Okie Weather

I saw the big Sydney dust storm on the news, and assumed it must've passed us by. But that same evening the sky darkened too early, and the next day there was wave after wave of gritty, chewy dust in the air, and deposited across everything, including my lungs. I'm still finding things that are covered with it and wiping them clean three weeks later.

Our genocidal campaign to rid the bottom of the garden of camphor laurels has resulted in an ever-growing view of Blue Knob and Sphinx Rock from the back verandah - I'l put a photo up once we can actually see the whole ridge of the mountain.
We have booked a local tradesman to insulate the roof, to take advantage of the federal rebate of $1,600 for insulation materials. With luck that should be done before the height of Summer, and should make a big difference to how long the house stays cool on Summer mornings.
We've been busier than ever at work - tackling multiple projects and keeping fingers in various pies, including our first ever local client - the excellent networking wizards at www.magedata.net.
I was very excited that our friends from Wisconsin, Alex and Linda, were sending us a present. Unfortunately, the Australian customs did not approve of the packet of (doubtless delicious) wild rice, and confiscated it all. Probably to make a risotto.
My latest improvement to my diet is learning how to make chocolate walnut liqueur brownies. The way I see it, at least I know what's in them (fat, carbs, and alcohol) so that's got to be healthier than eating shop-bought biscuits. There's a picture of K tucking into a plateful on her blog here.
The first weekend in October saw us at the Nimbin A&I show (what would in England be called a country faire - local crafts, farm produce, awards for best iceberg lettuce and so on). This was a rare opportunity for us to mingle with the "other" Nimbin - the respectable one. And extremely nice folk they are too.
Apart from the always excellent Perch Creek Family Jug band (shown above) the most interesting event was something I had always assumed would be very much in-your-face in Australia, but which I hadn't come across until now - snake education and awareness. Radoa did an outstanding presentation, and condensed into five minutes all the information required to not die when coming face-to-face with taipans, death adders, and king brown snakes, all of which are native to this area. Any doubts about the danger posed by the snakes the presenter was handling were dispelled by counting the fingers on his right hand. Later the same week, Ben, who is helping us sort out the studio downstairs, spotted a red-bellied black snake in a wood pile less than ten foot from the door (yes, yes, I know, I shouldn't have a wood pile ten foot from the door).
On the following Friday we took advantage of a very generous invitation from Marcus to share his campsite at Woody Head for a night (he had 2 large tents set up, and it was just him plus his daughters, so there was plenty of room). It only took an hour and 40 minutes to drive there, and it is the prettiest campsite I've seen in Australia so far, and far and away the best for a family camping trip, with a safe beach, rock pools, gum-tree forest down to the sand, and great facilities including a cook-to-order facility for those days whenyou don't feel like camp cooking.
When we got home, we discovered our mulberry tree was heavy with fruit, so we got busy picking the ready mulberries (K on a strict rota of one for her, one for the pot of course, followed by a very generous impulse to share the sweet black juice with all the soft furnishings in the house).
Now I must stop blogging and get busy making a mulberry and apple crumble. And custard.

Python and PHP

In complete contrast to this time last year, the dry weather has now continued for over 8 weeks. In the last two weeks it has also gone from cold to hot during the day, with one day being hotter than any day was during last summer, by a good three degrees, which cannot be normal. The unseasonal weather has also brought the snakes out early, and they are very active as well - I've seen both adult and baby pythons around our house, and the one pictured here was asleep on our verandah table yesterday lunchtime. She left after I disturbed her, but in no great hurry.
We've taken advantage of the soil and undergrowth drying out at the bottom end of our block to get in and kill the invasive species - camphor laurel and pollonia trees mostly. The next step is to draw up a list of native shrubs and perennials to replace what we've killed, and do a big mission to Fireweheel nursery.
The dry sunny days have also made it easy to finish painting the new railings, and rip the defective ceiling panels off downstairs in readiness for the final touches to that space before the council inspector comes to give our efforts the yay or nay. To remove the panels, I used the orthodox new-dad technique of cranking up the manu chao on the stereo, then balancing on top of a stepladder with a toddler swinging off my jeans, squinting up into the falling masonry dust and prodding vaguely with a Stanley knife until each panel fell on me and toddler, and then picking myself and the toddler up and starting on the next panel. K has never giggled so much in one afternoon before in her life.
I've been drawn into the planning for Nimbin's Software Freedom Day too - I even did the notice in the Nimbin Goodtimes after swearing blind that there'd be "no more IT articles from me this year"! I'm looking forward to the event - it should be a fun social afternoon, and a good basic grounding to kickstart my almost nonexistent knowledge of Ubuntu (and apache, and PHP, and Perl, and all those other things I've scratched the surface of but nothing more).

