Well, here we are in our final weeks of winter and spring is already in the air – thank goodness! Having to wear long sleeves, long pants, and socks in my sandals was getting to be a bit much. It was nice this week to get back to my usual garb of skorts and T-shirts and sockless feet! I took this video from our front yard yesterday morning:
Just a glorious day! Hugh and I went for a bike ride in the afternoon:
We started at our house in Taranganba and just past the Yeppoon Lagoon, went down to the beach (tide was out and sand is great to bike on) and rode as far as we could, to where the X at the top of the image is (hit a stream coming into the ocean so had to stop). While we stopped to turn around, I wrote in the sand:
How lucky are we!
On the way back, we decided to stop at Lure and have their amazing iced coffees:
There is definitely coffee in these, but honestly, it’s more of a dessert than a drink – full of ice cream, whipped cream and some chocolate syrup on top. YUM! Just behind where we were sitting in this photo, there are cages (old crabpots) on the wall with driftwood in them. This bird kept visiting:
You’d think the bird’s parents would tell him to stay far away from cages, but no, he kept trying to hop inside. What kind of bird is this? A sparrow! You don’t see too many of them around here. Makes me wonder if they’re considered exotic – when you’re surrounded by birds that are pink, green, purple, red, yellow, blue, etc., perhaps brown and beige is eye-catching?
So it’s been a weekend of beautiful blue skies and warm temps. But that was not the case from Sunday evening to Tuesday evening last week. We had 48 hours of major rainfall! Check out this map:
We’re in the dark blue area. We got over 180mm in 48 hours – that’s more than 7 inches! The ground in our back yard was so full of water, it heaved up the lower section of our pond. Extremely unusual weather for winter. The good news is, to re-set that part of the pond and not risk this happening again, Hugh has had a terrific design idea that will look even better than the original – stay tuned!
The downside of spring (September) approaching is that magpie swooping season will be starting:
Last year I wasn’t out on my bike during swooping season but I will be this year, so will have to see how it goes. I’ll send Hugh out first so he can find the routes with the magpies nesting so we can avoid them 🙂
Spring also heralds the beginning of snake mating season. I know by typing this, I’m about to jinx it, but we’ve been here almost 16 months and still haven’t seen a snake. Well, one time on a country road 420km from here from the car window as we drove by. We work on the assumption that they’re all around us and we’re as ready as we can be for when we do encounter one, but so far they remain elusive and we’re quite happy about that.
Another elusive creature is of course the mighty emu. You will have heard me talk about the field that I drive by on my way to work in Rockhampton where they post signs warning that emus are present and possibly trying to cross the road. One time I saw a bunch of cows chasing an emu at full speed at the far side of the field, and another time (near where we saw the snake) we saw a herd of them in the distance, but I’ve never seen any close up. My luck changed this morning! I had to go to work this morning (7:30am on a Sunday, ugh) and there was a huge emu standing right at the fence next to the road watching the traffic! Nowhere good to stop so no photo I’m afraid, but I was pretty darned excited to see an emu in the wild so close!
Why was I going to work at 7:30am on a Sunday morning, you ask? It was the Open Day at our Rockhampton campus for high schoolers and their parents to come by and check out the programs:
Speaking of emus, I have a funny story for you and it will come in handy for those of you coming here to visit (the protagonists in this story have given me permission to tell this tale :)). You will recall that my friends Michelle and Meaghan were here to visit and one day while I was at work, Hugh took them around to a few places. When we had been mapping out options for the day (which included lunch on the river in Rocky and a tour at the crocodile farm), I had suggested they might like to go to Emu Park as there is a beautiful memorial there along the ocean. As Hugh was driving from the crocodile farm to Emu Park, they asked how likely it would be to see emus. Hugh said not very likely. How about kangaroos? No, not likely either. They seemed perplexed by this. Then they approached the sign announcing that they were in Emu Park – and they realised that Emu Park was not a park for emus but rather the name of a town 🙂 Never in 16 months had it crossed my mind that it sounds like a park for emus! Well, this at least solved the mystery that had been going through Michelle and Meaghan’s minds as to why on earth there would be a war memorial inside an emu park 🙂
While out for lunch, Hugh+M+M saw this creature:
It was pretty tiny, 1cm at most, but we had no idea what it was. We therefore turned to our entomologist friend back home, Marvin, and he let us know it’s the nymph of the Assassin Bug. Why are they called assassins, you ask? Well, they suck the juices out of another bug and then proudly walk around displaying the dead bug’s carcass on their backs! So what you see in the photo above is mostly the carcass of whatever bug it just ate. Gross.
