Merry Xmas to all our family and friends!

We hope that you have a wonderful and peaceful and enjoyable Xmas and a fabby New Year! Apologies - we have not sent a single card out this year...Xmas kind of just crept up on us this year and caught us unawares. Well that's my story anyway. Enjoy the baubles!

An inauspicious start to Xmas Eve day

After loading up the vitara with assorted cardboard and empty bottles so I could do some pre-xmas recycling, and as I was just about to get in the car to drive off, I noticed that one of the tyres was flat. Oh my. So the beginning of Xmas Eve was a little less smooth than we had anticipated. Hope the rest of the day improves! Note Steve's expression - this is called a 'forced smile'.

Sunday brunch in Newcastle

Steve and I made a lightening fast trip down to Newcastle on Saturday afternoon so we could attend my mum's 70th birthday party which was a surprise affair at Cardiff RSL (photos to come soon). Yesterday we caught up with some of our special friends in Newcastle for brunch at Dimitri's cafe in Hamilton. From left: Geoff, Graham, Glen and Lee.

Good bye (again) Jann and Maxime

Jann and Maxime, two French help_x'ers who stayed with us a few months ago spent another week with us over the past week before heading up to Brisbane for Xmas and New Year. They did lots of things like cleaning our windows, watering our thirsty plants and digging out our soon-to-be decked Balinese style courtyard. Here they are after a few hours of sweaty digging and carting work.

On our way back home from the Gold Coast airport we met up with the boys at Uki pub which is 40 mins from our place. Jann is on Steve's left, Maxime on the right. After their time in Brisbane they head out to Charleville to work for 5 weeks or so in the abbatoir out there (unless they get lucky and score a better job in Brisbane - which we hope they will!).

100 not out

Woo hoo. We got rain. Lots of it. We were in Newcastle over the weekend and between leaving home at about 1pm Saturday and arriving back at 6.00pm Sunday we received a perfect score of 100mm - that's 4 inches in the old scale - not a bad effort. It rained lightly for much of the night bringing us another 5mm and it's been drizzling all morning, so we might get a little more.
Our lawns will green up and all our plants and trees will be slurping up the soil moisture big time. Fantastic!

Bandy Bandy on Cawongla Road

Pic: Google Images
I spent the past three days up at the Gold Coast for work, staying at Twin Towns Resort at Tweed Heads. My final task was to present some awards at the Gold Coast Institute of TAFE's Graduation at the GC Covention and Exhibition Centre last night. I haven't seen so many big heels and short dresses. Anyway, that ended at 7.30 and I picked up our friend Andy (who had come up for a couple of days to set up our new iMac and assorted bits and pieces) from GC airoport and drove home via Murwillumbah and Uki.
We were hirtling along Cawongla Road at about 10.00pm last night when the black and white bands of a bandy bandy appeared on the road. I turned around and walked up to it and it took off much more quickly than I had assumed this species can travel. Anyway, I managed to pick it up and have a closer look before letting it slide effortlessly through the grass and off into the night. The black and white banding creates this amazing blur when the snake is sliding away so as to avoid getting eaten. Great find - it was my first bandy bandy in the wild.

Nimbin - hippy capital of Australia

Photo from Google Images. Taken during Mardi Grass festival. Police checking people outside the 'Bringabong' shop with it's window display of the giant golden bong which is a permanent fixture.

According to the latest Nimbin High Times newspaper, Nimbin was recently named as one of the top 10 hippy sites in the world. It was up there with Kathmandu and Amsterdam. Also in this week's Echo, another freebie newspaper (which actually has much better quality reporting than the local mainstream rag, The Northern Star), a Lismore councillor failed in his motion to install 'drug-free zone' signs on the main street of Nimbin (ala the alcohol-free zone signs you see around the place). Most of the other councillors derided such a move as being, well, just silly. 'Because there is drug-related activity on lots of streets in lots of places - why single Nimbin out?' they cried.
Reasonable point but, to date, I haven't been asked if I wanted to buy weed/smack/cake/cookies/e/k/speed/amphetamines/ice in Lismore or Kyogle or Casino or Bangalow or Byron. But I do in Nimbin. Pretty much every time I visit.
Now, just for the record..as long as tobacco and alcohol are legal then I simply can't wear the illogic of allowing some drugs that cause considerable personal and community harm and not allowing others. I'm pro decriminalisation of rec drugs. So, my rant here is not with the actual use of recreational drugs.
My rant is about inconsistent application of the law. Last time I looked, Nimbin was still part of Australia. Where you have open selling of drugs on streets in pretty well every other part of Australia you get some police activity to mark the fact that well this is just not appropriate behaviour - indeed it is illegal. But not much sustained action takes place in Nimbin.
There's some sad looking smack-addicted characters that sell the drugs and not a few young guys, some who look younger than 15. I wonder whether lots of Nimbin kids become 'Saffy's' (drug-intolerant daughter of Ab Fab's Edina) and eschew drugs as teenagers?
But much of Nimbin's tourism (which by the way seems to be thriving) is drug-related. It's very interesting from someone who is interested in tourism as a thing to study. Loads of backpackers come up each day from Byron in minibuses with tour companies like 'Psychodelic tours' or 'Sky-high tours' to buy some dope off the lads (and ladies) on the street.
But the alternative view to mine, which was expressed by a female estate agent when she was showing me a couple of houses in Nimbin was that 'well everywhere has its drug problems....its just that ours is out in the open'. She has a point.