Our friends Louis and Mbweda have moved to near the Tuntable community this week as well, so we should be seeing a lot more of them - and when we went to the monthly Tuntable hall dinner, there were at least 30 people there we knew, so we're starting to feel more part of the Nimbin community, at long last.
I'm still pursuing my plan to get a complementary currency established in Nimbin, but am also still coming to appreciate the amount of inertia that will have to be overcome. The Nimbin sustainability forum were keen when I described my plan, and one of the organisers of the Maleny complementary currency scheme (Baroon Dollars) is going to come to Nimbin to give us a presentation and hopefully provide some pointers for our next steps. Rome wasn't built in a day, and the sestertii probably weren't minted that quick either. No quantitative easing or fiat notes either. Progress.

Soiled and Bitten

At our second attempt, we managed to actually book a babysitter, get in the car, drive to Lismore, and watch a film. The film was Bruno - it is not unamusing.
There will be no photos with this month's post - K has hidden the SD card from the camera. Well, we hope she has hidden it. If went in the bin, or was fed to the neighbour's dog, then we've lost a couple of months of baby photos and our record of this Winter, which would be a shame. SD cards really are annoyingly small.
The diversion trenches I've dug under the house, on the other hand, were annoyingly long. I have had enough of being covered in soil and bent double under a low floor shovelling rocks and grit to last me a lifetime. The trenches form the belt in my "belt and braces" approach to keeping water away from downstairs, with the retaining wall and the ag-drain forming the braces. If enough rain falls to knock holes in my diversion trenches, overwhelm the ag-drain, flood the gap behind the retaining wall, and seep into the downstairs, then we'll probably have other things to worry about anyway, like buoyancy aids.
Our home-front coffee renaissance, kicked off by Keith's gift of a Gaggia Classic, has continued apace - our barrista skills, long atrophied since our days working in a North Shore Auckland cafe back in 2004, have been polished up, and I have abandoned flat whites for caffè macchiato and long blacks. Having a coffee machine at home can become a bit like being a bedroom DJ - you're dying to show off your improving skills, but because you've no-one to get a reaction from, you're also constantly doubting whether you're actually getting any better. We quickly discovered that the tamper that came with the machine was not up to the job, and invested in a proper weighty and glistening stainless steel tamper - this cost $50, but delivers a perfect puck every time, baby. I also succumbed to a certain nostalgia for hazelnut syrup - I don't even like the taste of the stuff, but it brings back happy memories.
I shall be brewing more than my morning coffee soon enough. Despite never being a great drinker of alcohol, I'm now the newbie at a local (informal) brewing club. I have the suspicion that I may be the first member to produce a batch of something that is not even recognisably beer - but it will certainly be a fun learning experience. Like any new thing, the numer of variables seems overwhelming at first - the ratios of the ingredients, the temperature, the preparation and proper disinfecting of the container, the addition of pellets to add carbonation to the finished beer and so on. Of the other club members' efforts I've sampled so far, none were bad, one was genuinely tasty, and, worryingly, all resembled (to greater or lesser extents) beer. Oh dear.
Also a learning experience, but far from fun, was getting bitten this week by a paralysis tick. I didn't get paralysed, or infected - but the doctor said I was quite lucky to escape unscathed. The little bugger bit me on the eyelid, and the eye swelled up to the point where I couldn't comfortably open it. At the hospital they removed it with tweezers, and gave me strong antihistamine. "Take 2 of these and don't drive". I thought, yeah, I've had antihistamine before, it's not that drowsy, then 10 minutes later, sat in the passenger seat as C drove me home, the pills hit and I was like a puppet with its strings cut. If I'm bitten in the eye again, I will go to hospital immediately, now I'm aware how serious it can be, and how quickly swelling can develop, leaving you with only one working eye.

