A trip to the farm

I went to The Farm on Sunday and  I came back with a boot load of delicious goods and plenty of splinters in my hands (one day, I will actually remember to wear gloves whilst sorting through the macadamia leaves seeking out the nuts). I returned with oranges (Navels and Valencias), mandarins, bush (macadamia) nuts, a pumpkin and some flowers.

I was a little late picking up the bush nuts this year, mostly due to Uni commitments and also in part I guess to not wanting to go to The Farm as I wasn’t sure what my emotions  would be, particularly as a lot of my memories of Grandad in the recent years have been around macadamia harvesting process. I got three boxes full of bush nuts. I husked the two smaller boxes this afternoon and have the large box to go. I should end up with a bit more than a milk crate worth of bush nuts in their shells. Then they will go into the deep freeze for a couple of  months before I start shelling them. Whilst the bush nuts waited for me, the mandarin tree didn’t and I only got a very small box of mandarins. I won’t have enough mandarins to make any more mandarin jam 🙁 🙁 I’ll have to be conservative with the mandarin jam till next year. I did however get plenty of oranges 🙂 which means there will be plenty of orange cakes, eating oranges and who knows what else.  I’ve already got a bottle of orange extract steeping in the cupboard and I’m most certainly getting my daily vitamin C intake at the moment 🙂

The goings-on

Well.

Hanging out with Nemo lots of Clownfish  at Reef HQ.

I went up to Townsville last week for work and I had planned on putting a few posts up on the nights that I didn’t catch up with dear Townsville friends but that didn’t happen did it! I was so tired on those other nights that I managed a little bit of study (yep, took just near 5kg of uni books with me) and then it was straight to bed. So here I am a week since I got home from Townsville and I’m finally sitting down to type.

Apart from uni work, the other reason for the radio silence has been this.

The house is getting painted at the moment and repairs are about to start to the ceilings in this room and the kitchen. Once that is all done then the floor sander will start and then when he done it will be the laying of new carpets in the bedrooms. My vacuum cleaner is getting quite a work out and I’m forever dusting it seems. The house is going to look a treat when it is all done.

Back to Townsville though. Townsville was lovely.

I was staying in the Sugar Shaker so the views were very nice.

Looking towards Castle Hill and work.

I had a dip a few times in the roof top pool, I always had it to myself which was also quite nice.

I was picked up from work on Friday by Sam and then it was back to her house for a weekend of lazy fun in the ‘ville. BBQ next door on Friday night, Reef HQ and Herveys Range on Saturday with girls night out at Cactus Jacks on Saturday night, markets on Sunday and then flying back to Brisbane on the same plane as Bob Katter on Sunday.

Sam at Reef HQ.

Nemo.

The Seahorses were very cute.

These upside down jellyfish were very pretty as well.

As was this fish.

The chocolate nachos as Cactus Jack’s were as always fantastic.  They are soooooo good.

Thumbs up from Townsville.

The London to Cape Town ERA Rally

I really meant to post about this quite a few days ago, since there is only two days of the rally left I best do it now!

My uncle and cousin are just about at the end of a 29 day or 14,400 km mad dash from London to Cape Town in their 1923 Vauxhall OD 23/60, known as Penny. Penny (and my uncle) is quite the adventurer having completed the ERA Peking to Paris rally in 2010 and coming 2nd in the pioneer class.  The original plan some time ago was to do London to Cape Town in their “everyday” 4wd but look at the picture below and I think you can understand why Penny is doing London to Cape Town and not the Landcruiser…

This is them a few days ago barrelling down a road between Moyale and Marsabit in Kenya. The photo is by Gerard Brown who is the rally photographer.

 

They are currently placed at 31 in what is now a field of 41 cars, pretty darn impressive for a car which is the oldest in the rally by 41 years … The second oldest car is a 1964 Volvo PV 544 C. The rally was designed for “classic rally cars”, those rally cars of the 60s-80s, that are the type of cars you think of when you think major long distance rally. They’ve done really well climbing up from 40th which at the pointy end of the rally I would really say comes down to how well they prepped Penny to start off with.

One of the coolest features available to us rally watchers is the yellowbrick car tracking, at any time of the day you are able to see where all the cars are located and what speed they are travelling at etc. If you’ve got some time to spend I highly recommend having a poke round the rally website but also looking at the various participant blogs etc

I leave you with this photo also by  Gerard Brown. This is what happens when you run out of petrol 500m from the petrol station. I’m betting that is one tale those locals will be talking about for some time to come.

Gerard Brown

 

Japan charm kawaiiness

charm kawaii'ness

This selection of charms, key chain straps or whatever else you want to call them are some of my favourite things I brought back from Japan. There is an elephant, a hamburger mirror, Hello Kitty doughnut, Mr Green Tea Ice Cream man, edamame, Miffy with Sakura, Madeline, a little tea set etc etc and more. Probably once a week or so, I change round what I’ve got on my hand bag, mobile and uni bag. I get to take some little pieces of Japan with me where ever I go. sigh 🙂

home again

Well, we arrived home on Wednesday morning and boy were we relieved to be home. I’m slowly going through all my goodies (about 22 different Kit-Kat flavours just for starters) and even more slowly going through photos. I’m starting to catch up on the 2.5 weeks of Uni I missed as well as work. I’ve found it extremely difficult to read/watch/listen to any more news about what is happening in Japan. I almost burst into tears whilst reading a news article about people waiting for lost loved ones to hopefully be found alive whilst on the bus home the other day. Whilst we we were nowhere near any of the devastation it was just so heavy in the air across Japan during our last few days.

We ended up seeing a lot of places, doing a lot of shopping (oh the shopping), eating all sorts of things (Kobe beef!!! OMG), talking to a random mix of people and most of all enjoying the plum blossoms. We did see some cherry blossoms but personally we prefer the perfume from the plum blossoms (we were talking to a volunteer guide at the Osaka Castle Gardens and he said that that preference is quite common amongst westerners).

Plum Blossoms in the Osaka Castle Plum Orchard.
Plum Blossoms, Osaka Castle Gardens

Hello Tokyo

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Well we are now at our third night in Tokyo and whoa what a city it is. People watching, shopping and walking has been done not so much “proper sightseeing” but that is coming.

We had rain through the night last night and woke up to it snowing this morning, it continued up until midday’ish. The snow melted pretty quickly but it was nice for that little while.

The shops, whoa. It as all about variety and then some more. In some way I like the limited ranges of things back home. For example you want a pair of nail clippers; back home you probably have about 5 or so to pick from in a shop, here we were in one big electronics store and I kid you not there would have been at least 70 different types!

Still we’ve been having a ball and tomorrow is the halfway mark 🙁 :-).

Mum, the baking powder photo is for you, does it look familiar?

Cherry blossom season is getting quite close and the shops are filling with cherry blossom/sakura themes items (no Kit-Kats yet 🙁 )but I have had the cherry blossom frappacino from Starbucks and mmm it is very nice, will try the lattes soon.

Tomorrow we are doing more of the sane from the last few days and going to karaoke tomorrow night with a bunch of people from the hostel.