aggienaut | Entries tagged with birregurra

Friday we got off the ferry around 6:00am. Because the ferry only recently began arriving at geelong instead of Melbourne i don't think the Cafe ecosystem has adjusted yet, whereas there's several cafes advertising their open status when you get off the early morning ferry in Tassie there was no such thing in G Town. Fortunately there's a 24 hour diner i know of so we went there (doesn't have the iconic American diner charm though. Is just like a barely passable Australian cafe. I think five years ago they served me nescafe (note to Aussies: this is essentially an insult to Americans) but now they at least have an espresso machine). Then we still had a fair bit of time before the rental car place opened (recall, because my parents rental car wasn't allowed to go to Tassie they returned it, borrowed a friend's car, and now we needed another rental car)

Drove home in two cars. Despite being by now 10am there was very thick fog on the way home and it was quite rather cold. Got home and had lunch and then sky cleared and it became warm and sunny. Welcome to Victoria!

Then i drove to work because el bossman can't go to the bees while I'm not there and i knew he'd be itching to do so. So while many have questioned why I'd return to work for just literally the last three hours of the work week it seemed to me worth doing and i think he appreciated it.

Saturday afternoon was the local beekeeping group meeting. Our format has morphed around a fair bit in the last year or two but our latest thing which i think has been very successful is we meet at a members house on a Saturday afternoon, look at some hives and then have a bbq. I had always intended to avoid the club being a "one expert beekeeper lecturing everyone else" kind of event but both this and the previous meeting, the two that have been this format, was pretty much i get handed a hive tool and everyone watches what i do and i narrate. But whatever they want hey. But next time will be a Sunday specifically so my boss can come and then he can be the one wielding the hive tool.

The bbq portion is at least as much fun. It brings together a group of people with common interests in hobby farming and serious gardening in general and new members and old alike always get along swimmingly. I think my parents enjoyed meeting everyone very much as well.

After that my parents and i went on a nearby rail trail hike and found an enormous sausage sized caterpillar:

I think we've identified it as a helena gum moth caterpillar.

And we saw a wallaby

Sunday (today) we poked around the local market here in my village. Which conveniently takes place about 100 meters from my front door. Mom commented on the number of people selling knit goods. There was a dog jumping competition at noon but it appeared to be starting late and we had to go before it started.

In the afternoon we drove to the town of Camperdown about an hour west of here. A quantify it as "a cute country town" ... a contrast and rebuke to the nearer town of Colac which i think is generally agreed to be a country town that isn't cute. In Camperdoozel my friend, fellow beekeeper (and editor of the Australian Bee Journal) and retired botany professor showed us around the local botanical garden (mom's really into plants) and then we went back to her place for "afternoon tea." Which when she had first proposed it i had had to admit my ignorance of the subtle nuances of Australian tea related phraseology -- "tea" is sometimes a whole meal, what is "afternoon tea?" She had a laugh, admitted it can be confusing, and clarified that it's "literal tea and bikkies." Anyway we ended up chatting for quite awhile. She has a great view from her dining room down into a volcanic crater and there were about 15 kangaroos slowly bouncing around down there.

And now we've come home and mom is making "curry goo" which smells delicious!

Tomorrow i go to work but we're plotting a Thursday to Sunday expedition to the far east end of the state.

Parents leave in nine days (Tuesday the following week, the 21st), my how time flies!

   Today it rained very heavily, on top of the large amount of rain we've already gotten this season that has filled the lakes and ponds and saturated the ground. My housemate Trent called me at 16:12 this afternoon, he was trying to get out of Birregurra, the village we live in. As he described it two of three roads out of town were already closed due to flooding. He had packed up some stuff and was trying to get out of town on the last remaining road out. "Water is lapping at the sides of the road mate and it looks like it will be over this road soon as well. What are you going to do?"
   "Well, when I get off work I'll get in there if I possibly can" I replied. As it happens, further along that road it was flooded and he was turned around, unable to escape Birregurra. Shortly thereafter I got several notifications from the fire brigade app that they were having a call out to make sand bags.

   As the end of the workday approached I looked at the road closures map:

   I would be coming from the east, the right side of the above map. It looks like all three main roads were closed. BUT one will note coming from that middle road from the east (the "Cape Otway Highway") there's only a small closed segment which might just be them painting a road closure further down that connecting road with an overly broad brush. OR worst case scenario I could go past Birregurra on the M1 to the larger town of Colac, and circle around to come up the C119 (rough diagram).

