Local Market Forces

I stumbled upon a haul of obscure SF paperbacks in a bookshop in Holland Park, as we were due to drive home in the tiny hire car I'd driven up from Lismore while the garage got on with fixing our car's gearbox. I ended up leaving the books at a friend's house in Brissie for collection upon my return. There are even a couple of Zelazny books I've never read before.
Back in Nimbin, there was plenty to clean up following the heavy rains - mudslips, flooded trenches and washed away logs, and a brief (but apparently Nimbin-wide) plague of native mice (antechinus).

Our log fire has been lit more or less constantly, as temperatures dropped to lows of 1°C and 2°C, and real frost has been crunching underfoot in the morning. Chopping the wood for the logfire is probably the most rustic part of our lifestyle in the bush here (as everything else in the house is electric or gas) but happily it warms me up both in the doing and through the resulting split logs. It is only as cold as this in winter when there are cloudless skies, so the days have been bright and wonderful, with the afternoons around the 22°C mark - more or less what I think of as "perfect" weather.
Probably because the temperatures only get down towards freezing just before midwinter, most of the deciduous trees in this region lose their leaves very late as well - often in mid-June, which means that the striking red and gold leaves appear at the same time as the bright blue sky days, as in this picture of The Channon's Sunday market. I have further developed my incipient obsession with SF literature by joining a local science fiction reading group. Neuromancer, Slaughterhouse Five, and the Tripods trilogy are the eclectic first three books read since I started going - I'm hoping the wide range continues, and hoping the group picks something I haven't read before soon, too.
Louis reminded us to attend the Djanbung Gardens open day on the third weekend in June - there were excellent walking tours, and Louis gave an interesting speech on globalisation and local consumption/trade patterns and possibilities. The following day, we engaged in two most excellent opportunities for local trade, by attending first the Dunoon Wide Garage sale, and then The Channon market. Home-made pumpkin soup was on sale as a winter warmer, and thus fortified, we trudged the length of Dunoon, scouting for interesting bargains and unusual nik-naks, while all around us ocker Aussies got into their utes and drove every thirty yard gap between people's stalls, loading their accumulated loot into the back and giving us strange looks for having the temerity to proceed on foot.
Naturally, I accumulated another handful of silver age SF books.

Bookshop Crawl

Somehow this blog has drifted into a fortnightly update. I require less slackness. I'm even not working overtime now, so I've no excuse not to keep it up to date.
My priority for the springtime is R&R. I need to recharge my batteries, get outdoors a lot, and spend quality time with C and K rather than hunched over my keyboard tapping away like I am now.
Last weekend in Lismore turned into a bit of a bookshop crawl, and next time is likely to be even worse, as we discovered that the municipal library hands out an official Lismore bookshop-crawl pamphlet (which is a bit much really, in a town where you can count the independent bookshops on your fingers).
Nonetheless, There has been much contented reading (and re-reading) this past couple of weeks - some LeGuin and some Greg Egan has really cheered me up. I still need cheering up. It's now 12 weeks since I got the flu, and I'm still a bit under the weather. I keep dithering about starting exercise - I disastrously went running a couple of times after 6 weeks and made myself very sick indeed, so I'm now overcautious and nervous about resuming some exercise.
The man from the council came and examined our cement formwork and pronounced it acceptable, so we have booked the cement truck to do the big pour on Monday, assuming the weather holds - the only caveats were that we also have to find some way to raise the railing round our balcony by 6 centimetres as it's not quite legal height, and we need to install mains-powered smoke detectors both upstairs and downstairs.
Amidst the brilliant sunshine we had one and a half days of torrential rain, starting last Thursday - the creek burst its banks and we couldn't drive into Nimbin - I stood by my car on the near bank along with a crowd of neighbours and joined in the communal tut-tutting and shaking of heads before executing a very soggy three-point turn and heading home.
We have now been in Australia 24 months, so we rang up to book our citizenship test (yes, they really do ask you questions about Don Bradman). Just because he's probably the most outstanding player of a team sport in history, there's no need to rub it in.
The big task this coming weekend is to take a chainsaw to the row of big palm trees on the north side of the house that steal sunlight - much as we like them, they are incompatible with the planned solar panels on the roof, and a couple of them are starting to lean ominously over the deck as they grow too. If it gets any warmer, I'll also be packing the logs away and retiring the woodstove for the summer - and that's a very happy thought!
On a less happy note, I can't let the Sarah Palin thing go by. I am aghast. No, that's not strong enough. I'm dumbfounded that her selection as McCain's running mate has led to a poll bounce for the GOP. Frankly, much like the Italians with Fini and Berlusconi, if the good citizens of the USA vote for someone who had to apply for a passport when her job as governor took her abroad, then they deserve what they get and may Cthulu preserve the rest of us. Seriously, I don't usually blog into this territory, but it's gone too far.

• • Palin believes the world was created in 7 days by a sky pixie
• • She's convinced man made global warming is a hoax
  
• • She's convinced evolution is a mistaken theory and would like creationism taught in schools (She's backtracked, but check her quotes before she was on the ticket)
  
• • She's against abortion
  
• • she's against sex education in schools
• • When newly elected mayor, she approached the town librarian with a query about how to go about banning books
  
• • her position on healthcare: "...less regulation, more competition..."
  
• • She's as pro-guns as you'd expect from a moose huntin' lady
  
• • She openly campaigns to have the remaining wildlife sanctuaries in Alaska (and offshore) drilled for oil
• • She's sharing a ticket with a septuagenarian with a dicky ticker - if he pops his clogs, she's CiC and her finger is on the button of the world's second largest nuclear arsenal.
  

My fingers are crossed, but I've got a bad feeling about this one.

Free Association

I'm pushed for time with this blog, so I'm going to scribble down the week's doings as they come back to me.
I put the car into the garage, and miraculously they did the bodywork same day and I picked it up that evening.
Fran has finished her painting of K - a photo will go on the blog once the fixative has dried.
The tree surgeon came and quoted on sorting out our invasive tree problem - they're Polonias, not Camphor Laurels - Stefan had already told me they might be Polonias - should've guessed he'd be on the money. All five trees cut, logged and chipped came in just above $1,500, so I reckon we'll go for it as it will sort out our garden and give us lots more breeze and sunlight in the winter months.

The channon market featured a lively samba band.








I was less lively for much of the week.









We've had Cockatoos and Wallabies around the garden as the sun has started to come back out.










Fran wanted to see Woodburn and Evans Head, so we drove down on Saturday - impressive piece of national park, and beaches that surpassed my expectations - though it was too rainy for swimming that day.




We spent this morning consuming unlikely quantities of caffeine and then wandering round the market and Nimbin art gallery with Fran - and I picked up a load of good SF books for 50 cents a pop, including some Harlan Ellison I've never seen before (slaver, slaver...)
Jonas and Tanya came round this afternoon with Otto - he's become huge and much more of a person in his own right... It's amazing how quickly new babies' personalities start to shine through!
In a final burst of constructive energy, I have used some free time this evening to go through the enormous pile of clothes which C has been intending to sell on eBay for the last 2 months, and take a picture of each one before bagging them up - so the enormous clothes drift no longer threatens to topple onto me while I'm sleeping and crush the air out of my lungs.
Things are afoot. News is imminent. Watch this space.
Keep watching.