A day in the life (episode n+1)

Today was very pleasant, after a welcome 9mm of rain yesterday.  We got up to various activities which are the subject of this post.

Our day began with a look out the kitchen window at this cute family. 
Various captions could be applied including:
We then did the traditional walk/run to the highpoint of Widgiewa Rd.  It was very foggy and quite cool, which gave an interesting effect to the Acacia dawsonii on Whiskers Creek Rd.
 
 A major task for the day was getting stuck in to some digging so that we could plant some spuds in due course.  Quite often when digging we meet interesting chthonic wildlife.  My efforts today generated a few medium sized white grubs and this member of the Order Orthoptera.   As there was only one of them, and the antennae look very long, I am going it call it as a cricket (Suborder Ensifera) rather than a grasshopper.  I'd also make a call about it being an early instar!
We have also explored some of our collected cultural artefacts and added one more to the wall.  The addition was a woven raffia hanging, from the Congo, which we acquired in Tanzania.  

It was quite a fun purchasing event as some friends arranged for a Congolese dealer to bring their stuff around and a few of us gathered to view it (with the expectation that buying would occur).  This ended up with our friends courtyard (about 5m square) close to knee deep in textiles!  A number of textiles were purchased, with no more than the usual amount of debate, and on sorting ourselves out in Carwoola about 5 years later a large one was hung vertically.

Today Frances thought it would be nice to add a second, running horizontally down the hall.
A highlight of the horizontal hanging is that a great number of cowries are sewn into it.  As I have noted in the report of our trip North in 2011 we were very interested in cowries while we lived in Tanzania.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more