   As I left work I texted some people in town to ask them if they knew if any roads were still accessible. Family friend Lyn Downard called me back to say her daughter Sara had just successfully entered town from Cape Otway Highway way. So I headed up that way.
   It's about a forty minute drive up that road, which is my usual route. On this occasion there was water over the road in several places, which was intimidating because I just have the revenant honda civic the USS Trilobite, but as I saw other sedan cars coming my way (though traffic was very very light) which must have crossed through these, I was relatively confident that I'd make it and did. When I got to the area just outside of Birregurra that was listed as closed it was fortunately still open.

   I proceeded directly to the fire station which was in an eerily unusual condition of having all the lights on and doors open, and the fire trucks moved outside, but no one there. Fortunately another volunteer was arriving at the same time I did. I was about to call the captain and he said he'd already tried and got no answer, but he believed they were at the footy oval. So we got into our firefighting gear and proceeded across Birre to the footy ground, where sure enough we found some emergency vehicles with their red and blue flashing lights, and a bunch of SES (professional emergency services) folks in their sherbet-orange uniforms busily scooping sand from a freshly dumped pile into sandbags. We got right in with them making sandbags, which were loaded onto pickups and taken to where the rest of the brigade were using them to protect houses in a lower part of town.

   And then around 19:40 we were told they thought they had enough sandbags and we'd all stand down until further notice. I got the impression the SES folks were just going to redeploy immediately to another flooding emergency.

   Presently it is 23:20 and those roads are still closed. I think we expect the main river that flows through town and is causing the flooding, the Barwon, to continue rising overnight as water from upstream comes down, so things could potentially get worse by morning. I'm not terribly concerned about my own or house's safety though, I'm only at kind of the base of the hill but thats enough that I'm not in a low lying flood prone area. Might not be able to go to work in the morning though.

Current Music: Richard Shindell - Money For Floods

   Geoff Downwad (72) got a shocking surprise this month while mowing the central park lawn. He's mowed the central park lawn whenever it needed it for at least fifteen years now, without incident, but this time was different. On Monday, March 7th, just after five PM, he had just begun when, driving his ride on mower under one of the bottlebrush trees, and watching the grass he was mowing not, unfortunately, the tree he was driving under, he practically hit a hanging beehive with his face!
   He was able to drive the mower to the edge of the park while receiving twenty to thirty stings from his angry pursuers. After shaking off all the bees he walked directly to the health clinic [local readers will be aware that the health clinic is literally across the street] to get checked out. Though it was after five, Dr Jared was still there and was able to immediately examine Geoff, put him on some of the monitoring equipment, and give him some antihistimines. Though Geoff initially felt alright, after a few minutes he started to feel faint, so Jared gave him an injection of adrenaline, which Geoff described as “not the most comfortable experience I’ve had Kris, I’ll tell you that!”
   Dr Jared felt Geoff should be monitored overnight, and by coincidence an ambulance happened to be right there after having brought up a patient from Apollo Bay for transfer onward to Geelong, so Geoff, now feeling pretty decent, was taken to the Geelong hospital in the ambulance, and was home the next day by lunch, feeling fine.
   Shortly after the incident, Geoff's grandchildren Michael (8) and Sienna (12) went down to the park to find the bees with their father Joe Habib.
   “I arrived and the mower was just parked, and there was a zigzag where he had cut, obviously they were chasing him” Joe reports.
   “I can’t believe how big it was!” Michael exclaimed about the bee colony.
   “It was massive, but you couldn’t see it very well because they were hidden so well in the tree” Sienna explains.

