I think it’s been 6 weeks since my last post – which is good for not inundating your Inboxes but bad because there are so many photos, videos, and tidbits to share! For those of you in the Great White North, I’m seeing all your posts this morning with the -30 to -36 temperatures (funny to think there’s a 65 degree temperature difference between there and here), so maybe you can hunker down in front of the fire with your favourite winter beverage in hand and enjoy the read.
Let’s start with some birds because they’re always fun! One morning we woke up to a strange noise coming from our front porch. On investigation, we discovered a bird hanging onto our screen door:
Looks like a cockatoo but smaller. I contacted our Dr Doolittle friends in Brisbane and posted in the Yeppoon Facebook group and learned that it is a captive species called a cinnamon pearl cockatiel and had probably escaped from someone’s house. They suggested we give him some water and try to bring him inside as he won’t likely survive well in the wild. Hugh gave him water, which he briefly drank, but there was no way in hell we were going to try to bring him inside – you can probably get a sense of his beak and claws in the photo and I didn’t want any part of that likely fiasco! I did hear from a couple people in the Facebook group who reported having lost their cockatiels (apparently this variety is expensive), but of course, after hanging out on our screens for several hours, he flew away before the people reached out. Hopefully he was found safe somewhere. A couple weeks later, new neighbours moved in and they have a cat that roams around our yard a lot. Nice looking cat but probably not great for our bird watching. The cat did kill the resident lizard we had living under one of our hedges 🙁 so hopefully he stays away from our bird bath.
We then saw this bird singing away down at the marina:
It’s an Australasian Figbird. Funny how we’ve lived here almost 3 years and still regularly see birds we haven’t seen before.
Then there’s this fellow who has started hanging around our yard lately:
A Spotted Turtle Dove! All those years singing The 12 Days of Christmas and I never really thought about what a turtle dove might look like 🙂
Nothing super special about this one, just a juvenile version of my favourite songbird, the Pied Butcherbird. What’s neat is that I’m not zoomed in much here – he wasn’t afraid of me at all and let me get quite close to him:
A few other interesting critter sightings in the last 6 weeks. This guy was crossing the road in front of us near the marina:
We were driving and I wasn’t expecting to happen across a photo-worthy lizard so I rushed to get my phone out and didn’t get great photos. Seems to be some sort of goanna/monitor but I can’t figure out which. Distinctive stripes running horizontally along his face, and then distinctive stripes on his tail, but body was nondescript. Aussie friends – any ideas??
Oh, remember my non-stop whinging about how loud the damn tree frogs are here? They get in our down pipes and it sounds like a dog barking in a tin shed. Well, we don’t seem to have as many this year (we sometimes wonder if the black headed monitor we found here in the winter is still around and eating them…) – or else they’re respecting our wishes to keep the noise down a bit. Because they’re usually in the down pipes, I don’t see them very often. But when walking back to Kev and Jo’s after a NYE party, this fellow was waiting on top of their gate for us:
Jo has no fear so she just picked him up and held him for me to get a photo. They’re very cute so it’s hard to believe how incredibly loud and annoying they can be.
Another creature that is super loud here is the cicada. We of course have these in North America and they are a lovely sound of summer. They’re here in the summer too, but they are SUPER loud, practically deafening. Check out the link for interesting info on cicadas – did you know that they live underground for many years before emerging to mate (and then die)?
I joined an Invertebrates Facebook group to help me identify bugs etc. we find (Marvin – you would love this group!). Lots of people had been posting pictures of Christmas Beetles, which are all very shiny. So when Hugh and I were walking back from the beach one day, we thought this might be one:
But it wasn’t – it’s actually a Red Jewel Bug.
And then the invertebrate-piece-de-resistance – our first Huntsman! A neosparassus huntsman to be exact:
One of the members in the Facebook group called them “ceiling puppies”, saying they’re great pets 🙂 They’re apparently terrific for eating insects, although in our garage, he’d have to compete with all the geckos for that job. We only saw him twice (which does make you wonder where he might be…). He wasn’t huge – the photo shows him in the corner of the crown moulding (called “cornice” here) in the garage. Only 2.5 inches toe to toe but definitely the biggest spider we’ve seen since moving here. They apparently seek shelter when heavy rain is coming and we did have a pile of rain earlier this month (will tell you about that in a minute). What’s neat about these spiders is that their bodies are designed for where they tend to live (under bark) so they can get very flat and their leg joints are articulated in a way to allow them to move while very flat. They don’t build webs, they just hunt for their prey. This means that this massive web in our back yard is from some other type of spider:
You may have to click on the photo to see it but it goes from the Madagascar Palm at the front left all the way up to the Bottlebrush tree at the back right. Incredible! It’s another one of those really strong strands (I think I posted a photo of one on our back patio awhile back) that’s hard to believe is made by a little spider. Amazing!
