Here Comes the Rain again

So we all got up at five am and piled in the car, dropped K with the babysitter (Chris of course) and drove Fran to Brisbane airport. Fran had spent her last day with K showing her how to recognise her Secondlife avatar, so in addition to Skype chats they can hang out in Secondlife.

After dropping Fran off, we caught APT6 at GOMA (really, really awesome - APT is my favourite mainstream art event; it almost makes me want to stop being a philistine, and some pieces even actually verge on relevance).
After taking that in, and two Ugees espressos, we headed to Naomi's new place in Holland Park to check out how they've got it set up. Quickly, is the answer.

As we had an excuse to be in Brisbane sans toddler anyway, and all our friends were going to a burlesque ball, we decided it would be churlish not to join in. Much sartorial fun was had, and despite the stage show being well below par, it was an awesome night. In fact, the stage show being pants might have actually made it better - the whole group spent more time chatting and interacting than staring at the stage. C and I said bye to our (far more hardcore) fellow burlesquers, and drove back across the Brisbane river to Naomi's in the pouring rain at five am, and slept for three hours. Five am is a horrible time of day when you see it in the morning, and then you see it that same night, without having slept in between. At eight am we got up, and realised Naomi and Bruce had left for work, leaving us alone in their house. We briefly considered trashing the place and getting the gang round for an impromptu beerkeg party, but decided to get eggs benedict at a Stones Corner cafe instead, and then headed South on the M1 to get back to our daughter (we need not have worried, as she'd had a great time for the whole 30 hours we were away - a new record).

Back in Nimbin, the rains had set in for real - there is now a steady alternation between drizzle and hammering rain, the sky is gunmetal grey morning and evening, and you can hardly leave the house without tripping over all kinds of delicious mushrooms.
Being severely out of practice, the weekend of driving and clubbing in the big city left us both destroyed - ten days of taking it very easy indeed ensued, which is actually rather pathetic. But I can be honest with you, right, blog-page? You won't tell anyone else? Good.

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.

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.

Panda

It's been a busy couple of weeks, as the floodwaters have receded from around Lismore.
Heading in to Brissie in a low-slung courtesy car (a Ford Focus) to pick up C's mum Rose from the airport, we hit a "road closed" sign at Murwillumbah. The locals seemed to be driving round the sign however, so we risked following them, as the only alternative route to Brisbane is nearly three hours' extra driving. The water got deeper and deeper, until three of the four lanes were completely submerged, and then the fourth lane was underwater as well for about 30 yards. We could see from the cars ahead of us that it wasn't more than 35cm deep though, so we gunned the Focus and splashed our way across.
After collecting Rose from her red-eye special, we headed to Rod and Cherdina's to look after their spoilt (but lovable) dogs while they headed off to Bangkok for their honeymoon.
We took advantage of a few days in Brissie (apart from the morning markets and West End coffee houses, which go without saying) by taking K to the science museum to meet the dinosaurs (a huge hit) and driving up to Australia zoo. K was taken by the tigers, 'eleflumps', and koalas.
The rest of us, though, were blown away by a wee critter I'd never even heard of - the (apparently critically endangered) red panda. This photo is representative, but doesn't capture the cheeky fun these little guys radiated.
I got to check out the new West End offices that Gensolve have moved to (more space, and a great view across the river to the Brisbane skyline, from where the software development team sit). Inevitably, I was also party to Friday night drinks, but it seems pretty much the whole team now has young kids, so it was a muted affair compared to last year's impressively blind-drunk efforts.
Ridiculously, I agreed to three weeks of heavy overtime at work, and then immediately had to drive back midweek to return the courtesy car to Trevan Ford, and straight back up to Brissie again the next day. The entire experience would have been quite awful, except that Steffan and Iris saw my bedraggled state, and invited me home for falafel, fried haloumi, and a friendly evening - when what I'd been expecting was a cold, dark house alone on a winter's evening.
On the Saturday before we were due to head back to Nimbin, we dropped in on Marina (at the house we used to share in West End) and she made us a delicious lunch, and sprang a surprise: Mbweda was up in Brissie, and together they were putting on a fundraising evening for the community-sponsored afro.dot.net cafe in Moorooka (a major hub for the African community in Brisbane). We went along with Rose and Naomi and Bruce - all in a good cause! There was African food, a welcome in song from an Aboriginal elder, and then performances by the Brisbane African Womens' choir and a traditional Chilean group whom I recognised as friends of Louis's. We slept well that night, and headed home the next morning feeling we'd taken full advantage of our week in the city.