   I myself was driving home that day around 6pm, after another long day of beekeeping, on the final stretch of the Cape Otway highway, looking forward to maybe taking a nap on the couch when I got home, when my friend Joe Habib called me. His father-in-law had been attacked by bees in the park and sent to the hospital in an ambulance!? Yes of course I'd proceed directly to the park.
   I soon found myself looking at a very impressively large “exposed colony” of honeybees – that is to say, rather than in an enclosed space they had built their honeycombs hanging from a branch with only the leaves and branches as covering. I estimate by the size that it must have been there for months, and the fact that it went unnoticed is a testament to the docility of these bees – numerous Sunday markets would have happened right around them without anyone knowing there was a colony of bees there. It wasn't until Geoff Downard practically hit them with his face that they had been discovered. However, once discovered, we couldn't let the colony remain in this potentially dangerous place.
   “Do you think we should remove it now? ...or some other day?” Joe asked me. I still wanted to take a nap, I'd just wanted to go home, but I looked at the sky –overcast– and the temperature –cool–, the hour and a half or so of remaining daylight, these were actually perfect conditions to remove the colony. “Let's do it now” I said with a sigh.
   I didn’t have my beekeeping equipment with me but after a visit to my place and Joe’s we between us got together everything we’d need, including the nice “bee vacuum” Joe had made to capture bees live. We drove his white Sprinter van up to the tree so Michael and Sienna could sit in the cab and watch us and got right to work. While Joe vacuumed bees from the outside I carefully sliced off an outer layer of comb and carefully removed it while he vacuumed the bees thus exposed. The bees were docile enough that I was able to take my gloves off to take the accompanying picture. Michael and Sienna described watching the bee removal as “pretty cool” and “interesting,” and Sienna got a 27 minute video (“it took longer but I stopped and started the video a few times”) of the whole operation.
   It was very nearly dark by the time we finished. We quickly put the equipment in the back of the van and then discovered a problem we hadn’t anticipated … the kids wouldn’t let us into the cab of the van because we were covered in bees! Eventually after we got them all off of us and turned around several times so they could see to their satisfaction that we weren’t covered in bees they allowed us to get in. For added protection they had managed to pull a spare bee suit over them both. We only had to drive a short distance to the nearest suitable place to reinstall these bees (they needed to be moved far enough that they couldn’t fly “home” though so locations within town were out), next to the hives I already have behind Ripplevale. We unloaded in the dark by the headlights, once again had to remove bees and turn around until the kids approved, and we were finally able to return home.
   The kids didn’t get any stings, Joe got one sting on the ankle (“and I swelled up more than Geoff!”). Geoff got off so well due to his immediate medical attention, I for one have never heard of a bee attack in which someone got such immediate medical attention!
   I asked Michael if he was going to remove the next colony himself, he laughed and said “nah, but I’m going to be a bee man when I’m older!”
   Geoff is fine now with no lingering animosity towards bees, and everyone lived happily ever after.

   The last few days the temperature has been nice, warm, even a bit "muggy," with big purplish clouds rolling over rumbling with unseen thunder and dropped random fleeting showers. When I got home from work it was one of those pleasant reverse-September evenings as I walked across to the other side of my village to for the last day of some training with the firebrigade. My walk takes me first across an open park area that used to abutt an open field with cows grazing in it, though now they've built two houses on part of hte field (urban encroachment!), across a little bridge, through another park, and then along the shopfronts of Main Street. As I was walking past the Historic Center I saw one of the staff of the local newsletter in the open doorway, and stopping to talk to her saw others of the staff in the room inside in which they meet. They waved me in and greeted me with "we were just talking about you!"
   It turns out they want me to write an article about a recent bee incident in town that I was involved in. I'll spare the details here for now and just share the finished article. It should be fun though because I'll get to interview my friend Joe and his kids (appx 14 and 10?) for it. Then the staff invited me to go to the pub with them but I told them I had this training.

   The fire brigade training has been to wear breathing apparatus ("BA"). We met for five Wednesday evenings finishing today, learning everything we need to know and practicing putting the gear on and off (but mostly on), over and over again, as the final test would be to be able to put it all on in 100 seconds. The biggest struggle for me was not getting straps tangled, just trynig unsuccessfully to grab the other end of the helmet strap at the very end could take ten seconds, but in the end I felt I got it seemlessly for the final test. When the instructor said it had taken me a minute and twenty seconds for a moment i thought I'd failed before realizing I'd finished in 80 seconds.
   With everthing finished the members settled in to chat a bit and I was debating weather to socialize more with the brigadees or the newsletter staff, though the fact that I hadn't eaten yet was compelling me towards the pub. When conversation turned to puss filled growths their cows get and "look I have a video on my phone from when I popped it its so gross!" I decided to make my exit.
   At the pub I caught the newsletter staff somehow having only just ordered so I was able to order only slightly behind them (through some sort of oversight in the kitchen one of them actually got their food after me!) and ate this "double baked pork belly" --

   Now I'm sitting at my computer, obviously. I have a livestream of a bunch of different live feeds around Kyiv open on another monitor, which I've been doing lately. At least one of my friends has been trying to pretend the war isnt' happening and apparently muted the group chat due to "too much war talk" but for me it's most comforting to "see that Kyiv is still there." Most of the cameras actually show life seemingly going on as normal, cars drive down the streets, pedestrians walk around.. but every now and then you can hear booms in the background, or the air raid sirens go off... followed by even louder booms. Makes it feel very real. It is very real. To each their own and what they need to do for their mental health but I'm over here sitting with Kyiv.

