Big Birthday

We are usually away from home for my birthday and it has been a non-event for some time so I decided to celebrate this year and I am so glad I did.  We had a bbq under the pergola with my mum, our daughters, friends and neighbours. And what a wonderful surprise when my sister from New Zealand arrived, uninvited, the evening before!

This is my sister and mum with me.

This is me with our two daughters. 

The weather was great and it didn't rain until after everyone had eaten - perfect timing!

My thanks to the bbq cooks, John and Luke. (Luke is so good we are going to let him marry our daughter, Rachel, next year.)

Jacaranda

Each morning in recent times I have religiously and surreptitiously swept the fallen jacaranda flowers from our pergola area for fear that my husband will "get rid of that tree that makes so much bloody mess"!  I have seen how he can butcher shrubs that he decides need to be pruned!

This is the first time for some years that we have been home for late November and I am so much enjoying my garden area.

Rain is forecast for the next couple of days, starting this afternoon, so I expect that will be the end of the beautiful jacaranda blossom for this year.

Long absence from here

So long since my last post! I always feel I should be doing things instead of writing about them.

It's getting quite warm outside so my gardening activities have finished for the morning and I want to record my observations.  The jacaranda is in flower, the star jasmine and gardenias look beautiful and add perfume to the air, the agapanthas are in bud and even the melaleucas (bracteatas) are flowering brilliantly this year. So everything is green, purple and white/cream at the moment.

I have picked my first tomatoes for the season, we've had a few pickings of zucchinis and beans are compulsory each evening. (I can hear our daughters reminiscing about the bean gluts!)

Galahs and pale-headed rosellas used our nesting boxes again this year and the babies have already flown the coop.  My poor old magpie that I fed for over 21 years died earlier this year but his absence has contributed to a change in balance in the bird life we see regularly. We have a group of babblers http://birdsinbackyards.net/species/Pomatostomus-temporalis that have been hanging around for months and have built several nests on our block although don't appear to have raised any young. They are lovely happy chatty birds. Years ago when they nested here, the blue-faced honey-eaters moved in after them.

2011 has been a pretty good year and I will blog some more soon (while I can remember it.)

Very hungry caterpillars - and other things!

The butterflies (dingy swallowtail, papilio (eleppone) anactus) are beautiful but their caterpillars are decimating my citrus trees in pots, especially the one that I am babysitting for my mother.  I have been unable to take a photo but know I have identified them correctly when my reference (Queensland Museum) writes "larvae feed on citrus trees in suburban gardens."  I have not yet been able to identify the ones that are munching away at my gardenias. I hate using poisonous sprays and also hate squashing caterpillars but every day I pick them off the plants and stomp on them. At least by doing this so regularly most of them are very small so, for me, the act is not so gross.

The wet summer has changed the balance in the garden. Shrubs and plants that survived and almost thrived in the years of drought have "drowned" while others have sprung to life with vigorous new shoots.  We have never cut so much grass so often and I am not complaining because the lush green growth is very pleasing visually and emotionally. I have revived my vegie patch, repotted plants and renewed my interest in the garden.  I use the term "garden" loosely as we simply have a few garden beds on a bush block plus dozens of pot plants in our outdoor living area.

This is a picture of one of my bromeliad flowers.  (They are wonderful drought-resistant plants that grow out of pots - literally.)

The flower head is about 10cm in diameter and quite prickly. This morning I was amazed to see that something has eaten away a large patch of the prickly "petals". I have absolutely no idea what would do this; a possum, a rat???

Actually we've observed several other amazing things lately.  My vegie patch is enclosed by chicken wire to keep out the wallabies and hares  and something had made a big hole in one of the walls at ground level. We concluded that it must be a rat although there was no other evidence. Last week I was surprised, in more than one way, to disturb a big goanna in my garden. It would have been about 4 to 5 feet long and made a quick escape through the hole in the chicken wire. Perhaps it had learned that chicken wire enclosures can be a good source of eggs?

Recently something has been chewing out the centres of the "pups" on our agave. In the absence of any evidence we again blamed a rat initially but what a surprise to learn that crows are the culprits! We've seen them on several occasions and have yet to determine the attraction.

No - we don't live in a rat-infested area!

Floods

So much destruction and so close to home! The flash flood that passed through Toowoomba at the beginning of the week is available for the whole world to see as is the major flood that hit Brisbane mid-week. The devastation and loss of life "down the range" in the Lockyer Valley and surrounding area is heart-breaking.  For so many people the trauma will continue for ages and, for some, forever.

The clean-up has begun and at least the rain has stopped for a few days. Thousands of volunteers are assisting friends, family, neighbours and strangers. I believe our governments, at all levels, have made genuine efforts to manage the crises, comfort communities and inspire individuals and groups but the continuing personal suffering of so many is, and will be, immeasurable.

For anyone who has faith in the power of prayer, now is the time to pray.

Seeing the grass grow . . .

... you really can see it!  We've had so much rain and while it has inconvenienced our family and caused disappointment, we are all grateful that we have been spared the devastation and heartbreak of the many thousands of people, particularly in central and southern Queensland, whose homes and businesses have been flooded.

Before Christmas were returned along the Newell Highway from three weeks down south. At that time huge tracts of land in central NSW were under water.  So very different from the same trip and the homecoming welcome we experienced twelve months ago!

Our trip to Wonboyn was a successful fishing trip but I didn't really enjoy myself as I was pretty housebound, due to the weather, and I got fed-up with being chief cook and bottle washer. I think we knew before we went that this would be the last trip there; it is such a long way to travel and John is now 87 so it is a huge responsibility to take him to a place so remote.  As he will tell anyone who cares to listen: it was 66 years since he first visited the lake for fishing - so it was a very significant trip for him.

While we were away I did read several novels and completed the hand-quilting on my "L" quilt so that was rewarding and I learned so much. Today I embroidered my quilt label and prepared the binding so it's almost finished!

The festive season has passed.  It was so good to have the girls here together plus our younger daughter got engaged shortly before Christmas.  All that's left is for me to take down the Christmas tree.  This time we really are going to dump it; a threat I have made for the last three years.  I feel quite sad because we've had it since the children were little and it's given us so many happy memories but it's starting to look its age (like a lot of things around here) and makes a lot more mess than it used to (also like a lot of things around here!)

I still haven't done much to sort my photos, and now we have a heap more!

OGP and dam ride

A couple of nights ago we watch On Golden Pond on television.  It made a wonderful change after some of the second-rate movies we've seen in recent times.  Mind you, Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda didn't look as old as they did to us back in the early 1980s!

Early this week we went for a ride to inspect the dams after October's rainfall and the top-up that Cressbrook Dam has received from Wivenhoe Dam. It was great to see Cressbrook looking better than it has for some years. It was a perfect day for a picnic at Crows Nest National Park and we agreed that we should keep the bike for a little longer. We've always had bikes and guess that we are not quite ready to end that era of our lives.

The spring flowers around Toowoomba have been replaced by summer flowers.  Jacarandas were starting to look beautiful (until today's heavy rain) and the perfume of star jasmine is everywhere. They are such hardy plants. This one was planted in our garden about 25 years ago and has been totally neglected and has survived all extremes of weather.