First, the answer to the tupperware container question from the last blog, drumroll, please…
If you guessed it was for storing beetroot, you are probably Australian! Over in North America, it was typically used for celery or pickles (not at the same time :)). If you need a refresher on what this beetroot container looked like:
In other fruit and vegetable news, our first pineapple plant starting bearing fruit in August! We planted it almost two years ago – patience is indeed a virtue. I decided to take photos of it intermittently to document its growth into a full grown pineapple. Things started off really well, but the ending isn’t so good.
August 7: you could peer down into the middle and see the beginning of a fruit:
September 8: Emerging from the plant:
September 21: Starting to take shape:
October 4: Looking like a pineapple! Decided to start taking photos with a tape measure to better document the growth:
October 18: Noticed that it hadn’t grown much in the prior week so took a closer look:
Something’s eating it 🙁 Two years of waiting and some bug or animal ruined my prized pineapple! Well, we have about a dozen other plants around the yard so maybe we’ll have better luck with the others. One of the guys Hugh golfs with is a pineapple farmer so we’ll see what we can do to prevent this happening again.
In happier fruit news, we are seeing some Hallowe’en displays:
There are some Hallowe’en decorations up at work and in shops. Still don’t see much around people’s houses though. Most Australians think Hallowe’en is a bit of a bizarre tradition, but shops are trying to get the idea going, presumably $$$ to be made. The Yeppoon Cinemas showed the Rocky Horror Picture Show last weekend, in honour of its 50th anniversary, and I feel like they should have waited until Hallowe’en to screen it. We’re really looking forward to seeing Rocky Horror live in Rockhampton in March – we have a group of 12 going, how fun will that be! Starting to plan my Columbia outfit now. We noticed when watching it at the movies last weekend that there are 2 curious references to Rockhampton: the creature’s name is Rocky (which is what Aussies call the city Rockhampton) and the tattoo on Frankenfurter’s right leg is 4711. My Googling says that 4711 is in reference to a unisex fragrance popular in the 70’s. But 4711 is also the postcode for a suburb just outside Rocky. Hmmm…
I think Hallowe’en may be doomed here because Christmas really takes priority. With there being no Thanksgiving, Hallowe’en, or Remembrance Day (there is Remembrance Day, of course, it’s just not a big public holiday; we do ANZAC Day here instead), as soon as September clocks around, people start planning for Christmas. Our neighbourhood in particular is known for its Christmas displays. However, our street and the one at the west end of our street had been rather weak links in the neighbourhood tradition. We stepped up the game on Coolibah St in 2023 and last year a bunch more neighbours on our street really got going too. This year, new people moved into Carbeen St to our west and they already have their house looking like Clark Griswold’s in Christmas Vacation! Way to throw down the gauntlet, new neighbours! It is Hugh’s and my opinion that you shouldn’t do everything at once so that you can add to your display each year to keep all the fans who drive and walk by each year excited with new additions. To that end, we have purchased 2 new items to add to our display this year. Stay tuned for photos in early December!
(This month’s blog could be a bit all over the place – I’m catching up on curling pre-trial games and watching the World Series as I write this!)
Speaking of sports, I am officially hooked on NRL – National Rugby League. Our Brisbane Broncos teams, both men’s and women’s, won their national titles a few weeks ago. It is such an exciting game to watch! American football and baseball are so slow; the action is non-stop in rugby and geez, the players are fit. I’ve watched the annual State of Origin series between Queensland and NSW each year, but never really had time to watch the regular NRL games until this spring (it’s spring here now, not fall :)). I am hooked and am looking forward to next season to start cheering for the Broncos again! We had Young Rob, Barb, Rod, and Llew over to watch the Grand Final so of course a feast was had. Highlights of the meal were that Llew made us a cherry pie (she’s been listening to me whinge about the lack of fruit pies here) and Hugh put the cherry pie filling Glenn and Nancy brought from Canada to delicious use:
Next sport to try to understand/enjoy is cricket – but we’ll leave that for when watching paint dry becomes too exciting for us 🙂
Still on the topic of headlining sports events – Hugh won the Veterans’ Club Championship at Yeppoon Golf this year!
