Before I jump back into things Australian, I realised I forgot to tell you a few things about New Zealand that were interesting, so let me wrap up that story first.
The south island gets 4-7 metres (yes, METRES) of rain each year! No wonder it’s so lush everywhere. But that makes for a lot of grey skies – I’m happier back in Oz with less lush and more blue sky. NZ is also where Manuka honey originated. It’s an interesting read about the honey and the associated crime because of its value – made me think of how the mafia controlled (controls?) a bunch of the maple syrup industry in Quebec – new opportunity for them in NZ 🙂 Too expensive to buy the honey to try but I did buy a manuka honey lip balm and it’s very good. Next, I forgot to mention when we were at Milford Sound that one of its unique features is having glaciers melting into rainforests – can’t find that combo in many places in the world! It’s like K’gari where rainforests grow in sand. So many unique things down in this part of the world. And now the most important fact about NZ, that I can’t believe I forgot to tell you in the last 2 blogs – they have fabulous potato chips, just like in Canada!!! Oh what fun to drink wine with terrific potato chips again.
OK, back to the land Down Under. You probably haven’t heard that a huge cyclone has been brewing off our east coast, cyclone Alfred. We’ve been keeping an eye out and I’m pleased to report that this is as close as it got to us, about 500km away:
This is all we could see of the cyclone yesterday when it was about 700 km away:
One of my staff has been doing clinical work in Fiji the past couple weeks so I was staying in touch to ensure she was OK with the cyclone (southern hemisphere word for hurricane) brewing (she’s been fine!) and I discovered two other cyclones around Fiji – Rae and one starting with an S. So I was trying to figure out how we’d gone back to A in the alphabet but also had S and R at the same time. Well, it turns out that cyclones are named based on the body of water in which they form. Rae and the one that started with S both formed in Fijian waters, so Fiji named them. But Alfred formed in Australian waters, so we named it. Learn something new every day! Oh – do you know how they pronounce Fiji here? The accent is on the second syllable instead of the first.
In the ongoing curious phenomenon of cyclone (and pandemic) preparation, toilet paper disappeared from shelves this week. I’m sure if alien civilisations are observing us, they really must wonder some days.
Yesterday morning we went down to the foreshore to see the waves. Because of the islands off our coast here, we don’t often get big (even medium-sized) waves, so the cyclone has been a treat for surfers! Plus we had a king tide yesterday on top of the cyclone. The sea was full of youth and their surf boards – I had no idea how many people owned surf boards in the area until seeing them out yesterday and today!
You can see where the point is that waves are washing over and flooding the road, they had to close it to southbound traffic yesterday. All good today though, we took these photos from just past that point this morning:
I took this video looking the other direction yesterday:
Mom, Andrea, Michelle, and Meaghan – you’ll recognise where the people are standing. Usually there’s beach below! The waves reminded me of watching Lake Ontario from our back yard in Stoney Creek. If you watch near the end of this video, you’ll see some large debris tossed in the air by the crashing waves. This used to happen in Stoney Creek too. Here, the kids were all standing right there in order to get splashed – hopefully none were hurt by the projectiles. When you don’t get big waves here very often, you might not be aware of the debris they can fling at you.
Ah! I’m sitting on the patio writing this week’s blog and a lizard just skedaddled by:
I’ve caught brief glimpses of him (or his friends) before and have never been able to get a photo because he’s very quick. Leigh – any idea what kind he is? Not terribly big, just around 20cm tip to tip, and seemed to have a yellow stripe length-wise. Nothing like the iguana Hugh saw at the golf course the other day! It’s seriously bizarre how many classic Australian animals hang out at the golf course.
Found this spider web on one of our patio chairs the other day – very cool, it’s 3D:
Apparently lots of spiders make 3D webs, I’ve just never seen one before. And yes, April – the pineapple is still going strong! We had crazy winds here while we were in NZ and it didn’t blow over, and nor did it during the high winds this week with the cyclone.
Our lemon tree produced its first lemons a couple weeks ago!
Hugh used one of them to make a delicious lemon curd that we put onto crepes along with raspberries and blueberries, yum yum:
Speaking of food, we’ve found that many packaged foods come in much smaller packages here compared to in Canada. Sometimes this is really handy, like this little tin of black beans:
It’s so rare that we ever need a 540 mL tin like you’d get in Canada, so we would use what we needed, put the rest in the fridge hoping to use them later, and then just throw them out because we never did. This tin (placed next to a wine glass for size calibration) is the absolute perfect size!