   Though after a long day of filling 10 liter buckets with honey at work, before I go to bed I need to do one more things ... fill some 10 liter buckets with honey for an order of my own honey.

   We have a bit of a rodent plague here right now. It's not as bad down here as it is in New South Wales but still, I seem to have at least one mouse living in every room. They're always darting between furniture out of the corner of my eye, I hear them chewing on things all night and lie there hoping they're not in the act of ruining something, and in the morning I find their poop all over the table and counters. I realize now what a "bread box" is actually for -- and not having one I've taken to storing my bread in the microwave.

   Legendary cat Cato doesn't actually live with me unfortunately, he lives at work. Every now and then I glance outside and see the neighbor cat Bailey walking by, and throw open the door calling out to him "Bailey come patrol for mice!" And, lo, he immediately changes direction and walks right in, and then he proceeds to walk the perimeter of my house sniffing around at all the nooks mice could be in. As he passes the kitchen I'll open the undersink cabinets and he'll walk in and sniff about and then come out. Once he's done a thorough inspection he proceeds to the door to be let out. He does this so purposefully it's like he's a pest control professional just doing a routine call, and it really makes me think about how really this is exactly why we domesticated cats in the first place and maybe it's deeply ingrained in their instincts as essentially a job.

   This morning after hearing particularly insistent gnawing in the kitchen I traced it to a box of pasta I hadn't known was there (it was among some things my Russian friend had given me before evacuating last year), I quickly tried to close the box to trap the mouse but it successfully lept out.
   Ereyesterday I heard rustling from the small box I put recycling in in the kitchen. I also went to quickly pick up the box but much to my alarm I fekt something strugging against the hand I'd placed under the box -- it had been under the box. I whipped my hand away doublequick because I'm not keen at all to get infected with something by a mouse bite.

   I've been lucky on occasion though, I did successfully catch one in a box, and in a stroke of remarkable luck (good luck for me, particulary bad luck for the mouse), I heard rustling in a box of crackers, I quickly picked it up but the mouse lept out. flying through the air right into a pint glass half full of water, from which it was unable to extricate itself.

   Now many people might find this very convenient indeed, since drowning is a common method of killing mice, but it feels a bit barbaric to me. I'm actually a big softy in fact, or maybe I can blame it on my vague pseudo-buddhist philisophies, I feel I cannot kill anything _directly_, but I can feed things to other things because the circle of life. I've attempted to feed mice to Cato in the past and have wished I had a snake just to feed the mice to it (though apparently feeding live mice to snakes is illegal in Australia, which.. comeon people, in nature things eat eachother, you can't deny the cycle of life!). My current preferred method of disposing of mice is to simply place them in the greenwaste bin. If it's mostly full of stuff I dont' worry too much, but currently it's mostly empty and there's two mice living in there, and now I find myself looking around for some past-its-prime fruit or vegetables to throw out to feed the mice in the Greenwaste Gulag. It may well be that they will be crushed by a trash compactor in the greenwaste truck but, well, that's still easier on my concience than if I offed them myself.

   I have posted another episode of the podcast! This one explains the current Ethiopian civil war in Tigray and tells some stories of my time in Tigray in better times.

Ethiopia Episode II

   Today we continued cutting back the blackberry brambles by the river. Myself and two other regular volunteers have come to be referred to as "the three musketeers of the blackberries" (: Today we were also assisted by a a four person conservation crew that apparently roves around the region.

   But we had an exciting development today, we seem to have inadvertently conducted a bit of archaeology! As we cut back the impenetrable brambles the pilings of an old bridge emerged. None of the current old lifelong residents of the town have any recollection of their having ever been a bridge there, but our wee little village is complete with a historical society so hopefully they can find some record.

