Once again, I seem to have too many things to share! It really is such a tremendous privilege to live here and share our new experiences with all of you!
Last weekend, a curious phenomenon occurred – we had a major wind shift bringing hot, dry air from the west (west would be where the Outback is). We’d become very accustomed to humidity and high dew points here, so when this weather arrived, it really caught us off guard.
In the winter, humidity is in the 40-60% range and in the summer it’s in the 70-85% range. So when it hit 17% last weekend, we were blown away! Quite literally, actually, the west winds really cranked up for awhile. The much more typical wind is from the east. I had noticed the change in wind direction but hadn’t looked at our hygrometer until I was walking around the house and the tile floor felt different somehow. Then I had laundry on the line and it was instantly dry, and the towels in the bathroom were drier than they’d been since we left Canada. It felt like we were in Arizona! And then the regular weather returned a few days later and everywhere felt damp to us – Gary and Jo, we now know how you felt coming to Canada in July and everything seeming wet to you! It was strange to have such a dramatic juxtaposition of humid and dry days. And check out the dew point in the screenshot above, 2C! On a typical 30 degree day it would be well into the 20’s (we actually had to replace the felt pads under our chairs with plastic ones because the felt ones stick to the floor in the summer!). The heat didn’t last long, went back to normal mid-20’s the rest of the week, but we’ve had a west wind again today, it’s warmed up again, and the humidity is around 40%. Quite the rollercoaster! Oh and while we had the hot dry air from the Outback, parts of the Outback got 30-50mm of rain! There are all sorts of videos floating around of waterfalls running down the red rocks – that would be brillant to see.
We went for a walk on Farnborough beach on that hot, windy, dry day last weekend and these caught our eye:
From a distance they looked like sea urchins. But they were just tumbleweeds from the sand dunes:
We’d never seen them before because usually the wind is blowing from the east. I’m sure the tumbleweeds had no idea what hit them when they landed in water instead of sand and grass!
Ray and April – we were reminded of North Carolina when we saw a bunch of these little fellows zipping along looking for sand crabs:
We think they’re Red Capped Plovers here. We also saw these terns, standing facing into the west wind:
The terns here are very similar to the ones we used to love watching over Lake Ontario from our backyard. But I don’t think either in Ontario or here have we ever seen them standing – they’ve always been flying and diving – so it was strange to see them on the beach. The wind was howling but at least in Ontario, they always seemed to like the high winds. Another mystery!
When we were walking over the dunes to leave the beach, we noticed a tomato plant was growing around the base of a tree in the sand!
No wonder our tomato hedge is 8 feet tall if these suckers can grow fine in sand. We really need to rethink our tomato planting habits going forward. Fortunately, Chef Hugh is using tomatoes to make his own base sauce for spaghetti – here is the first pan of roasted tomatoes, yum yum:
And what goes well with homemade sauce? Well, obviously:
There is an amazing wine distribution system here – you can buy by the case from a pile of places that sell a range of Aussie wines. We had coupons to try the Naked Wine distributor and both cases arrived the same day. Makes it look like we have a problem… Fortunately we were home when they arrived so we could quickly squirrel them inside before the neighbours were tempted to refer us to AA.
We had gone down to the beach last weekend to watch some of the youth sailing event happening in Yeppoon. There were usually little sailboats as far as the eye could see in this week-long event. Here a bunch had come in already:
We had a particularly high tide on one of the days last weekend too – almost 5m (usually is closer to 4m). Here is how high the water was, no beach at all:
Whereas this is how it is in this same spot in between low and high tide usually (I’m standing about 20 feet from the base of the stairs in the above photo) – lots of beach:
The red and yellow flags you see here are how they delineate the swimming area of the beach when the lifeguards are out – they encourage you to stay within the area indicated by the flags if you want to be rescued 🙂 (I’m quite sure they’ll still rescue you if you’re elsewhere, they’re just hoping that beachgoers will make things easier on them – which of course never happens.)
We did make it easier for them and went to the coffee shop opposite the beach for our new guilty pleasure called iced coffee. While sipping the dessert in a glass, seagulls swooped in to polish off the fries someone dared to leave on their plate:
Seagull behaviour knows no borders.