I mentioned “security” in the title of this week’s blog. I think I’ve previously commented that almost every house here has security screens, to try to thwart break-ins. I haven’t seen any evidence that theft is higher here than in Canada, but anything relating to home security seems much more prevalent. One of those things is mailboxes (“letter boxes” here). Canada has of course largely done away with homes having their own letter boxes, instead going for those large multi-mailbox units in central areas. But here, the letter box is ubiquitous – every house has one and it’s at the edge of the yard, where your own property meets the council land, and posties driving scooters deliver your mail every other day (it used to be 5 days per week, but that changed a few months ago – so I now have to wait an extra day to get junk mail).
Here is what our original mailbox looked like:
The postie lifts the flap to put the mail in and we get it out by lifting a flap on the back that is about double the size of the front one. Those of you with a good memory will recall that I wasn’t keen on blindly sticking my hand into a small dark place that would make a nice home for a killer spider. Although I was eventually able to reach in for mail without first putting on safety gloves, it’s never been my favourite thing. So I decided a new letter box was in order. All I wanted was something simple that didn’t require taking a leap of faith every time you wanted to check for mail. Well, that doesn’t exist here. Mailboxes are either small and difficult to reach into or they’re large and built for security. So we had to get one of the security variety. As much as it’s annoying to have to use a key to get the mail, it’s a pretty funky mailbox!
The postie lifts the top up and puts the mail in and when the lid goes down, it dumps the mail or parcels into the secure section below, which you open from behind:
Way overkill in my mind, but I guess if you’re getting priceless goods delivered, it’s pretty spiffy. I’m just happy that it’s a nice looking letter box, keeps the rain out (which somehow the old one didn’t), and I can clearly see what I’m reaching into!
As you probably know, just like Canada’s population is all concentrated along the southern border with the US, Australia’s population is concentrated along the east coast. I saw this image the other day that really shows this:
Crazy, eh! If you’re finding the red dots hard to see – it’s Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne on the east coast, Adelaide on the south coast, and Perth over on the west. And then a mostly empty country the size of the USA.
Here’s another funny map for you:
We attended another music bingo a couple weeks ago:
That’s my “friend” Leigh in the front pointing out one of the song names on my bingo card that she said reminded her of me. With friends like that… 🙂
Ok, this brings us to scat. I’m not sure how this came up over polite dinner conversation, but our friends Rod and Llew told us last weekend that wombat scat comes out in cubes. Now, I consider Rod and Llew to be kind, knowledgeable, trustworthy people. But they’re Australian and they have the Aussie sense of humour. So I had to wonder if this was one of those “dupe the tourist” kind of things, like the drop bear. But far out (that’s Aussie for “unbelievable” or “wild”), they were telling the truth!
That looks like an elegantly stacked collection of chocolate truffles or brownies to me! There aren’t really any wombats where we live, so hopefully I don’t have to worry about a case of mistaken identity. To learn more about cube-shaped wombat poop, click here.
All right, I think we’re overdue for some Aussie bird photos and videos! Hugh took this fabulous photo at, you guessed it, the golf course:
That’s a rainbow lorikeet sitting on a tendril of flowers on an octopus tree – such incredible colours!
Here are a couple magpies singing on our bird bath:
One of them then flew over to our fence, where we’d attached a huge cuttlebone (from the cuttlefish) that we found on the beach one day. I remember my grandma used to put one of these in her budgie cage for them to clean and sharpen their beaks on. We’ve noticed a number of birds using the top of our fence to clean and sharpen their beaks, so when we found this, we thought we’d put it up there for them. They haven’t been quite sure what to do with it yet. This one tried to eat it:
Apparently it’s a good source of calcium for them. We’ll see what happens.
These two kookaburras were laughing away, but I only caught the end of it, so you can’t really get an appreciation for how it sounds like monkeys:
Here’s one sitting on the bird bath:
They’re so darned cute! But we’re keeping an eye on them around the bird bath because 2 baby fish were born in the pond below in recent weeks and we don’t know if mama and papa fish have taught them to dive when they see any sign of birds above.
Well, I’d better go get the laundry (“washing” here) off the line before it catches fire. Despite this weekend being the beginning of autumn here, it’s 36C with only 38% humidity this afternoon! Very unusually hot and dry. We were chatting with Gary and Jo in Phoenix this morning, so I guess this weather is in honour of the Arizona summer that will be arriving in the not-too-distant future – although 38% humidity there would be considered an extreme level of humidity!
Have a fabulous week, everyone!