What's been happening on the mountains round here

First up I have to say sorry to those of you who were hoping for a Lilli tale tonight.

Deb and I have decided as a spur of the moment thing to go out to dinner and catch a movie afterwards. So Lilli Labrador Tales will have to be another night.

It is still freezing down this way.  In the city today I looked out of my 12th floor window and saw this stuff falling.

It almost never settles in Melbourne or suburbs. But the mountains around are getting falls.

The ski resorts are having late, heavy falls and are looking forward to a good end to their season.

An Echidna deciding if I was scarey

My Piccie of the day is a fellow I "caught" one afternoon a couple of summers ago. 
Echidnas (Tachyglossus aculeatus) are entirely innocuous, very gentle retiring creatures.
Their main diet is termites and ants which they get at by tearing nests apart with those amazing claws.
Their defensive tactics are very passive too. If the ground is soft enough the literally dig in leaving only their spiny back exposed. If they get stuck on hard ground they will either hang on for dear life or roll into a ball.
When I found this fellow he/she dug in and waited for me to go. But I was more patient, I stood quietly and waited until he/she came out. He she rolled around to see if I had left which is when I got this shot.

These guys are quite common and can be found almost everywhere in Oz from the high snow country to hot, hot deserts. They are common but hard to photograph because if they are aware you are around you get a piccie like this an echidna in "go away and leave me alone mode."

What is it Wednesday?

Well once again it is cold wet and miserable down this way.

As I stood on a garage forecourt filling my car this evening, the radio was predicting snowfalls on the mountains around Melbourne. No wonder I felt a bit chilly!

I have just one word. BRRRRR!

Now as it is Wednesday I have to say: what on Earth do you think this is?

A clue, I have posted this piccie on my blog once before!

“If you don’t like it” or Melbourne Weather

They say about Melbourne weather: “If you don’t like it, just wait it will change” or “Melbourne the city where you have five seasons in a day.”

Well Melbourne is living up to its reputation just lately.

This city is located on the south coast of Australia’s mainland and two major factors drive our weather here. The Southern Ocean and Australia’s hot dry inland.

Winds here tend to come roughly from the west. If they come from the South-West they come off the Southern Ocean so things are cool to cold. If the wind veers to come from the North-West the wind comes off the desert centre of Oz then things get warm to oven- like.

Just over a week ago, to be absolutely precise 10 September (we do the dates the right way around down here) I took these photos. That is right folks that is snow taken at the Upper Yarra Valley a week ago Saturday.

Spring And that road was closed because of snowfalls further up.

When I took those photos it was 12:00 in the day and the temperature was hovering around 0° C (30°F).

But yesterday we went back to the mountains these next few piccies were taken high up across the valley from my snow shots. No snow this week!

This weekend just past we had glorious spring weather, with the temperature climbing to a pleasantly warm 29°C (84°F). I say pleasantly warm because that is how I see it, basically almost warm enough to head to the beach. Remember summer temperatures here are often between 35°C (95°F) and 45°C (113°F) so 29 is “warm”

This cute little waterfall is called the La La Falls.As you can see it was just too bright to take really nice waterfall shots.

Bright enough to capture shadows of a certain Aussie, call this one a “self portrait”.

Just finally,
I had to share this boulder in the stream and this absolutely cute bridge in the trail on the climb up to the falls. The clever national parks rangers have built this little beauty out of dry-stone. There isn’t so much as a drop of mortar in this construction.

A quick poll. For my next post would you prefer:

A: More waterfalls
B: Some majestic trees
Or
C: Sunlight through clouds?

Tea or Coffee Anyone?

First of all an apology. I have not responded to all your wonderful comments on my last few posts. As you know I have just started a new job which is very different from my previous one. So I have been working hard and long hours to get on top of the new role as quickly as possible.

Apart from anything else every conversation in the new workplace seems to be filled with acronyms I just don’t know! The Victorian Public Service seems to have a language all of its own! The good part is I seem to have fallen on my feet in terms of having a great team to work with.

Down to the business of today - as you can guess by the time we got to the weekend I was ready for a change of pace. Deb and I hopped in the car and drove to one of our favourite places.

I have posted about Mount Donna Buang before, but here we go again. As you know it is winter down this way and this past week we have had miserable and cold weather.

