Al Scores!

Well we are back home after a very tiring couple of days.

As I said the other day we were helping our eldest E move from Queensland.

Well she was moving from Kingaroy QLD to Yamba NSW. As I said Kingaroy is about 7 hours from here (590 km or 370 miles). Yamba which is on the way is about two hours from here.

E didn't get a quote less than $2,500 for professional removalists. Which is highway robbery.

Enter the bunnies parents to save the day. 

So the plan was to drive up the day before yesterday, load up our trailer with E's worldly possessions and drive back to Yamba yesteday, unload and then come home.

Of course things started badly, loading took longer than we expected. Then the traffic gods intervened - in a bad way

Part of the trip back is the Goldcoast Motorway, between Brisbane and the Goldcoast. It is probably the only 8 lane superhighway that runs any kind of distance in Oz. Normally it flows reasonably well.

Deb and I set off from Kingaroy towing our laden trailer, while E and her sisters stayed back to finish the last of the cleaning. They planned to catch up on the five hour drive because we would be travelling slower because of the trailer.

As Deb and I hit the outskirts of Brisbane rush-hour began. The traffic was mad but with 8 lanes it didn't slow too much.

For the girls following behind it was a whole different story. About an hour behind us by that stage they hit the motorway as it was closed down for roadworks. Eight lanes down to two. It took them three hours to go 10 miles!

Meanwhile Deb and I had reached Yamba to unload at a house we didn't have keys to!

End of story, we stayed the night in Yamba at a motel and unloaded this morning.

So we staggered home this evening nearly 24 hours late...

Finally, on a different note back to WIIW.

Al wins this time, while people were in the right kingdom with guesses of roots and seaweed none were close enough to earn major points.

I posted a piccie of a nice Banksia bloom a few days ago.

Following flowers come seeds, and this is what Banksia seed capsules look like.
Hard and woody, many will not open until after a bush fire. Don't they look weird?

OOPS! A Missed Anniversary. (Oh and a Giveaway)

I’m back from my holiday at Merimbula. I realised the other day while I was driving home an important anniversary had passed.

Before you all think I am in the doghouse for missing our wedding anniversary, things are not that dramatic.

The anniversary I missed was my first blogiversary (probably not a word but what the heck).

It was on the Eighth of July 2009 that I posted the first time.

My blog is a year old!

The nerd in me notes I have made 137 posts since then which means I have averaged a post about every 2.7 days.

I have posted 795 piccies over the twelve months, most of them my own photos.

My list of followers has grown to 143 since Kathleen Jones found my blog just a few days after I started.
Kathleen’s blog is well worth checking out by the way. Kathleen is a published author and poet who resides in a gorgeous spot in England’s Lake District (when she’s not spending time with her partner Neil in Peralta in Italy).

I would like to say a big thanks to all of you who have followed my wanderings and a bigger thanks to those who have taken the time to comment. Comments seem like the icing on an already pretty enjoyable blogging cake.

So where to from here?

Probably more of the same. I hope to post a little more frequently (because I’ve been a bit slack lately). Generally I guess I’ll post more piccies as I take them (or more realistically sort them, I’ve got over 2,000 that I have taken just in the past few weeks).
Hopefully I’ll also have more news about my book Veiled in Shadows in the near future.
I guess I’ll talk about the WIP from time to time.
My family and work will also no doubt feature.
Other than that I suppose I’ll just run with ideas as they take me.

In celebration of my blogiversary I’d like to run a little giveaway.
What am I giving away? Well it seems to me that the obvious thing to give away is some of my piccies.

So to that end the lucky winner will receive three 8” by 10” prints of any of my piccies from this blog. The winner chooses the piccies they want.
Just a few caveats: a small number of the piccies on the blog are not mine, I can’t give away prints of those; and a few piccies are cropped from larger images and would not print well at 8” by 10”, if the winner really wanted those I could organise smaller prints.

The rules to enter the give away:
The competition is open to people anywhere in the world.
You must leave a comment on this post.
You must be a follower of my blog (new followers are welcome to enter too).
Now my mercenary side comes out, if you post about my giveaway on your blog I will give you an extra 2 entries.
I will keep entries into the giveaway open until Sunday the 18th of July 2010 to give people time to enter.
Once I have chosen a winner at random (my decision will be final) I will contact the winner so they can choose the piccies they would like to receive as prints.

Now because a post from me would feel naked without piccies:
Rocks and Waves at Bermagui (an hour north of Merimbula)The “Blue Pool”, BermaguiMimosa Rocks National ParkBeach + Nobody, Mimosa Rocks National ParkEastern Grey Kangaroo and half grown joey, Mimosa Rocks National Park
Banksia Flower and bud, Mimosa Rocks National ParkBanksia seed pod (open)Tathra Warf at sunset.Tathra Bay at sunset

Another award.

Last Saturday Michele Emrath of Southern City Mysteries passed on the Beautiful Blogger award to me.
Thank you Michele!
Michele’s blog is well worth a look, so check it out when you get the time.

The rules to the award are: link to the person who nominated me for this award; share seven interesting things about myself; and nominate seven other beautiful bloggers.

