Another blog with no adventures to report on, just daily life occurrences in the Land Down Under. We don’t have any adventures planned until June and August and those will be two very opposite end of the spectrum experiences – stay tuned to see what they will be!
Hugh and I just got back from Bunnings. Bunnings is part Home Hardware and part Home Depot. As we were leaving, I saw they were selling:
Yes, chrysanthemums. Not surprising, it is smack in the middle of autumn after all. But it’s 30C out, so it was weird seeing chrysanthemums. I just loved having chrysanthemums in pots in fall in Canada – really brought some bright colour to the yard as the leaves were falling and the skies were starting to become grey, but they also looked fabulous on the beautiful blue sky days of autumn. It continues to be a struggle to use season names here, April-May will forever be “spring” in my mind and Sep-Oct will forever be “fall.” It has started cooling down here this past month, especially overnight. We haven’t had the air con on at all, just ceiling fans, and we put the quilt back on the bed. And, say it ain’t so, I even had to put socks on with my t-shirt and skort a couple mornings to keep my feet warm for the first hour or two of the day!
Good news – we have another pineapple growing! Hugh has planted pineapples randomly around the yard (you just cut the top off a pineapple and stick it in the dirt – and then wait patiently for 18-24 months for them to grow). You’ll recall my excitement when the first one in the front yard was growing so nicely, only to be decimated by some sort of bug. Well, our second one, in the backyard, is doing better than the first!
This was on 10th March (isn’t he cute!):
This is 2nd April:
And this is today:
This one is growing underneath what has turned into an ENORMOUS African Bird’s Eye (aka piri-piri) plant. If Wikipedia is correct, they’re supposed to grow only to 2 ft tall. Well, I guess no one told this to our 4′ tall plant:
We’re excited to have some St Andrew’s Cross spiders back in the yard!
We usually have a couple along one of the fences near various plants and one had a couple babies and they were becoming part of the family. And then last August, we forgot to tell the pest control guy to not spray near one section of the fence – and we lost our favourite spiders :(. Months went by before they started returning and we now have two. One hasn’t yet made a cross in his web yet and the other has half a cross made. They’re very cool creatures!
Then I got this creature on my window in my home office last month:
This is the Green Garden Mantis. It is apparently the most common mantis in Australia, but I’d never seen one before. Very funky looking.
So that’s the 6- and 8-legged critters covered, let’s move on to 4-legged ones:
Zoom in. That’s a little tiny gecko on the door of an SUV parked at Bunnings. Would love to know how he ended up there! Speaking of baby geckos, we found one in our bed one night (we’ve had a lot in the house recently). Good thing we’re not freaked out by them, but they’re quick so Hugh has had to develop a system to live catch and release them.
Now onto our 2-legged feathered friends.
On one of our beach walks, we saw a bunch of seagulls taking advantage of the water sprays at the Yeppoon Lagoon public pool:
And now for an episode of Adventures at the Coolibah Bird Bath. This is magpie-bathing-stage-one (figured out what I was doing wrong with embedding YouTube videos, so you can now see them without clicking away from the blog):
And then this is magpie-bathing-stage-two, when they clean their beak on our fence:
I had been watching stage three with a prior magpie before I got my camera and this one unfortunately didn’t demonstrate for me, but stage three is major preening. Then they’re all ready for date night!
I talked about crows in my last blog because they really are fascinating creatures. Here we have a whole murder of crows at our pond:
This one this morning tried hanging out in our Foxtail Palm, but he’s a bit big for the fronds to support him well:
We had a bit of an algae problem for awhile, but this crow decided to do his part to help get rid of it:
He would use his beak to grab some algae (pronounced with a hard ‘g’ here, not a soft ‘g’) from the water, then use his claws to hold it on the concrete while he pulled it apart with his beak to eat.