Railing Against

Mandarine Waster
1. Strain the juice of 3 large, chilled mandarines into a blender.
2. Add 3 tablespoons of chilled full fat yoghurt.
3. Add 1.5 measures of chilled Cream Liqueur (2.5 if in a hurry). Baileys or Feeneys work well.
4. Blend on high for 90 seconds.
5. Pour into a chilled highball glass (no ice).
6. Decorate with a dab of fresh yoghurt and a curl of mandarine peel.
7. Dispose of the pips, peel, and fruit pulp in the compost, because while the object is to use up the mandarines as quickly as possible, we don't want to add to landfill, kids.

Mandarine season is upon us, and with it our predictable panic and lack of preparation. In addition to the above recipe, we have had great success with mandarine curd, and also marmalade - though a combination of citrus is required for this.
After a chance meeting in town, Lynne and Richard showed us a place that does a good flat white in South Lismore, cunningly hidden in the garden of a furniture shop. There is a tiny sign on the road, and you have to walk through the furniture shop and almost into the garden at the back to get to the cafe area, where seats are arranged amongst the plants and garden furniture, looking out over a pond and the woods to the West. Not only is the place on our way out of town, but almost unique in Lismore in having somewhere outdoors to sit which overlooks some countryside. Richard also walked me around the native plantings he's started on his block, and I took copious notes.
Now that Winter is here, I've made a start on planning the native plants which will replace the invasive camphor laurels at the foot of our garden. The emphasis is on smaller plants which won't stop the breeze coming up the hill, or block our view of Blue Knob to the North (which was completely obscured by the 50 foot tall camphors). I'm also hoping to find a mixture of colourful flowers, winter berries, and interesting leaves, but most of the more colourful varieties are native to parts of Australia a bit North of here, and I'm unsure how much leeway I should give myself. Climate change could see the more Northerly plants moving into this region in my lifetime anyway.
Stefan and Iris have had a beautiful baby girl, Nala, and we have taken K around to meet the new arrival. She spent the next two days pointing at every picture of a baby and grinning manically.
The project (literally) around the house this month has been replacing the railings on the balcony - this photo shows one of the three stretches of railing we have replaced (and some of the old uprights in a pile). I didn't really think through the number of uprights in the structure, and in hindsight, I should have invested in an electric screwdriver, especially once we'd decided to go with hardwood for the new uprights. The new toprail has one massive advantage over the old one however - it is wide enough to stand your beer on.
When not rebuilding the verandah, coddling the toddler, doing my day job, or lying in a dark room listening to whalesong, there has been time for a little partying - not least of which was a rather excellent do at new friends' Chris & Kirrily's place; Kirrily's Alice-in-wonderland themed 40th birthday bash. I just wish I'd thought to undercut the other hatters by pricing my hat at 10 shillings and fivepence.

Midwinter Lights

The main event in Lismore in June is the Lantern Parade. Somehow we managed to miss it in both 2007 and 2008, so we were lantern virgins (and somewhat miffed that we would never now attend the event as dinkys, with the attendant getting drunk and staying out late privileges. Despite unseasonal, torrential rain, we all had a great time, and K's adrenaline rush from all the lanterns was fully catered for by the fireworks which followed.

Later in the week we had to run back up to Brissie to drop Rose at the airport. We stayed at a hotel in Kangaroo point so that C could walk in to the CBD and I could walk to work in West End, and I did a couple of days in the office. We also caught up with Halim again at cafe Checocho - the place is going from strength to strength, a veritable oasis of chess, BYO Indonesian food, great coffee, books, live music, and pavement people-watching.

My ex-colleague Keith has upgraded his coffee machine to an even higher-end model. He asked if I could give his Gaggia Classic a good home. I didn't need to be asked twice, and it was also a good excuse to stop off at the Gold Coast for (good) coffee and a catch-up. I've paired the Gaggia with a Sunbeam 0480, and the first flat whites from freshly roasted Nimbin beans will be rolling off the production line tomorrow morning, in time to head off Mondayitis. No matter how good they are, I have resolved not to let them cut down on my time in the third place. Besides, working from home as I do, the third place is my second place. Or something.
Back home in nimbin, it's mandarine season again - there will be mandarine fool, mandarine compote, and mandarine jelly, as there was last year. This year, the new experiment is mandarine curd. As I write this, I have just bottled 2 kilos of the stuff, and we will discover tomorrow morning if it is delicious when spread on freshly baked wholemeal loaf.

