What a great weekend

Our friend, Jason, from Sydney, arrived on Friday evening to spend the long weekend with us.  The weather into the Gold Coast airport was sodden and there were some doubts about whether his flight would go ahead or if it did it might have to be diverted to Brisbane, but luck was on his side and his hire car pulled up outside our garage around 7.15.  Lots of drinking of sparkling wine, dinner and spa time occurred shortly afterwards.

After our regular Kyogle Saturday morning, Jas did some work on a painting he has been working on for us for a while now, while I prepped for dinner. The weather had promised cool and wet on Friday night/ Saturday morning so I decided on a slow cooked pulled pork even though the day became progressively hotter and sunnier.  Julia and Bluey came over together with a new friend, Blaine, from Kyogle.  Blaine has taken over a cafe that we occasionally frequented so look out for some big things happening in Kyogle over the next month.

 Anyway, it was a great night - lots of things to eat and drink and lots of chatter and laughter.  The best kind of night.  Then on Sunday Jas, Steve and I headed off to Bangalow market, as that was the only local market Jas hadn't experienced, but it was a very very hot day so we pulled stumps after a
couple of hours and headed north east to Brusnwick Heads.  But, before we left Bangalow we had a browse in a book and art shop and I found this wonderful historical and picture book of the circus.  It has a very interesting chapter on animals in the circus, and even more amazing illustrations so I need to make it my own.  
The beach at Brunny Heads was spectacularly beautiful and we frolicked in the waves for an hour or so before hauling our bodies out to dry on the sand for a while.  Gelato followed soon after and then we headed for Julia's place at Cawongla for afternoon drinks.  Yes, we do lead a very civilised life up here in Larnook/Cawongla.  Blaine came up for drinks as well and we all enjoyed Julia's tour of his amazing garden before settling down in his beer garden for some polite drinking. A huge storm had been brewing which broke without much warning so we all ran in underneath the shelter of the dairy bales.  We really felt like we were part of the storm as the dairy bales is not the most stable or robust of structures.  We received an enjoyable 34 mm of rain out of it.

 And then today dawned sunny and warm so after an enjoyable breakfast of my corn fritters and bacon and mango chutney on the back verandah we drove up to Border Rangers. We stopped at the Blackbutt lookout and

 marvelled at the wonderful view of the Tweed Vally and Wollumbin/Mt Warning before driving further along the road to The Pinnacle lookout which again gave superb views.

 And then we drove clean across the national park to its western edge and went for a walk to Brush Box Falls where we could admire the water hurtling off the cliff face.

 Isn't this the most wonderful ancient liana.

After lunching in Kyogle on pluto pups and scallops - what could be more Australian - we got back home around 3.00pm.  Jas only had an hour before he needed to drive back up to the airport so he got stuck into planting the rainbow gum that he kindly bought for us at the Bangalow markets yesterday.  This species, which doesn't grow naturally in Australia but does grow in PNG and the islands surrounding, is extraordinary.  When mature its bark is coloured in the most beautiful patches of bright crayon colours. We had to plant it in the spot least likely to suffer from frost as it is a tropical species and so doesn't tolerate frost at all. Fingers crossed it will be OK.  Oh we also made up a new saying based on the farmer's market in Kyogle. Lettuces come in two types - your more pedestrian iceberg lettuce and anything else is a fancy lettuce.  So 'that's as fancy as a Kyogle lettuce' is now part of our Larnookian idiom.

We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto...

A rather lame heading really because Jeff didn't bring any dog with him, let along a dog called Toto.  But he does come from Kansas - Manhattan Kansas, can you believe.  Jeff is one of the contributing authors to my book, Animals and Tourism, Understanding Diverse Relationships (to be published in April for those who have been impatiently scanning Amazon) and he was in Australia to do some work for an ecotourism business in Melbourne and so another colleague and I invited him up to Lismore for a few days so we could work on a research project we hope to carry out later in the year which might also lead to an application for a large grant. He stayed at Larnook last Tuesday and Wednesday.

Jeff is interested in wildlife tourism and its conservation outcomes and so last Wednesday we spent the day visiting Fleay's Wildlife Park and Currumbin Wildlife Park in the southern Gold Coast and then finished the day off with a walk on the Bar Mountain track in the Border Ranges National Park, about 30kms north west of our place.   By the time we got up to the little picnic area where you park your car the weather had changed dramatically. We went from 29 degrees at the entry to the national ark to 20 degrees as we climbed up in altitude. It was also misty and we expected to see a silverback mouton gorilla around every bend in the track.  Great day!

It seems we have termites

We've always taken a proactive approach to termites since buying Maryville@Larnook and get the place inspected on an annual basis. Just a couple of weeks out from our 2015 inspection and both Liam and Julia commented, rather too casually for my liking, that it seemed we had termites as the product of their relentless chewing and gnawing could be seen spiralling out of the cracks between timber in the guest bathroom. Stifling a 'don't be ridiculous - that's just dust', I bit my tongue and waited until our insect inspector arrived.  Who told us the same news.

Termites. Not everywhere and no, it is very unlikely that the house would cave in around us anytime soon, but we will need to deal with the invertebrate marauders in a timely and effective manner.  We have located ground zero and the insect exterminator opened up their trails so that the neighbouring colony of black ants could mount their own offensive before he came back tomorrow to check on progress and to do whatever else he needs to do to rid us of this ancient cousin of the cockroach.  Since then Steve has found another site of infestation and they seem to have found their way into my rough scaled python enclosure through the bessar blocks, so we may have to be more aggressive than we first thought.

2014 Rainfall Figures

January 60.5
February 41
March 300
April 43.5
May 48
June 24.5
July 12
August 201
September 28.5
October 17
November 60
December 193

Total 1029.5

2014 1029.5
2013 1638
2012 1573
2011 1777.5
2010 1687
2009 1500

So you can see that 2014 was well and truly the driest year we have had since we moved here with the next driest with 500mm more rain than we had in 2014. No wonder some of the plants have been stressed and not been growing particularly well.  2014 was also marked by some quite severe frosts that badly affected some of our tree plantings including the poinciana we have growing as a specimen tree on the lawn.  We had to remove quite a few branches that had been killed by the frost. Luckily the blue quandongs which looked as though they had been killed are now covered in regrowth.