I wonder if they need more spiders and geckos in Perth. I forgot to mention in my last blog about how incredibly annoying the flies are there – they are literally in your face all the time. You see this when you watch stuff filmed in the Outback too, flies constantly on your face. The flies are annoying enough where we live, but at least they tend to stay away from your face.
We spent Dec 30-31 on Vivacious with Kev and Jo. I tried out my new full face snorkel mask:
We saw so many pretty fishies and clams on the reef. Big parts of the reef near Yeppoon have died in the last 2 years; fortunately, other parts seem to have a lot of new growth. But you’re wondering, why did Justine randomly insert a photo about snorkeling when she was just talking about invertebrates? Well, I’ll tell you! At two different points while snorkeling, I saw a cool fish in the distance so started swimming toward it – only to suddenly notice a jellyfish in front of me! Not huge, body was maybe 5 inches, and totally see-through, not a stitch of colour. That was an instant stop and put the flippers (called fins here) into reverse thrust! I have no idea how to tell which jellyfish are the stingers so I just try to stay far away from them all. The next day, a boy was snorkeling where I had been and was stung by an Irukandji jellyfish. The ones I saw were not Irukandji. How do I know? Because I could see them. Irukandji are TINY and you will not see them. But their sting is vicious and can be life-threatening. We don’t get them down here too much, they’re more common up north, but we had several days of northerly winds and that tends to blow them down here. Summer is “stinger season” in Australia. Fortunately, the boy was airlifted to hospital in Rocky and he’s fine.
OK, what next… Let’s go to Christmas! Seems forever ago right now (although maybe not for those of you in Ontario, surrounded by snow and cold!). Our first Christmas here, in 2023, coincided with the first occurrence of Radiance at the Rockhampton Botanic Gardens. This is where the gardens get turned into a Christmas wonderland and you follow the paths through incredible light, sound, laser, and even snow and fog displays. Our favourite displays this year were the ones with projections onto the ground – they’re able to get such vibrant colours now! Click here for a video of one of them. There was another one, which I didn’t get a great video of, where you could interact with the projections – your movements would dictate how the Christmas baubles moved on the ground! Very fun.
One night we decided to drive around to see the Christmas light displays in the neighbourhoods throughout Yeppoon. Check out this one in Lammermoor. And that video doesn’t capture the full yard – I took a separate video of the other side of their corner lot! This was the first time we’d seen anyone put lights onto the grass – no idea how they managed to cut the grass! Absolutely gorgeous display though.
That reminds me – I have a monthly calendar of things I need to remember to do each month. For the first week of December, I have an entry to remind me to waterproof my winter boots. I guess I can scratch that one off the list now 🙂 But just yesterday, the pavement at the marina looked like this:
Except for the people walking in t-shirts and shorts, that could be a winter image from southern Ontario! All the salt stains on the pavement. But here it’s from the boats being washed when they come out of the water 🙂 Speaking of winter, I learned a new Aussie word a couple months ago – skivvy. That means turtleneck. Which is never required in Yeppoon!
OK, back to Christmas. We had a gathering of our golf and sailing friends at Kev and Jo’s the Saturday before Christmas. Here I am with Doiya and Llew, all with drinks in hand:
We of course had to get rid of our Christmas sweaters now that Christmas is in summer, so you can see my Christmas shirt in the photo. We had a number of different Christmas events to go to this year, and you get sweaty this time of year, so I think we’re going to have to buy more short-sleeved Christmas shirts!
At the CCYC (Capricornia Cruising Yacht Club), Santa comes to visit the kids and he arrives and leaves by sailboat. Click here for a video of Santa leaving on our friend Phil’s boat (with Doiya at the bow). As we were waiting for Santa to arrive, it was fun watching all the kids get excited. One boy, probably around 7 years old, was playing near the railing above the water while waiting for Santa. His family seemed a little rough around the edges and then he spat over the railing into the water and I was immediately not a fan. But my heart grew three sizes that day. As Santa was leaving, the boy stood at the railing waving and said, “Have a good afternoon, Santa!” I am still tearing up now writing this. There was such genuine care and love in his voice. A wonderful reminder of the basic goodness of humans.
Our lovely neighbours Graham and Bev, who were the first to welcome us to the neighbourhood when we bought our house, had us over for Christmas lunch with their family:
Their granddaughter is a high level netball player – she’s just 17 but has moved to Brisbane to compete at a high level (she also plays on Fiji’s national team). She’s just fabulous to speak with – it’s not surprising that, despite being the youngest person on the team, they nominate her to do all the spokesperson jobs, she’s such an engaging and informative speaker. I hadn’t heard of netball in Canada but she told us there are internationally ranked teams there!
