The House(s) of Fran_mart

The background to this project is summarised in the January report . At the start of the year I had an objective of getting to the end of the year.  With the help of a few rarities, that looked easy.  Early in February things began to look a tad bleak: would I have to start using my "savers" to get through this month? The answer is fortunately 'No." Before getting to what has been seen, I will note that I have changed the way I calculate my index, which guides me in choosing the bird I select each day,  For reasons which now escape me I had calculated the index as the product of scores for Carwoola and the COG Area of Interest (COGAOI).  Where the bird hadn't been recorded in Carwoola I gave it a notional score of 0.0001.  As time has progressed I realised that this gave very low indexes to birds that were unusual in Carwoola but very easy to get in Canberra.  For example: Australasian Darter index 0.000018 Australian Pelican   index 0.007494...

As Frances had a week off guiding and the weather seemed reasonable we decided to take the camper for a trip to the Illawarra coast.  We wanted to visit the area and still need further practice in putting it up.  It turned out the reasonableness of the weather included strong winds, which made life a little tricky, but we did get it erected in 45 minutes, which was definitely a personal best.  Here it is. The campground was pretty crowded .. .. and the site we scored was about the smallest around, but we fitted.  I got a bit panicked that I was blocking the road while setting up, but it seems that everyone has to do that so people don't get agitated. The other folk we spoke to were very pleasant, and all seemed much more experienced than us.  Many of them had small dogs which gave Tammy much to look, and occasionally sniff, at. On the drive we were initially amused by the new road safety adverts "Keep your hand off it." followed by a second phrase re...

This follows on from part 1 of the report on this trip .  I hope that it isn't too linear to have part 2 following part 1! Kiama was found easily and we swung into the town following signs marked to the Blowhole, which is the big tourist item in the area.  This was our first example of working out where to park a camper and was initially a bit fraught as no double length drive-through spots seemed available.  However we eventually found a parallel park from which we could walk back to the War Memorial. En route we met some more marine-life themed pavement art. This tin shed is attached to the old fire station (now an art gallery, see below) but no-one seemed to know anything about who painted the shed. Here is the front of the fire station.  In contrast to the she d the painted cow (Daisy) has a webpage all about her .   Any students of bureaucratic OHAS obsessions are encouraged to read the PDF guidelines for painting her! This is the basic war Mem...