Frangipani in February

Over the two and a half years or so that we have been here, various friends have given us cuttings of frangipani, and we've also bought a couple at various markets. In addition, we transported a couple that we had growing in pots back in Newcastle. So this is just a series if point and shoot shots of different coloured frangipani that are all out in flower.
This is a deep red
while this one is more a crimson colour
The traditional white with yellow centre - it also has the strongest fragrence
This is one of my favourites. Frangipani, genus Plumeria, a beautiful tropical plant.

roof top shot of new garden

While I was on the roof taking a shot of the solar panels (see blog below) I snapped this one of our new garden that we had begun creating before Xmas when Taylor was here with us. Our Helpers, Marie and Seb, from Germany, who left today after 10 days with us, continued on with this garden, adding more soil, and then mulching it and doing a little bit more planting. The two fox tail palms we transplanted last Xmas from where our middle deck is now. The poinciana tree in the foreground has been in now for about 2 years and is growing very well.

solar

After procrastinating for over a year we decided to bite the sustainability bullet last November and signed up for a 3kilowatt system and the deal included a 5 kilowatt inverter which means we can easily upgrade to 5kilowatts when we decide to do that (just need to add another 12 panels). Luckily for us we literally just scraped in under the NSW Gvt's solar scheme which they scrapped literally the day after we had got our paperwork through. Phew!

The installers arrived today and did what they do: install the panels but apparently they hadn't been given all the doodads they needed so are back on Friday to finish the job off. Then we wait for the electrician to come and connect us to the grid and hey presto, we are making money from sunshine...woo hoo!

Wicked and Matthew Shephard

As some of you would know, Wicked, (see posting below) tells the back story to The Wizard of Oz and so you learn why the wicked witch of the west becomes 'wicked', how she gets her witchy hat, why she is green etc etc etc. You also learn how the tin man becomes the tin man and how the scarecrow becomes the scarecrow.

When the character of Fiyero, who is the love interest of both the female leads, Elpheba who ultimately becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda, who becomes Glinda the Good, ends up in trouble, when the Wizard of Oz's guards take him out into the fields to 'hang him up like a scarecrow' and well, bash him to smithereens, Elpheba uses her magic powers to transform Fiyero into a scarecrow so that he won't feel pain and suffer. While she is casting the spell she sings:

'Let his flesh not be torn/Let his blood leave no stain/Though they beat him/Let him feel no pain/Let his bones never break/And however they try/To destroy him/Let him never die/Let him never die. The spell worked and Fiyero becomes a scarecrow and so cannot feel the pain as he is bashed.

The scarecrow imagery and the irony of those words made a link for me to the story of Matthew Shephard, the 21 year old guy who was the victim of a hate crime in Laramie, Wyoming, back in 1998, bashed so brutally and relentlessly and then tied to a fence on the outskirts of town and left to die. Which he eventually did, having first been discovered by a guy cycling past him some 18 hours later, who thought at first he was a scarecrow.

I began thinking about Matthew again after we had bought the dvd of the movie of this and the subsequent events, called The Matthew Shephard Story, and watched it late last year, and I was moved by the film to to search Amazon.com and have a look for what else had been written about him. I ended up buying The Meaning of Matthew, which was written by his mother, Judy, which is a moving account from her perspective and also another fascinating and more scholarly and analytical account, Losing Matt Shephard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder, by an academic at the University of Wyoming, Beth Loffreda.

Matt Shephard was left lifeless and twisted like a scarecrow, but tragically for him, such a transformation didn't allow him to 'let him feel no pain'....

Wicked weekend in Brisneyland

Leaving Seb and Marie behind, as well as Shane and Jason, who had cooked us a delish dinner and stayed over on Friday night, Steve and I high-tailed it yesterday morning bright eyed and bushy-tailed and by 8.30am we were on the road, driving along the edge of the great caldera of Wollumbin, on or way to Brisbane. Prior to the floods, we would have told you we were heading up to see a matinee of Wicked followed by an evening performance of Jesus Christ Superstar, but alas, the floods have postponed JC S'star until June.

An uneventful and seamless drive into the city (I'm much better about entering the city than I was last year) and we were checked in at the Skyline Apartments near Fortitude Valley and on our way back into the city where I wanted to visit a big second-hand bookshop I had discovered on the web. Waiting at the train station was a student of mine from the early 1990s, Keith, who was in town to watch the Indigenous Games tat were being held at the Gold Coast later that day. So we caught up with him while we travelled the one stop into the city and promised we'd stay in touch.

