Well, we saw our first stick insect this week! I was walking up to the 1st floor of my building at work on Monday night and at first walked on by, thinking a twig had become stuck on the wall (stairwells in our building are outside, so this was on an outside wall on a balcony-like area). When I walked by again, I realised it was a stick bug, so ran down to get my phone to take a picture. Unfortunately, it didn’t really look like much, you would have just thought it was a twig. But when Hugh came by with dinner, I brought him up to see the bug and it had moved a bit, so looked more like a bug now. I had Hugh stick (ha ha) his hand out to give you a sense of the size:
I’m pretty sure we get stick insects in southern Ontario too, but this was my first sighting of one over here.
Then last night before we went to bed, Hugh discovered a spider trying to nab a dead fly from the floor outside our kitchen. But nothing terribly exciting, I’m afraid, just a plain ol’ Black House Spider:
Less than 2cm toe to toe. So still no ferocious spider sightings to be had.
Earlier in the week, we discovered another large cockroach, this time in our almost-done-renovating ensuite bathroom. Probably 2 inches long – a big fella and quick moving (Kevin K – you wouldn’t have liked this at all and would definitely have needed Cathy’s help :)). Hugh managed to get rid of him. Our house was sprayed for bugs last June and you just spray once/year (can only imagine what kind of chemicals we’re inhaling!). We didn’t see any bugs inside the house at all for at least 6 months. Then we’d start to very occasionally see a dead one. But in the last month, we’ve seen a handful of alive ones. 2-3 months to go before we spray again…
No new birds for you this week, I’m afraid. When Hugh and I were admiring the stick insect on Monday, the crows were gathering in the trees across the road from my building on campus and they were deafening:
We had quite a miserable weather week here, grey and drizzly – thought we’d escaped that kind of weather when we left Ontario! But fortunately, things cleared up for the long weekend and Fri, Sat, and today have been beautiful. Here Easter Monday is still a national holiday, so our long weekend is 4 days – amazing! After working so much the last 2 months, this weekend has been a breath of fresh air. And speaking of fresh air, the temperature has cooled off a bit, daytime highs around 28C or so, just lovely! We are of course solidly into autumn now and if you can’t tell that from the 28C temperatures, you can from all the fleece and flannel items appearing in the shops:
On Friday, Hugh and I went out to Cawarral to see a leather worker (I had an idea for a custom towel holder/strap/clip/thingy – will show you once ready). Cawarral is a tiny village/hamlet/intersection about 20 minutes inland. As the crow flies, would be a quick trip from Taranganba, where we live. But as you can see on the map, there aren’t many roads to Cawarral:
A bit further south is the crocodile farm I told you about and there’s also a camel farm in the general area. The camel farm made national headlines in recent weeks because a finalist in Australian Idol is the owner of said camel farm (we actually had 2 locals among the finalists – the camel farm guy and a gal from Rocky – but I don’t watch it so can’t tell you much about either). On the way back from Cawarral, we stopped to pick up some eggs from a farm in the area. Aussie humour is everywhere here, even at the egg stall:
This type of stall is everywhere here – honour system, just put your cash into the container (which is bolted down) and take your items.
Oh yes, almost forgot! Lorraine, while the spelling is off, we saw these signs while we were on Cawarral Road and had to pull over to take a photo for you:
You’ll have to zoom in to see the street sign on the right side of the road. We love seeing reminders of our friends back home and this one warmed our hearts :).
On Saturday morning, our friends Leigh and Darren came over. We’ve decided to remove the shade garden on the east side of our house and replace it with a vegetable and herb garden so that our backyard can be 100% non-vegetables. It turns out that among her many talents, Leigh is an avid gardener and she kindly offered to take most of our shade plants and give them a loving new home. Here they are salvaging the plants:
Leigh also taught us about many of the plants we have and gave us some great ideas to make use of some of the plants that we would never have thought of. For instance, we took the hanging baskets from the shade garden and hung them from tree branches in our backyard – they look great! And then she suggested taking a couple of our favourites and keeping them in a vase with water indoors. I would never have thought of doing that but look how pretty this looks:
Hugh is going to start dismantling the roof over the shade garden in a couple weeks, so we’ll show you after photos later, but for now, our shade garden is looking a little forlorn:
But now that the plants are mostly gone, Hugh can take all the fabulous rocks there and move them to the stream/pond/rock garden in the back! We get so excited when we find good rocks. We also got excited when Hugh and Leigh were digging a plant out and the shovel hit something solid – oooh, could it be a buried treasure??? I’ve always wanted to find a buried treasure! Nope, it was a termite bait station. Glad Leigh was with us when we discovered this because we would have had no idea what it was. When the bug sprayer guy comes back in June, we’ll have to point this out to him. And you wonder where this week’s blog title comes from, how many bug experiences can you have in one week, sheesh.
Speaking of gardening, check out the huge new frond that’s going to open on one of the palms in our front yard:
When Leigh and Darren arrived, they brought us coffee and treats. One of the treats was:
Anzac Day is coming up at the end of April – will tell you more about that then. But Leigh explained that these cookies (oats and coconut) are a very traditional Anzac Day treat.
Hugh prepared his now world famous pineapple cheesecake for Leigh and Darren so they could sample a graham wafer crumb crust for the first time ever – and it was a hit!
Saturday afternoon was spent on our patio, enjoying our new favourite grapefruit/lime/gin drink in our new favourite Yepp Brewery glass:
And for dinner, we ordered from our favourite pizza place, Rossco’s. Their pizza boxes always have something fun under the lid that you can wear as a bib. Here is this week’s:
Today we had a new first ever experience – we went to the beach on Easter Sunday! Late March / early April isn’t a time of year we’ve often traveled anywhere, so we have never before spent Easter Sunday on a beach. I think it’s a nice tradition to start :). Back in early January when the Boxing Day sales were on, we picked up a beach wagon and a cabana:
We live so close to so many beaches and there’s so much space on them, we wanted to make it easy to spend time at them. And then work got busy and we hadn’t had a chance to use the wagon and sunshade. But we did today and it was great! We of course chose a super windy day to learn how to set the Sun Ninja shade up, so I’m sure we provided some entertainment for the handful of other people on the beach for awhile, but we got it figured out! It’s actually really simple if you read the instructions, who knew. Having an SPF shade is pretty much critical here, it’s crazy how quickly you burn in the Queensland sun. Yesterday I was in the sun intermittently while chatting with Leigh and Darren. I had a hat on but didn’t have sunscreen on because I wasn’t going to be in the sun much – all told, my shoulders were exposed to the sun for maybe 15 minutes, and they got burned. Fortunately, the magical Maui Vera (remember that, Chris S?) did the trick and they’re much better today. But hence the need for a sunshade at the beach even in the late afternoon sun!
Well, that’s it for this week. From our home Down Under to yours – we wish you a very Happy Easter!