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Unlike a yoyo craze, unlike a marble phase

I love it everyday – Spaghetti Bolognaise!

Life is an interesting thing. Or perhaps more the internet is an interesting thing or even more precise Facebook. Last Sunday night Mum and I went to see Peter Combe. The very next day I got a message on Facebook saying that Catherine Riddle had added me as a friend.

Catherine and I grew up together. A fair swack of my childhood was spent playing in Catherine’s back yard, swimming in the pool, playing dress-ups in her Mum’s old ballet costumes and generally just having fun. We went to the same primary school but after her dad spent a year on exchange in England and they went up to Charters Towers to live/teach we pretty much lost contact. We have seen each other a few times over the years but I don’t think I have seen Catherine for probably four years now. I nearly fell off my chair when I got the notification on facebook because a few weeks before when I had joined facebook again as it now seemed like all my friends had it now, one of the first people I searched for was Catherine but she wasn’t to be found.

This is us when we are young tykes, Catherine and I had just turned 4 ( our birthdays are 10 days apart) and Matthew was/still is my little brother.
Catherine, Helen & Matthew

What made it all the more special was that the night before as Mum and I were walking down the steps out of the Zoo after seeing Peter Combe, Mum was commenting on how Margaret (Catherine’s mum) had introduced us to Peter Combe as I was mentioning that a lot of my friends had not been exposed to Peter when they were young and that she was going to send Margaret a letter and her Peter Combe ticket.

Peter Combe was a fantastic night. The Zoo was sold out and it was full of newspaper hats and pure glee amongst the punters who had forgotten just how much we had loved Peter Combe as children and that we would still sing those songs word for word. I can’t wait for him to come back north again as I would be there in a split second. I have gone to a fair amount of concerts and whilst there was no fancy lights or sound effects, I have to say I think it was the only concert I have been to where every single person there had a huge grin on their face all night long.

Peter Combe

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a weekend on the bay

ok so we got back from Straddie, oh 3 wks ago and I haven’t done a proper post on our w/e “crusing the bay” in sea kayaks and frankly I have photos to show. I plan on spending tonight playing catch up with various blog/photo things.

*****

5 kayaks, 8 people, numerous Turtle sightings, a fire on the beach, assorted sea birds, a flock of 50 or so Black Swans, assorted marine life and 1 Dugong sighting. That in short sums up the weekend of paddling we did.

Seeing the Turtles and Dugong were so cool. I was just paddling on Sunday morning and this Dugong popped its head up just ahead of me. It was sooooo cool!

In a slightly longer form. We paddled from Victoria Point to Macleay Island for morning tea to Blakesleys Anchorage to set up camp and have lunch. Then we relaxed on the beach/in the bush round camp as well as doing a short paddle down to an Eelgrass bed at low tide to explore the marine life. Watched a rather nice sunset (no clouds but still nice), ate a very nice dinner of pasta salad which I had made the night before. Relaxed round the fire for a while. Marvelled at the lack of sandflies/mozzies compared to what we were expecting.

And in an even longer form, the email that Mum sent 😀

I had such a lovely weekend I want to share it. Helen and I went sea-kayaking with an NPAQ trip. We hired a sea kayak with blow up roof racks!! We started from Redland Bay and paddled in across to Garden Is – uninhabited. That stretch was choppy, but the rest of the paddling for the whole w/e was easy. Then across to MacLeay Is. Pulled up onto the beach there and went up to the coffee shop for hot chocolate and caramel slice – a bit different for morning tea on an NPAQ outing. Then through some passage and a longish open stretch across to Stradbroke Is (Blakesly’s Anchorage to be precise). This was where thing started to get interesting. We saw an osprey’s nest in /on a navigation light. I suspect that the light was built to accommodate a nest!! Then we saw about 40 black swans just swimming along. Latter Helen and I were watching a cormorant swimming with a large flapping fish in its mouth when an osprey dived to take the fish! The cormorant dived and won, but actually the fish may have won as the cormorant dropped the fish and flew off when we got too close.

