A hot, but social, weekend

 The weekend was a very hot one here, with 37 degrees reached on both days. Saturday was nasty at times because a hot north-westerly battered our plants over much of the morning, killing off the delicate new fronds on our tree ferns. I'm really hoping that we get a bit of rain tomorrow. Anyway, despite the high temperatures, we had a very social weekend, beginning with lunch on Saturday at Mel and E's fabulous house at Cawongla, literally 7 minutes from our place. We met the girls a few months ago when they happened to be celebrating a friend of their's birthday at the Cawongla Store on a Friday night that we were there with our Canadian friend from Cairns, Ryan. They had dinner at our place a week or so after that and they returned the hospitality yesterday. They have such a beautiful place which is based on a 'shed' construction that they have extended with a separate wing for their bedroom and bathroom. I'll take some more pics another time and show you the interior (oh and the girls as well :-)
After lunch we splashed around in their above ground pool - one of those ones you can get quite cheaply from various department stores - we might do the same.

We were possibly going to head to Lismore Show on Saturday night (Mel and E had actually been on the Friday night and the last time we were there was a couple of years ago with Piglet and Glen) but our mate, Trent, who had convinced us that it would be a good idea to go, if just to eat a dagwood dog (pluto pup) decided it was too hot and dusty so we had a quiet night at home watching Phantom of the Opera (the 25th anniversary production at the Royal Albert Hall - brilliant).

I got up early and set about watering our trees and shrubs before it got too hot and did this diligently for an hour or so before feeding the boys their lucerne which has become their staple now that there is so little grass in the paddock. We're thinking we may have to buy in a big round thingie of lucerne since the hot dry winds continue to brown off any grass that has managed to grow. Our friends, Warwick and John from Melbourne arrived at midday and we enjoyed a long lunch with them starting with a chilled bottle of Pol Gessner champagne. The boys are up staying with friends Matt and Stuart in Bangalow and looking for property to buy as they are keen to relocate up in the Northern Rivers. Which will be completely fabulous if they do.

Sunday, lovely Sunday

 Today was one of those lovely days where you get everything you want to get done, done, and in beautiful weather. Steve has been away in Newcastle this weekend attending the 35th anniversary party of Metropolitan Players, the theatre group he has long been involved with. He's also agreed to do costume design for their production of Phantom of the Opera next year, so he was also going to do some preliminary stuff for that. So I've been pottering around the place, mowing this, cutting back that, that kind of thing. I rodgered the bottom paddocks yesterday, which I always find satisfying, and today I tackled the area down by the creek. As you can see in the pic above, the grass and weeds had started to get away, and so I have myself two hours to whip this into shape.

 And after just one hour and a bit I had it back looking like this. Very happy with myself - so happy that I had to repeat the photo in this posting (it was a mistake which I can't seem to rectify).

 Anyway, it was hot and sweaty work, and pushing (or more correctly, pulling) the lawn mower (yes the creek has to be mown with a push mower) up the paddock is a bit of a hard slog.

I took a walk up over the bridge up Martin's Road to where it meets Cawongla Road this afternoon and found this female water dragon laying her eggs right by the side of the road. I hope the littlies head the right way when they hatch, otherwise their first outing might be their last. I thought to myself how dry the soil was that she was laying in and how careful you have to be if you are trying to incubate reptile eggs yourself - temperature and humidity must be kept within a fairly narrow range - and yet this female decided that this would be suitable. But I have to wonder if she could tell that we were likely to get a storm later on which would moisten the soil and assist the eggs in their incubation.

Dry

It's drier than we've ever experienced it up here and some of the plants are starting to really show the stress of low levels of soil moisture. This far north Queensland tree is normally covered in huge (and I mean huge) leaves but over the past few weeks it has been shedding them. Luckily its branches are covered in small baby leaves - and we have been watering it well - but it's a pretty stressed tree at the moment. Check out the male wallaby just to the left of the tree.

 The paddock in which Baxter and Dexter graze is very dry as well and we really need some good soaking rains (god I sound like a farmer) to kick start the growth of grass. We always give the boys lucerne hay over the winter when the grass slows right down but we've had to continue with the supplementary feeding right through spring. The boys are still looking pretty good but they should really be putting on the weight by now.

And our creek is at its lowest level since we bought the place. Looks beautiful of course but very low. Our own water supplies are fine - our drinking water tank is a good third full and we pump bore water into the other tank which is used to water gardens and for toilet water.

Wet

 I started seeing a storm front developing about 4ish and was hoping that the clouds would open up and unleash a torrent of rain. I heard, for the first time this season, a couple of channel billed cuckoos (also called rainbirds), so I was hoping that was a good sign as well.

And even though the sky started looking tremendously stormy, the clouds headed east and that was that. Or so I thought. But just as I was saying goodbye to our friends from Newcastle, Sam and Jane, who had called in after they had visited the Channon Market and Nimbin, (they are staying in their super deluxe campervan at Byron for a few days), a storm hit. Unfortunately it only rained for 15-20 minutes but I'm hoping we got about 5mm. Not the 40mm I was hoping for this weekend, but 5mm is still 5mm.