Waskally wild wallabies

Steve and I woke up in the middle of last night to what sounded like a young bull elephant being pursued by a banshee right along our verandah. Quickly ruling out both elephants and banshees we settled for an explanation involving the dog from down the road which periodically visits us. But that was incorrect as well. Turns out that there was a fairly major altercation amongst a number of the red necked wallabies that share Maryville with us. Lots of thunping, hopping on the verandah, nashing of teeth, deep nasty dry cough-like grunting and chasing.
I expected to see mangled corpses lying all over the place this morning but all seems to have ended peacefully.
Steve's busy (on his last day of hols) hanging a glass door in our entry while I've been out planting a few trees and getting my desk back under some sort of control.

A weekend in Brisvegas

Wasn't the weather absolutely superb this weekend? Well it was up here, hope it was for you, too. Steve and I choofed off up to Brisvegas around midday on Saturday, getting up to the Mantra Apartments on Southbank 2.5hrs later. This excursion was in aid of seeing two American stars of stage, screen and musicals, Patti Lupone and Mandy Penoptokurion..well that's not his name but it's something like that. They performed at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre which was a 5 minute stroll up South Bank. We ate at a Vietnamese Restaurant before the show and even had a drink at a bar before that. The show was fanatastic.

It seems that every city worth it's salt now has to have its own version of the London Eye. Melbourne has one (though it buckled a bit during their extreme heat earlier in the year) and now Brisvegas has one.

On the way back home this morning, we stopped at Uki, which is 15 mins west of Murwillumbah and 45 mins north east of our place, to have a stroll around the market. As tourist marketing slogans go, I think Uki's isn't bad, and is almost poetic....the little village is glorious and sits uner Wollumbin (Mt Warning).

This pic gives a nice view of the village of Uki which runs along the Tweed River and sits below the volcanic peaks including Wollumbin. It's funny how the past is often echoed in the present....many many years ago, probably about 16 or so, Steve and I drove up to the Gold Coast and we actually stayed at Uki (where I joined a frog expedition for the night and spent much of the night on the flanks of Wollumbin looking for the marsupial frog). I can remember us giggling about how Uki was pronounced U-ki) and now here we are living just 45 mins awy from it. Spooky.

When we got home, Steve set to work doing some carpentary (he's putting in a new door between the Good Room and the kitchen) while I liberated the girls so they could scratch around outside, and planted some gingers and some rainforest trees.

Dinner with friends/colleagues

We had our friends, John (Jenkins) and David (Rowe) over for dinner on Wednesday night. John is head of school of tourism and hospitality management (ie my boss) and was also a colleague at Uni of Newcastle. I was too drunk to take any photos on the night so thought it would be fun to use pics of each of them as supplied through Google images. So John above, David below.

David is based at University of Western Sydney where he is a Professor in Cultural Studies and was up at Southern Cross University to review a degree in media studies. So as I said, he came over for dinner and a sleep over on Wednesday night. He is a regular reader of this blog, so I'm sure he will be pleased as punch to see this image.

We enjoyed a spinach and fetta pie made with our own silver beet and eggs, and Steve made his famous Armenian Nutmeg cake.

Ducks, custard apples and market day

It must be the time of year when wood ducks start pairing up..I've noticed quite a few pairs grazing together on the lawns of properties down in the Rock Valley as well as on our own lawns.

Moving up here has meant that we've had the opportunity to eat fruits we'd not tried before. We've loved eating black sapote (also called chocolate pudding fruit), didn't care much for dragon fruit and tonight we tried custard apple - which was beautiful! Recommended!

The weather up here over the pasr few weeks has been rather iffy, in fact it's been quite cold some days. But the weekend was beautiful and today was perfect. 23 degrees, blue sky, not a cloud to be seen. So we headed off this morning to the Channon Market to meet up with our friends Stewart and Matt who live in Georgica which is in the Jiggi Valley. The pic is of the Chai Tent which is a kind of meeting place, chill out zone where one can buy organic chai tea and, other substances, I've been told, later on in the afternoon.

We bought plants of other kinds, buying a native gardenia, some gingers, some cliveas, a himalayan iris and a himalayan magnolia, amongst others. Got back home around 12.30 and spent the afternoon walking over the property, checking out the creeks, and picking bush lemons. Steve made a rather tangy lemon cheese slice with the bush lemons on Wednesday and we also juiced some of our tangellos (we thought they were oranges) for breakfast this morning to have with our porridge.

