The Tuesday Cow

We've had the Monday heron; now we have the Tuesday cow. I couldn't understand why Toby was barking; then I noticed a cute heifer wandering around the garden. It was just as curious about me as I was about it, and it let me get quite close with my camera. Eventually it got bored and mooched off to see the grass on the other side of the road. Luckily we live on a VERY quiet road.

The wildlife here is great (well, the stuff with 2 - 4 legs, anyway). We have swallows nesting under the car port and they sit very cosily together in the evenings, snuggled up in the corner; there's a hare that we've spotted along the verge several times; there are kookaburras and plovers in the paddock; kangaroos and wallabies regularly jump across the grass; little lizards run around in the sun on the deck; and satin bowerbirds, a butcher bird and lots of mynah birds fly around the garden. Hoorah for nature!

Now it's the caterpillars

What is it with the bloody insects around here? Not content with spiders the size of small plates in my bathroom, or enormous crickets that look as if they've been armour-plated in the guest room, I am now afflicted with poisonous caterpillars falling onto me from trees. It isn't funny and it isn't clever.

There I was, wandering around the garden, suitably attired - so I thought - in socks, proper shoes, long trousers and elbow-length leather gauntlets (I'm not kidding), when I felt something land on my neck and brushed it off. Tum te tum, I gather some beautiful azaleas to put in a vase and return to the house. A short while later I feel something on my neck again and flick it off. It lands on the workbench and I notice a small hairy caterpillar. 'Oh!', I thought. 'Hairy caterpillars are often an irritant to the birds that try and eat them.' So I gingerly scooped it onto a bit of card and chucked it out of the door.

An hour or so later my neck began to be a bit itchy and I thought I must have been bitten by a mosquito, but no! I have a caterpillar-trail of hives all around my neck, with new lumps appearing by the minute. My neck is, in fact, red, swollen and almost unbearably itchy and I am feeling a bit pissed off. I can't cover it up because it's so itchy, so I'm attracting a lot of unwelcome 'looks' as well as unwelcome pests. WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE BLOODY INSECTS IN THIS PLACE?

Dogs and little fishes

Poor old Toby's in the vet hospital again with another paralysis tick, poor thing. You know your dog is ill when it sniffs at its favourite treat but isn't capable of eating it! Michael and I are feeling very guilty that we didn't spot the damned tick, but at least we did spot the symptoms and get him to the vet in time. I hate to think what could have happened if both of us worked away from home: we might have come home this evening to find Toby dead on the carpet... Hopefully he's going to be OK: we rang the vet this afternoon but were told it takes 12 hours before it really becomes apparent which way things are going to go but he did say that at least we'd been able to get Toby admitted in good time. Oh dear!

On a lighter note, we took Ella out this afternoon (she is going back to school tomorrow after her chicken pox/ear infection) and went to get the first fish for our newly set up aquarium! Those of you who visited us in Bristol may remember the octagonal column tank we used to have in our hallway. We've had lots of fun here filling it and getting it set up: our first thought was to use bore water, which is what we have as a water source for all our water needs, but the pet shop staff told me that it was too full of minerals for tropical fish and that we'd better use rain water instead. Thankfully with the aid of all available water-holding receptacles in the house we were able to collect enough rainwater to fill the tank in a single evening: 100 litres off the roof in a few hours! After several days of settling down we've now put in 6 assorted Platys and 2 different small cat fish. We'll see how they go. Having only seen red Platys with black fins or orange Platys with red tails it was interesting to see greater variations in their colour: we've got two ordinary red ones with back fins, one orange one with a red tail (named 'Sylvie' by Ella), one almost black one with a bit of red ('Black Spot'), one with metallic gold sides ('Shimmer'), and one orangey-red one ('Daisy'). I suspect that we have a mix of males and females as we had last time, so hopefully around Christmas when the tank's had time to settle down we might have Platy babies again!

Panoramas

I've been busy with Photoshop, learning as I go! I keep taking these panorama photographs with the intention of stitching them together but haven't got round to it until now. I thought you might like to see where we're now living, and where we're going to live.






This is obviously the back of the house, taking photographs from the paddock fence. So there's 10 acres of grass and trees and large ponds that you can't see, behind me as I took the photos. The other side of the house isn't very exciting... The main body of the house is an 'L' shape, with the other arm of the 'L' behind our bedroom and extending around the back of the pool and deck area.