Seven (hopefully) interesting things about me:

1. I grew up in a “hippie” family

2. Perhaps because of the above, I am most at home living on a mountaintop, miles from anywhere.

3. When our kids were young, we did live on a mountaintop miles from anywhere.

4. Despite the above I now live in the second largest city in Oz.

5. Two of our three girls almost died when they were children (see below)

6. Io our number two used to get really bad croup, late one night we drove her 25 km (15 miles) at over 160 km/h (100 mph) to the nearest ER (thank goodness we weren’t living on a mountaintop at that stage).
Io went from virtually not breathing, to breathing normally after a simple dose of adrenaline. Two nights later another little girl in the same town died from croup. Sadly she died while her parents waited for an ambulance.

7. When we were living on our mountaintop, E our number one daughter, was coming back to the car after closing a farm gate. The gate was hit by lightning when she was alongside the car. Fortunately, the lightning earthed through the fencing wire and steel posts. If she had still been touching the gate I am sure she would have been a goner.

Now I have to nominate seven blogs.
In no particular order, some of my old favourites and a few blogs I have found (or perhaps have found me) recently.

Heather at Gofita’s Pages

Kristen at We be Reading

Sonshine at Sonshine Thoughts

Rolf at Roffe the Viking from the North

Ann at Ink Pots and Quills

Alyssa at The Writers Block

And Finally Christy at The publishing Maven

Christy is running a givaway of a copy of Aaron Shephard's Perfect Pages at the moment. So if a book on formatting is useful to you head on over.

And now, yet another Banksia variety
Bored of Aussie wild flowers yet?

A Wet Afternoon

This weekend just past we did our usual thing and got out and about.
It was intermittently drizzling and the weather was quite cool (not compared to the northern hemisphere, but to the high temperatures we have had recently).

We headed up to the Dandenongs, a range of mountains on Melbourne’s eastern outskirts. It is a beautiful spot with fantastic views. On Saturday though, the cloud cover was too low to give us the chance to see the vista. My fall back position was to photo Mountain Ash trees standing in the mist. That didn’t eventuate either.

The day wasn’t a complete washout, Deb and I stopped for a coffee and went for a stroll in some gardens in between some showers of rain.

There were a number of native flowers in bloom including these Banksias.
Banksias were named for Sir Joseph Banks who explored the east coast of Australia with Captain Cook in 1770. Banks was the most famous naturalist of his period. He collected many specimens including Banksia around Botany Bay when the Endeavour stopped there on Cook's First Voyage.

Another variety of Banksia in the same area.
This piccie shows an un-opened bud, an open blossom and a withering flower.
Foraging around the flowers for nectar was this New Holland Honey Eater. Normally these little fellows are extremely active. They can be quite hard to photograph, which is why I was happy to post about one before.This fellow was fluffed up against the rain and just sat and watched me as I moved around for another shot.
If you click on either of the photos to enlarge it you can see the rain splashing down and spots of wet on his tail feathers.

Eden and Twofold Bay.

Tucked into a sheltered inlet in Twofold Bay, across from Red Point and Ben Boyd’s Folly, is the quiet fishing port of Eden. Even at the height of tourist season this place stays calm and relatively quiet. At six hours drive from Melbourne, and six and a half from Sydney it is seen as “a little too far” even for Aussies.
The town sits in the hills immediately around the port.
There is a small fishing fleet that still operates from here.
This piccie represents for me how hard these fisher folk must work.
Looking across the bay in a landwards direction it is easy to see how undeveloped this chunk of country is. Largely because the Great Dividing Range extends almost down to the coast here.
As in many places in Oz there is wildlife in abundance.
Beautiful like Banksias
Cute and beautiful like a Rainbow Lorikeet.
Cute, tiny and too quick to get a decent photo. (A Superb Blue Fairy Wren). And oddly beautiful, but definitely not cute.
Eden wasn’t always so quiet from the 1840s until 1930 there were shore based whaling stations here. Whalers set out in longboats from the shore to hunt whales using hand harpoons.

One station, the Davidson’s, was operated by the same family for four generations (from 1843 – 1929).
One of the Davidson’s old cottages still stands.
This is the Davidson’s front yard (my youngest sitting at the bottom being contemplative)
While nestled in the corner of this idyllic inlet
are the remains of the station including: “trying” vat for boiling down the blubber and the capstan that was used to haul the whales up onto the beach.
The whalers, in particular the Davidson family, received significant support from an unlikely source. Perhaps uniquely, several pods of Orcas assisted in the whaling operations. The killer whales assisted in a number of ways: alerting the whalers that baleen whales were nearby by breaching and tail slapping; driving the baleen whales into Twofold Bay and into range of the harpooners; and harrying the larger animals as the whalers killed them.
In payment for their services the Orcas were allowed to take the lips and tongue of the baleen whales after they were dispatched.

There is one tale “Old Tom”, a male killer whale, becoming quite irate when one of the Davidson’s managers tried to renege on the deal.

If anyone is interested there are a number of websites that feature information on Eden’s orcas.