Wild Weather

Well that one wasn't too hard: four out of eight people who commented said water or ocean. Although some of those did have a bet either way :-)

I was really impressed with some of the other guesses, pencil, ultrasound and wood.

Well here it is

I shot this on Saturday during my break. Deb and I acted as tour guides for Deb's sister down along the Great Ocean Road. It is meant to be high summer down here in Oz, but it was blowing a gale most of the time. And on Saturday evening it really clouded over. You can see the sun is bravely trying to poke through the incoming storm!

Fortunately there were periods when the clouds blew off but the wind was constant.

It is a beautiful section of the coast and I can never get enough shots of it. I will post more over the next little while but I simply haven't had time to sort them yet.

A sample though, The Twelve Apostles at sunset the evening before. Unfortunately the clouds had built up out at sea and robbed the evening of the rich sunset colour.

This was taken the same afternoon as my “What is it Wednesday” shot. I thought it illustrated how wild the sea was getting. These cliffs are about 45 metres (147 feet) tall. Those are navigation masts on top not golf flags!

Happy New Year and an Answer

Well this week no one was even close to guessing what this image was.It really was droplets of water cascading off our excited pup Lilli on Christmas day.Many of the places we go on our weekends are National Parks so dogs are banned. But for our Xmas BBQ last Sunday we went to a spot on the Yarra River where dogs are welcome. Our Girls and Lilli had a great time in the water.

A ball, water and getting to run around - a mix that is pretty close to heaven for a Labrador!

You will have to forgive me but this rather silly story has just popped into my head while I look at these photos.

"I can't see my ball. Can you?'"No mate, I can't""Lu, I've lost my ball, can you see it?""We can't see it either""Found it!""Now back into the water."Lilli did actually lose two balls on the day.
Lucky we travel with spares.
As to the Kookaburras, they were busy hunting for food for their young on the ground along the river.

Potography Hiatus, Writing Bonanza

Well this one was too hard for people.
I guessed when I posted this that people would think "railroad sign".
Like a railroad sign it is a warning sign, but in a very different place.

This is a channel marker in Port Phillip Bay. I took this at the Bellarine Peninsula on the far south-west side of the bay. The Bellarine is near the mouth of the bay close to the city of Geelong.
Melbourne is about 100 km (62 miles) to the north where the Yarra River flows into the bay.
The mountain in the distance is on the far side near Dromana and has the lovely name (I think) Arthur's Seat.

I have taken very few photographs over the past few weeks (the ones of Lilli being the few exceptions)
I have kept my eye out for waterfalls and took this at the Murrindindi river in the central highlands.The semi-hiatus in photography is probably due largely to my putting a lot of creative effort into my writing.

I have finished the next draft of Veiled in Storms. I mentioned a while ago I had read the previous draft to Deb (she liked it).

This week I have been jumping forwards and plotting out books 3 and 4 in the series. Till now they have been very rough ideas, now 3 (working title Veil of Iron) is starting to look like a proper outline.

Well I have given a copy of the current draft Of Veiled in Storms to a friend to read (Cheryl did some copy edits on the first book Veiled in Shadows).

Once I get feedback from her I will put a bit of effort into tidying errors up and then in a month or two probably look for a couple more readers for opinions.

Anyone interested?

Hard to trick!

Well Anne who guessed first pretty much hit the nail on the head with her guess of " a lizard or iguana..." And most of the rest of you were pretty close with guesses of other scaly creatures

This mystery object was cropped from this close up portrait of a Shingle-back lizard. This was a guy I moved off a road in NSW about five years ago. They are slow moving with stumpy little legs so they definitely do not mix with cars.

We don't have iguanas in Oz (except in zoos) but the land down under is a kingdom of reptiles. We have 860 known species of reptiles hundreds of which are lizards, from tiny skinks a few centimetres long to giant 2.5 metres (8 ft 2 in) Perentie goannas (Varanus giganteus).

Anyway shingle-backs (Tiliqua rugosa) are a blue-tongued skink very common to areas west of the Great Dividing Range (and on dryer parts of the range too).
This is another portrait of an animal I moved off a road in the Grampians on my last visit.I think they are so ugly they are cute!
You can see from their shot tails why they get the name "bob-tail" which is their common name over in WA.

This piccie of my Grampians one shows why "shingle-back" is also apt.They vary in size quite a lot with adults between about 30 to 60 cm long (1' to 2'), most of them towards the shorter end of that range. They are one of my favourite lizards, and totally innocuous.
Relying on bluff to try to scare predators away. They pop open a bright pink mouth and flop out a very blue tongue to look alarming. The Grampians one obliged me with a show.
They have small blunt teeth, if you handle them carelessly they can bite, but their bite will not break the skin (it is like being squeezed by a pair of pliers). Certainly their bite is unlike dragon-lizards which I can attest from personal experience have a painful bite full of needle like teeth.
By the way all native reptiles are protected by law in Oz and should be left alone (but I can't help but move the poor sods off roads before they get cleaned up by a car.)
I have very warm memories of these guys, when I was a small child we had some living in our garden. That is a good thing because just about their favourite meal is a juicy snail.

Now I can see I am going to have to try to make the next mystery object much harder!