This is a view up the hill towards the back of our block, showing the way in which it curves into the hill and is embraced by the ridge which runs up one side, around the back, and down the other side. The geophysical surveys show that the bowl of the hill is subject to landslides so we will use it for garden, paddocks and orchard i.e. things that don't matter if there is a slip... As the left hand boundary and the back are all koala habitat we shall be building on the ridge running down the right hand edge of the block, indicated on the photo. We recently engaged a man to come in with big machinery and clear out the undergrowth on the site, so this picture was taken afterwards, when it had dried off enough for us to be able to go up there with our architect, Christian, and take a fresh look at the proposed new house site. Christian seems enthusiastic, even though it means a complete re-draw of his plans to take in a steeper slope and smaller footprint for the house. We're awaiting the plans with interest.

Bluebottles

A few weeks ago we had big sea storms and when I walked Toby on the beach I found Bluebottles - the first of these infamous Australian nuisances that I've seen. They're reknowned for affecting paddlers and surfers and in 'the season' many beaches are closed. In severe cases of stinging people have died, but for most people an encounter with a Bluebottle ends up in excruciating pain and nasty scars...


For the first day or two I only found small numbers of tiny Bluebottles, but then I went down one morning and the high-tide mark was just covered in thousands of them, some of them a good 6 inches long although that isn't their maximum size.

Strictly speaking Bluebottles (Physalia Physalis) aren't jellyfish but Siphonophores, colonies of polyps and medusoids. They have a translucent 'float' which is tinged blue around the edges and gives its common name, but they're actually a type of Portuguese Man o'War. Larger Bluebottles trail strings of stinging cells over a metre long in the water, trapping small fish and crustaceans, but these small examples only had strings of about a foot long.














I found it all quite eerie and was glad that - owing to the storms and the general state of the weather - I'd elected to wear my wellies on the beach! When I found large masses of them, some quite fresh, I was worried Toby might tread on some stings and be badly affected but he was oblivious to the danger and I think I would have known about it if he'd been stung...

Yeah, yeah, I've been busy...

Those of you who have witnessed the vastness of my baggage on previous visits will be surprised to hear that I managed to spend a single night in Sydney with only one, half-full rucksack... There were two reasons for this: firstly I was only there for a night and didn't think that merited checked-in luggage, and secondly it seems that a bunch of world leaders thought they'd drop in on Sydney to have some APEC meeting, do a bit of shopping and catch up with the animals at the zoo. The resulting security lock-down in Sydney is amazing and ridiculous and I felt it would be better to be travelling light.

APEC is all Sydney-siders seem to be talking about at the moment, from the taxi driver to the newsagent. I wanted to see things that are close to or within the security perimeter and although all the information said it would be 'business as usual' at least at this end of the week, it really wasn't. For starters there is now a 5-kilometer 12 foot high metal and mesh fence around the CBD and the Opera House, which has closed roads and created pedestrian 'check points' at designated crossings. While I wasn't stopped and searched I was certainly scrutinised, by CCTV, the many groups of policemen and 'HazMat' agents ('hazardous materials', I gather) and the strange cars with jamming and video surveillance equipment cruising down the streets. Restaurants and cafes around Circular Quay are empty; I had the restaurant at the MCA to myself when I stopped long enough to have a coffee; and the staff at the Royal Botanic Gardens Shop greeted me like a long-lost friend after I'd braved a maze of blocked turnings, police blockades and manned crossings to find a way into the gardens to see the orchid displays...

I have never experienced anything like it, not just from a practical 'how do I now get from A to B?' point of view but also from the simmering resentment that is evident. People in the city are actively furious: how dare Bush swan into town with his 250 CIA agents, 4 chefs and 3 plane loads of staff - and, to make it worse - arbitarily decide to arrive two days earlier than planned in order to have a 'bi-lateral lunch' with Johnnie Howard, thus throwing all the careful arrangements into disorder? Australian tax payers will be footing a bill $370 million dollars - which includes optional day-trips for the entourage, including a visit to the zoo animals. Note that I didn't say 'to the zoo' - oh no. That would be too much of a security risk, so star animals have been transported to Garden Island from Taronga Park so that the ladies who lunch can view them in comfort and in more easily defendable surroundings.

Apparently we're all supposed to feel honoured and priviledged that Bush agreed to Howard's request to hold the meeting in little old Australia. I think it might have been planned as a triumphant proclamation of Australia's "special relationship" with the USA in the twilight of Howard's loyal premiership, just before the November elections and I suspect it was thought that the war in Iraq would be 'going well' by now so the meeting could be seen as a pat on the back for Howard. Sad how things turn out, isn't it? Sydney-siders are furious about the disruption, Australian tax-payers are furious about the bill, and every second person is scathing about the war. So I hope everyone enjoys their little outings around the Harbour this week: a Southerly change has blown in and as my flight took off it began to pour with rain.