Rising Waters

The extreme weather making its way down the coast finally hit us towards the end of the second week in May. We had relatively little strong wind, but fairly serious rainfall. My recently completed trench and wall work seems to have held out (thus far) but a lot of mud and gravel has been transported downstream, and there was some worrying gullying around the stump-pads that hold up the house.
Rod and Cherdina's wedding was scheduled for the 3rd weekend of the month, and they hit a lucky break in the weather.
We drove to the Gold Coast, in time for me to partake in the stag party chaos - a scarily typical stag-night (or bucks night as it's sometimes called in Oz) of beer, strip clubs, and getting barred from the casino due to the state of the groom (well, the dilation of his pupils).
For the wedding itself, I was MC, which involved nothing more challenging than some light banter on the mic, introducing the speakers, and playing the scheduled music during the various parts of the ceremony which called for it.
The waterfront house (venue for pre-nuptial party, wedding, and reception) was well appointed, The weather was postcard-perfect, and the beach was a 10-minute stroll away the next morning when we all needed to recover from the drinking and dancing - nothing to complain about.
The weather turned nasty on Monday when it was time to drive home, providing pathetic fallacy for our total gearbox failure. The car (just) limped to the garage in Lismore, and we then paid seventy bucks for a cab home, having been quoted a third of the car's value to get it back on the road.
The mad rain continued, and increased in intensity - we saw mudslides, and Steffan's driveway bridge was washed away.
C intended to catch the bus into town to pick up a courtesy car the garage had arranged for us, but with much of Lismore underwater the bus company cancelled all services, and C ended up first hitch-hiking into Lismore to collect the courtesy car, and then quite literally racing the floodwaters out of North Lismore to collect K from daycare, which was also shutting for the week due to flooding. She got back to Nimbin and picked K up allright, but the courtesy car (a Ford Focus) was too small to get over the Gungas road ford leading to our house, so they ended up waiting for two and a half hours until the waters subsided.
Apparently our car will be fixed early next week, so the plan is for us to head to Brisbane to meet C's mum off her plane, and then dog-sit for Rod and Cherdina for a few days, and when our car is fixed, I'll drive Brisbane-Lismore-Brisbane to pick it up, and the following weekend we can all drive back to home.

