…Rainy for a Week
It is unusual that we have many grey days in a row here, but we did have a week where it rained most days. One night we got 80mm in a few hours – which is nothing compared to what some areas a few hours north of us were getting. In Canada, 80mm would easily result in flooding, but the infrastructure here is built to manage large volumes of rain. Our downspouts (called downpipes here) have a much wider diameter:
And the drains along the kerbs (that’s how they spell curb here) are big enough for a small child to crawl into (this picture doesn’t do the size justice, but trust me, you could for sure lose a small dog in the opening!):
Parents here definitely train their kids to be careful. Between cars not stopping for pedestrians and storm drains you could get stuck in, kids need to pay attention to their surroundings. Australia, at least regional Australia, doesn’t yet have the “sue somebody for my own bad decision” attitude. Check out this awesome contraption in a kids’ playground in Rockhampton:
Can you imagine something like that being allowed in Canada! One of the many things I love about Australia.
Anyway, I was talking about that week where we had rain. The good news is, our 4 rain tanks are all full again and we’ve switched our irrigation system back to using rainwater instead of tap water (so our water bill should come back down from the whopping $11-12/month we’ve been paying for the past 6 months of the drier season 🙂 ). And then when the rain stopped, the temperature and humidity dropped for 4-5 days and it was lovely having the windows open with a beautiful breeze! Today it’s crazy hot, 35C, so we’re hibernating inside with the air con on. It’s also unusually dry, humidity around 55%, so the laundry I put on the line was dry in about an hour!
…Delicious
Hugh learned to make focaccia this year and he’s come up with a rosemary and tomato version for Christmas dinner tomorrow:
On Saturday, Hugh and the golfing gang were playing in a comp and while they were having beers afterward, they decided a dinner party at the Widdiltons would be a good idea. Well, when Mom and Andrea came to visit in November, they brought some Old Bay seasoning for us and a month or so ago, Hugh bought this:
So he decided to put it to the test on Saturday night and he made a Low Country Boil for our guests! It was FABULOUS. And it was fun to introduce our Australian friends to something we had learned about from our family and friends in the southeastern US – no one here had heard of a low country boil! I meant to take a picture of the pile of deliciousness before we all dug in but was too busy eating and so just got this photo part way through dinner:
Kevin brought his guitar and played some songs for us and it was just a wonderful spur-of-the-moment evening! And good timing for me because it was at 5:15pm that Saturday when I FINALLY finished everything relating to a big brain injury intervention course I’ve been developing for a company in the States this year – I was ready to celebrate! A lot of red wine was consumed, which made pickleball the next morning a little trickier, but still a lot of fun – and the Lords, Richards, and Widdiltons invented a new version that was awesome for 6 players who were tiring out.
But back to deliciousness – after everyone left on Saturday night, Hugh and I stayed on the patio for awhile longer, the weather was just so gorgeous. The geckos were out in full force and we watched a large one catch a bug, and then he noticed a couple moths over by where we were sitting:
He was this close to the first one and it didn’t fly away! Deserved to be eaten. But we were a bit surprised that he would want to eat a moth – I can’t imagine the wings would be terribly tasty (well, personally, everything about eating a moth would be gross, but as a gecko, I’m guessing parts would be tasty). Anyway, after he swallowed the first one whole, we thought the second one, about 2 feet away, would take off. Nope, he stuck around and moments later, he was swallowed whole too. I continued sipping the extra glass of wine that I shouldn’t have had and noticed that the big gecko wasn’t at our end of the patio anymore. I took a look around to see where he’d gotten to after his big meal and discovered something feisty going on:
The next morning, we had piles of leftovers and so I decided to use a bunch of the potatoes to make my Nana’s/aunt’s/cousin’s famous taty bread (Irish potato bread):
I can never make it as well as my British family can, but it was still delicious (and that was with a twist of Old Bay seasoning in the potatoes!) – and good for absorbing some of the red wine still coursing through my veins that day 🙂
Also in the category of food, Hugh has officially introduced his mushroom pepper and salt mills to Australia!
Hugh’s gotten to know Justin, the owner of Archer Cottage (gourmet food and cheese shop in Rockhampton that we obviously frequent regularly), and Justin thought it would be nice to make up some gourmet gift baskets containing pepper mills so Hugh made some traditional styled ones as well as mushroom ones. Who knows, these may become a staple on the shelves there, very fun!
Last food-related item. I told you in the last blog post that a bunch of our neighbours on Coolibah Street got into the festive decorating spirit this year and one neighbour in particular has really done an outstanding job. I think I posted a photo like this last time, to show the 2-storey-tall Santa:
Well, you’ll also see the smaller Santa in front and what you can’t see at night is that he’s BBQ’ing:
Not sure which reindeer is on the grill…
…Buoyant
Yesterday our friends Kevin and Joanne took us and Rob and Barb out on their sailing catamaran, Vivacious, to spend the day at GKI (Great Keppel Island). Wow. Absolutely perfect weather and such good company! We left Lordsville around 8am and enjoyed a coffee on our way over. This is us as we’re leaving the marina (it was around this point that we had to turn around 7 weeks ago because of the PAI (pinky amputation incident), so it was nice that there were no incidents this time – although Hugh did park our car at Lordsville such that we could make a quick escape if we needed to get to a hospital suddenly 🙂
We had a strong wind blowing in the right direction for us to go straight over to the island without tacking – and we were going at a good clip!
