Getting the place ready for Xmas

 Which inevitably means quite a bit of mowing. Now you all know how much I enjoy saddling up Roger and mowing the lower paddocks and the lawns around the house, but the part of the property I really find challenging is down by the creek. Part of the problem is the long walk down the paddock pushing the mower over uneven ground and snags until you actually get to where you need to mow. And then there's the long walk back up the paddock after you've exhausted yourself mowing. This is a shot from the seat that Kevin and Antonin installed looking down over the area I was mowing today.

 I (or Julia, as Julia mows down here more often than me) hadn't mowed down here for probably close to two months and it showed! My heart sank as I wheeled the mower down and saw the extent of the growth. A suburban back yard has nothing on this!

It took me four hours (with a couple of breaks to refill the petrol in the mower and refill my water levels) before I'd conquered it. I'll mow it again next week and that should have it looking great for the Xmas and New Year period when we'll have quite a few friends staying over. No doubt there will be some creek-related activities and so we need a pleasant access to the creek.

No storm, no burlesque

 So we were all set to head down to Kyogle Golf Club to meet up with our friends, Elizabeth and Mel, to enjoy a night of burlesque and drag, when this big, angry, nasty looking storm front appeared. After some phone consultations we decided we would wait until the storm passed us by, rather than driving directly into it.

The BoM satellite showed that it was headed directly for Kyogle so we thought it safer to sit it out in the comfort of our home. It turned out that we were on the very edge of it and apart from lots of lightening and thunder, and a few spots of rain, that was it. However, it wasn't until 8.30 that it passed and the show had started by then. With another 20 minutes to drive down there, we decided to give it a miss. Bugger.
The sky darkened over again late today but all we go were a few spots of rain.  We definitely don't want another hail storm, but a nicely energising electrical storm with about 20 mm of rain would be perfect.

Weekend Triumphant in Newcastle

 This past weekend we spent in Newcastle. Steve, together with Bev, had been nominated for best costume design in a non-professional production, for their costumes for Metropolitan Players production of Phantom of the Opera, so we flew down on Friday afternoon in time for the CONDA Awards in the sumptuous Civic Theatre.

 The category was second up so Steve and Bev didn't have long to wait.  The agony was over when they were announced joint winners along with Valmay and George for hair and wigs, also for Phantom.  Phantom picked up 7 CONDAS and Steve's CONDA was his 6th.

 And here is the proud costume designer flanked by our friends, Joel and Glen, who were looking resplendent in matching ivory tails with sequinned fronts (courtesy of Steve some time ago, for another show, 42nd Street).  We celebrated in style after drinks at the end of the awards ceremony by sneaking into Hamburger Haven around midnight. (Well it is a culinary icon in Newcastle, let's face it, though we both agree its glory days are in the past).

 The next day saw us enjoying a lovely lunch with friends, Glen, Graham, and Geoff, who took the photo. Always great to catch up with the boys when we are in Newie. We needed to do a bit of shopping in the afternoon and then we celebrated our friend, Damien's 40th birthday, which was much fun, held in the salubrious Gallipoli Legion Club.

After a bit of a slow morning, Geoff (who's fabulous art deco flat we were staying at), Steve and I visited our friend, one of Newcastle's Living Treasures, Terry (aka Miss Bubble LeGay) who was recovering from having his second leg amputated. He was in very good spirits considering all that he had been through and the challenges he was facing with getting up to hospital three times a day for dialysis and delays in being properly equipped with various devices to help him with his daily life.
Then on to my mum and dad's for lunch with my bro, Brett who had come up from Sydney and my sisters, Alison and Leanne and their respective families.  Mum always puts on a great lunch and it was lots of fun.  We won't be coming down to Newcastle for Christmas this year, but instead we are having a quiet, low key, Larnook Christmas, so this lunch was a pre-Christmas celebration, where we could celebrate that we were all together and in good health and in good spirits.

