Kiwi Lurgy Hiatus

I have no excuse to offer. This second hiatus of the Nimbin interblag in as many months is inexcusable. Three people have now complained.
Since my last post, we had a one-week holiday in New Zealand. It was fantastic to catch up with our Auckland friends, and we narrowly missed out on a triumphant return to our pub quiz team of yore - we were one point away from tying for first place, but instead lost (again....) to long-time arch rivals.
Unfortunately, about 20 minutes after stepping out of the plane into the frosty Waikato midnight, and scraping the frost off the hire car's windscreen, I came down with the world's most evil viral flu (or, man-cold as Jo dubbed it, until she caught it herself...)
The rest of the holiday passed in a blur of fevers and flu and long car journeys with a sick, screaming baby.
My work contract at the moment specifies that if I take holiday, my hours must nett to zero over the following weeks, so as soon as we got back I began working longer weeks to make up the hours - which was tough at first as I was still quite ill.
By last week, I was feeling much better. Bas and Jo, over from New Zealand to visit Jo's father in Cairns, stayed with us for a couple of days and we showed them around Nimbin and spent a sunny morning walking up to protesters' falls.
And so three weeks of semi-convalescence have passed, and most of my time has been relatively non blog worthy:

We bought low-key lampshades and other assorted "the Gap of home wares"-style basics from Ikea on our way back through Brisbane.

Some time has been spent restoring our 1930s Tasmanian meat safe - this is a labour of love, which is just another way of saying it's taking bloody ages to get what should be a small simple piece of furniture looking good enough so I'm not embarrassed to put it in my kitchen. At this point, there is 'only' some planing, sanding, painting, varnishing, replacing of hinges, tacking, and wire brushing left to do.

Less frustrating, but also less constructive was last week's effort to connect the Wii to the interweb. After a fair amount of profanity, I gave in, and removed both WPA encryption and MAC address filtering from my wireless access point and was finally able to connect with the Wii. Our neighbours are too distant to be able to piggyback on our WiFi, but I wouldn't be surprised to trip over a bunch of Nimbin wardrivers in beaten up VWs with solar powered laptops out the back one of these mornings.
The last 10 days have been crisp, clear, sunny and still. Also, bloody cold by Australian standards. The enormous crop of mandarins in our garden only serves to rub in the fact that at night time at the moment, it's dropping to what I consider Christmas temperatures.

Today is C's birthday, so we drove to Byron and had a day at the beach. The water was much too cold for swimming, but just lying on the beach and paddling in the water rocked, and we wandered round the back streets of Byron and discovered a few little shops and cafes that we didn't know about, including a toy shop that only sells wooden and plush toys, and an interesting looking vegetarian restaurant.
Given that my plans for the foreseeable future consist of staying at home and chilling out for the portion of the week when I'm not at work, it may be somewhat boring, but none the less normal service interblag-wise will be resumed from next week - namely a weekly blag of our exploits such as they are, and some photos - some, perhaps, even relevant.

Blue Shells, White Paint, Black Bags

It feels like we've made progress on the paperwork front recently - K has her Australian passport, and our home-office is now fully legal, displaying the requisite business name licence upon the otherwise bare wall.
When we first looked at our house in Nimbin I can remember that two of the things we said to ourselves were "it's a little bit tired, but nothing that a coat of paint won't fix", and "ooh, look at those lovely exposed beams". During the phase of falling in love with a new place, mental maths about ease of renovation come quite a way down one's list; but, now that we have got to the point where I am perched on a stepladder, applying masking tape and then renewing paintwork 15 foot up with paint dripping into my eyes, the reality has struck home fairly hard - if a room is three metres by three metres, and only a plain dado rail separates the wall from the ceiling, then prior to painting the ceiling, you have to apply 12 metres of masking tape, and then you have 12 metres of edging which needs to be painted carefully. Our lounge-cum-kitchen has eight exposed beams, squiggly dado edging around the beams, and a main beam through the middle upon which all the others rest. It is approximately seven metres long and four and a half metres wide. Even ignoring the squiggles, this results in 87 metres of masking tape and careful edging required - several times as much work, in other words, as edging a plain ceiling.
Prevaricating about painting walls and ceiling has become significantly easier since we bought a second control of the MarioKart. I only have one complaint about the game, which is that C seems to beat me too often. For the occasional gamer such as I (as opposed to the hardcore gamer) the balance, playability, learning curve and fun factor are simply superb.
This week, we are taking a break both from MarioKart and the joys of house painting. We are housesitting once again for a South African who has temporarily returned to her native land to run an ultramarathon. Being in Brisbane next week will be very convenient, as we are flying to New Zealand to catch up with friends in Auckland, and this way we will be able to get the train from the city to the airport instead of facing a three hour drive. Driving up on Thursday though, we had a pleasant surprise - the Tugun bypass is finally complete, routing through traffic behind the Gold Coast airport, and cutting 15-30 minutes (and a lot of stress) from the Nimbin-Brisbane drive, depending on traffic.
Having won a design competition for the town's sports kits a few weeks ago, C has gone one better this week, and has scored a deal to swap some design skills for a weekend yoga retreat in Mullumbimby next month.
I have been tired and grouchy because the side project I took on last month has dragged on, eating into my evenings, and turning out not to have been financially worth the time and effort invested (by a long chalk in the end). If I count in the lessons learnt, it was probably a worthwhile venture - but, being honest, one of those lessons is "never do anything like this again".
In our moving from being full-time employees to forming a partnership for our freelance contract work, there have been many lessons both big and small - and one of the hardest to learn has been that not all chunks of time are equal, and that it is very important to remember that, if the chunks of time when one is alert and wake already spoken for, then any work that one takes on that will have to be done in the remaining parts of the day will have a disproportionate impact on one's energy levels. Yes. That's a roundabout way of apologising for being late with the blog.

