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.

Water water all around

Well, this has been a very rainy week in the rain forest.

On Monday and Tuesday, it rained so hard that the ford connecting our street to Nimbin was too deep to ford in our Ford. Luckily, we had plenty of food in, and by evening the water was low enough so that we could get into the village. The rain continued to hammer on the roof into the night, though, and a visitor we have had before returned - clinging to the outside of our kitchen window was a tiny, bright green tree frog. I think it's great, and he is obviously not stupid -the light coming through our kitchen window attracts moths and other small insects, and I'm sure the frog is now twice the size that it was when I last saw it about a month ago.

On Wednesday, C went into Lismore base hospital for her full term check up. Everything is proceeding well, but the baby shows no sign of wanting to come out into the big wide world. C and Rose made a day of it in Lismore, and we really are running out of things to buy for baby now - we're even stocked up on things like replacement covers for the booster seat, and loads of those little sterile plastic bags in which you can hygienically store the feeding bottle teats. I confidently predict there will be hundreds of things it will seem obvious we should have bought, stocked up on, and/or prepared, within a couple of days of the baby being here.

The weather turned around completely on Saturday, and we had a bright hot sunny day after a full week of rain, so we took advantage by driving to the coast and showing Rose around Cape Byron and the Byron Bay shops - she has been getting a little frustrated trying to find everyday souvenirs of Australia in Nimbin and Lismore (we are more on the backpacker tourist trail than the sunbird tourist trail). We made the happy discovery that the Byron surf lifesaving club position shade umbrellas on the beach, which anyone can use for a gold coin donation - so we were able to have a great picnic lunch just a few yards from the high tide line, watching the surfers and the breakers beat against the rocks around Byron lighthouse.

As I write this, I am feeling achy but happy, as I have finally got round to doing a few things in the garden that I have been putting off for a while - and the real killer is building raised beds. Well, it's not so much the building the walls, as moving the soil into the raised beds that is tiring - but I know it will pay off later, as everything will be so much easier to control. Or, that's what I'm telling myself now.