It isn’t too bad down in Melbourne but in the mountains around there has been snow.
In fact the Oz Alps are reporting a bumper ski season.

Mount Donna Buang usually has snow cover at the peak for much of winter and although there isn’t skiing there it is quite popular because it is so close to Melbourne. Any way as I said Deb and I shot up there today. By the way, a lot of these piccies benefit from clicking on to expand them.

When we reached the peak it was cold and misty.This tower was built for spotting fires in bushfire season. A bit redundant today!
I had a look in one of the shelters - there was a warming fire that someone had lit in the BBQ.People have been busy building snow men and snow sculptures. I thought this teapot was clever.
It was complete with cups.
I went traipsing around looking for objects to turn my camera on. I loved this boulder standing clear of the snow.After a while we were cold and miserable (I wonder why?).

So we jumped back in the car and drove the 4,000 odd feet back to the valley floor. Perhaps the teapot had given us ideas. Because we stopped at one our favourite eateries.

Wild Thyme Café is in the village of Warburton. It has great meals and good coffee.

But the thing they absolutely do best is cakes and pastries. The owner bakes the most amazing cakes you can imagine.

I had the baked continental cheesecake. It looked so yum I couldn’t help myself and took a spoonful before I remembered to take a piccie!

Deb had the lemon meringue pie. I am not normally big on sweets but the ones at Wild Thyme are as good as anything I have tasted anywhere in the world!

One last piccie. We sat in the front room of the café. I noticed a whole collage of reflections on the window. Nearly everything in this piccie is a reflection or a reflection of a reflection. The two legs in the foreground are actually just outside, as is the bicycle rickshaw. I have no idea where it originally came from, but the rickshaw is always parked out the front when they are open. Wild Thyme is that kind of place.
The blue car is actually further up the street and going the other way. The sunny park is about 100 metres down the road to the right.
The man sitting with his face to the picture is Alan, the owner of the café. He is not outside this window but at a table to the right on the footpath. It’s illegal to smoke in restaurants in Victoria so they have a table outside for those who have to smoke while they eat.

Al Rambles

I mentioned the other day that I had plots worked out for a couple of extra novels, one of which was a YA piece. I find it very odd to be thinking about writing YA, I've never wanted to write anything for young people before. Although I must say when my girls bought books I always queued up to have my turn reading them. Sometimes my imagination gets even more active than usual and this is one of the things that popped out.

I don't dare do more than a rough outline or I might get carried away from what I am currently writing.

On the subject of the WIP, I've taken a slightly different tack with writing this one.
Both the WIP and my first book are written from multiple points of view. The narrative is broken up so we get differing perspectives on many of the events in the plot.

With Veiled in Shadows I began at the start and wrote to the end. Generally, I switched perspective as I came to the section I was writing. So I mainly wrote from start to finish for most drafts, although I did leave sections when I got ‘stuck’.

With my WIP I am (mostly) writing one character's perspective at a time right through the whole stream of the book. Then I move back to the start for the next character. But it is all written in chunks that will be pasted together at the end.

I think this has a huge advantage in terms of keeping with the flow of each character.

But there is a downside. Because characters are not present in each scene writing the over arching narrative seems more disjointed. Also I will have to be extra careful about continuity when it comes to bringing it all back together.

What do you think - would you prefer to write from beginning to end, or would you prefer to explore characters one at a time?

Do you enjoy reading stories that are from multiple POV?

Finally two piccies from my archive. A snowy mountain road as a reminder it is winter down this way.And that relative of the platypus an echidna or spiny ant eater. These guys, like platypus, are egg-laying mammals.

Swan Watch XI: Unseasonable Weather

I have barely posted recently and I have spent even less time visiting other people’s blogs. First I was away at my Mum’s and since then work and life have just been sucking up so much time. Hopefully you’ll see me around the blogosphere a bit more in the near future.

You'll have to forgive me for being so negligent in responding to your comments. I hope things might be getting more back to normal soon, but we will see.

Io did the swan patrol for me this week because Deb and I headed in the opposite direction. More about that in the moment.

First to the swans. Unfortunately, we have no more news about the injured cygnet. We’ll just have to hope that no news is good news.

On a cheerier note mother swan and the remaining baby are doing well. Io has captured some beautiful piccies to prove it.

