Settled At Last

So, we're settled. I'm settled. We've gone bush.
Hitting the ground running in my new job has still been tricky though - no sooner had the tree surgeons ridden off into the sunset (leaving me wondering what I'm meant to do with all those sections of tree trunk) than the termite control guys showed up to sort us out.
We hastily arranged to borrow Steffan's trailer, hitched it up and ferried two trailer-loads of gravel from the sawmill up the road to our place, and I got up at 5am on the day to dig trenches around our stumps and fill them with gravel - we're planning to have gravel around most of the perimeter, so the news that we couldn't move any soil after the poison was down was something of a kick up the arse in that department.
The main man reassured me that the chemicals he was using were quite safe (though I noticed that he didn't remove his breathing apparatus, eye protection or thick gloves at any time - nor did he go anywhere near his junior assistant, who was actually applying the poison). We decided to be out of the house for the part of the operation where the workmen drilled tens of holes through the cement slab in order to inject litres of organophosphate solution into the soil - so we went to Lismore for the day.
My good intentions of keeping my hours low and staying chilled have been somewhat compromised by stereotypical newbie-contactor fear of turning any work down. C has started getting busy again too - she has chunks of freelance work, and she's volunteering at the Nimbin CTC - which is both in a good cause and a very good way to meet people in the village.
Our random element this week came from Stefan and Iris heading off for a mini-break, and needing someone to look after their goats. We fed them, we watered them. I even scratched them between the ears. Still don't really like goats though - all they're good for is making delicious cheese.

Penultimate BrisVegas

So we were back in BrisVegas en-masse for what should have been the final time, but is now the next-to-last time.
My (over)persuasive boss sweet-talked me into working an extra two weeks - so I've had to recruit C to help out with all the crap I've now committed myself to doing over the next four weeks. Idiot.
Nonetheless this week's will be my penultimate drive up to Brissie - and I'm pretty excited at the thought of getting rid of that weekly 340 kilometre round-trip! I drove the other way this time - imitating C & Fran's detour via the famous Lions Road, but going straight at Dairy Flat for the most direct inland route from Nimbin to Brisbane. It' s a nice drive, if perhaps a bit too scenic at times, and doesn't take any longer than driving via Murwillumbah and the Pacific Highway. I had to work on Friday, so Fran took the Citicat all the way along the Brisbane river from the Port area right up to the UQ campus out West, and hopped off to look at the New Farm park around the Powerhouse. Saturday the four of us had a great chilled day exploring Latrobe terrace (that's me above at cafe pandemonium) - I never tire of the old junk shops and nik-nak places in Paddo; this time, by ridiculous coincidence, I stumbled on a 1983 pen-and-ink drawing of the house 3 doors down from our place at Besant Street in West End (which is way across the other side of Brisbane and over the river from Paddington) and even talked the lass at the shop into giving it to me for $20, which I reckon is a bargain. I'll put a photo of it up next week, it's a nice sketch.
On Sunday we spent the day at the Mount Coot-Tha botanical gardens, then I drove Fran to the airport for 11pm, as she had a 2:30am flight for Brunei. I was sad waving her off, but I knew she was even sadder leaving her granddaughter on the wrong side of the world.
After (many) hours of digging and shifting soil around the perimeter of our house, this week I have finally found termites around a stump. This is actually a major breakthrough as the stump in question is directly below the wall I already knew they were in - so I've pretty much located their entry point. Friends in the area have all advised that I should use chemicals myself rather than call out a pro to use chemicals for me at a massive surcharge, so I'll soon be blogging about my experiences with various arsenic based insecticides. I hope.
I've also used a large chunk of my time this week setting up my profile on The Content Wrangler community site and starting a group for "work from home" tech writers - somehow it seemed more important than work and more fun than digging soil away from the house. To all ye hordes nipping at my heels about my lack of a MyFace, or SpaceBook profile - have patience! As well as the Content Wrangler, I am LinkedIn, I keep my work site pretty up-to-date, and I'm fairly active on most of the relevant forums - so, the only way I'm going to get myself set up on the social networking sites is by making absolutely sure that I'll have no extra maintenance to do on my new profiles - and that takes time!
The shenanigans surrounding the company lease of my car (now that I'm leaving my permie job and going contracting again) have been enough to make me pine for my car-free London days: It seems the change in status from leased to hire-purchase somehow involves me filling in forms in triplicate for the HR department at work, the licensing guys, the road tax people, the finance company, the tax office, the insurers, and Bob. And Bob's Dog. And its fleas.
We have a four-day weekend coming up for Easter, which means more time to battle the termites, and (with any luck) more time to sleep.

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.

Termites!

The good news is... I'm moving on from my Brisbane job. I'll be upping the hours on my home-based contract, and cutting out the weekly 6-hour round trip. Expect more sanity, more feedback, and more photos on the blog.
This has been a particularly busy week, and has really brought home how much I need to cut back my hours - I've been up late this evening doing the crossword for the local paper, I was up late yesterday proofreading a friend's thesis, the night before that I got up at 2:45am to catch the train to Brisbane - what I really hate is that I'm starting to let people down because I'm too tired to concentrate on the things I need to get right.
The bad news is... we have a termite infestation in our house. The buggers are eating our bedroom floor. A professional will be coming along in March sometime to inject arsenic into the wood along with some other toxic stuff I don't want to think about. Embarrassingly, it's the same guy who did our house inspection 18 months ago - and have I done all the termite-risk minimisation work on the garden he advised me to do? Have I hell.
Fran has got our garden pond to within a few hours' work of finished - we drove together up Gungas road to collect large stones to cement around the edge, and Fran re-pointed the bottom of the pond itself - we should be filling it with water and seeing how it goes within a week or two - expect excited posting of boring fish when that happens. The gardening energy levels were fairly sustained all week - herbs were planted, pots were purchased, weeds were pulled up, and trees were earmarked for destruction. I'm excited about how much we'll be able to get done this coming winter when things grow a bit slower and we can get ahead of the bush. We even (finally) made a call and called the tree guy to confirm we wanted his team to come in and chainsaw down our five "problem" trees - that will be a manic and exhausting two days, probably in April some time.
I was tired from driving to Bangalow and back for the market, so I took the train to Brisbane this week - now I'm here I'm realising that I'm gonna miss the little city pied-a-terre. Onwards and upwards.