   After cutting blackberries until noon, we three musketeers had been encouraged to stop by the golf clubhouse for pizza. It was apparently the christmas party of the local golf club (is that what you call a club for playing golf? It sounds like an obvious pun). I was a bit self conscious at first because I'm not golfer, but they made us blackberriers feel welcome and noted that since the blackberries we've been eradicating border on the golf course we've been contributing, and everyone was very friendly, so it ended up being enjoyable. I love the community of my little village. (:

   Now in other news, why does the FBI have to be like this? Recall I posted a bit ago about what I had to go through to get fingerprinted here to send them to the FBI to get a background check for my visa. Well the FBI received them and I got this email. Why do they have to make it like a gosh darn exploding message?? And because my computer crashes about once an hour I'm terrified to access it on my computer and have it crash before I can save their secret message. So I actually dusted off and booted up my OLD laptop that I had replaced with this one. It's really slow and half the keys on the keyboard don't work, but I can get around the latter by using an external keyboard. So I managed to try to go to the FBI site on that computer, only to find a message there that my records might not be available for 12 more hours. I am really lucky I used the old computer though because my newer computer did in fact crash in the next minute or two of usage. So anyway tomorrow morning I'll try again, once again with the older more dependable computer. But seriously why do they have to make my life difficult with this dire you-can-only-look-once thing???

Current Music: Mikelangelo & the Black Sea Gentlemen - Ten Long Years in the Saddle

   Yesterday (Friday) was a very lovely day. 76f and sunny. My application for permanent residency had just finally been lodged, finally freeing me from the threat of being expelled from the country on the 5th, so I was in a very good mood. For an hour or two at twilight I've been cutting blackberries along the slope beside the river at the edge of town, to make a trail, and this fun project was much on my mind in the morning. The trail is being bored a dozen feet a day through the thick tangle of brambles and was getting very near the comparatively clear "other side" of the entangled slope. In particular just the evening before I had discovered instead of slipping on the loose hillside and carrying the cut tentacle-like branches all the way back out of the track, if I carefully laid them lengthwise underfoot and stood on them they made a great stable trackway. So in the morning I eagerly thought about getting back to that, but first I had a busy day of beekeeping, to take advantage of the good weather!

Mid-afternoon, around 3pm-ish, I was emerging from the forest when my phone started giving me notifications. I glanced at my phone and my brother (Tobin) had sent me a screenshot of a Trump tweet announcing he (Trump) had coronavirus. I nearly swerved off the road! I had to stop and demand "IS THIS REAL???!?" it turns out, as you probably know, it was.
   The rest of the day I was checking my phone between every hive as the updates continued throughout the day. More Trump allies infected! Trump off to the hospital!

   I'm not gonna lie, this already good day was suddenly upgraded to euphoric. I've seen some hand wringing from people saying its immoral to wish ill on even Trump, and some Trump supporters posting that we should be ashamed, but you know what, no. Trump has downplayed this all along. Becuase of his downplaying this 200,000+ Americans are dead and now he himself is sick. It's his own damn fault and I'm not sorry. He mocked Hillary for getting pneumonia during the 2016 campaign, he mocked the McCain family when McCain died, he deserves exactly zero sympathy. He is a direct threat to the health and very lives of Americans and if this severaly damages his elections then it is objectively good.
   On top of all that, I think there's been every indication he planned to lead a chanting mob on election night to dispute the results, which was a terrifying prospect for democracy, but I doubt he can do that from a hospital bed. So yeah, no, this development may have saved America and I won't pretend some imaginary "high road" compels me to feel sympathy for this ogre.

   Anyway, in this state of euphoric wonderland I mnaged to finish the day, inspecting at beehives until the sun set around 6ish. Driving back to work to unload the truck, legendary cat Cato came to greet me and I held his warm furry purring koala-self for possibly an hour while I contentedly watched the big yellow moon rise. And took a photo:

Here is the moon. Did you know it's surface is "slightly brighter than that of worn asphalt" according to wikipedia?

   This morning (Saturady) wasn't even forecast to be a sunny day but it turned out to be yet another nice sunny day. I eagerly walked over to where the blackberry cutting had been going on and found the other two guys who have been having a hack at it in mornings had actually succeeded to cutting all the way through!! I was disappointed though that they didn't seem to take note of my track-laying technique and had manually lugged all the cut branches all the way out and left the soft bare earth of the slope to be directly walked on.
   And then throughout the day today about every hour we find out that yet another member of the Trump camp has come down with Covid!
   It kind of reminds me of the 30 Years War. Ah it seems like just yesterday ::gazes off into the distance:: but no really, so the war raged across Europe with important battles happening in different corners with important ramifications but the news might take weeks to get across. So for example, RBG dies, it feels like "our" side has just lost a significant battle somewhere a bit far away but turning the tables so things seem nearly hopeless for our side. But then just two weeks later there's another battle, and throughout the day news is slowly trickling down to us of all the major figures of the opposing side who have fallen as casualties in it.