Floral Arrangements

 This is our gorgeous Madagascan 'palm', Pachypodium lamerei. It's actually a relative of the frangpani, which can be see in the style of flower. This amazing plant which is now close to 2.5 metres tall has been with us for about 10 years but this is only the second time it has flowered. The first time it flowered it only produced one flower, so it's a real treat to see a few flowers on it.

 One of the sights of summer in the northern rivers, a beautiful Poinciana in flower against an endless blue sky.

And another sight of late spring/early summer: an Illawarra flame tree. These are so stunning and this one in particular stands proud on the side of a slope along Rock Valley Road about 15 minutes from our place.

When in doubt post pics of eating and food

 So that's what I'll do. Piglet, aka Michael, has been staying with us this past four weeks, he leaves at the end of this week, and a couple of weeks ago we had a scrummy dinner with Glen, Liam and Julia. Piglet slow cooked a shoulder of pork and then made this delicious

 salsa, which was then combined with the pulled pork, the most crunchy and gorgeous crackling and a tortilla, into

 this very enjoyable creation.  Stevie made his decadent toblerone cheesecake to round things off, but I have been remiss in not having photographed that creation.

Then for Sunday breakie we had what is becoming a trademark Larnook Big Breakfast which consists of corn fritters (made with corn off the cob, of course), home made guacamole, bacon and bbq'd roma tomatoes on a piece of Turkish bread sprayed with olive oil and then toasted on the bbq.  Not a bad way to start a Sunday, really. Oh that's right, we also had orange juice and champagne to wash it down.  Decadent with a capital D!

Celebrations. Champagne. And a visit from Warwick (Katie).

As you will read in the post below, we've had a busy weekend with family coming to visit. This is our neice, Warwick, (OK so we have a kooky unconventional intentional family as well as our kooky but lovely biological family), who arrived for Sunday night. Here he is with a bottle of champaign which he is presenting to Steve on account of all his hard work in creating costumes for Phantom of the Opera. And because Warwick really likes champagne. A lot. And it just so happens that the very next day, on the Monday, the CONDAs (City of Newcastle Drama Awards) were announced and Steve and his co-costume designer and creator, Bev, were nominated for a CONDA for theor costumes for Phantom. We will go to Newcastle in early December to attend the awards ceremony and hopefully see Steve and Bev win a CONDA.  Combined nicely with our daughter, Damien's 40th birthday the next day.

Grandson Jason comes a'visiting

 We were very happy to have our grandson (OK so he's not really our grandson but we have this kooky intentional family thing happening...go with it) Jason spend the weekend with us. He arrived around 8pm Friday after flying into Coolangatta and came bearing a gift - not of this pineapple jam which we got from Lismore car boot market on the Sunday, but rather a bottle of champagne. We raised him well!

 After Kyogle on Saturday morning we drove to Mavis's Kitchen at Uki for a delicious lunch and yet more bubbles. Jas enjoyed Mavis' as we thought he would and it was hot and the air was filled with that pre-storm feeling.

 Which became more of a pre-storm look as we left there around 2pm.  The storm broke while we were driving home and

 Julia texted me to warn me that a hail storm (one of four we experienced from Friday through to Monday - see below) had just cut a swathe of destruction across his property and was heading down towards us. Luckily we missed the hail (we've just leased a new car and really didn't want it hail damaged the second week into having it) but the rain became so strong that Steve had to pull over at Mt Burrell about 20 minutes from our place until it had calmed down a bit.

And we'll finish with another of Jason's purchases at the car boot market...this very retro and camp set of Tupperwear cocktail 'glasses' each with a swizzle spoon with matching colour and a little shelf at the top to place olives or yummy bits of cake or slice.  It was a hoot of a weekend and we look forward to Jas's next visit.

an early (white) xmas

 As we approached our place, about five minutes away, we suddenly encountered hail coating the paddocks and leaves, branches and other debris covering the road. I had not a minute or so remarked to Steve that the car's thermometer must not be working because when we had left Lismore it was 31 degrees and nearing our place it said it was just 15 degrees. Now that could not have possibly been correct. Well it was. The strip between Cawongla and Larnook school had just suffered a severe hail storm.