For some reason, the crows have recently decided to start pulling at the hoses that bring water to the bird bath and the fountains in the pond. Here is one trying to pull apart a hose in the pond:
And then this morning we noticed that the water level in the bird bath was low – and that’s because they had once again pulled the hose out from there too! We’re trying to explain to them that those hoses are what give them fresh bathing and drinking water, so leave them alone for crying out loud. They haven’t touched them for 2.5 years, I don’t know what’s suddenly changed. It reminds me of the Kea parrots in NZ that rip apart anything made of rubber-y compounds. Hopefully this is a very short-term phase they’re going through!
Hugh got this interesting video a couple weeks ago – 2 crows trying to gang up on 1 kookaburra:
Kookaburras are smart like crows but also really tough, so if it’s a contest between 2 crows and 1 kookaburra, the smart money is on the kookaburra.
We had another Pied Currawong at the bath this week – we made eye contact:
At first glance, they always look like crows – until you see their white feathers.
Hugh saw this unusual bird at a golf course in Rockhampton:
Have never seen one of these and my Merlin bird app wouldn’t identify it, so I had to do some googling. It turns out it’s a White-Browed Babbler. What’s curious about this (and presumably why Merlin couldn’t identify him) is that they don’t usually come this far north. Neat looking bird though.
And then, Jo, this is the one you’ve been waiting for:
I was picking Hugh up from the golf course the other day and I stopped to take this photo:
I thought it was sort of neat to see both kangaroos and ducks on a golf course (you can see the kangaroos off to the right in the shadows). As I was taking the photo, Jo was leaving the golf course and she yelled over, “is that for the blog?” (she knows me, most photos I take are for the blog). I asked Jo if she knew what these were and she very helpfully responded with “ducks” (I seriously need to find better friends… :)). But then she looked more closely and said, “oh, that’s the brown-spotted duck.” Right, like I was going to believe that. So I was dreading looking them up in case they were actually called brown-spotted ducks but fortunately, they are Australian Wood Ducks (which Jo did eventually suggest, when she was done “taking the piss” (another Aussie phrase)).
I took a Tuesday off the other week so Hugh and I could use a voucher (Aussie for gift certificate) we had won at a pickleball event a year ago and do the Freedom Fast Cats Combo Cruise. We are very fortunate to have friends with boats, so we have never actually taken a ferry to Great Keppel Island before. We really didn’t have high expectations but just wanted to use the voucher. Well, it ended up being a fantastic day and I definitely recommend doing the Combo Cruise! We had perfect weather – but the water was still churned up from all the wind and waves and the flooding from the Fitzroy dumping all sorts of debris into the ocean. Despite that, we still had good snorkeling on Monkey Reef and the glass bottom boat tour was a really pleasant surprise! The guide was a coral researcher, so we learned a lot, and it was actually a comfortable boat with great viewing windows. We learned that when the guide first moved to Yeppoon in 1999, the reef was down to 5% of its usual size, but today it’s back to almost 85%. We also learned that the white tips you see on coral is new growth (and we saw lots of white tips on this trip) and that coral is part animal and part plant. We knew that coral dies in the summer during low tides because it gets exposed but what we didn’t know is that clams squirt water on the coral when it’s exposed and this helps keep it cool. We also learned that flood waters that enter the ocean are devastating for coral – the freshwater alone can kill it but then add in the sediment and pollutants from flooding and it’s devastating. This is a reason they don’t like to encourage dredging here, because the sediment kills the coral. I had no idea.
To finish the bird section of the blog, we saw this one while we were on the glass bottom boat:
This is a Brahminy Kite, which are very common along the coast here.