Island Vibe

We trundled up the road to Brisbane once again, and caught up with Marina, Bruce and Naomi, and our ex-flatmates Oscar and Aida. K loved the big city this time around - she wanted to investigate everything she saw and heard. C took her around the Roma Street parklands, the central toy library, and the Queen Street malls, while I had a couple of days working from Gensolve's West End office.
That week over, we took the ferry to Stradbroke island, found our campsite, and got set up. All was well until 3 am, when a drunken Frenchman got into an argument about his girlfriend, and half the campsite joined in. The next morning, fortified by much caffeine, we headed to the Island Vibe festival site and registered as volunteers.
We got an excellent deal - free weekend tickets in exchange for three hours work per day, and best of all, the other volunteers in ticketing weren't even reggae fans, so no-one objected to us swapping our shifts around to catch the headline acts. Katchafire (naturally) rocked. Schoolfight were also rather toptastic. I can't even make up an adjective to describe Olmecha Supreme's efforts... Perhaps bizarrific comes close... I didn't even know you could overdrive an acoustic tin whistle. But you can.
We ate unhealthy, fatty foods. We lay on the beach and paddled in the warm ocean. We were desperately tired and wished the baby would sleep. Our own fault, I guess, for disturbing her routine.
Before heading home we put K in the backpack and did the hike to the blue lake. It's a beautiful spot - if it had been sunny I'd've swum for ages there, and even cloudy, it's peaceful and unique.
Back home in Nimbin we've now had two weeks of sunny weather, so the village pool has been much patronised, and the garden is slowly getting less cluttered as I work my way around it with the chainsaw, pruning shears, axe and machette. I need to call the man with the woodchipper before the pile of branches entirely obscures our view of the road and prevents us getting through the gate with the car.
This week we sat our aussie citizenship tests. I think we passed, but the staff couldn't operate their computers so they printed the tests out and will have to mail us the results in a couple of weeks' time - the usual chaos.
We're keeping busy over all - I'm now writing a series of articles on internet freedoms for the local paper in addition to compiling their crossword, C's list of local clients for her web-design services is ever growing, Gensolve want me to do more work than I already am, and there's plenty of paperwork left before we get our passports - the main things getting squeezed are sleep, and blogging time.





-

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.

Toowong Time

I have spent the last couple of weeks taking advantage of being in Brisbane rather than in the bush - everything from the mundane (dental checkups) to the cultural (West End’s second hand bookshops) to the tempting (the Greek stalls’ halva and pistachio creams) gets sorted, and indulged in more after a period of relative rural isolation.
I have also been catching up with my friends and colleagues at Gensolve, and we even arranged a beer and pizzas afternoon last Saturday and a load of our friends and ex-housemates turned up.
I have used the two weeks to break out of the cabin Fever syndrome but does eventually set in from working at home day in day out. It's made quite a nice change to work from the office a couple of days this week and last, and commuting by ferry on the Citicat reminded me of commuting across the bay back in Auckland.
When we looked after the same house last year, I went running two or three times a week and each time I varied my route slightly. The outcome was that each one took me past a different section of the North West Brisbane suburbia. This year, I took up where I left off - I continued to explore the network of suburban cul-de-sac roads and paths. On my very first outing, I turned left, left, and left again - and Kapunda street led me into a large tract of urban parkland that sits in between the Western Freeway and the bottom of Mount Coot-Tha. Somehow, I had failed to discover this strip of eucalyptus trees and jogging tracks last year, even though they form a crescent behind the dead end street the house we're staying at sits on.
We have dealt fairly well with the housesitting - we have fed and pampered the cats, supplied them with the correct vittles, hot water bottles, electric blankets, reverse cycle air conditioning, and C even lets them sleep on her tummy. We have also fed the white parrots, and more or less kept the place shipshape. Having animals around does remind me how much I miss having pets, having grown up with both dogs and cats. At the same time though, it reminds me how much hassle it is trying to find someone to look after them when you go away, or even worse, the horror of putting them into kennels. We have been very close to adding a dog to the family several times in recent months-it will probably happen quite soon now.

