The House(s) of Fran_mart

So I have cleaned up this site for the 3rd consecutive year. This time I got approxmiate;y 3.5 bags of stuff, about .5 of a bag less than last year. My estimate of the composition by weight was about 60% recyclable and 40% not. The biggest single class of crud (by weight) was empty beer bottles (mainly stubbies): when is the pathetic NSW Government going to start charging deposits on these? Needless to say McDonalds wrappers and Coca-cola bottles featured extensively in th collection. The most noticeable decrease in crud was cigarette packets: probably means the smokers are croaking. The most most notable increase was about 15 cans of 'energy drinks' particularly a brand called 'Mothers' which I had never seen before. In the street jive use of the term, an appropriate name. As a point of philosophy I reckon most of the recyclable crud (bottles wrappers etc) is deposited by active disassociation (ie people chuck it out of their windows - true tossers). However it ...

When conversing last Thursday with the pest control guy about piggy matters he commented that when he'd been cruising Taliesin (the huge station/ranch behind our place) searching for the feral grunters he had seen a whole lotta roos. So it wasn't a total surprise to find a few of them (about 40 or 50 ) on El Rancho on Saturday morning when we did our patrol. Here are a few images. I'll start with a panorama showing a few of them going about their business. Note the total absence of panic despite Tammy-the-rat's presence about 40 metres from them. This is a close-up cropped from the above. We always rate joeys as unbelievably cute. These two, some distance away from the mob above, just looked really nice standing together. Again notice the absence of hysteria induced by the dog: while she is small she is very fox shaped!

The main sort of wires that don't mix with trees are those carrying electricity. In Canberra the separation is ensured by little inspectors coming round and leaving notes in your mailbox threatening you with penalties if you don't clear the trees from your wires. In Carwoola what happens is a pleasant guy turns up and has a chat about what needs doing and saying he'll send some lads round to fix it all up. In due the lads turn up with a cherry picker; an indstrial strength chipper; a truck; various chainsaws; and some pink gunge that stops the trees regrowing. When they leave they are kind enough to leave some nicely sized logs here and there. Also the output of the chipper is deposited at a convenient location for transfer to one's garden. An issue arose when I started to move this to the desired location. Some parts of the heap were a greyish colour and steaming. On consulting a fire-fighting neighbour he said that spontaneous combustion was a possibility so severa...

I found myself riding my bicycle around Queanbeyan on 10 February. Specifically I turned onto the sidewalk (sorry about the American English, but it does seem better than the Pom 'pavement') on Crawford Street passing the Council Chambers. The area was littered with folk in black suits, wearing white shirts and ties. This is not the usual attire of folk in beautiful downtown Queanbeyan : shorts, t-shirts and workboots are more the go. My first thought was that it was an undertakers' convention, but I continued on to the library where I had reserved a couple of books for our trip to Peru. On emerging from the library I noticed that a couple of representatives of NSW ' finest (aka 'the filth') were lurking on the far side of Crawford St. This pricked my curiosity so I asked a pleasant looking lady (also wearing black) what was occurring. Apparently it was a Regional Meeting of the State Cabinet. Amongst those I had ridden through was the Premier! It possib...

The flower garden has gone a bit quiet, although these flowers have put in their usual flashy appearance. They are formally known as Belladonna lilies, but in Australia their habit of appearing sans leaves has led to the appellation n@ked l@dies. Sorry about the obfuscation but I really don't want to have to bother with the sort of people who reckon: they can supply me with n@ked l@dies of a less vegetative nature; or wish to persuade that I will burn in eternal fires for even thinking about n@ked l@dies.

