Sunshine and Wattage

It's been a period of mending nets, and this is therefore a short post. At least the rain has gone and the sun is out in Nimbin.
Last weekend there was a joint birthday for several friends at Tuntable community hall - this was our first time checking out the premises (confusingly separate from the community run Tuntable cafe) and I have to say, they've done really well at creating a social space that everyone can use - airy, spacious, and subdividable.
Meanwhile, our solar panels were wired up and are now delivering juice to the grid.
The tomato and chili plants continue to deliver.
The mandarines are about to ripen.
The overnight temperatures are falling fast now, and we've been firing up the wood stove in the evening all this week. some component has snapped off - but Vanessa recommended a boilermaker to us so hopefully we'll get it fixed up properly next week. The stove issue has come on top of a spate of hardware issues - broken washing machine, broken bread machine, storm damage to gutters (fixed singlehandedly!), broken car stereo, and ISP issues (in the sense of being unable to work for hours at a time).
Other news:
All our classes are off for 5 weeks for Easter break.
The drainage trench below the retaining wall is (finally) finished - but I still have to build a swale above the wall, put some 75mm ag-drain in the trench and gravel over the top.
Friday was spent with Rob from two doors up, drilling and poisoning the invasive camphor laurels at the foot of the garden. They are a pest, but they do smell wonderful. When they're gone (we'll cut them up after they die and dry up, in three weeks or so) our balcony will have a view to Sphinx Rock - there will be photos of the new Northerly aspect in June or July.
As a reward for our industriousness, we spent Saturday at Shelly beach, just North of Ballina - we have a new default spot behind the flags under the shade of a beach tree (though not a beech tree).
It's been a long week at work, and Easter meant less daycare for K (hence the babycinos). Also, C has been putting in long hours on a complex piece of print work, so it's been a time of little sleep. Proper service should resume on the blog front next week.
I can't let the Pirate Bay verdict go by without comment. My comment is this: Cory Doctorow is correct when he suggests the best way to make money in a world of infinite cheap copies, is "give cheapskates the tools to spend their time promoting... [content], and stand by with a commercial item to sell to the rich, busy people". Locking people up for publishing links won't hold back the tide.

PV'ed but Unwired

The solar panels are up on the roof. We have paid for them, and now we have to wait and hope the government aren't fibbing about the rebate.
The system is rated at 1.3kWh, and took the two guys from Rainbow Power Company about 6 hours to install, including setting up the inverter and all the wiring except for actually connecting the AC output to the grid, which is done separately by the electricity company.
They chose to lay the rack and panels flat on the roof, as this will maximise Summer output, at the cost of slightly reducing Winter efficiency, when the sun is lower in the sky. As we're grid connected, maximising the total fed into the grid over the whole year is the aim.
The forthcoming NSW feed in tariff for domestic PV systems will kick in in July, and should see us being paid somewhere in the region of AU$0.60/kWh, and should provide a full return on our investment (after rebate) within 36 months.
The panels are not visible from the ground, and come with a 20 year warranty. There is a separate system of federal and state rebates for solar hot water systems, and getting that set up will be next on our list - financially it is much less rewarding, and the payback time is longer (because the power gathered substitutes for low-cost off peak power used over night to heat the hot water tank) but the environmental benefits are actually greater than the grid-feed system, with many households using up to 70% of their power in water heating, especially if a lot of hot washes are being done in a washing machine.
On a more rock'n'roll note, we had our first night out without K this month - our neighbour Natalie kindly watched K for us while we went out to the Nimbin Blue Moon Cabaret. We enjoyed the jazz piano improv, the street poetry, the belly dancing and even the hip-hop, but for me the highlight of the evening was the physical theatre comedy duo The Pitts. I'd seen them before at the Auckland busking festival in 2005, but they've got more polished since then (and had a young son who plays his part on stage too, though he's only about three years old). We made a night of it - there were plenty of people we knew at the place, decent South Australian red to drink, and food both before the start and in the interval. My kind of show. Nimbin being Nimbin, the interval also saw many of the crowd leave the premises to spark up, after which a quite phenomenal haze wafted through on the breeze.
Rod and Cherdina have asked me to be MC at their wedding in May, so I need to memorise my cues for each tune, and make sure I've got the order of speakers straight in my head - but it sounds like an easier gig than being best man - and the place they've booked out on the Gold Coast looks a fantastic place to spend a few days.

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.