Up the Road One Last Time

On Saturday we turned up for Stefan and Iris's party. Which was great, except that the party was scheduled for Sunday. They took advantage of our fuckwittedness to take a break from their chores, and we had a good chinwag and catch-up over tea and biscuits. Who says I'm getting old?
There was an eight-foot-long snake above our breakfast spot on the balcony outside our lounge on Sunday morning. It looked like a carpet snake to me. I hope it was a carpet snake anyway. It was friendly and relaxed, and seemed to be looking for somewhere to bask. It slithered off and lay on the roof for a bit, and when I went back to check a couple of hours later, it was gone. We packed the car for the last ever Brissie commute, and then hit Stefan and Iris's party on the way. Their dutch-themed Easter-egg hunt, beer, and superlative spicy apple cake parties are definitely a fixture in my calendar. I had a couple of beers and caught up with people I hadn't seen since the last one, so poor C was designated driver as far as Murwillumbah. The post-easter traffic was fairly light to my relief, and we were back in West End by seven thirty, which is a good start to the week.
Knowing this is our last week in Brissie for a while, we've been frantically doing things that are easier and/or cheaper in the city than in the bush: We took the car to the garage to get a towbar (and discovered a rather excellent cafe on Logan Road while we waited); we've put the food safe which we bought two weeks ago into one of those "dip'n'strip" places in the Gabba, but the guy's still battling the (probably lead-based) 1940s Tasmanian paint a week later; we've got Kaara's photo for her australian passport; we've showed our faces at the annual ITG contractors' shindig at The Fox in West End (and fluked a friend's babysitter for the night so we could actually go together!); and, we've rung round most of Northern Rivers' insect exterminators - and the termites' days are now numbered - I've booked a pest guy to come at the end of next week and use the powdered arsenic and maybe more long-term chemical solutions as well. No more Mister nice householder.
Mostly, though, I've been finishing off at one job while ramping up at the other, and helping C stay on top of the nappies and the entertainment of an increasingly easily-bored little girl.
A final piece of frantic background activity: This cookie-cutter template was chosen back in 2006 in a desperate attempt to avoid choice of (and tweaking of) a template from becoming a displacement activity as I tried to shirk the weekly blogging. A new (and less playschool) template is on the way. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of this blog.

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.

Awake

we've done much, but little that's blogworthy.
K is now a month old, hale, hearty, and loud.
We've spent a couple of weeks in Brisbane, and shown Rose the sights to some extent - trundled the pushchair round Lone Pine Koala sanctuary, taken the Citicat down to New Farm and looked round the Powerhouse, shopped for nik-naks along Paddington's Latrobe Terrace, and gone out for wine and pizza in West End - which is not bad considering we've got a month-old bub in tow.
Work has proved pretty tough with my reduced sleep ration, and working from home has, in practice, meant putting an eight hour day in, in smallish chunks between 7am and 11pm.
Though it hasn't got any sunnier, it has got hotter and more humid, and in the last few days it has become harder to work from home - I'm training the fan directly on my face, and trundling over to the fridge for iced water every 5 minutes or so.
C's mum has flown back to the UK, and my mum has arrived from Portugal, in a fairly efficient tag-team operation which will ensure C doesn't have to cope with bub by herself in the first four months. I've become conscious of the looming logistical nightmare that will be taking a toddler on two 25 hour flights to the UK and back to meet the relatives - even though it's a year or so away, I should start solving the problems while I've got thinking time to spare...Now if only I could get enough sleep to think straight.
Next week is Australia day, a Mondayised bank holiday, which I've extended to take as a week off, so I will catch up properly with the blogging, upload some of our Brisbane photos, and maybe get around to replacing the picture of me enjoying the cigar of fatherhood in the sidebar, which is getting a bit tired. Apologies for missing a week last Sunday - I'll not let it happen again any time soon.