 When we drove in through the gate and looked to the right, this is what we saw. Hail covering the lawns and the gardens. It really looked like snow.

 This is just a random sample of the hail and as you can see, there was some fair sized hail stones amongst it.

 Say no more.

Luckily we didn't cop any serious damage but our plantings and gardens have taken a battering including what was a beautiful crop of basil that was powering along. I'd also planted (well Julia had actually) some heirloom cherry tomato varieties between the basil plants. As you can see, they got shredded. We copped another major hail storm the following day, the Monday, while we were at work, and these poor plants are now pretty much beyond salvaging I think.
So we ended up copping four hail storms, from Friday through to Monday. That's a lot of hail. And more are expected this coming weekend, unfortunately.

Dramatic skies. Storms.

 Storm season has begun. With a vengeance! This massive storm passed overhead at work (ie Southern Cross Uni) last Thursday afternoon. Pretty impressive looking and dumped some rain and hail. Although we didn't get any hail at our place. At least not on Thursday night.

 And this was the sunset that followed the storm. Taken from a spot I don't often photograph from, looking out over our neighbour, Marissabelle's place down the valley.

 Another nice sunset shot.

And the moon. The jacaranda tree had begun to lose most of its flowers by this stage, so it looks a tad skeletal.

Fish pond clean out

 This was a big job. The pond had not been cleaned for some time and the amount of algae and scum was disgusting. From go to wo it took the best part of a weekend, although much of that was just draining the water. I'd caught the 40 or so white cloud mountain minnows over the preceding few days and then I syphoned out the water. Thank the lord for high pressure water hose thingies, I say. It would have taken forever to have scrubbed the algae off the sides by hand and to have cleaned the scum off the pebbles but with our trusty Kartcha, I blasted the algae and scum clean right off. If you enlarge the pic above you can see what the un-blasted parts of the pond walls looked like - that was what the walls looked like all over.

 Once the gravel was cleaned, bucket load by bucket load it was put back in and the filter and fountain placed back in and the pond filled.

And there we have it. One nicely cleaned pond!  And that has just reminded me that I need to add the barley straw compound to it tomorrow to try and keep it that way!

My early Sunday morning walk to Billen Cliffs

 I have been trying to get up early on Sunday mornings over the past few months to walk to the entry to Billen Cliffs. I'm not power walking by any means but rather I do more of a brisk stroll and it takes an hour for the round trip. I begin by bidding my early morning hello to the boys, who then get terribly excited in that loveable bovine way of theirs and begin mooing for their morning treat of lucerne. I feel a bit guilty about this because it means Steve and whoever else might be staying with us is woken up by the boys' incessant mooing.

 Once I get on to Martin's Road, who knows what I might see or hear. Unfortunately on my last walk a few weeks ago (yes, I've been slack) I found a couple of casualties along the way. This black shouldered kite (which is a surprise because I wouldn't have thought it would have been a likely car victim) and

 this eastern swamp hen, which unfortunately do get hit from time to time as they like to wander out on to roads as if they own them. And often suffer the consequences. But happily, not all the fauna I saw on this walk was ex-fauna.

 And this is an example of being in the right place at the right time. I had already passed along this part of the road about five minutes prior to returning to it on my way back. No python on my first walk past. And python when I returned. The road surface was quite warm and so this fella had decided to stay put and soak up the warmth. Given that it was close to two metres long and stretched out across the middle of the road, I was concerned that it could have been run over.

So I urged it gently off the road in the direction it was travelling. Which was fortunate because two cars passed by within a couple of minutes going both directions and I suspect that this python would have joined the swamp hen and black shouldered kite as an ex-python. Carpet pythons seem to be very common in our valley. Will they stay common in the next 50 years I wonder.  I hope so.

