The House(s) of Fran_mart

A pair of Sacred Kingfishers have been very vocal at our place recently and it seemed that they were making the call used around a nest site.  When I went to the sunroom today I found that a large knot on a Yellow Box ...  .. was being visited.  On most of the visits I saw the bird seemed to fly and give one peck,  while on others it would perch for several seconds doing woodpecker impersonations. I'll finish with a couple of portraits,

These guys were from  ... who are the concreters engaged by Masterbuilt Garages to get things ready for our big shed/carport and garden shed replacements.  Yhey had bought a;long a Dingo to smooth a few things out.  I was very impressed with the skill and precision of the way the operator manipulated stuff to fill holes.  then he put some form of road base on which his offsider smoothed out.  Other folk - I think there were about 8 of them in total - then did the form work and placed the reinforcing.. Meanwhile up at the top shed the Dingo had done stuff to the bank to get it how required  and placement of the formwork had commenced.  And eventually finished. It was pretty good the way the guys worked on through the showers of the day.  this will be continued tomorrow when the pour happens.  Inshallah. It happened.  The concreters arrived between 6:30 and 7:00 and the concrete not too long after.  Here is the horde filling up the banks on the top shed. I think th

The first lot of workers are the fencing contractors doing their stuff with our fences.  They are from Patterson's Rural Contracting and are a great bunch of guys. They are making great use of this JCB.  Frances reckons that if she wins Tatts she'd not want a Roller, but one of these.  As they seem to go for $60k or thereabouts (its very hard to get prices on such stuff on line) she could probably have 2 - keeping 1 for Sundays! When I was studying agriculture I visited the Essex (UK) office of Strutt and Parker (a land management company) and was most impressed that the guy I spoke to had his Labrador sitting under his desk.  My sort of job.  These two spend most of their time sitting in the utes!  I was astonished that they stayed in there despite Tammy being with us.  Very good dogs. The next workers are the blokes doing ther road works on Captains Flat Rd,  Today they started applying the bitumen to the last bit.  Wooo hooo1 I reckon they were very lucky t

Having looked at the number of workers in the Gazette area and how/where they go to to work this post looks at the outcome of their labours.  That means the nature of the goods and services delivered by their employers. The ABS classification of industries has 19 entries at the top level.  Several of these have very low numbers of employees in the Gazette area and it is very difficult to fit, in a legible way, such a large group of entries in a blog-chart.  In addition the confidentiality algorithm of the ABS makes small numbers unreliable (as might the impact of non-response and imprecise reporting by punters).  So I have combined the groups in a hopefully logical way to give a set of 11 slightly broader groups. I have also adopted relatively brief names for the groups to present the charts in a sensible way. I may do a later post looking at the major components of the more significant groups if that looks interesting My first analysis is the number of persons classified to eac

A few photos that I think are good to look at! The Frogmouth chicks are getting close to leaving the nest.  Judging by the amount of noise coming from our dam, they will have been getting plenty of food delivered to them.  Obviously the chicks are very aware of their surroundings, giving me the eye as I photograph them.  There are some details of later in the day below this next photograph. I'm not sure if this Gippsland Water Dragon was looking at me or not as I photographed from the car parked on our Creek crossing. Getting back to the Frogmouths.  On checking my records it seems that on average timing the chicks will leave the nest tomorrow night, 20 November.  So I also consulted my records of last years flight process and it seemed that activity started between 1945 and 200 Hrs, so tonight, 19 November, I watched them from 1945 onwards. The male adult left the nest at 2002.  This caused the chicks to wander about the nest but not do any wing flapping.  At 2008 t

Yesterday afternoon we got quite a bit of rain..  It totaled to 15mm (both weather station and plastic rain gauge).  When it started about 15:00 the BoM radar showed us as having our very own little storm cell.  By 16:40 there were massive thunderstorms all the way up the ranges (the + symbols are liughtning strikes).  The Creek had flooded and our drive was getting hammered as the key drain had been blocked temporarily by some works, and I am not in shape to dig them out.  Anyway that all happened.  While we scored 15mm a couple of neighbours (perhaps 2km SE) whose places overlook the Plain both reported 40mm and another 6km North scored 5mm). Moving on to Saturday 18th and the radars were not clear on what we were likely to get.  Would the rain head straight South or keep to the west?  By about 11;00 it seemed likely it was going to bracket us. By noon we had 0.8mm!

As well as details of whether people work or not the Census collects details of where people work and how they travel to work.  This is mainly used by planners etc in the big cities to work out public transport schedules and some aspects of road planning. Before getting to the local results I was always interested in the relationship between size of a City and use of cars for the commute. The actual data available from the ABS is amazingly detailed with some 230 combinations of modes available.  There are of course some 'special'modes such as ferries in Sydney (0.36% of commutes) and trams in Melbourne (2.71%) and Adelaide (0.53%). There are no ferries on the Molonglo and trams , trains and even buses are few on Captains Flat Road.  So the commute in this area is dominated by the car. I assume that most of those who walked to work were folk employed on properties, as would be some of those who worked at home.  (In view of the rural nature of the area I'm a little