In other bird news, we finally had another visit from a Pale-Headed Rosella:
They’re so incredibly pretty! We had one visit us back in March and haven’t seen any since. He seemed to like the new rock Hugh added to the front pond.
Oh! While I’m sitting here typing right now, a Little Friarbird came to visit! We get a lot of these but they’re hard to photograph because they’re either hidden in the bottlebrush trees or they move so quickly. But this guy kindly posed on the fence for me for a few seconds:
I think that’s it for birds so let’s move onto bugs. Remember I showed you the chrysalis on the reed in the front pond the other week? I was starting to question if it was a chrysalis or if it was part of the reed, like a bullrush. It started growing some hair-like tendrils and a few other smaller ones appeared on other reeds. But then this beautiful moth suddenly appeared under what is now a shrivelled up chrysalis/bullrush:
So I don’t know if the moth emerged from the chrysalis or if it was simply hanging out on the reed. I do note that the moth has fuzzy tendrils on his head just like the chrysalis did. Another mystery!
I also happened across this fella on a bathmat I had drying outside:
Really neat looking bug. Only about an inch or so long. We checked in with Marvin and it’s the famous assassin bug! We posted a photo of an assassin bug nymph in early August, who was proudly carrying around the carcass of the insect he had sucked the guts out of. Some days I’m really glad I’m human.
One bug I don’t have a photo of is the mozzie (mosquito). They are of course very similar to the mozzies in Canada, with one notable exception – they’re stealth! They don’t always make the annoying buzzing noise that they do in Canada and you don’t always feel them when they bite. This is good because you don’t go insane listening to the noise and wondering where the bloodsuckers are but bad because you don’t notice they’re around until you’re covered in bites the next day!
Found a different type of spider web in the corner of our laundry line the other week:
I think it belongs to a Black House Spider but can’t confirm that definitively. He scooted away when I was hanging laundry and I couldn’t get a good look at him, but his web was funky, looked like broken glass.
Have I told you before that Hugh’s great great great grandfather was Matthew Flinders? Flinders mapped the coastline of Australia and this plaque at Wreck Point commemorates him:
We don’t seem to get any special treatment for our almost-royal ancestry though 🙁
Yesterday we drove down to Emu Park for our Saturday morning yoga class. It is such a beautiful way to start the weekend – we drive along the coast to get there, looking at fabulous ocean views:
Then have an amazing class with Liliana, listening to the waves in the background. Pretty easy to experience gratitude!
Yesterday afternoon we went for a bike ride down Farnborough beach. We usually stop and turnaround here because a creek empties into the ocean and it’s not usually passable:
But it was a couple hours after low tide and you could actually bike across this time, so Hugh did:
Not being certain how much Flinders is in Hugh’s genes, I suggested we stay on our side so we didn’t mis-time the tide coming back and have to navigate uncharted areas through the dunes while the sun was setting. Safely from our side of the creek, I took this video looking back toward Yeppoon:
We live on one of the hills in the distance. So today I took a photo from our driveway looking back toward Farnborough beach and I’ve identified with a red arrow approximately where I was standing when I took the video above:
This is why our house was advertised as having a “sea glimpse” 🙂
On our ride back from Farnborough, we stopped at Boba Shack, a new Vietnamese restaurant in town that our friend Irene from pickleball started. We had a Banh Mi pork roll – absolutely delicious!!
Speaking of pickleball, our friend Vicki organised a Pickle and Parilla day last Sunday. Hugh and I had never heard of Parilla before but it’s an Argentinian BBQ thing. The pork belly was a bit fatty for my liking but the chicken and brisket were fabulous, as was the chimichurri sauce.
And still speaking of pickleball, Barb and I joined a Barbies and Bubbles event earlier this week. I don’t usually drink n pickle, but the sips of champagne were a nice treat in between games:
In other random news, when Hugh was making breakfast this morning, his flat white came out with a heart-shape completely on its own (when he makes coffee for me, he always makes a heart shape on top, but this one happened all by itself):
Hugh made blueberry pancakes this morning so got out the Canadian maple syrup – this style of container always makes me think of the Costco maple syrup!
As we discovered last year, September is when Christmas decorations appear in stores here:
I saw this on Facebook and it pretty much sums up September in Australia nicely:
But I think that might apply equally to this time of year in Canada 🙂