Missing Nimbin

Week two in Brisbane, and we're both missing Nimbin already. We checked out Paddington, the only central Brisbane district we hadn't explored yet. It's reminiscent of Parnell in Auckland: Climbing up a hill, and with pleasant converted queenslanders all in a row selling retro nik-naks and overpriced (but delicious) spiced hot chocolate, flat whites , lamingtons, and Queensland cakes. After buying some retro nik-naks (really, there's bugger all else to do) we had flat whites and a preposterously large slice of Queensland cake.
Sunday morning, we took advantage again of being on the West side of town, and drove round the corner (less than 5 minutes, in fact) past the botanical gardens and up to the Mount Coot-Tha lookout. There's a popular cafe and picnic spot at the top, as it's the highest point in Brisbane, and you get a great view of the skyline and beyond to the ocean. From there we walked into the park and followed an aboriginal art trail for a couple of kilometres - at a leisurely pace, of course.
On Sunday afternoon we scored a real win. Knowing we'd need a room in Brisbane for about 9 weeks after our current house-sitting stint ends, so that C can see out her contract, we'd (fairly optimistically) put up posters around West End, in the hope there'd be a friendly house-share with a spare room. A lass phoned us on Sunday (the only phone call we got, after putting up 10 posters around West End) and we're going to move into a very cheap room in the heart of West End - there's a beautiful, quiet back garden, broadband access in the room, and fun, progressive housemates... We'll soon see if there's a catch!
My contract with Gensolve starts next week, and not only are the sterling chaps there allowing me to do all my work from the comfort of home, they are also supplying me with a snazzy new laptop, and latest versions of the software I need (this should keep my inner nerd well fed and happy for a few weeks). Switching from software development to technical writing, despite the inevitable paycut, is working out more or less as I'd hoped thus far - there is lots of demand, few good people in the game, no chance of my role being outsourced to a non-english-native-speaking country, and a good 20 years' worth of Moore's law before any significant chunk of the work can be automated away. The only catch is that paycut...

A Break From the Bush

We have a 3 month break from going bush, it would seem. Anne, a friend of a colleague, needed people to house-sit (and cat sit...) her place in Toowong, and I figured it would be a good fit for me, as for the next four weeks or so I'd've rented a room in Brisbane for three days a week anyhow. C was well up for a city break after 3 months in Nimbin, and the plan also cut short the time we'd have to spend half the week apart by nearly a month - a win-win. Once in Brisbane, C logically enough decided that she may as well look for a short-term contract. Her first interview was for the Queensland office of the Premier, and she decided to sign up for a 3 month contract working on their websites.
Anne is an ultrarunner, and is heading over to her native South Africa for three weeks, to compete in the annual Comrades Marathon - 90 kilometres of sunburnt craziness. Anne's place is a pleasant queenslander, set back from the road in a very quiet street in a quiet part of Taringa. You can tell she's the South African on the street - it's the only house surrounded by a bloody great wall, and with a closed, locked gate at the front. Her cats (Cleo and Slinky) are friendly and affectionate, and at 14, too old to be any hassle - both of them live to eat, and spend their day directly in front of the heat ducts, and hunting the sunny spots in the garden - hard life. We now have a couple of tricky problems to sort out - Brisbane accomodation for July and August, and how to make time to get down to Nimbin during that eight weeks. C's job doesn't start till next week, Monday is a bank holiday in Queensland, and I work from home on Fridays, so we have six of the first 10 days to chill here and to explore this part of the city together. Toowong and Taringa themselves are your average suburbia - there are quite a few old-style queenslanders here, some in very good nick indeed, but other than that there's nothing of interest.
The state botanical gardens are a five minute drive up the Western motorway however, so we checked those out on Saturday - they'll be more impressive once they're more mature, but the range (and arrangement) is pretty impressive, and they seem to be keeping all the plants alive despite the drought, through an extensive system of tanks and reservoirs.
Monday is the Queens Birthday here - a bank holiday, and therefore a long weekend. We took advantage of being back in Brissie, and headed down to the Powerhaus - they have an exhibition of press photography from around the world. I enjoyed it, but was slightly disturbed by some of the images, such as Iraqi babies killed in the war and Lebanese residential districts blown to smithereens, and much more disturbed by the flippant attitudes to the images that several groups of Aussies displayed - I've never been to an exhibition of photoreportage before where it seemed to be the done thing to joke about the images.
The long weekend has felt like a well-deserved holiday, and made me realise that I need to schedule a proper break quite soon - I've been working for 10 months without more than 2 days off in a row, and most of those have been wrapped around weekends and pressed into service to do things that don't really fit into long weekends like fly to New Zealand and back. I'm looking forward to another 3 weeks during which I can think about all the things that need to be done to the house in Nimbin, but without the threat that I might actually be called on to do any of them.