Barely blogworthy: Many, many pieces of veranda rail have been strapped to the roof-rack, driven home, cut to shape, sanded down, stained, screwed into place, treated, and varnished. Soon now, we will have railings of legal height.
Much, much high quality red gum has been delivered and stacked on said veranda. The cool winter nights are banished by our blazing log fire. Much, much road-base was delivered at the foot of our driveway, and much, much shoveling was required to spread it. Many, many kilos of cement and breeze blocks have been stacked under the house, waiting patiently for me to transform them into the final stretch of retaining wall.

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.

Hotting Up

The mornings are still chilly, but the afternoons are getting uncomfortably hot for Northern European types.
The kookaburras and lorikeets have decided it's definitely spring, and they're partying. Loudly.
Our Colombian ex-flatmate Oscar got his Aussie residence (PR) this week. I drove up to Brissie to help him celebrate. Unfortunately, he (and colleagues) were intent on celebrating a little too hard for me. Oscar had turned up a bottle of Colombian Aguardiente, so we had a few shots of that before heading out into West End, and following it up with lager and malt whiskey. We headed on to a West End restaurant (Tukka), but I became (strangely) extremely ill. After some vomiting, a bit of gratuitous falling over, some unexplained bruises and cuts, a disturbed night's sleep, and an enormous fry-up, I decided all was well and drove back to Nimbin to nurse my headache and curse those lorikeets and kookaburras.
Despite my pounding head, I've made good headway with the garden - hammering in a few more fenceposts and stringing up some chicken wire around the edges of the raised beds in a (probably doomed) effort to keep the wallabies away from our veggies.
Excitingly, the downstairs expansion project is finally in the "putting things back together" phase, so I've been able to help Bruce here and there with wall panels, lifting and carrying, and some measuring and marking. We're about three weeks away from the building work proper being complete - I'll try to get a photoset of the work up on photobucket at that point.

We're now girding our loins for Island Vibe festival, a week in Brissie beforehand, and of course, a long, hot Summer. In a good way.

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.

Monotreme!

Make room! Make room! This is the way to make more space - dig and dig and dig! The Bobcat only just fit under the ceiling, but had enough space to maneuver between the walls and get the soil out to the foot of the garden. Once Mr. Bobcat was done, there was less than an hour's spadework to get the ground ready for the new cement slab. There will be so much space - I think I'll just keep digging until I've built my own empire down there!
Apart from the "dig out downstairs" project and all the usual early Spring gardening fun, we've been appreciating the wildlife as it comes out of hibernation. Monty the Python is back in action - slithering up the garden of a Tuesday morning, and as I was going up the outside stairs on Monday I spotted a new visitor to the garden - an echidna. I got a photo, but he's just a spiky ball, and you can't see him quivering in a photo so I haven't bothered putting it up here. Unlike me, C had the patience to stand stock-still next to him with K until he calmed down and poked his very handsome snout out to have a look around.
I still haven't shaken off (what I'm hoping is only) the winter blues - I'm still coughing and spluttering my way round the house, and am heading to the doctor tomorrow; I've never been to the doctor before just 'coz I've got a cough, but it's getting ridiculous - I've been only half-well for over 2 months now. Even little K is getting more sleep than me, and she's the one waking me up at night!

This has been a high "screen time" week too - as well as a long week at work I've been succumbing to long online Mario Kart Wii sessions, and I finally got dragged into Facebook (yeah, I know, I swore it would never happen, whatever...I'm still holding out against Twitter and MySpace...) my monthly crossword for the local paper seemed to take forever to finish somehow (actually, I know why - it's because I boxed myself into a corner and refused to just rip it up and start again, which would have been far quicker)... and what am I doing now? Why, I'm sat here typing my blog when I should really be playing with my daughter before she goes to sleep.

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.