Unexpected (and very unwelcome) visitor in the Lizard Palace

I've had some drama in the Lizard Palace of late. I noticed a couple of mice in there about a month or so ago and I thought that they might have come in via the leaf mulch that I had raked up off the edges of Martin's Road. I searched for them but didn't find them again, so I put mouse-eradication activities towards the back of my mind. However, a week or so later I discovered to my horror that one of my western blue tongues had a badly swollen arm and some small bite marks in its arm pit. The vet didn't really have much experience with reptiles and didn't know that reptiles don't produce liquid puss so the needle that she was sticking in its arm to draw out puss was ineffectual and possibly damaging (but to be fair on the vet, neither did I at that stage). She gave me an antibiotic to give to it daily but unfortunately it died a few days later.  Now I am still not sure whether it was a mouse, a rat - yes I have  now seen rats in there at night, or another of the blue tongues. Now, even though I kept a 'group' of between 6 and 12 eastern blue tongues in an outdoor enclosure when I was a kid, I have been largely unaware of the aggression that blue tongues inflict on each other. So, much so that I have had to separate my two blotched blue tongues (I am hoping that the aggression has been mating-related and I will enjoy the pitter-patter, pitter-patter of little feet soon).
Anyway, I have been setting mouse and rat traps and have managed a few dead rodents but I was completely surprised by this capture. i have since realised of course that the rodents can gain access through the chicken wire mesh of the Lizard Palace roof from the overhanging branches of shrubs but the toad could have only been raked up in the leaf litter.  I also saw to my horror last weekend one of my baby Tasmanian blotched blue tongues (well not so baby anymore, they are about 20cm long) carting around a very dead, squashed cane toad skin in its mouth, which I promptly removed from its mouth. And they're just blue tongues!

Wildlife Snippet

Stanley, the satin bower bird who lives next door at Marissabelle's flew up on to the back deck the other day while I was lolling on the daybed. He then grabbed one of the cherry tomatoes that are growing on a vine near the hot tub and flew off with it.

Operation Moo Moo

As the days have passed and no rain of any magnitude has fallen, our grazing paddock where we graze the boys, Baxter and Dexter, has grown progressively browner and the grass cover has just about died off. Although we've been hand feeding them now for a couple of months, it was time to bite the bullet and transfer them into our other, larger paddock on the eastern side of McGuinness Road. Our neighbour, Bill, has been grazing his beef steers on our paddock for the past year or so, as there is a gate on our common fence, but seizing an opportunity to close the gate when his stock were elsewhere - and after walking the fenceline to make sure there were no breaks, accompanied by our friend Liam, on one of his weekend trips to Larnook from Karragarra Island, it was time to organise the transfer.

We decided to act two Sunday mornings ago. Not only was Liam staying here but so too were Glen and Vaughan. So, with Steve and I that made five. Five against two...the odds were in our favour. It helped that they are a tad hungry all the time now (although I hasten to add that they are still pretty rotund and downright obese in comparison to most other cattle around here at present). Anyway, the plan was for me to enter their paddock with a wheelbarrow carrying some nice green lucerne and hope that the boys would follow me all the way down to the bottom of the paddock and then out through the gate, up McGuinness Road and into their new premises.  No sooner had I wheelbarrowed my way into their paddock did they gallop up to me, heads tossing and saliva dribbling in thick mucous-ey ribbons from their open mouths. They were a little more exuberant actually than I had been anticipating and it was difficult to wrestle the barrow away from them. Nevertheless I managed to move away from them and then literally run down the slope with the barrow in front of me, followed by two seriously hungry bovines.

Glen and Vaughan were positioned further down McGuinness Road to stop them from heading the opposite direction. As I expected, Dexter had no qualms in leaving the security of the paddock which has been his home for the past three years to follow the trail of lucerne but Baxter, being the sensitive and somewhat delicate younger half-brother, needed a little more coaxing. Once they were both out they calmly headed up the road, though at a slightly quicker pace. Than I had been expecting. Fearing that they would wander too far ahead and down towards Bill's place I yelled to Liam to run back up the paddock and come out of our driveway to make sure they went into their new paddock and not keep heading up the road. As their speed which seemed to reflect their general enthusiasm for loping up the road increased, I began to worry that Liam by himself wouldn't be able to do much to stop them, and I didn't want them to try and access our driveway via the cattle grid because they might have broken their legs. I jumped over the barbed wire fence and raced back through our house paddock and met up with Liam. We both guarded the road trying to shepherd them in through the gate into their new paddock.