The guide also pointed out this rock formation, which looks like the head of a baboon (nose at lower right of photo, forehead in the upper middle part of photo):
Despite the water being churned up for so long, we still saw some lovely turquoise pools over at the island:
When we were coming back to the island from the glass bottom boat tour, the water was a bit wavy and I wasn’t thinking and left our beach bag on the floor of the boat – and a big wave splashed in and most stuff in the bag got soaked. But not to worry, when we got to the island, we just hung the towels on a volleyball net and enjoyed a coffee in the shade while they dried:
It was 7th April here when we did the boat cruise, which would be 6th April in Canada, and that was the day that the fabulous Artemis II astronauts were on the far side of the moon. While we were waiting to board the boat, I took this photo, which includes the boat we were taking and a cool fish sculpture in the foreground – but if you look up near the very top of the photo about a third of the way in from the left, you can just see the moon:
Hugh and I thought this was pretty cool that we’re looking at the moon while there are astronauts on the other side of it! I don’t know what it is about the moon but it always makes me feel close to my friends and family around the world. Knowing that no matter where anyone is, we’re all looking up at the same moon is just such a lovely feeling for me.
Hugh and I were also thinking back to 7th April 2009, just days before Senior Mixed Provincials in Beaverton when our lives changed completely. We certainly never imagined then that 17 years later, we’d be living in Australia!
In other moon photos, our friend Sarah was playing at Tides N Tunes down at the foreshore during the full moon and I got this photo of her with the moon rising in the background:
Some other photos from behind the stage she was on:
And then I got this photo of the Southern Cross constellation and its 2 pointer stars:
Moments after I took that photo, I saw the International Space Station fly through the constellation, how cool is that!
Got another photo of the Southern Cross, this time from our yard looking above our shed, a few nights later:
OK, the shed. So this brings me to The Stimulator part of the story.
I mentioned in the last blog that Hugh and his mates are turning half our shed into a golf simulator. And of course it’s therefore called The Stimulator (why is it that everywhere I go, I meet friends with the same dirty minds… don’t answer that!). Despite having perfect weather the great majority of the time here, there are occasional rainy days when the guys need somewhere to hit golf balls, and it’s nice to have a practice range in your own backyard. Sigh.
Before talk of the Stimulator became serious, Hugh had already hung a net and sail (old one from Kevin’s boat) in the shed and would occasionally hit balls into it from a piece of cheap astro-turf:
And boy was it loud when the ball hit the sail! I’m sure the neighbours wouldn’t be happy if that had been the permanent solution. But it was not, it was very temporary. Yesterday, Kev, Rod, and Hugh got a lot of incredible work done. Here are some photos of stages along the way:
(yes, there was Smoko of course, a mid-morning break with bacon and egg rolls and coffee 🙂 – and those of you with a keen eye might notice a couple Marc Tetro mugs on the table, some very good Canadiana)
Still lots of work to be done but it’s been so neat seeing how all the various areas of expertise across our friends comes together! We’ve got designers and builders and IT/AV tech and all with a love of golf.
The sail is now forming the ceiling and they bought a foam curtain to hit the balls into – it’s so quiet! Here’s a video:
I’ll keep you posted on how the project comes together!
We went to the Festival of the Wind again last month (we’ve gone 3 years running now). It’s held down at the beach and park in Emu Park and just gets bigger and bigger every year. Loved the stingray and lorikeet kites (they were enormous):
This sailing ship one was fun (you can’t see the strings so it looks like it’s floating in the sky):
This was a fun kite, round and bouncy with a crab in the middle:
And the people who had the kite with the stingray and lorikeet were working hard to get the next one added to the row (looks like a raptor of some sort):
They did eventually get him up but I took this video to show how huge they are.
In other entertainment news, we went to see Rocky Horror at the Pilbeam Theatre in Rocky. Wow, amazing job by the local cast! The guy playing Riff-Raff works in pharmacy at the local hospital and the gal playing Magenta is a speech pathologist (one of my former students). The show broke all records:
It was the week before the show started that I learned that instead of saying “break a leg” here to wish success to the cast, they say “chookas.”
