Waterfalls, Rainbows and Mist

Fran picked me up from the Brisbane train for the last time on Thursday morning.
Thursday and Friday were rainy, indoorsy, fruit cheesecake, movie and coffee kinds of day. Apart from my day job the only constructive thing that got done was sanding and varnishing the magazine rack which C had found on last month's Nimbin market. It looks great now, and fits in with the default-early-settler look our place seems to be acquiring whether we like it or not.
During a brief sunny interlude I did manage to rip the ancient, collapsing roof off the chicken coop. Obviously, this is only the first half of a job - but now the lack of a roof on the structure is very noticeable and it should (at least in theory) spur me into completing the task!
Saturday was taken up with a mission to Lismore to get a wheelbarrow and a load of breeze blocks. I've made a start pulling up the railway sleepers that retain the raised beds in our garden and substituting breeze blocks: The horizontally placed sleepers are held in place by vertical wedges of sleeper that are jammed three feet into the ground, and can only be removed using extreme violence. Laying about one such vertical wedge with a large mattock, I managed to hit myself in the eyelid with a flying splinter of railway sleeper, and my eye was inflamed and swollen for three days. It's on the mend now, but still tender.
On Sunday we drove to Protestors' Falls and walked to the waterfall. This is a magnificent walk, which more than made up for my disappointment over the other local rain forest walks: The trees are great, the river valley which the path follows up to the falls is pretty and varied, and the falls at the end are impressive despite being quite small and not (at the moment) having that much water.
This walk was also my first successful use of the hug-a-bub baby sling in the "bub-facing-you" configuration - the verdict: very comfy for both dad and bub!
There was a rainbow over Nimbin when we got back from the waterfall - arching right above the town when viewed from the North.
Apart from replacing the sleepers with breeze blocks, the other task that has been a very high priority since learning that we have a termite infestation is that of clearing all the wood and building materials that the previous owners had left stacked under the house. This was a horrible job because the space under the house is not quite high enough to stand up straight in - so I had to stoop while I lifted and carried armload after armload of nail-studded wood through semi-darkness. In doing this I found more termites at the bottom of the woodpile - but I'm still no closer to figuring out their entry point into the house... They're cunning little buggers!
On Monday, for the first time in Nimbin, I was able to do my morning's work over an espresso coffee while watching the world go by on Cullen Street. The e-bar is working getting wireless broadband set up, and I was able to plug into their LAN - I find doing some screen-time in a cafe environment makes a pleasant change from working at home from time to time, if only because of the interaction and background noise, which is more human in the third place than in a home office. We were in the village because Monday was K's 2-month inoculation day. C took her to the GP and they administered all the standard shots. Once recovered from the initial shock and pain, she alternated between grizzling and screaming for most of the rest of the day - which didn't leave me in the best of moods for my (last and final) 2:45am alarm call to catch the Kyogle train in to work on Tuesday morning.

Cabin Fever

An even rainier week!

To see just how rainy, check out this video our friends Steffan and Iris took (from their blog vos2oz.com). The first half of this video shows what is normally a very small, placid creek on their property. The second half shows the adventure that driving to Lismore has become!

My grand plans for getting ahead on the garden have been stymied by the continual downpour. Even most indoor work is impossible because the wooden structure of the house is too wet. Looking on the bright side, it has enforced a degree of rest over the first couple of weeks with the new baby, which is probably a good thing - especially for C.
When we have gone out, it has been indoors - we've spent a fair amount of time at the Rainbow cafe.
Given that our tumble dryer died, and the rain has been more or less constant, the most rock and roll element of my lifestyle has been the daring early morning trips to the laundrette. In order to keep up with the demand for clean, dry nappies and bunny rugs, I've been driving through knee-deep water to the village and back whenever we've got behind on the nappies. The guy at the Spin Cycle shop in Lismore promised us he would be able to fix our tumble dryer this week, but when we drove into town on Wednesday to drop it off, we found that he had extended his Xmas holiday. These small details can really change the shape of your week. And lose you someone's business.

As the four of us have been experiencing slight cabin-fever, cooped up in our house, we have avoided driving straight home from the village a few times, and today we took a 10 minute detour up Gungas Road to take a look at the normally peaceable small creek that runs though Steffan's yard. Not only had the creek been transformed into a eight metre wide torrent, but there are waterfalls falling directly onto Gungas Road itself, and Gungas Road is cut off to all but the ruggedest all terrain vehicles at the point where it fords the creek to go up the hill. its a bit of an adventure in the rainforest right now.