On the Wed of their visit, M+M took the ferry over to Keppel Island to go snorkeling on the reef. While we were waiting to pick them up on their return, I finally got a good close up photo of the ubiquitous Moreton Bay pine:
As you can read here, it’s not actually a pine. The needles are very funky.
We had M+M over for dinner the night before they left and Michelle took this lovely photo of Hugh and me – it’s not often we get in a photo together!
The next morning, Michelle was up early and down to the beach and she took this amazing sunrise photo:
I really need to get down to the shore one morning to get my own sunrise photo. As we leave winter and the days are getting longer, that means getting up pretty early, so I better get moving on this goal…
When we took M+M back to the airport, we stopped at the Kangaroo Sanctuary (commonly known as the golf course) because they hadn’t yet seen roos in the wild. Well, did we luck out! There were 2 kangaroos right close by where we walked, having a late breakfast – actually, make that 3, you can see a joey in his momma’s pocket, having a bite to eat as well:
Some more photos:
This is what I think of as the more typical kangaroo pose:
On Friday, Hugh went golfing at the other course in town with our friend Melbourne Rob. That golf course is out past Rob’s place on Farnborough beach and I needed the car to go to work, so Hugh biked with his golf clubs to Rob’s place:
Some of you may remember that we bought these things called “wikes”, made by a company in Gueph, to tow our kayaks behind our bikes. Well, they also make a wike to tow golf clubs so Hugh had bought one before we left. It worked great! Other than one instance where the cyclist turned a bit too sharply and the wike caught the curb and flipped over, but the clubs stayed inside and weren’t harmed – and nor was the cyclist 🙂
Today while I was at work, a brand new bird appeared in our front yard! Hugh got this photo of him:
My handy Merlin app identified him as a Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike. Hopefully he’ll come back again so I can see him!
Speaking of birds, our friend Lynda C from Canada happened to post this on Facebook recently:
This solved a mystery for us! During the Olympics, Australian mobile phone company Telstra had a fabulous series of ads running where they used stop motion filming to depict Aussie animals in locations across the country. These ads were quirky and we just loved them! If you want to see some of them, go to YouTube and google “telstra stop motion better on a better network.” In one of the ads, a character was holding what appeared to be a blackberry in his hand and suddenly the blackberry was speaking – we couldn’t figure out what the significance of the blackberry was. Well, it was the bird that Lynda shared in her post 🙂
Speaking of the Olympics, how impressive were the Aussies! The population here is only 27 million, but we ended up 4th in the medals. That’s pretty incredible on a per capita basis – Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi! (we won’t talk about the embarrassing breaking performance, ugh)
It was so fun watching the Aussie broadcasters for the Olympics – the sense of humour is alive and well over here, such a nice change from North America! I have already reported on radio broadcasters being so funny that I’ve started listening to radio again. Well, same for the TV coverage of the Olympics. They showed the French pole vaulter in slow motion a few times, they referred to how dirty the Hungarian water polo team was, they talked about someone following an athlete “like a bad smell”, they talked about a Canadian athlete being from Windsor, “the armpit of Ontario, it’s pretty rough”, etc. And people here can take it as well as they give it, it’s such a nice characteristic to see, constant laughter. Channel 9 also did a segment each day with “Comparison Man” – click here to see Comparison Man try his hand at various Olympic sports 🙂
All right, last item for today. I saw this on Facebook and thought it was pretty accurate – if you want to spend a year traveling around Australia, this is the route to take to experience optimal weather:
Yeppoon is in the April section, but really, anytime of year is beautiful here. Probably the best weather months are Sep-Nov and Mar-May. June-August are cooler for us locals, but Canadians would love it (it was 24C out this afternoon with a light breeze and I felt the need for a blanket while sitting on the patio – how quickly we have acclimatised!). December-February are hotter and more humid, which southern Americans would be used to. Only two things we would advise against if planning a trip here:
- Don’t go to the areas labeled Dec, Feb, Jan, Mar in our winter (May-August). Cold and miserable.
- Don’t go to the areas labeled May-Sep in our summer (Dec-Feb). REALLY hot.
That’s it for now – I hope you are enjoying a lovely warm August in the northern hemisphere!