Blakesley’s Anchorage is a nice place to camp – the only facilities provided are rubbish bins, but it is a huge flat area with plenty of
shady trees and no undergrowth. It is the only sandy beach on that part of Stradbroke. After lunch, we went for a walk and found beach curlews and watched a mangrove bittern feed on the mud flats. Helen had fun with the thousands of soldier crabs. Late in the day, Helen and I went for a paddle south and then turned around and came home close in to the mud flats. We saw lots of things: stripped sea-anemones growing out of the sand, some areas had hundreds of mud whelks in a small area, u-tube
worms, sea cucumbers, and a couple of really weird things. One was this long flattish body about 15″ long and 3/16″ wide in a puddle of water. When we got close it would contract down into a hole. We paddled home after the sun had set – nice light but no clouds.

On Sunday we all went for a walk east to find Blakesly’s Lagoon that was marked on the map. In the process, we realized that the whole area has been re-vegetated after sand mining – that explained the lack of undergrowth. We were able to walk close to a kilometre inland in either bare feet or river sandals!! Those sandhills should be very thick with undergrowth.

Then we paddled to the northern tip of Macleay Is for morning tea and across to Coochiemudloo for lunch – that place was busy, then the longest leg south to Redland Bay again. this was against the tide but with the wind. Geoff showed us how to rig a tent fly as a sail across 3 kayaks – the wind pushed us along quite nicely.

It was a lovely weekend – nice weather, nice temperature, no wind to talk about, good company – so much so that Helen has a mad scheme to take the barge / boat to Moreton, kayak down the western side of Moreton across to Stradbroke and down the western side of Stradbroke and end up somewhere. Anyone interested? 🙂 We need some open water experience first.

This was Helen’s first trip to Stradbroke!!

ExploringWashing the dishesChristmas BeetleSunday morningGeoff, his boat, his camp.Rosco YellowIntegrifoliadecked out

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Target 140 refined

Well it is now a bit over three months since the Water Commission formally introduced Target 140. When I did the last post on our water usage the Brisbane average was 137L per person per day. That has now dropped to 133L. Our water usage in that period has dropped from 77L per person per day to 54L. In the next period I/we are going to try to reduce that to 35L as that would mean that we would be doing Target 140 for the whole house instead of per person.

For the entire 3mths that this advice note reports on, our washing machine has been fed off the rainwater tank 100%. It is dead easy to reduce your water use and we don’t have aerators on our taps, we don’t have a water efficient shower head and our toilet rigged to use less water by the shampoo bottles full of water inside it. If we did have these we would quite possibly reduce our use even more. It is just a matter of taking a millisecond when you turn on a tap or step into the shower to reduce what you use.

Water Advice

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Mum and her Binoculars

A collection of photos from the weekend showing Mum and her Binoculars (Canon of course). There was so many things to look at: birds on the water, birds on the beach, birds in the trees, plants in the distance, the list goes on.

Mum with Binoculars 1 Mu<a class=Mum with Binoculars 3 & our kayak Mum with Binoculars 4 m with Binoculars 2″ />

If there had been someone else there with a camera, they could have quite easily taken the same number of photos of me with my camera 😀

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Birthday Breakfast

We went to Walkabout Creek yesterday morning for a Big Breakfast Buffet to celebrate my Birthday. Pabbi picked Grandad up from The Farm for the occasion and then we headed over to Brisbane Forest Park for some serious Breakfast Buffeting as in I am not having lunch today and won’t eat much for dinner sort of Breakfast. It t’was very good indeed. Lots of very yummy foods. The waffles were huge and very nice with Greek yoghurt and berry compote and there was Danishes and bacon, lots of bacon and very nice breakfast.

I had hoped to get a photo of Matthew as he was told that he had to let me take his photo as it was my Birthday event, somehow it didn’t transpire. I did two very nice photos of Pabbi and Grandad though.

Grandad
Pabbi

Grandad brought a Hippeastrum stalk down with him for me to put my desk at work this week. He must have known that the Crucifix Orchids that I had picked at The Farm a fortnight ago had reached the end of their life on Friday. I have quite liked looking at the Hippeastrum flowers at work today, so big and red 😀