   Though in studying the 30 Years War, which I've been finding fascinating lately, I still can't decide for the life of me which side to root for.

   Anyway, in conclusion, Spring is here, in spirit, in the weather, and apparently in politics.

4/22 - 1,655 active cases in Australia - 4??? new in the last 24 hours
4/23 - 1,541 active cases in Australia - 12 new in the last 24 hours

And finally I found a shop with a goodly stock of hand sanitizer and PPE! That looks like a price gouging price on the masks but the $8.99 hand sanitizer seems alright. Got two bottles of "sanno" and a box of gloves. Took a miss on the $70 masks though.

Coming home from work today at 17:45 this was the view as I came back into Birregurra. I quickly parked and rushed out to take this photo. Everything was aglow wit hthis sort of pinkish sherbet color -- there was a light drizzle and low misty clouds that took up and transmitted the glow, which also reflected from the wet asphalt and roofs to just give everything this absolutely surreal glow, it was gorgous.

In other news, at present moment I'm like 106th in LJ overall ratings, but about two days ago I was 99th! I broke a hundred!!! woooo yeah woooooo!

04/13 2804 active cases in Australia, 46 new cases in last 24 hours.

   In Australia we get a four day weekend to celebrate Eostre, because apparently "Easter Monday" is a thing of some kind. Friday was a bit nice so I checked some beehives, and was pleasantly surprised by how much honey I was able to harvest from them. Saturday and Sunday were so bloody cold I thought I might die the one time I opened the door (it was 53-54f, yes I'm melodramatic about temperatures under 60, I'm from Southern California). At one point we were getting sideways rain and the wind blew a bunch of things over.
   Sunday evening I got good and snug in front of my computer, consumed an unusually large amount of caffiene and started writing. I've been reading other people's travelogues on the writing site scribophile.com and it had inspired me to work on a nice polished travelogue of my own. It's mainly just a writing exercise at this point. So I've been working on the story of my journey into the heart of Tanzania to help the Hadzabe hunter-gatherers. Sunday night, while my friends were complaining about being "bored out of my mind" I was like "I'm reading about the Bantu expansion!!" (which had nothing really to do with what I was writing, so much as I got distracted by the wiki article on it). I actually get a bit annoyed when people complain about being bored. There's so much to do, how can you be bored?? (other than if caught out at the DMV without a reading book or other such specifically trying circumstance)
   My travelogue had some challenges, such as (1) that in my livejournal, my primary "rough log" to use as a foundation, I pretty much just skipped over four days in Nairobi in the beginning -- I don't remember anything I did and my rough-rough log was notes on my phone which were later lost. And (2) yesterday I was trying to jam some regional history in where I visit the museum in Arusha, and trying to make the history interesting and/or fit in nicely. It does appear that the area was "pacified" by a German Captain Kurt Johannes, which is delightfully reminiscent Colonel Kurtz. His apparently cruel second in command was a Lt Moritz "the Hyena" Merker. This stuff at least lends itself to good story telling. As these things go I probably spent 10x more time researching than writing. This kept me up until about 4am which is probably literally the latest by far I've been up in years. But hey I was on a roll.

   Today, "Easter Monday" was actually a nice sunny day. From the moment I woke up I managed to stay primarily outside until around 5pm, having not gone outside for the previous 48 hours. Town was eerily quiet. I expected to hear kids playing and see people walking about and all that but for whatever reason town was just super quiet.
   My mom convinced me to pick apples from my tree to make applesauce. I actually have a bumper crop of little apples. Usually they're all gobbled up by the cockatoos but the latter haven't been as abundant as usual -- must be socially isolating themselves. Messaged my across-the-street neighbor asking if he had any lemons so I could put lemon-peel in the applesauce and he came over to deliver some lemons ... which he placed on the porch and then ew chatted from a safe distance. It seems the fellow who has owned the General Store ever since I've been here has very abruptly handed over ownership of the store to someone else. I knew he kinda wanted out for awhile but this seems really sudden and I really wonder if it was coronavirus related.
   Trevor mentioned that the store now has fresh produce and other groceries! It always had SOME stuff, like sausages in the fridge, and milk and eggs and a few packs of one kind of pasta, but it wasn't really a sufficient selection to replace a trip to the grocery store. I had bene thinking with the new fear of going to the grocery store he was missing a golden opportunity. And I guess someone else thought so and bought him out with immediate effect. Suddenly the General Store has as many of all kinds of groceries as they can fit!
   I trotted over there to introduce myself and ensure a continued honey sales presence there. So weird to make a new business acquaintance and NOT shake hands. Doesn't feel right!