Mardi Grass 2008

Last year, we partied for two days and then went to the doof after mardi grass. This year, we fed the baby and went to sleep.
The carnival parade was better than in '07 or '06 though, and overall the event feels more successful than those previous years in merging the political with the personal. On this note, I was amazed to hear that Albert Hoffmann had died. I saw no obits anywhere - it's as if he'd never existed. Maybe it's just in Murdoch-land, but the lack of any media reaction to his passing seems downright creepy to me.

There were several reasons making this one a big mardi grass - it was the 35th anniversary of the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, and one of the Nimbin's Icon's, the Plantem, died recently, and his image adorned the publicity for the festival. As usual, the town was packed for a week leading up to mardi grass, and as usual, most everyone was smiley, happy, and having a great time.
We finally got around to checking out the Bush Theatre, which reopened a couple of weeks back - it's got a great little auditorium and a rocking sound-system, so there should be some mashup events there if they use the venue right. It's such a perfect space, nestled over the bridge by the river, half in and half out of town - it seems impossible it was ever closed, yet also impossible to see how it can be truly profitable; I hope very much that either I'm proved wrong, or the community finds away to keep it open without it having to make a (monetary) profit.
On the home front we've been making steady progress back to normality in the aftermath of the chaos caused by the tree-felling and termite treatments: We have developed a low-tech system for maneuvering the tree stumps around the garden - I roll them a few inches at a time, and C follows up immediately with a chock to prevent them rolling back. It's slow and annoying, but it works. I've been swiftly chainsawing up the piles of older wood, and it seems to multiply as you chop - I've been chuffed to realise we actually have more than enough fuel for the wood-fire to keep us snug all winter!
Our cacti and capsicum plants have both produced babies, which we've potted out. I'm going to have to find some capsicum recipes for the spring, or we'll be overwhelmed! We also have a few kilos of tangerines coming along, a couple of kilos of lemons, and probably a fair few bananas - the lesson for next year is, if it doesn't rain heavily in February and March, water the bloody trees!
Ah, yeah, and I got my Wii hooked up.

Sun & Snake

After weeks and weeks of rain, we finally have glorious blue skies and clear weather, just as the polonia trees lose their leaves for Autumn and the temperature dips down towards 5 degrees overnight. Still, we're enjoying walking around town and getting out on the deck for lunch in the sunshine.

Just when things should have been calming down, as per usual, an interesting piece of work came along. Never one to pass up a masochistic opportunity to pile on an extra side-project, I've teamed up with mates in Auckland and Brisbane to take on a development project for a UK software firm. Obviously, the time difference is not conducive to project management at sensible hours of the day.

Similarly overenthusiastic, young-mum C has been discussing a marketing project with a local small business, volunteering weekly at the Nimbin Community Technology Centre, looking after baby and keeping up her previous freelance commitments. We love it.

To Europeans and North Americans in their snug, centrally heated homes, "dipping down towards 5 degrees overnight" probably sounds fine. However, most Australian houses, and certainly ours, are basically large wooden shacks on stilts. Within 30 minutes of turning off the heating, the temperature inside matches the temperature outside, and I don't like getting out of bed when its 5 degrees Celsius. So this week, we've been chopping wood and lighting the fire in the lounge - a good month earlier than we had to last year.

In an unrelated threat to my free time, those evil buggers at Nintendo went and released Mariokart for the Wii. Now every nerd has their breaking point - and that's mine. Luckily, I was not organised enough to get the correct cabling to wire it up in my lounge, so I have a pretty white brick in the room.

The time that would have been spent perfecting my lap times with Mario and Princess has instead been wasted mowing the lawn, potting out baby plants, weeding, and applying wood filler to the gaps in the bathroom floor so you can't see through to downstairs anymore. Shame.
Desk with No Snakes
Today was threatening to break the pattern and become quite constructive. However, an unexpected visitor soon got things back on their usual chaotic track. Walking into the office, I surprised a small snake which had been basking in the sunshine on C's desk. "That's OK" I thought, "I'll just open the window and encourage it to leave." Somehow, in the 5 seconds it took me to open the window, it completely disappeared. It was small and (probably) not dangerous, but nonetheless I don't like my office to have hidden snakes in it. We searched high and low for 90 minutes, and couldn't find the snake.




I'd even started to persuade myself that it might have somehow wriggled the length of the desk, jumped onto the floor, gone right past me and then across the room and out the door in the few seconds I took my eye off it to open the window. An hour later, C spotted the little critter. It'd crawled through one of the holes in a decorative vase and gone to sleep curled up in a ball. I carried it out and it slithered off into the long grass quite happily.