Found the Archives Fine Bookshop and O_M_G! I could have stalked the aisles for hours but this wasn't possible, so managed to find some fantastic old Australian natural history books and placed this location firmly on my Brisbane map for next time.

We walked across the bridge over the still muddy looking Brisbane River to Southbank, had lunch and then on to see Wicked. A young guy who had performed with Steve when he was even younger, David Harris, was now the male lead of the show, Fiyero, which gave the performance a little more zing than usual. Our seats had been some of the cheaper seats, at the front, but towards the side, but they were actually quite good as we were very close to the action and quite a lot happens on stage right as it happens. We enjoyed the show so much (we had seen it a number of times previously) that we decided to hang around and enter the lottery that is held a couple of hours prior to each performance where you have a chance to get up to two front row seats for $35.00 each (not bad when such seats would normally put you back close to $200.00).

As luck would have it, my name was pulled, along with a dozen or so others, so we were off to the theatre again. And again, we enjoyed the performance a great deal, and there's something a bit spesh about being guided down to your front row seats by the usher. We got to see both women who perform the role of Elphaba, the wicked witch of the west, but all the other leads were played by the hmmm whatever the term is for the 'correct actor', lol. Bert Newton received applause both performances for just walking on stage, and good old Maggie Kirkpatrick (aka The Freak from Prisoner, and who was in the same classes as my mum at high school) was commandingly wicked.

So, now I've seen Wicked 6 times, Steve 5, and of course my brother Brett, just a few over 100!

what the...? black blue tongues....?

Not the greatest of shots, I agree, but at least this gives you an indication of how black my new baby black blue tongues really are. For those of you who know your reptiles, you might even be thinking, gee they look like baby land mullets without the spots. But they are in fact common or eastern blue tongues that originate from a mother or father who was themselves black and after a number of generations, the people who breed them are now producing lines of black blueys. These cuties arrived at Lismore airport last Thursday afternoon and are settling in well. When they grow to about 20cm (which, with a bit of luck will be towards the end of the year) I'll let them go in their specially designed blue tongue habitats outside (which still have to be constructed). You can see their lunch of chopped up apple, cucumber, lettuce, tomato and minced turkey.

luscious

Our frangipani are starting to burst into flower now. We have planted quite a few varieties with different coloured flowers but this luscious beauty was one we had in a pot back in Newcastle that we planted in the ground up here. Really starting to look beautiful in that luscious, tropical kinda way.

browning off

Now I know we haven't had the heat-wave like conditions that those of you who live down south have had, but we have had a few harsh days over the past week and yesterday and today would have been high 30s (our thermometer claims it reached 45 outside in the sun today). Even though we had 309mm in January, the grass is starting to brown off and the soil is hard and dry..who would have thought we had so many wet days over December and January...why didn't you bank some of that moisture, nature?

I should push the lawn mower down to the creek and start some serious restitutive work down there, but you know what...I can't be arsed...it's just too hot!

We had two new Helpers arrive today...a German couple called Marie and Sebastian who are here until Thursday. I hope it's not going to be too hot for them.

Meet my new bubs

These two young ladies are blotched blue tongues which I acquired yesterday from a breeder in Grafton. I also bought a boy as well. They will be kept in plastic tubs inside until they reach adolescence later this year when they'll go outside in an enclosure landscaped to resemble their habitat. I've long wanted to keep this species...the colours of reds and yellows get quite pronounced when they are adult.

I've been fortunate that most of my reptiles have been gifts (Kimba the woma, my two rough scaled pythons and the two black blue tongues I'm getting next week) but I paid for these guys...these two cost the same as one of our belted galloways!

pests pests pests

As much as like the sight of fluttering butterflies and spectacular moths, the damage that their bubs make to our plants is not so good. Our two Illawarra flame trees have had pretty much all their foliage stripped off them by juicy fat green caterpillars that denude them each summer. I try and keep them under control by squishing the little 'tents' they shelter in during the day made of a folded back piece of leaf, but unless you are vigilant and do this on a daily basis, you may as well not bother.

Then, this morning I looked more closely at the water lily leaves, which I had noticed seemed to have had some predator action, and sure enough another variety of green caterpillar, this one more maggot-like and slimy, has been munching its way through our water lily leaves.

I made my way through the rank grass down to our creek plantings to discover that our red cedar plantings are now battling cedar tip moth caterpillars, while another variety of brown, bird-poo like fat caterpillar has been joyfully eating its way through a tropical Arum lilly.

Bitches!