We have had a bit of hot weather (over 40C) recently. That has been attracting a fair slew of birds to a couple of small ponds in the corner of the lawn. As well as the water there have been many insects hovering on the sludge so they have been able to eat and drink. The images are of Red-browed Finches (which used to be called Red-browed Firetails in honour of their red bums) and a Spotted Pardalote - which turns out to be a tautology since "pardalote" is derived from a Greek word meaning 'spotted'

.. because hopefully the Sentoro ain't Luminoso any more. It is possible that I have overachieved on obfuscation on this one. But here are some background notes. In keeping with my normal style we'll start at the end and work forwards. At least one member of this list speaks good Spanish and is familiar with recent South American politics. Thus they will be thinking "Why is Martin writing about the Shining Path: is he going to Peru?" The short answer is yes: more on this below. It seems that DFAT are not confident that the Shining Path have retired as they warn about possible issues with recidivist elements. However assuming that they have gone we'll need a light to show the way. Thus the phrase in the title entered the active area of my brain: hopefully it will shortly be joined by the Spanish I learnt through the UN while in New York. On googling the phrase it turns out to be the first words of a hymn written by Cardinal Newman while stuck, for a week, ...

Despite the fact that it has been a very hot summer, we got a good lot of rain early in the season. Taken in conjunction with a slow leak in our nearby, snake-infested dam has meant that the vegetable garden is producing bigtime. (It is also of course producing a motza of weeds which Frances is just keeping on top of. Compost shortage is never an issue by the end of Summer.) To enable some supplementary watering of various things I dug the first half of our spud crop today. It was quite impressive to get 20Kgs of nice ovoids (and a few deviants). They have been temporarily stored in plastic racks to dry off before long term storage. Of course, being a cheapskate I have also gathered in as much as I can of the straw we use to hummock the plants: some of this stuff will get applied for the third year in a row next year. The images above are from the second digging. This resulted in a further 23+ kgs of spuds. The '+' reflects the omission of the ones that I speared during harves...

This is not an early posting about the upcoming National Folk Festival. Rather it is the opening entry in a saga about feral animals and plants. The most obvious ones recently have been the wabbits, which featured to some extent in the Rodent wars page. They have got completely out of order - the snakes and foxes are obviously falling down on their job - so I have been supplementing their feed with some commercial petfood . That was very popular and I am now trying them out on a different flavour: Oats avec Pindone ! In 10 days time there should start being a few less of the little mongrels around the place annoying the dog! In fact that seems to be happening. By 21 February we have dropped from up to 6 bunnies on the lawn in the evenings to just two or none. Of more consequence is the appearance of some feral pigs. We had a small patch of grubbed up grass after heavy rain in December and then in early February I spotted 4 full sized grunters emerging from the large station beh...

This will be a collection of various wildlife things that have occurred over the month. It starts with a couple of lepidopterous entries. This is mainly because I haven't done much on them before as they are hard to photograph. (A friend, who was a professional entomologist, suggested it is easier to get them on a cold day. After spending some frustrating time trying to snap some, I thought it might be easier after they'd had an encounter with Mortein!) This moth was hanging out on a piece of polypipe leading from our gutters to the catch tank. I thought it an interesting example of protective coloration. The butterfly to the left was imaged on Chalet Rd up in the Brindabellas. It is clearly a Brown and I concluded from reading of behaviour that a Banks' Brown was most likely (although the Common Brown has a meaningful name). If anyone has a different view a comment would be welcome. Clearly this is a reptile not a butterfly. It is a skink , Pseudemoia ...

It has been a while since I did one of these but I am feeling a bit cranky in the heat so it is time. A first bouquet goes to Country Energy. They are our provider of electricity and are generally excellent people to deal with. The particular episode that gets them a bouquet was when our supply crapped out in a thunderstorm. It was a big storm so they had lots of folk to attend to, but their guys turned up at 23:15 and after working through a few options found that the problem was a circuit breaker not being reset (by me). No aggro just a pleasant "there is nothing on the breaker to tell you how to reset it , see you later". Excellent work ethic and PR. They have been included in a "Thank you" note to CE (to which they gave a very nice rply). The first brickbat goes to whoever manufactured said circuit breaker. As far as I can see no-one else in the area has ones that require the switch to be flicked fully down to reset it. Needless to say petrol companie...