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.





-

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?

Rooted but Proactive

We have been extremely proactive around the house and garden in the last couple of weeks. Our 5.1 surround system in the lounge is now fully wired up (after a bit of clambering around in the crawlspace under our lounge) as is the tumble drier. Sounds in the office are halfway there. I've climbed up on the roof and cleaned the leaf mulch out of the guttering. I've cleared the encroaching bush from a sizeable vegetable plot. I've mowed the entire road frontage. The garden as a whole has taken a beating - between me and Fran we have planted out a root vegetable plot in the newly cleared space, trimmed back two large native figs, and completed a survey of the trees we will have to finish off with a chainsaw and a tub of glyphosate. On the garden-fixing front, while getting my coffee fix at the Rainbow café, I bumped into Junior, our affable South African professional-diver-cum-cook-cum-project-manager friend, and it turns out that he also has his chainsaw licence (as though he didn't have enough hats already!) When he gets back from his annoyingly glamorous stint diving in the Red Sea off the Yemen, he will come and have a look at the camphor laurel problem in our garden, and, with a bit of luck, get rid of the problem trees for "mates rates". Some of the work on our garden has made me realise that I still have some serious thinking to do in terms of reducing the amount of ongoing work that it generates. For example, Fran not only dragged the dead palm leaves off the lawn and onto our brush-piles, but even cut off the dead palm leaves that were still attached to palm trees in our front garden, and there is now lots more light coming through the kitchen window. There must be a way (other than killing all the palm trees) to cut down on that - I just need some ingenuity.
There has been more light generally in the last couple of weeks, as the preceding weeks' constant rain has been broken up by quite a few sunny days. We have used the good weather to get into Lismore and explore the town with Fran, to go swimming At Nimbin pool, and to spend a day around Byron Bay. I had to work for half the day in Byron, so I ended up heading to a WiFi cafe for a few hours (and getting twice as much done as usual - probably due to more regular doses of caffeine). Fran, K and C had a great day on the beach, and we met up afterwards and headed to the Hari Krishna restaurant for dinner. Before driving off, just before sunset we witnessed something I hadn't seen before - flocking lorikeets. These birds are pretty alone or in pairs, but they looked like hundreds of flying jewels as they spiralled around the pines above the Byron beach in the evening light. They are quite small, and fly (and flap their wings) quickly though, so you'd need a top-end video camera to capture the scene.
Before we got back to our house in Nimbin last week, I had been very worried about possible water damage due to the severity of the rain we'd had previously. In the event, our house stood up very well to what was, really, an unusual and severe climatic event. The most noticeable effect of the severe rain has been a jump in the number of spiders and insects, and of course in the lizards, frogs and presumably snakes that feed on them -though I haven't seen any snakes yet since the rains. Another, much more enjoyable effect of the severe rain is to make our friends Steffan and Iris's little creek swell up to the point where it is a veritable river (though not in flash-flood mode like it was three weeks ago) which means that the bigger of the two swimming holes on their property is now about three metres deep and 30 metres long. We went along with a bottle of wine, and had a fine time - all that was missing was a lilo, and I'll make sure I bring one next time!
We are learning to sleep when the baby sleeps, and K is now often sleeping 4 hours per night, which is making it a lot easier to get up for work in the morning. Nonetheless, last night, which I spent in Brisbane for work, was my first night of uninterrupted sleep since December 21, and I don't believe that it is coincidence that it is this evening I have finally found the energy to write this blog entry.