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.