I had organised a group of 12 of us to go and we had a blast! I still think it’s funny that Rockhampton is called “Rocky”, which is the name of a character in it, and that the character Frankenfurter in the movie has the number 4711 written on his leg, which is a post code on the outskirts of Rockhampton. 4711 was actually the name of a popular unisex fragrance in the 70’s, but I feel like someone needs to invent an urban myth about the movie having some sort of secret tie to Rockhampton 🙂
I mentioned in an earlier blog that we’d had an unusually rainy/windy summer here. One day, we got together with Rod, Llew, Rob, and Barb at the marina and we mis-timed heading back to our cars and got caught in the driving wind and rain. Here is Llew, trying unsuccessfully to not get drenched:
Speaking of bad weather, Cyclone Narelle was quite the news-maker recently. Click here to read an interesting article about why it was so unique. Didn’t impact us, most cyclones hit land much further north, but this one pretty much circumnavigated half of Australia.
Fortunately, that weather is done with and we’re back to non-stop blue skies (OK, well, the occasional white fluffy clouds too :)). So beach walks are lovely again. Some random beach walk photos:
The last one, with me on the rocks, shows that the tide can come in rather quickly. I had been able to easily walk to the rock with water barely covering my feet and after literally a few minutes, it was over my knees. But my tall Sweetie came out to give me a hand stepping from the rock into the water.
We saw these great drawings in the sand but it took me a minute to realise why they seemed so strange:
No houses here have chimneys! So these must have been tourists from down south. Or maybe children learn to draw houses with chimneys even though they never see any?
Surf Life Saving Clubs are fixtures all along the coasts of Australia. Lifeguards are trained there and work at many beaches to keep people safe. This year is the 100th anniversary of the Yeppoon SLSC!
(Strange – doesn’t seem like 1926 should be 100 years ago!)
A fun fact that my friend Toni recently taught me is that a tablespoon measure in Australia is not the same as elsewhere in the world. Here is an explanation from Grok:
Tuck that away for a future trivia night!
Speaking of baking, when our friends Glenn and Nancy came to visit last September, we asked them to bring a couple cans of cherry pie filling (because fruit pies do not exist here, cans of cherry pie filling do not exist here). Hugh made a cherry cheesecake with the first one when we were watching the NRL Grand Final last October. Yesterday, I used the remaining can (‘tin’ here) to make my favourite dessert, dump cake:
For those who don’t know, dump cake is made by dumping 540 mL of crushed pineapple on the bottom of a 9×13 pan, then dumping a 540 mL tin of cherry pie filling on top, then dumping a box of white cake mix powder on top, then drizzling melted butter on top, then baking for an hour. This is always a crowd pleaser (and I think it was again last night) but of course, I can’t make it here, not being able to get pie filling. Three other differences making it here:
- The cake mix came in a plastic bag instead of a cardboard box (and it’s not “white” cake mix, it’s “vanilla”, but tastes very similar).
- Tinned pineapple is measured in grams instead of mL.
- There are no 9×13 pans here (Australia being fully metric rather than Canada’s mixed system). I wasn’t able to bring my 9×13 pan from Canada because I left it behind at my uncle Keith’s place in Toronto one night and Keith never returned it 🙂 So we bought two pans here, one is a bit smaller than 9×13 and one is a bit larger. It was a tough call to decide which to use for the dump cake. I went with the larger one, so it wasn’t as deep as usual, but it turned out great. Next time someone comes to visit from Canada, we’ll put in a request for a couple more cans of cherry pie filling and I’ll experiment using the smaller pan 🙂
One more food item and then I’ll call it a day for the blog. One of the girls at work is very reliable for recommending food and restaurants. She suggested we try a deli meat called Honey Kabana:
She said the Plain Kabana is good, but the Honey Kabana is fabulous. We agree! Most of our Aussie friends here had never heard of it either and the good brand is only carried at one supermarket chain and it’s not always stocked. But we now keep an eye out for it! I don’t think it exists in Canada? What about the UK? The size and texture is similar to Kolbassa (which you can’t get here) but the flavour is much better. A great find!
All right, better wrap this up. We’re off to a friend’s 50th birthday party shortly and then after that, we’re going to a comedian/hypnotist show! I haven’t seen a hypnotist show in probably close to 40 years. I don’t think I could be hypnotised but we’ve booked a table at the back in the hopes of not having to find out 🙂