Possum Galore
A life ‘Down Under’!
Australia Day!
Yesterday was Australia Day. The 26th of January is the annual celebration which marks the anniversary of the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet of British Ships at Sydney Cove, New South Wales and the raising of the flag of Great Britain by Governor Arthur Phillip. For many it is known as 'Invasion Day' or 'Survival Day.' I can see their point. If the day falls upon a weekend the following Monday is a National Holiday...which was the case today. I hardly noticed it
We travelled from Frogknot to Toowoomba. We visited our friend Julié (pronounced Ju-lay). She used to live in Stanthorpe but has now bought house in Toowoomba. It was a lovely house which has a fabulous pool. We sat and chatted on the verandah. She loves her pool.
"I just float in the noodle," she said.
I thought she was saying she swam in the nude. The pool was not that secluded and I was thinking she was brave but she explained a 'noodle' is a long thin cylindrical float.
She had a 'cunning plan' for us...we put up some pictures, and carried two large bookshelves from her garage into the house as well as some boxes of books. Will passed a box of books to me and in picking up another brushed off a spider clinging to it.
"Was that a red-back?" asked Julié. He nodded. I dropped my box and checked it thoroughly before picking it up again.
It was lovely to see her and we hope to go back and see her again soon and avail ourselves of her pool and float in the noodle.
We stayed the night at Andrew's who also lives in Toowoomba and caught up with some great British TV including some of the new 'This is Jinsy' series.
We are back now in Brisbane. It is feeling a bit cooler than when we left. The school holidays are over and the new school year starts tomorrow. Trace and Jen are coming up to stay tomorrow and a week tomorrow we fly to Fiji.
Good times!
The Fabulous and Flippin' Fauna of Frogknot.
We had no rain yesterday and it was much warmer than the day before when we had lit the fire.
I was happy to see the turtles are still there (fabulous)...I was getting worried after seeing the snake and yesterday spotted the white necked heron (flippin' fabulous) in the tree...but I spotted one peeking out of the water later in the day.
A frog hopped into the house just before we went to bed in the re-vamped bedroom area. It was only tiny but it couldn't half jump. Of course it headed straight under the bed and Will had to crawl in after it. It evaded him and got away and was crossing back across the lounge when I stunned it by shining one of the solar lamps on it. Will grabbed it and took it out nearer the dam.(Fabulous at flippin'?)
The froggies have been very quiet of late...I have heard one or two at night as I go out to rid myself of fluorescent water but they are definitely not as loud as they have been.
I slept okay in the new bed...I love the net ( Will hates it!) but I really would not be able to relax at night without it. I saw two huntsmen spiders yesterday, granted they were not that big but they are fast and seem pretty clever. One was underneath one of the futon chairs that I had taken outside to clear away the cobwebs. I turned the chair over and there it was...it ran and hid out of sight. Turning the chair again to find it..the spider ran again and hid again just out of sight. I tried to swipe it with the brush and it actually jumped! (Flippin'.)
I know it was more scared of me and probably would do anything it could to keep away from me but I am glad I am under that net. There was also this weird looking wasp that was crawling all over one of the wooden posts. I caught it in a glass and slipped a bit of card underneath and carried it outside and let it go. I went back in and you would not believe it...it was there again back on the pillar. I caught it and carried it out again and this time took it further away and set it free...the stupid thing came back, so I squashed it! It had its chance and blew it! (Flippin') Never mind the spiders and wasps...I missed taking one vitamin B tablet and was bitten twice by a mosquito! If the net was not there...I would have no blood left by morning! (Flippin')
It rained again this morning for a couple of hours before we got up. Will found 11 mm in the rain gauge. I didn't think it had rained that much.
There was no more rain for the rest of the day. We just lay about reading. We did do a 'dump run' this afternoon to get rid of the stuff Will had decided to throw out from 'The Pit of Despair'. Driving down the track, Will suddenly stopped and we watched a black snake slither across in front of us. That's two!....in just a few days! It seemed a bit shorter than the one we saw by the dam. I wish I had not seen it because now I know how fast they can move and it is a lot faster than I had imagined! (Flippin')
Just a bit further on two 'wedgies' flew off the trees...(Wedge-tailed Eagle...fabulous!)
Back home we went back to laying about punctuated by short wanders outside. I think we both felt a bit guilty by doing nothing. I noticed on one of my wanders that Will had built a tripod of sticks for something in the garden to grow up. I wandered down to the dam to have a close look at the stick I put in at the waters edge the other day. I went very slowly looking carefully for snakes. I saw a kingfisher (fabulous) sitting on a branch shaking its feathers before it flew off. The water was perhaps a little higher than I remembered it a few days ago but not much.
Just as the sun was setting...my guilt at a wasted day got the better of me and I had a sudden urge to fix the gutter at the back of the house. We did it together, tested it with the hose pipe and it worked great. I am happy now that just a little more water will be directed towards the dam rather than sink into the ground at the back of the house. I just had time to clean out some of the other gutters before it became too dark.
I was just startled by a little beetle crashing into my laptop screen. It is either a cane beetle or a dung beetle...I hardly care...but I evicted it. If I was to choose from the pictures I googled... I would say it was a cane beetle...but there might be some who say...'crashing into your laptop screen? It was surely attracted by dung!'
(Flippin!')
"You made your bed, now lie in it!"
Rain!