I drive up to Uni of Qld tomorrow in Brisbane for a day-long seminar, back home tomorrow evening and then after I have finished teaching on Tuesday morning I drive down to our Coffs Harbour campus for meetings with staff who I supervise.

Oh and the good news - our bowerbird has rebuilt his bower and its looking better than ever.

Bower broken

Checked the bower bird's bower this afternoon and to my horror it's been totally destroyed, presumably by a rival male bowerbird who took out his displeasure at seeing so many beautiful blue trinkets by demolishing it. Nature can be a real b!
I hope 'our' bower bird rebuilds....

Different Sorts of Orange

Our mandarins are copping a hiding from the noisy miners that literally eat them while they are hanging on the tree. We've saved a few - they are quite OK but they have a bit of a bitter after-taste.

This orange trumpet vine breaks out in a riot of colour which adds a tremendous vibrancy to winter. It grows along the fence we share with our neighbour, Marissabelle, whos is an 83year old woman who has lived in her place for 25 years or so. She is staying with her daughter up at the Gold Coast over winter.

Today was another beautiful day and just as the sun statred sinking it cast this wonderful golden orange over the Billen Cliffs.

The sunset became even more spectacular wihth the sky filling with orange, pink, golds just as the sun disappeared.

Saturday, Beautiful Saturday

Today was absolutely glorious, about 21 degrees, big blue sky that you could dive into and a pure white moon that began rising over the Billen Cliffs at about 4.oopm. Bliss.
After our Saturday morning shop in Kyogle, I spent the day mowing. I saddled up Rita and had spent about 15 minutes on her when she decided enough was enough and she shut down on me. In the the words of the inimitable Lizzie Birdsworth, 'she can be a real b, that one'. So, luckily our Rover hand mower is a real little trooper and I spent most of the day pushing that around. I'll probably need another 4 hrs tomorrow to finish the job off. Luckily the grass has slowed right down so won't need another mow for another 3-4 weeks (hopefully).
Steve spent much of the day sawing and planing timber for the window in the kitchen and he's now cooking his world famous spag bol.
Little Miss Clucky is now in solitary confinement for a few days so that her maternal instincts wear off a bit. She's not all that happy about it, but what can you do.
Winter is thistle time so I took great delight in mowing down the baby thistles that were starting to emerge. No cane toads now as the nights are too cold but I did see a blue faced honey-eater and a solitary yellow tailed black cocky today. Oh and the wallabies of course. No doubt they will sulk for a few days once they find out I've mown down their best grazing lands. They won't appreciate the new growth that I'm actually encouraging. They aren't that good at figuring stuff like that out, actually.

Broody hen

One of the girls is broody. She refuses to leave the nestbox and insists on trying to hatch out the unfertilized eggs that have been laid. It seems though that broodiness is a sign that things are going well in the chookery and that the girls (or at least this girl anyway) is happy, well fed and healthy enough to want to abandon the carefree lifestyle available to her and settle down to the unrelenting demands of motherhood. But, as those of us who can remember some high school biology know, unfertilized eggs just don't turn into little chickies.
So the advice I have garnered from Farmer Glen and Google is that I now must remove her from her nest box and place her in solitary confinement for a few days. Luckily our chookery has a little internal caged off area where she can spend a few days, forgetting this unrealistic ambition to be a mother. I just keep learning so much about the (sweet) mysteries of life (at least I've found you...)

massage@larnook

While on our way to meet up with Glen and Peter at Bangalow Market, which turned out to be cancelled due to all the rain we've had up here lately, even though Sunday itself was a magnificent day, we called in to Lismore Tender Centre. Brenda Tender had phoned me on Friday to alert me to a 'simply massive tender sale' so we could hardly resist the siren call of other peoples' discarded objects, could we. Two bids were made: on a massage table like the one above and on a wine barrell. I'm happy to say that we the highest bidder on the massage table and it is now sitting in The Good Room.I've decided to study for a Certificate 4 in Massage through the Australian College of Massage, and I can do each f the 12 subjects bar 1 through distance learning. Now for a name for my business.....
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