The House(s) of Fran_mart

 Excuse the boring title but that was all I could think of.  Dawn on Sunday gave a nice view of Mount Ainslie to the North. The light also revealed interesting marks on the window.  I assume these are bumpers on the swinging stages as the guys remove and replace the cladding.  Probably not a good idea to wash the windows until the cladding project if finished. Our morning walk started with a pretty Magnolia in Glebe Park. Passed through an alley in Reid (notable for the signs about dog poop)  .. .. and past some good topiary in a garden in the Northern section of the suburb. Frances returned to Lifeline Book Fair while I went for a walk to Justice Robert Hope Park.  Few birds around but it was good to get three species of Acacia in flower in one image.  I think they are A. ulicifolia; A. baileyana and A. melanoxylon . Bad news for the local frogs! A flowery street scene in Watson.  Note that the heads-up display on my windscreen shows the 50kph li...

 There is a Lifeline Bookfair this weekend - hopefully  will not be trashed by Sovereign Citizens and other oxygen thieves - so we have come to Canberra to see what we can acquire. The drive up had a few slightly interesting moments.  Not really interesting as in the sense of "may you live in interesting times".  There seemed to be more than usually heavy traffic on the Monaro Highway from Cann River to Nimmitabel.  Some of this was caused by people who didn't seem able to overtake a truck! In this case the truck was fine on the flat or downhill, but dropped to less than 50kph on the uphill bits.  Neither of the other two would overtake.  I was able to get past the truck somewhere after Ando. We stopped at Nimmitabel to hand over a small package we were carrying from one wildlife carer to another.  It was in a plain brown envelope and as Frances said, the other people at Lake William probably thought it was a drug transaction.  (Which it was,...

  Having done 1,000 km (not hard with a trip to Mallacoota and back at 350 km each way) it was time for the Mazda to get its first service.   The drive up to Canberra on Monday 13 June had some potential to be interesting.  The first element of this was realising it was the last day of the long weekend which opens the ski season.  So there was potential for chaos on the stretch from Cooma to Canberra.  A second element was the poor weather - cold and damp - leading to an Alpine weather warning from Brown Mountain to Cooma.  So we set off early to minimise the first issue and hope that the second was not too bad. As it turned out there was no evidence of snow or ice on the 'Alpine' stretch.  Rather than the forecast 2C it was 4C when we came through Nimmitabel.   I noticed a rally car parked by the bakery in Nimmitabel and guessed there had been an event at Bega. The results  are  here , and lots of photos etc in  this Face...