It is 5.30 pm and it has just stopped raining. It has pretty much rained all day from 9.00 am, steady rain. The rain gauge shows there has been 18 mm. If only we had some tanks to collect the rainwater off the roof. We would have filled them today. I kept going to see if the dam was slowly filling up. I had stuck a stick in the mud at the waters edge this morning but it does not look as if it has risen at all.It was awful to see so much precious water going to waste. Because the wall at the front of the house had sunk the angle of the corrugated iron roof was more shallow and the run off was curling under the edge of the corrugated iron, dripping and missing the gutter completely. Quite a pool of water was gathering under the verandah at the front. I discovered that if I laid small sticks in the valleys of the corrugated iron over the gutter it stopped the water from curling under and missing the gutter altogether. The pool dried up and the water ran along the gutter and into the pit at the end which drains into the dam. But still the dam did not seem to rise.When we had initially seen how cloudy it was we had decided that today we would clear the rest of the cassinia from the 'chook' pens but with the rain we decided to stay in. There was only one big job left to do in the house...'The Pit of Despair!'Will made a start on it. There was not much I could do as it was up to him to decide what to keep and what to throw away. I would have whizzed the lot! I removed all the cd's, books and magazines from one cupboard, wiped it down and then we moved it into another corner and I put most of it back, leaving a pile of stuff for Will to sort through. I sorted the magazines before putting them back. There were gardening magazines, poultry magazines (!), permaculture magazines and some called Grass Roots with interesting titles like "Making Money from Muesli". They all looked very old.On one of may wanders out to check the dam I spotted a white necked heron flying up away from the waters edge.
There was no sign of the snake today....perhaps the heron ate it.
(It was strangely quiet in the night...we did not hear any frogs...I hope the heron and the snake have not eaten them all...I could not see any of the turtles today either.)
Back in the house Will was sorting all the clothes hung up under the loft bed. It was a slow process as he kept on modelling some of the more wacky ones...things people had left after dress up parties at the house in the past. He cried out at one point as a mouse scuttled out from somewhere giving him a shock. We know a song about that....
"I saw a mouse, where?
'The pit of despair'
Where in 'despair?'
Right there!
A little mouse with togs on,
Well, I declare
Going scuttling off in the pit of despair
Oh yeah."
While sorting through all the stuff Will found this lovely picture of his Mum and Dad...
It was all cleared and swept out by about 6.00 pm.
The plan is to lower the loft bed to a more normal level. There is no way that I can sleep up there as it is just a few inches below the ceiling!
Into The Pit of Despair.
Rambo's End?
We are returned unto Frogknot.We were unhindered as we had expected by Cunningham's Gap. I always glance up the mountainside as we head up just in case I spot another large rock tumbling down on us and I can warn Will to speed up or brake!Just past Warwick we passed the scene of a dreadful accident. A truck with two trailers had come off the road and was lying down an embankment completely burnt out. We later heard that the driver was killed. It had happened at 3.40am. From the marks on the road it looked like he had gone across onto the oncoming lane scraped along the barrier and headed back over and down the opposite embankment. The truck had apparently exploded and by the time the fire crew got there it was so badly burned that they could not tell which company the truck belonged to and had some difficulty finding out about the driver.We arrived at Frogknot at about 1.30 after getting provisions from Stanthorpe. There was the distinctive, sickly smell of death and decay at the front door but when we got inside could not really smell it any more. We opened up all the windows to air the place but it was pretty much as we left it and I spotted only a few rat droppings near the door.The vegetables in the garden looked pretty sad and wilted. Something likes eating the corn but there were a few weird shaped courgettes and one sickly looking squash. The dam was much lower and everything was very dry. It has been about 2 weeks since we were last here. It has been pretty hot in our absence but there was 6mm in the rain gauge so there had been some rain.It was very hot but not as uncomfortable as it gets in Brisbane. We sat and read our books. I lay by the open window to catch the breeze coming in.Will went for a wander and came back asking if I wanted to see a snake."A dead one?" I asked hopefully. He shook his head.It was a red bellied black snake and was curled round a clump of reeds down by the dam. It looked very healthy and had probably gorged itself on frogs. It watched us and looked a bit wary but did not move away.[gallery ids="1453,1454,1455,1456,1458,1457"]They are venomous...yikes!... but Will said they are not aggressive...good!I found some different tracks in the mud. Some were definitely from a hoofed animal and the others were from a large bird.
We left the snake alone and headed back in. I looked a little later and it had gone....but where?We heard thunder and it appeared to be getting closer. We looked forward to getting some rain but it never materialised. We watched the clouds pass us by.We had a phone call from Dave next door and he invited us over for a drink. We went over and spent a lovely hour or so chatting on their verandah. He said he had seen a red bellied black snake about at his place too but we were unsure if it could be the same one. We told him about the tracks in the mud. He reckoned the hoofed prints would be deer and said there were a lot about. I wondered if the bird prints might be a heron. He said he had seen them by his dam.Back home I discovered the sickly death smell was coming from 'The Pit of Despair.'I entered bravely armed with one of our solar lamps. Looking up there were so many spiders webs that a few months ago would have sent me scampering out but I was on a mission. Following my nose I found what could only be a rats nest on a wire shelf amongst a pile of Will's old undies. I gingerly pulled it out but could see nothing.I went out again having found nothing but was not satisfied and later decided to go back in and pull out the wire shelving and look behind. I did and there behind it was the dead rat. My work was done. Will came with a plastic bag and while I shone the light he reached in and picked it up with the bag. It did not look as if it had been dead that long. It's fur was brown and white and looked very clean and neat. Will said it was a bush rat...was it Rambo?We wondered how it had died. Earlier I had found what looked like a bit of dried blood on the sink draining board that I could not imagine I would have left there from our previous visit. Having seen the snake earlier I wondered if it had been bitten by the snake and crawled off to die in 'The Pit of Despair.'We shall never know.Will carried it off and threw it in the bush.Goodbye Rambo?