Oh what fun it is to ride on a Seawind catamaran! And yes, despite Hugh’s and Rob’s protests, we did listen to Christmas carols on our way over:
Kev and Jo took us to Svendsen’s Beach:
We’ve previously been to the main beach where Holiday Village is, as well as Monkey Beach (where there’s great snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef) and Leekes’ Beach (where we did a walk to the homestead on the island and saw the wild goats earlier this year). We had passed Svendsen’s Beach back in September when our friend Melbourne Rob had taken us out whale watching, but we didn’t go swimming or head to the beach that day. Well, we spent all day there yesterday and it was AMAZING! The water temperature was ideal – just a smidgen cool when you first got in but quickly perfect, not too warm (which happens here!) and not too cool (which definitely doesn’t happen this time of year!). Our friends Phil and Doiya came over on their boat, Moderation, and joined us for lunch:
Phil is the one with the 3D printer I told you about last blog – check out this fidget toy he printed, my mind can’t compute how something like this is “printed”!
Kevin brought out his guitar to play some tunes for us:
We did some paddleboarding (although I couldn’t seem to maintain my balance standing this time so did the kneeling version instead – and my quadriceps are reminding me of that today!):
Hugh and I donned our flippers to swim to the beach and have a bit of a walk – forgot to bring my camera and missed an opportunity to get some great photos of black rocks in sand and turquoise water, will have to do that another time. But I spent most of my time floating! I swear the Pacific ocean is more buoyant than the Atlantic. I’ve Googled and Grok’d and the Pacific has slightly lower salinity on average, so on average would be slightly more buoyant, but it’s not supposed to be perceptible. Nevertheless, I find it incredibly easy to float here:
I just cross my ankles and put my arms out, essentially like sitting in a lounge chair, and I just float – it’s heavenly! And if I have flippers on, I just bend my knees and stick the ends of the flippers straight up out the water and floating is also easy. But I particularly like the lounge chair position I discovered yesterday, super relaxing!
Later in the arvo (Aussie slang for afternoon) we took the tender over to the beach to enjoy a sunset beverage with other boaters in the area. Ironically, it was 5pm when we got there:
There’s a sheltered area that the sailors have created and continually add to and it was lovely to sit in the shade of the trees with a campfire, enjoying a beverage and waiting for the sun to set:
You can see Kev and Jo’s boat, Vivacious, in the background of the photo above.
As the sun set, we headed back to Vivacious for the trip home:
It was my first time sailing at night and my, what a beautiful experience! The stars are so much more visible in this area than where we lived in Canada because there’s so much less light pollution, but being on the ocean even further away from the light pollution was incredible. The wind had picked up a bit again for our trip home so we were coursing along at around 6 knots and it was so peaceful listening to the water rushing by while looking up to the starry sky. Venus is super bright in the west right now, so we followed it home. Jupiter is really bright in the east right now and you could clearly see the Pleiades Star Cluster with the naked eye (we had been looking at the Pleiades from our yard the other night and it was even brighter out on the ocean).
…Bright
The stars aren’t the only bright things this time of year! We went to Radiance again. Actually, before that we had dinner at The Cri in Rocky (best meatballs on the planet) and there was a lovely Merry Christmas sign on the bridge across the Fitzroy River there:
OK back to Radiance. Last year was its first time in Rockhampton and it was incredible so we couldn’t wait to go again this year. Last year the theme was about a deer; this year it was about Dusty the Dingo:
It was still really good, but they omitted a couple of the displays they’d had last year and so the overall experience dropped down a notch or two, in my opinion. They also moved one of my favourite experiences from the end of the walk to the beginning, which meant there were CROWDS there all at once and so I couldn’t enjoy the magical experience of being surrounded by fog, laser lights, and beautiful music. I’ve sent them my feedback 🙂 But there were still some mesmerizing displays, especially around the Japanese pond area (note that the lasers often appear blue on my videos, but they were usually multiple swirling colours):
These displays have given Hugh some additional ideas, so stay tuned for Exterior Christmas Illumination 3.0 next year. But version 2.0 this year isn’t bad. I posted some photos in the last blog entry and here are some with our new additions:
And this video to show you some of the constant stream of traffic most nights as people visit our neighbourhood to enjoy all the Christmas light displays:
(If you had the sound on for the video above, it sounds like Hugh is snoring in the background – I took the video from outside so I’m quite sure it’s not Hugh snoring that you can hear, but I have absolutely no idea what that noise is!)
The moon added to the brightness of the season the other week, after the rain had moved on:
And we have lots of brightly coloured plants and flowers in our back garden right now (Liz, I apologise that I haven’t been able to get a photo of a Jacaranda tree for you – they seem to only be in Rockhampton, not Yeppoon, and anytime I passed one, I wasn’t in a good spot to pull over to take a photo – next year!):
So I’ll end my Christmas post with a repeat from last year. Sending you all many wishes for a beautiful Christmas holiday and much happiness in 2025!