The swans are very used to Io and Damian now, when they come down to the ponds edge the swans usually cruise over to check them out.Today they were back in their original pond, I liked this piccie of them coming closer through the reeds.The remaining baby continues to grow at an almost unbelievable rate. It’s hard to believe this strapping youth is the cute fuzzball of only a few weeks ago. I can’t help think of Hans Christian Andersen’s ugly duckling now.

But of course the sinuous curves of baby’s neck reminds us that he/she will be a beauty like mum before too long.Now to Deb and my weekend. Most of the good folk who read my blog live in the Northern Hemisphere and are half way through Autumn. We down here in Oz are halfway through spring and the weather should be warming up.

It isn’t! This is the scene at Kinglake yesterday. It hasn’t snowed where we are (it almost never does in Melbourne and near the coast). But it has been so cold that it has snowed in the hills around here. We can see Kinglake from our street.

I have never heard of snowfalls in the country near Melbourne in October. But there it is.
Higher up at Mount Donna Buang it was still thick.

This is the road to the summit.Being a kid at heart I couldn’t help but walk up to the summit.

Past this gate.To the top where it started to snow again.On the walk back down.
This wattle peeping through the snow further down the mountain is a reminder that it is supposed to be spring.

Ghosts

You’ll have to forgive me but the tone of this post is a bit somber.
On Saturday Deb and I went for one of our weekend drives.

As so often happens we drove out into the mountains to the east of Melbourne.
We decided to head up to Lake Mountain to see how the snow is going in the tail end of the season.

The road to Lake Mountain passes through Marysville which was devastated in the Black Saturday bushfires back in February last year. Across the state of Victoria 173 people perished in the fires.

We paused in a valley behind Marysville where I grabbed these piccies.

What was a lush valley of Mountain Ash trees is a stark graveyard of greying ghosts. The reason these trees are grey is after the fires the burnt bark has fallen from those that have died.The trees covered in a green fuzz in this piccie are the ones that pulled through the fire. Normally after a bushfire you would see the bush bouncing back and all the trees except a few would have come through. These fires were just too hot.

Back on the main road we drove further up the valley.
In places low clouds softened the ridge-lines covered in dead trees. The Aussie bush is not deciduous, these trees are bare not because of winter but because they have perished.
Finally on the high ridges ahead we saw what we had come for: Snow

Winter.

While I was away on holiday at Merimbula I was posting photos like this.

And this.

Then I was grumbling that despite the gloriously sunny weather I was cold.

People enjoying their Northern hemisphere summer looked at photos like this

and for some strange reason they didn’t take me very seriously.

Fair enough in tropical parts of Oz it never really gets cold.

However, it is winter down in the bottom half of the world and here in the southern end of Oz it gets wintery.

This Aussie for one thinks it is cold.

Now I have proof of the cold down this way.

On Saturday I took this

and this

See, I’m not just grumbling :-)

Of Humble Pie

We have developed a strange obsession with going out into the wide blue yonder what ever the weather. Today for example it is another cold damp day and blowing a gale. What do the household do? Curl up in front of the fire with a good book? Sit and watch the latest DVD? Do anything warm and cosy?
No, not a bit of it. Instead we head off for a picnic.

But the plot thickens and humble pie is called for.
At the insistence of our eldest, we again headed for Mount Donna Buang, in a quest for snow.
Now anyone who has been following my blog during its brief existence, will remember that just under two weeks ago, I wrote very disparagingly about the snow cover up on old Donna.

If a picture is worth a thousand words

As you can see same place but now definitely not the same story.
Admittedly only about six inches cover at the moment, but definitely snow.

My eldest is still girding her loins in preparation for her “wet-pracs”. She says she is feeling a bit more able to face the idea. But the poor thing is still very apprehensive about being physically ill come the day. What is keeping her going is the long term goal.

Given the title of this blog I had better say a little about my literary endeavours.
Basically they can be summed up as: word count - 0.
Too many early starts and late finishes just lately.
Writing and the day job don’t necessarily go together.
Truth be told I am probably spending too much time looking at other peoples blogs as well. But a boy has to have some fun from time to time.

Then again writing or researching are fun, but I find I need much more energy, more focus to work on the book. If I write tired, more often than not I just junk that material when I reread.
So speaking of tired, I ran breakfast at work this morning (we try to provide a service 365 days a year) which means a 5:30 am start. So without further ado goodnight and talk to you next time.