OK, I mentioned earlier about having lots of rain here earlier this month. There was a cyclone that came inland as a tropical low about a 10 hour drive north of here. Boy, did it dump rain on us! Check out our rain gauge:
The black lines are inch markers and we only put them to the 5″ mark because we thought that was reasonable. Nope, we were wrong – take a close look and you’ll see that the entire gauge is FULL. That means we got at least 12″ (30 cm) of rain (because maybe some overflowed) in less than 72 hours! Fortunately, this area is built to handle massive rain given that that seems to be what happens here – very little rain most of the time but when it does rain, it comes down in buckets. Some low-lying sections of roads were under water for a bit but the drainage is quite incredible here. About 5 hours north of here, though, they had significant flooding. And where does that water go? It moves along the river system toward the ocean. The Fitzroy River flows through Rockhampton en route to the ocean (if you’ve visited us, you know the river, we take everyone to the river district because it’s so pretty). Hugh was there on Wednesday last week, a day before the flooding peaked, and he took these photos:
Fortunately, it only peaked at 7.25 metres (24 feet), so it didn’t do too much damage. Check out the markers on this to see the bigger flood levels of years past (you may have to click to enlarge the photo):
The Fitzroy enters the ocean quite a ways south of us but one of the downstream effects is debris in the ocean. Boaters have to keep an eye out for logs and “weed islands” and the water has been brown for the past couple weeks.
It was around Christmas when I decided I needed to make a couple lifestyle changes as I spend A LOT of time sitting with working from home at least 3 days per week (when I’m on campus, I walk around a lot more, but at home, I really just sit – this has not been working out so well for the belly area…). So, you won’t believe this but, I’ve somehow managed to stop eating chips every night, yay!!! And the other change is that we go for a late afternoon walk on a beach a couple times a week. Hugh gets lots of walking in because he walks when he golfs, but I need to move more. We have 8 beaches to choose from so Hugh just picks one and we walk for about 30 minutes. It’s just lovely, sand in your toes, listening to the waves. And I get to take photos like this:
We really do live in a beautiful part of the world!
Tomorrow is Australia Day and it’s either on or near Australia Day when the CCYC has the Blessing of the Fleet. Kev and Jo of course pick a fabulous theme and we get Vivacious all decorated for the event. This year they chose a Hawaiian theme:
We had dance moves choreographed to the song Pearly Shells by Burl Ives. I had never heard this song before but it’s lovely! And probably stuck in my head forever now because we did the routine 10+ times between practising beforehand and then making sure any spectators along the route for the Blessing of the Fleet got to enjoy it 🙂
Yes, that’s an inflatable flamingo, peacock, and kiddy pool (filled with bath bubbles) and below, we had a palm tied to the mast:
Plus the usual Australia flags, including the Boxing Kangaroo flag (from when Australia II won the America’s Cup in 1983), and a Margaritaville “it’s 5 o’clock somewhere” flag. A good time with friends as always!
OK, so you’re thinking now – hold on, the title of this blog is Turning Seventy in the Sunny Southern Hemisphere, but she hasn’t said anything about that. Yes, I’ve been saving the best for last!
Hugh turned 70 this month so I organised a party at the CCYC for him. Here’s the invitation I sent:
I put together some fun facts about 1956 in Canada, Australia, and the rest of the world. I made this photo collage of Hugh over the years:
I created 45 “true false” cards for people to learn fun facts about Hugh:
I had a cake made with a Par 70 flag:
It was an awesome afternoon! We had our friend Anthony’s band playing and they were terrific. It was, however, probably the hottest day of the summer so far:
Thank goodness for shade and a breeze off the ocean. Despite the heat, 50 of our friends were able to join us. How lucky are we to have so many incredible friends in our new country! Here are some photos of the people who make our lives so wonderful here:
Jo prepared a fabulous poem for Hugh. Click here to see the video of Jo reading her poem to the crowd.
And our friends from Canada Ray and April sent up a poem they wrote and asked me to read. Click here to see that video. Couldn’t quite make it through the last couple lines without choking up. The world is indeed a better place with you in it, Sweetie – I love you so much!
One last thing for this blog. On the 18th December, Hugh got his first ever hole-in-one:
This is memorable for another reason. That morning, Hugh got a call that his brother Gary had passed away. I think Gary was letting Hugh know one last time how much he loved him. The feeling is definitely mutual. These are photos that I included in Hugh’s birthday photo collage showing Gary and Hugh in 1976 and again in 2023:
A bit of a height difference and Gary was much more of a talker than Hugh is, but otherwise they were two peas in a pod. Here’s to you, Gary – another person who made the world a better place. Rest in peace, my wonderful brother-in-law.