The House(s) of Fran_mart

I have written elsewhere ( http://franmart.blogspot.com/2007/11/election-2007.html ) about my interface with the letter boxes of Carwoola during the election campaign. This became part of a little local storm, as a few residents decided to launch into the postie for poor service. I replied that the postie was entitled to launch into a few residents for crappy post boxes. However, being my usual conciliatory self I did allow that some of the post boxes around here are pretty good. Here is a selection (the hand is my favourite):

For various reasons Frances and I found ourselves at the Australian War Memorial with a couple of hours to spare on 19th December. After having a squizz at the T E Lawrence meets the Australian Light Horse (as it turns out after 3 years fighting the same people from different directions) we had enough time to start one of their guided tours. It was highly excellent and strongly rated for any of you who have some time to spare in a North Canberra-ish dircetion. One of the points the guide made was that all known Australian Dead are listed on the brass panels in the rememberance area. But I noticed that East Africa wasn't listed as one of the areas covered in the plaques out in the courtyard. So, knowing that there are two dead Australians buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Dar es Salaam I decided to check them out to see if they were listed. To my slight surprise, and great pleasure, they were listed. There were slight inconsistencies in the listing (I suspect the ori

Season's Greetings to you all! For a close-up of the pretty white flowers, see Kunzea ericifolia in: http://franmart.blogspot.com/2007/12/more-flowers-from-block.html http://franmart.blogspot.com/2007/11/recent-changes.html may also take you to some entertaining spots!

After the near disaster posted in Beer gets skittled and the previous coverage of brewing in Interesting things to do with yeast I decided that the time had come to get ready for the cooler weather of next Winter. This means a batch of Imperial Russian Stout (which takes at least 6 months, and preferably longer, to age) is needed. Background My interest in this stuff started when I was in Moldova and took to drinking the dark local(ish) beers to accompany my evening meals (when I was eating alone - while Moldovan wine was very good, knocking off a bottle solo was not a good idea when the pavements were icy). One evening the waiter offered me a Baltica #6 as a good dark beer. I jokingly said "is that the alcohol content?" at which he examined the label and pointed at the number 8 in front of the % sign sign. It was very nice, which led me, on return to Australia to investigate beers of Russia. I don't know what they did before the Crimean War but apparently during that

Following on from http://franmart.blogspot.com/2007/09/orchids.html here are some more flowers that have emerged later in the season. This is the "standard" Kunzea ericoides which seems to be the initial coloniser of regenerating paddocks (if the brambles and briars don't get in first). In close-up it is obviously a really spectacular flower! Here is a long shot up the track, showing the blooming K. ericoides across a paddock, together with a passing mushroom hunter! This is the Blue Devil Eringyium rostratum , described by Ian Fraser as "an essential component of native grasslands". Floating on the top dam we have Ottelia ovalifolia, which is apparently a native water plant.

My previous coverage of brewing has been detailed in: http://franmart.blogspot.com/2007/10/interesting-things-to-do-with-yeast.html . While that will be the core repository for matters zymurgic the events of 4 December were worthy of a post of their own. In the past I have used a pipe and siphoned the beer out of the top of the vat. This became easier with a valved pipe but when I got a tap for the base of the vat I found it much easier for solo efforts to use this approach. However, earlier in the year I found that the first tap I had acquired was getting rather stiff, to the extent that when trying to turn it off it started to unthread itself. Since the problem disappeared with the acquisition of a new tap (OK, one I found at the Captain's Flat tip) I was rather happy. However when just starting to bottle on the glorious 4th the problem of unscrewing reared its ugly head. So there I was in the laundry trying to work out how to avoid losing, or at best spreading over the laun

I find it difficult to resist a chance for a pun like that. My previous post about the weather is under the URL http://franmart.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-radar.html . A bit over a week later, after more or less constant threats of storms but no action here at El Rancho, the radar was again largely blue and yellow on the evening of 30 November. This time it started to rain about 7:30pm. About an hour later, after steady rain producing 8mm, I could hear a strange noise from the drive. On going to look, I found that the creek was roaring across the road. I think this means that there had been a really heavy downpour up at the source (in the headwaters?) of the creek.

As suggested last month, this is becoming a mini series with the previous episode at http://franmart.blogspot.com/2007/11/november-gardening.html . Possibly with a total of three posts we are now at the "series" level. Vegetable doings The material covered here actually starts on November 30, when we decided that the time had come to start really picking the "eating" broad beans. (I add the qualifier to distinguish this crop from the "green manure" broad beans, which we started picking in October, because we didn't need to use them as green manure. ) The upshot of our decision was that we got 2.5kgs of beans from about 1/3rd of the plants. A couple of days later I picked the rest and estimate that i got another 4 kgs. About 5kg of these were frozen and the rest we (mainly me) have been eating with our evening meal. It has also been interesting to see that we have fruit on two of our tomato plants. Since one of the traditional challenges of growing toma