meeting.

Won't someone stop that evil man - not only is he blowing his carcinogenic cigar smoke into his baby daughter's face, but he's clearly drunk in charge, oblivious to the feral lizard just waiting to strike, and to top it all he's exposing his newborn's face to the antipodean sun.