Bloggito ergo sum.

Officially forcing self to blog.
We had a (wonderful) day at the beach at Byron bay with Jonas and Tanya.
We tried to find the hanging rock swimming hole, but got lost in the car and ended up in Border Ranges national park, so we had a picnic there instead.


The Nimbin pool is open and the weather is now hot, so we're swimming most days in the morning before the rush (I can squeeze this in in the morning as I work 9-5 Brisbane time, and the clocks have gone forward here, so as long as I'm at my desk by 10 I'm OK).
Bruce has finished building our carport, so the car is all snug and out of the rain.
Steffan came round today and helped me, Bruce and his crew lift the five metre I-beam into place which will hold the house up, once the rest of the stumps are removed from the downstairs studio.
Monday was New South Wales Labour day (a bank holiday) and Iris celebrated her 31st, so we headed to Steffan and Iris's place and drank cold beer and swam (and dipped K) in their creek for a few hours until a rainstorm hit.
Last week Rob invited us to a Barbie at his place - they overlook a few acres and are set up on a nice hill out of town with a view of the Nimbin rocks and have a lovely little pad with plenty of artist studio space for both of them to work in peace and quiet.
This last 3 weeks we've planted rocket, sweetcorn, basil, strawberries, tomatoes, cucumbers, leeks, sunflowers and spinach. We planted so much, in fact, that we used up the sunny part of the raised bed, and had to trim the gigantic mulberry that was shading the rest.
Incredibly, there was a whole, mature apricot tree underneath the gigantic mulberry. I wonder what else lurks in the overgrown depths of this garden. Time (and our chainsaw) will tell.
C is working quite a bit now, and getting back into the swing of browser incompatibilities and buggy CSS rendering. Ahh, the joys of other than parenthood.
Have blogged. Can I sleep now?

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.

Early this week we finally got round to visiting our neighbours two doors up the street, Lynne and Richard. They have a few acres of land, running down to the creek at the foot of the hill, and have dug in a dam to catch some of the runoff, have started to terrace the steepest part of their garden, and made real progress reverting to native plants and removing invasive alien plants and weeds - the pay-off was clear to see: A happy family of wallabies bouncing around their bottom paddock. Also, they've only been in Nimbin for about as long as we have. Richard's industry in the garden definitely gives me a complex, but the bright side is, he has a wealth of knowledge and is happy to give me cuttings!
We have also heard from the our ante-natal classmates Jonas and Tanya - they're doing fine (despite Dunoon -only a few kilometres away- suffering a mini tornado last week) But Tanya's baby is yet to arrive, though she's five weeks ahead of C. I'm dreading the imminent period of some 2 to 5 weeks when the baby might arrive, quite literally, at any minute.
After an almost unbearably sweltering week, the temperature dropped suddenly to the mid twenties and we had a week of intermittent but persistent rain. This has made for a really nice late Spring, with the Nimbin and Tweed valleys even greener than usual, and the blossom staying on the trees later than it did last year. It has also made us see reason however - given that C could go into labour as late as mid-December, we have decided to invest in a "backup plan" window-mounted air conditioning unit, just in case we are really unlucky with a heatwave.
The upside for me was that I had a reason to get some work done indoors, given the rain. I had completely run out of excuses and I had all the tools necessary to press on with the bathroom, so after prevaricating for another day and a half, I got in there with the dust mask, a belt sander and lots of attitude. The results so far have been better than expected - the floor is never going to come up beautifully flat and shiny, but the planks are a very rich red-brown colour, and in fairly good nick for an almost 20 year old tongue and groove floor, so I'm optimistic that the end result will be worth the effort.
We had a tough decision at the end of the week, as we'd planned to stay in Nimbin until Tuesday, but due to leaving it very late to book a Christmas party venue, my work in Brisbane ended up organising their Christmas do for Friday November ninth.
In the end, I decided to drive back up to Brisbane on the grounds that, working from home, if I don't go to some functions I'll never get to know the people I'm working with. the works do turned out to be a good laugh. It was at the Merthyr bowls club by the Brisbane River In New Farm - it was your basic Australian works do: Dress up as sheilas, then spend the afternoon doing something competitive under powerful antipodean sun, while consuming weak lager and competing to be last to the kharzi. All great fun if you keep a certain detachment! Once a state of sufficient dehydration was achieved, we retired to the boss's pad in West End, where it turned out he'd set up not only a DJ and cocktail bar, but a full-on play-money casino setup, complete with blackjack table, roulette and two croupiers. All great fun if you keep a certain detachment.
Somehow, our Brisbane house mates colluded to have an impromptu barbecue in the back garden on the Saturday, and that, along with our mad dog decision to walk all the way from west end to Paddington in the noonday sun, put paid to any lingering hangover, and should ease us into next week.