Hot and dry

Each morning breaks into a clear blue sky and rising temperatures. No sign of rain. Ever. Brisbane might have thunderstorms this afternoon according to Fran Kelly on ABC National this morning. This gives us hope. A little. We are starting to lose plants that we planted down by the creek and if we hadn't been watering our plantings close to the house systematically over the past few months many of them would now be dead.
We had just over 1000mm of rain in the first six months of the year. So far, in the last six months we have had around 150mm. Please rain.

An arvie swim

It was another hot day. The NBN weather man said it had been 38 in Limsore and so was probably about 40 out here at Larnook. For those of you who live in Newcastle, Larnook is positioned about the same distance from the ocean as Singleton. But Larnook is prettier. Much prettier. And we don't have coal mines.
Anyway, so it was still real hot when we arrived home at about 5.00pm. Martins had been wheel barrowing loads of dirt from Ground Zero today until the tyre on the wheelbarrow got a puncture. "Exploded" to quote Martins. He then spent the rest of the day watering plantings. He had done half the plants down by the creek but had taken some time out.
When we arrived home he was about to return. So I joined him and together we filled buckets of cool water from Leycester Creek and watered the remaining 20 or so plants. When we finished I decided to have a swim. I stripped off to nothing, feeling that fleeting feeling of exhileration of being completely naked outside. How naughty. I walked a few steps into the water, treading in soft. clean sand before falling into the water.
The coolness of the creek swallowed me and I felt as if I weighed nothing. I slid further into the deeper water until I could barely stand on the rocks below. My body felt like it was sensing like it hadn't been sensing. I felt slightly warmer and slightly cooler currents against my skin as I swam leisurely across to some rocks that jut up out of the creek. Turtles and little pied cormorants rest here as well. I felt refreshed. I felt alive. I felt like a kid again. And this was at my place. Skinny dipping in a cool creek. After work. At home. Bliss.

a different view of maryville

Shane and I mounted an expedition on Monday up our little creek on our property on the other side to the house. We then headed up a ridgeline on our neighbour, Bill's property and found we had a fine view of Maryville from a very different perspective.

Latvian versatility

Martins (see posting below) has been quite versatile....digging out stubborn azealea bushes (well what was left of them after they got hacked back to their roots); laying down barrowloads of mulch and...

painting a timber bench seat we bought some time ago at the Tender Centre. In the shade. Under the mango tree.

(partial) metamorphosis

My main project while I have been on rec leave this week has been to clean out the central 'courtyard' area between the two pavillions so that we can do a complete Jamie Drurie makeover. Think timber deck, long rectangular fish pond, water lillies, Bali effect. Go on, use your imagination.

So Shane and I began the process on Tuesday by removing all the pavers and some garden beds.

Then Martins, our Help_Xer from Latvia (think Eurovision Song Contest) got stuck in on Wednesday and Thursday and we cleared put all the plants (most of which we have transplanted), rocks, sleepers, soil and other debris.

And here we have ground zero, awaiting the holes for the footings for the deck. Stay tuned.

Awakening to the dawn chorus

Blissful isn't it. All you city folks thinking how beautifully serene it is to wake to the bushland choir of birdlife, celebrating life by singing. Hmmm well not if you include amongst their ranks a very noisy koel cuckoo which likes to wake at 4.30am. This musical philistine is joined shortly afterwards by the gaggle of channel billed cuckoos (see story below). Recently joining in the fray are a number of cattle that Bill, one of our neighbours, has placed in a paddock near our place. I now understand what 'the cattle are 'lo'ing means.'...it's bloody well short for bellowing...and then there's the cow amongst them that sounds not unlike the T. rex from Jurassic Park. Literally. Hand me that valium....

Rain birds: rain!

The channel billed cuckoos have been extremely raucous over the past few days, irritatingly so just before day break at about 4.30/5am. There must be half a dozen or so that are roosting close to our place and they begin their morning by sounding like they are being collectively strangled. Which, as a matter of fact, I would like to...sometimes. well in the mornings, anyway. They fly inelegantly overhead at various times of the day, announcing themselves well before you actually see them. Maybe they are telling each other where the best nests are to lay their eggs in. If you know what these birds look like you would appreciate what an absolute shock it must be to a raven or currawong or whatever other unfortunate bird becomes the unsuspecting surrogate parent to this large and let's face it, not entirely attractive bird.
Now another name for this species is rain bird, and eevrytime I hear them I think..'agh they must know through some inne mechanism encoded in ancient DNA that it is about to rain...this is good because we need it deperately'...but no...they get it wrong every bloody day.
And it is dry again. We received only 38mm for November and if we don't get 2omm at least in the next week or so we are really going to brown off in a big way. Today Shane and I shifted two of our tree ferns to a new location because they just couldn't cope with the dry winds and harsh sunshine. Rain. Please. Go on.