Aside from the cash prize, he and our friend Rod seem to have “won” the job of organising the league going forward.
And then I won bronze in Women’s Intermediate Doubles with amazing partner Joanne at the Club Championships for Yeppoon Pickleball:
Hugh and I played together in the Mixed event for the Club Championships:
But the only joy was for all our opponents as they crushed us every game! Pickleball is a lot like curling – you can have a lot of fun even when you lose!
OK let’s see, I’ve covered Cherries, Cheers, and Championships. Let’s move onto Chirps.
For two years, I’ve been listening to a bird that you only tend to hear in the evenings when it’s dark. It makes a distinctive clucking sound but I’ve never been able to see one and googling for “nocturnal clucking bird” didn’t reveal much. Well, it turns out that’s because it isn’t a bird – it’s a gecko! We have geckos everywhere but they’re really small and the sound is really loud so never in a million years would I have guessed the sound was coming from a gecko. But check out this recording (not mine) – it is indeed a gecko.
So then for about a week or so earlier this month, we heard a new nocturnal bird sound coming from our backyard. You know the sound a rubber ducky makes when you squeeze it? That’s what this sounded like. Well, also not a bird! One of the 100,000 flying foxes (fruit bats) in the area decided to hang out (literally) in our bottlebrush tree for awhile. This would also explain the massive splash of diarrhea along our shed wall. Prior to learning it was a flying fox, I was worried about which of our cute birds was experiencing such serious digestive upset near my laundry line.
Another bird we’ve heard a lot from lately is the Eastern Koel. It’s a type of migratory cuckoo that arrives in eastern Queensland in spring. You hear them but they’re really hard to see. The Eastern Koel is also known as the Pacific Koel. Now, for those of you in North America – are you wondering why it would have two such different names? If you’re like me, “east” is inextricably linked with “Atlantic” and “west” is inextricably linked with “Pacific.” However in Australia, east is where you find the Pacific – so an Eastern Koel and a Pacific Koel are actually very similar names 🙂 Just like I had to think for an extra minute to understand why the highway along the east coast of Queensland was called the “pacific coast way.” Clearly I am not always smarter than the average bear!
Another bird I saw regularly at work earlier this year but couldn’t identify, I have now been able to identify as the Apostle Bird. They’re quite cute and really not afraid of humans.
I’ve previously posted a video of a Willie Wagtail but they’re hard to photograph because they’re in constant motion, shaking their booty. A couple weeks ago, as we were leaving our personal training session with our personal torturer Michelle, a bunch of them were flitting around a fence and I finally got some photos:
Yes, there is indeed some canoodling going on there. No shame.
We were at the garden centre a couple weeks ago and chatting with our friend Leanne when I spotted a bird I’ve heard people talk about but have never seen:
A Sunbird! Just gorgeous.
I’ve posted plenty of photos of one of my favourite birds, the Kookaburra (remember, the first syllable is pronounced like “book” or “cook”), but I got a funny video the other day – check this out: https://youtube.com/shorts/6ElBzaeIDVo
Kookaburras are really smart but when I saw this, I was worried that the only dumb Kookaburra in Yeppoon had arrived in our yard and I was going to have to call someone to rescue him. Fortunately no, he was able to fly away, either having swallowed or dropped whatever he was holding onto on the other side of the fence.
Going from our backyard to our front yard, our “fuzzy palms” (I’ve called them that for a gazillion years but they’re actually called foxtail palms) have outgrown their pots. Young Rob had grown them from babies and kindly gave them to us when we moved into our house. They are my pride and joy – for all my life, fuzzy palms seemed like such exotic trees and now I get to have them in my front yard! We’d transplanted them into larger pots a couple times but they really needed to move to soil as their roots were pushing them right out of the pot and it was hard to find a bigger pot. We had originally wanted to keep them in pots, out of fear of root systems impacting our retaining wall or water pipes. It turns out we had no need to worry about that, their root systems are surprisingly small. So we moved them down into the lower garden two weeks ago:
They weigh a ton and with the root ball, there was no way we (as in Hugh) could dig a hole big enough – the soil here is rock solid (you’ll recall we had to use a drill to put a tent peg into the ground and even that was difficult). Hugh decided that if he saw someone with a digger in their yard, he would see if they could come by to do the work for us. As luck would have it, there was a digger just around the corner and the guys had a 2-hour window while they were waiting for other work to be done, so they drove the digger over and looked after a) digging the holes (using an auger attachment) and b) lifting the trees down. Wow, how amazing was that! Now my beautiful fuzzy palms can grow to their hearts’ content! We’re keeping a close eye on them to ensure the shock of the move doesn’t do them in. So far, so good.