However, they seemed reluctant to obey us and instead headed in to the rainforest garden we have at the drive, gaining access rather delicately in between a couple of large tree ferns. By this stage I was close to apoplexy as I was sure they would trample over my beloved rainforest plantings. I also new that they could actually gain access into the house paddock via this garden if they kept pushing their way through the shrubbery. I hugh tailed it around the other side to attempt to stop them. But magically they suddenly were overcome with bovine commonsense and retreated out of the garden and trotted across the road and through the gate. We closed the gate behind them and Project Moo Moo was achieved.

They've been in their new paddock for almost two weeks now and seem to be enjoying themselves. There's a fair bit of (short) grass over there and they are now spending their days grazing again and then relaxing, while they chew their cud in the shade.

Rough scaled snake 1 November 2013

Reptile Sighting: Rough Scaled Snake
Looked like a gravid female, quite thick, crossing McGuinness Road into our paddock but down near the fence with our neighbours, Cheryl and Peter's place. I was on Roger just driving up the road after rogering the lower paddock and it was about 6.30. Quite a hot day.

1448 pages of Alfred C Kinsey

One of my favourites in our ever-expanding DVD collection is the movie, Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson as Kinsey. Not surprisingly, it's the story of Alfred C. Kinsey, the sex researcher of the 1940s and 1950s who most notably wrote the volumes Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953). One night after enjoying another viewing of the movie it suddenly occurred to me that the movie was probably based on a biography of Kinsey and that 'of course, there would have to be a biography or two written about him'. Durrrh. (I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes). So I Googled and sure enough I was soon entering my credit card details into an online purchase order for a Blue Mountains bookshop for my very own Kinsey biography. Now, while I was waiting for it to arrive, I was in Newcastle to see Phantom, and being the book whore that I am I spent some time rummaging through various Newcastle second-hand book shops. And, I found a Kinsey biography - the one on the right, all 935 pages of it - for $10.  I was assuming that this was the same book that I had just bought online but I thought at $10 I could afford it even if I was to receive it in the post again.  But lo and behold when my package from the Blue Mountains bookshop arrived if it wasn't a different biography, the one on the left, which was only 513 pages long. Phew!
I began with the biggie and managed to finish it in about three weeks. I then moved straight on to the other because I was interested in how each of the authors approached the subject and whether or not their interpretations varied much. The biography on the left, written by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy is often quite scathing of the one on the right, written by James H Jones. Jones argues that Kinsey was driven by various demons which pursued him relentlessly throughout his life. These demons were what Jones regards as his essential homosexuality, his inability to really accept this aspect of his self and his penchant for sado-masochism. Jones also tended to side with a number of Kinsey's detractors about some of the aspects of his studies, particularly the way he constructed his sample of something like 15 000 case histories. Jones also argues that at least some of Kinsey's interests were less scientifically motivated and more motivated by Kinsey's own desires, such as the filming of sex acts in the attic of his house, ostensibly to collect data, just as Masters and Johnson did a decade or so later. (SBS is currently showing a series based on the lives and work of M and J, somewhat unimaginatively titled, 'Masters of Sex').
Gathorne-Hardy argues that these demons are more in the imagination of Jones than real, and that rather than being homosexual, Kinsey's sexuality was fluid and for much of his life beyond his 40s he was bisexual. (Kinsey was married happily to his wife 'Mac' who provided him with amazing and loyal support). Gathorne-Hardy also demonstrates that Kinsey had an interest in SM (indeed it was probably Kinsey who coined the term) but did not see this aspect of him compelling him so much as did Jones.
Anyway, I really enjoyed immersing myself in the life of Kinsey, as recounted through these two biographies.
I recently 'liked' the Kinsey Institute's Facebook page and I hope to visit it sometime at the University of Illinois.
I once wrote something about Kinsey in a draft of my book 'Gay Tourism' though I'm not sure it ever made it to the final version. I can remember my co-author at that time, my friend, Loykie, asking me why I had written 'The zoologist, Alfred C Kinsey'...I had been following the way by which many social scientists had referred to Kinsey, trying to locate him as a zoologist (who really shouldn't have been doing social research). And of course his PhD is in zoology and the first 20 years of his career was studying gall wasps, and he did treat the sexual behaviour of humans as a form of zoology. BUT, he was much more than this and was a humane, empathic person who was indeed a social reformer, who actively campaigned to change archaic laws which saw people imprisoned for pre-marital sex or oral sex, believe it or not.
I will continue to enjoy learning as much as I can about Kinsey and his institute.

