a great way to start the day

photo: Queensland Gvt

As we drove into the uni this morning, one of the resident koalas slowly dawdled across the road in front of us, just like in the photo - although I think that one had a bit more speed than Blinky Bill did this morning. The koalas seem to be on the move a bit at the moment as Steve saw one in the same place last week and we saw another in a different spot a couple of weeks previously. The population up here in the north coast is apparently taking a battering through the depredations of dogs, being hit by cars and loss of habitat. It's quite unfathonamble when you read how many koalas that were killed just in Queensland up until the 1930s for their skins....millions were killed. We must have such a tiny proportion of the total population left now. When will the last wild koala die I wonder...

The deck building continues

So the project for this weekend was to cement in the 'stirrups' as they are called - all 26 of them. The bearers are then bolted or maybe screwed, not sure, into each of these...anyway our friends Warwick and John stayed with us for the weekend and John was pressed into service helping Steve do half of these on Saturday while we did the rest today.
We had about an inch of rain this week so that made the site rather muddy and a tad dirty to work in. You might also notice that part of the pond wall has given in - this is not good.
And that's what things look like now, Sunday evening. We moved the two fox-tailed palms that were growing at the top right of the pic as well...hopefully they will survive the transplant. Next week hopefully will see the bearers in place.

Purple Rain (kind of)

The beautiful mauve flowers of the jacarandas are now falling freely from the trees and within a week or so the trees will be green again. The fallen flowers carpet the drive way and the bush garden with the most lovely carpet of mauve.
Our little Xmas bush provides a little bit of contrast with the mauve carpet.

A few pics from The Big Bush Garden

This spectacular flower belongs to one of our Banksia robur which is growing very nicely and has about five flowers on it at the moment.
Quite a lot of these phalloid fungi have pushed their way up through the mulch over the past couple of days...they smell a bit like rotting meat and attract flies which I guess transfer their spores around the place.
There are a couple of young joeys that have just left their mum's pouch for good on the property at the moment...here are a couple of adult females and a little fellow who will be on his own soon.

Bush garden mounds

The soil that we dug out of the hole for the fish pond was dumped in five separate mounds throughout The Big Bush Garden and then mulched over. We'll then use these as sites to plant more low shrubs. The mounds will break up the rather flat topography of The Big Bush Garden and make it more visually interesting as well as create more habitat for all the Bush Critters I hope will take up residence there, like...
the owner of this shed skin, which I suspect is the green tree snake we saw last week. It's very heartening to me when I see signs of life like this in The Big Bush Garden. On Saturday a small goanna, a bit under a metre, came pelting out from some of the shrubs in this garden and made a bolt from this garden down across the lawn for some reason. Was nice to see!

Shifting dirt

Phase 2 of Building The Deck was carried out over the weekend. This involved digging out all the holes for the deck's footings (which I did on Saturday while Steve was in Brisbane at a matinee of West Side Story) followed by digging out the fish pond. We carefully marked out the shape using pink twine (what else) before cracking through the hard clay. It was great to feel the warmth of the sun (at long last) but you can see by Stevie's shirt that it was hot, sweaty, dirty, dirty work.
Looking somewhat like an archaeological dig, we dug and we dug and we dug and we carted and carted and carted barrow loads of soil from the site where we dumped them in mounds over in our bush garden (see previous posting). Adding to the general discomfort (but hey who are we to whinge) were huge march flies the size of small mice that were intent on sucking at our perspiring sweat. Luckily they were easily dispatched. We were lucky that we had had some rain earlier in the week which had softened the clay-ey soil, otherwise it would have been like digging into concrete. As it was it as bloody hard going until we reached a softer, sandier horizon.
Ta daaa! Fish pond now completely dug out. It has a sloping 'floor' so that one end is shallower than the other deeper end (which is where I am). We will add a layer of concrete blocks around the edge before lining the whole thing with pond liner, thus increasing the deep end to about 90 cm which should be enough to grow some water lillies in. Next week is Phase 3: cementing in the footings. Stay tuned.

20 Films we really like

These are like comfort food, really. Movies we watch when we want to know we'll enjoy them, cos we've seen them lots of time before. There's no effort, just relax and enjoy. And we keep coming back to them. No pretensions to critical acclaim....and in no order...

1. Tea with Mussolini

2. The Ghost and the Darkness

3. Kinsey

4. Short Bus

5. Wilde

6. Carrington

7. Misery

8. The Omen

9. Beautiful Thing

10. Latter Days

11. Copycat

12. Paradise Road

13. Shirley Valentine

14. Young Frankenstein

15. Mamma Mia

16. Another Country

17. Fried Green Tomatoes

18. The Mummy

19. Mambo Italiano

20. Steel Magnolias

Sun setting from the spa

After a very physical and tiring couple of days we finished Sunday off with an hour soak in the spa, me with a beer, Steve with a ginger and soda water, looking down the valley in the last light of day. Bliss.

First stage of courtyard: retaining wall

A fair bit of this weekend was given over to building a retaining wall which was necessary to complete before we begin actually building the decking for the space between the two pavilions of our house. It was a very physical weekend and quite tiring but it's great to have that part of the project finished. It also meant driving down to Bunnings in Lismore on Sunday morning to buy another 10 bags of cement.
And here's the retaining wall in all its glory. Clay-ey soil had to be shaved off and levelled; 5 holes 60 cm deep had to be dug; 16 bags of concrete had to be mixed with water and shovelled from the wheelbarrow into the holes; timber had to be cut and fixed with concrete or bolts.
The very last things we did before soaking in the spa while the sun was setting was mark out where the pond would go and where all the holes for the footings for the deck would go. Now we just need to dig something like 26 holes and a pond 3.6 x 1.2 metres and 70 cm deep!

A green tree snake comes a'lookin'

After we came back from having lunch yesterday and just about to start back working on the retaining wall, I noticed we were not alone. We had a visitor. In the shape of a green tree snake. How lovely. I had seen a sloughed skin of such a snake hanging from the roof of our entry area two years ago, but hadn't sighted the real McCoy. Till Saturday.
It was reasonably OK with me holding it, though snapped a little bit. I held it just so I could remove a couple of large ticks from it and I then released it in amongst the hydrangeas which are looking very lush at the moment.
It seemed to like where I released it because it spent much of today sunning itself on top of the hydrangea leaves exactly where I had released it yesterday.