We’re giving them water right now because it continues to be very dry here. I’m not actually sure when it last rained. This means wildfires continue to occur, which means smoke hazards continue to occur. This is the smoke hazard area from this morning:
We had a couple weeks of smoke that started around when I posted my last blog and then it cleared up for a couple weeks. But it started again last night. It’s not terrible, but I do feel it in my eyes a bit and you can smell it a bit. One morning we had a combination of smoke and fog, so a true “smog”! I’ve been learning about the particulate matter in smoke from wildfires. I assumed it would just impact respiratory systems but when the particles are really small, they cross from your lungs into your bloodstream and can therefore impact your organs. I had no idea! One day I was googling about inflammation and learned that the exact type of particulate matter from wildfires is the prime environmental (vs food) cause of inflammation. I had been feeling “puffy” for a couple weeks during the first batch of smoke, so I’m going to see if there is any correlation. Doubtful, given that the particulate matter isn’t super dense here, but this is the House of Science after all, so I will do my own little experiment. The smoke does, however, make for pretty sunset pictures:
Something I realised the other day is that we go through next to no Kleenex here. Part of that is not having cold winters where your nose naturally runs. And part must be the outdoor lifestyle where you just don’t get sick as much. Hugh and I have always had good immune systems but I think we’ve each only had one or two very mild colds in the 2.5 years we’ve lived here. So we’re saving lots of money on Kleenex 🙂
(Whoa – quite the 6th inning!!!)
October has seen spectacular weather! Daytime temps in the high 20’s with humidity typically below 75% – perfection! When the wind blows from the west, our humidity drops crazy low. One day, over the course of 12 hours, the temperature went from 20C and 82% humidity to 30C and 30% humidity.
Some Aussie vocab for you:
Punter: gambler (therefore a very common word here)
How are we: How are you (both singuar and plural)
Have a crack: Have a go, have a try
Vale: Farewell (when someone dies)
Canada made news in Australia about a month ago. Apparently Canadians are big smugglers of Fentanyl into Australia and New Zealand. Per the RCMP, Canadians smuggle more Fentanyl into Australia and NZ than they do into America. The most recent batch was hidden in maple syrup bottles – hmmm, I did seem to be in a particularly good mood after that crepe breakfast the other day…
Oh, good news – Hugh and I got Medicare! We were approved in about 2 weeks, so we’re hoping that’s a good sign for being approved for permanent residency. Now that we have Medicare, we need to change our private health coverage from a visitor plan to a regular plan. What’s funny is that our visitor plan cost $670/month (for the two of us, not per person) to have full hospital coverage and good “extras” coverage (like physio, massage, etc.). The Medicare premiums that get deducted off my paycheque come to about $4,000 per year, but I get those refunded each year while on a temporary work visa, so all we were paying for excellent coverage was $670/month. Now that we’re on Medicare, to replicate the quality of coverage we had on our visitor plan, the private plan will cost about $400/month plus I won’t get the $4,000 in Medicare fees refunded, so the total cost will actually be $800/year more being on Medicare. Oh well, small price to pay to be one step closer to becoming permanent residents!
Well, quite the Game 1 for the Jays! I remember watching the World Series in 1993. I actually stopped watching baseball after the strike in 1994/5 because I was so annoyed at all these people earning millions of dollars squabbling over who gets more millions. I used to knit while watching baseball so I also stopped knitting after the strike. No need to knit now in our subtropical climate, but it’s been fun to see the Jays do well. Go Jays!
We have another adventure coming up in a month or so – starting in a city we’ve already visited but ending in a city we’ve never been to before. Stay tuned – we’re anticipating having some great, smiley photos for you! (that’s a hint :))