A Miscellany of Beasts

 A pair of magpies have shared Maryville with us since we moved in five years ago and each year they nest and generally produce one youngster which we hear calling pretty much for much of the day begging to have its mouth filled with tasty morsels. The parents are doing it tough this year because it's so dry and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of insect tucker around. So they often hang around the back verandah hoping to get lucky. The youngster was on the lawn on front of the house yesterday (the photo is of one of the parents) and we were a tad concerned it wouldn't be able to fly back up into the nest, but it seems to have accomplished this.

 Two of my Tasmanian Blotched Blue Tongues enjoying the overcast conditions yesterday. I got these in February from a breeder in Brisbane and they were about 8-10cms long. They have a distinctive and quite attractive reddish-orange tinge to their heads.

 This spider's web caught my eye the other morning as the light from the sun picked up the geometric lines of the web. Astonishing really, isn't it.

 OK, so this isn't actually a beast. Or the construction of a mini-beast. Now I'm going to call this a Brazilian Cherry but I'm not sure that's correct. Anyway, it's covered in fruit at the moment and I helped myself to half a dozen of these this afternoon. The fruit is a bit tart but I like it.

 We've been visited by a couple of pairs of king parrots over the past few weeks. OK, so this, as are most of my pictures these days, was taken on my iPhone, so I wasn't able to zoom in on it, but you can see it dangling off the frangipani. The kingies seem to be attracted particularly by the seedpods of the zigzag wattles which are hanging off the wattle trees. They are such lovely parrots.

As are these guys, of course. A small flock of about a dozen yellow tailed black cockatoos flew into Maryville this weekend and when I was doing a walk around the boundary fence of our paddock on the other side of McGuinness Road, I was able to walk up to a big wattle tree in which four of the birds were perched. My attention was drawn by this little guy (a bub) who cried for food for all the time I was watching them. The youngsters are very noisy when they are hungry and incessantly squark/whinge for food. Mum or dad was too busy ripping open a branch looking for grubs to pay this little fella any attention. You can see the golden flowers of the silky oak behind it. The valley is very colourful at the moment with silky oaks, jacarandas and Illawarra flame trees all in flower.

The boys get a treat

 We had this big round bale of wheat delivered from the friendly people at the Kyogle rural store last Wednesday and we rolled it down into the boys' paddock on Thursday afternoon after work. It was rather heavy but rolled down pretty well, though it was a little reluctant to roll where we wanted it to go.

 It didn't take long before the boys came over to investigate and they found it to their liking, which was a relief. As I posted last week, the boys' paddock is pretty much bare of grass now so we've been hand feeding them with bales of lucerne and rye grass for the past month or so. The boys have lost weight and are no longer at their rotund best.

 Baxter particularly liked it and would use his head to loosen up the wheat so he could have a good go at it.

 Here he is covered in wheat stalks. He's a loveable rogue.

By today (Sunday) the boys had demolished the lovely symmetrical shape of the bale so that it now resembles a hay stack. They've eaten a fair bit of it but hopefully there's still a  few days left. I'm hopefully going to move them into our other paddock on the other side of McGuinness Road this weekend. Our neighbour, Bill, has been grazing his cattle in that paddock for the past couple of years but I've had to close the gate on his beasts so that our two can get access to some grass. Hopefully there will be a bit of growth in that paddock after we had 16mm of rain a few days ago.