   Then I mowed my lawns and generally futzed about while procrastinating making applesauce becuase I always put off food production related tasks (but also that would have involved being indoors).

   March 30th - 3,983 active cases in Australia, 279 new last 24 hours.

   As I woke up at 06:30 this morning, still pitch black outside, I reached for my phone to message Cristina, the first thing I do every morning, and... why do I have 20 messages from eight different people??

   The Brig Pilgrim. Has sunk.

   "Ole Pilly" was my first tallship. I went aboard as a sixth grader for the overnight program in ancient times. More recently it was my introduction to crewing on tallships. My mom was chaperoning a class of sixth graders on another program, and asked the crew how one gets involved, and they told her about the Saturday morning maintenance sessions. That must have been 2009. Ever since, as long as I was in Southern California, I was usually down there on a Saturday morning swinging from the rigging painting blocks or tarring backstays or some such fun. Once a year the ship used to go on a three week sail which was kind of a reward for the volunteers, though the last time I had a chance to go I was kicked off by an organization big-wig for having ebola.

   The Pilgrim was built as a working sailing vessel in Denmark in 1945. In the 70s she was sailed to Portugal to be refit as a replica of the famous 1830s era sailing vessel Pilgrim from the book Two Years Before the Mast (and renamed accordingly). And then sailed to Dana Point (which is named after the author of said book because the place is featured in it).

   People are speculating it was an "insurance job" since the organization was already hurting before the coronavirus dried up the last of their school groups (or probably any attendance of any kind to their marine science museum). I doubt they actually opened a seacock or drilled a hole, but I do think it could maybe be called "sabotage by neglect" ... the organization had been severely skimping on her maintenance for years. She's the reason the OI is even on the map and yet they treated her like the red headed stepchild.

   To quote an apt line from the sea shanty The Marie Ellen Carter: "Well, the owners wrote her off; not a nickel would they spend / She gave twenty years of service, boys, then met her sorry end"

   Normally I'm sure all the volunteer crew who can would get together to sing Leave Her Johnny Leave Her and other departing sea shanties to the poor girl but...

   Today I extracted a lot of honey. Then Cristina sent me a picture of the pizza she had just made and I couldn't get pizza out of my head, so I justified that I needed to support the local buisinesses and ordered a pizza from the general store (they have a pizza oven, make them fresh).

   Today, March 30th, is International Doctor's Day. So I went into the Birregurra Health Center to bring them some honey and a card. It's only about 150 meters from my house.
   There were some big signs on the front door with "ATTENTION" and "READ THIS BEFORE ENTERING" on them. The signage instructed visitors to the health center to enter one at a time, immediately use the provided hand sanitizer, approach the receptionist no closer than the rope barrier, tell her the reason for the visit, and then wait in car until called.
   It seemed news to the receptionist, as it is to nearly everyone I think, that today was international doctor's day, but she seemed really touched. I asked how many people worked there but she was having trouble counting up all the various people who come in on different days, but I determined there are three doctors who work different days, and on this day there were four staff in. So I left jars for all the staff that were currently in plus one each or the other two doctors. And my handwritten card thanked them for risking their lives on the front lines every day.

   As I was leaving I saw the main doctor, all masked up, admonishing an elderly gentleman in his car "that is NOT a suggestion Bill!"

   See also: Nurses Die, Doctors Fall Sick, And Panic Rises on the Virus Front Lines"

Current Mood: sad
Current Music: Stan Rogers - The Marie Ellen Carter

   March 29th - 3,727 active cases in Australia, 331 new cases in the last 24 hours. Another set up numbers I just crunched, at the moment the United States has 23.6% of all active cases, while only having 4.25% of the world population.

   Today Cristina reported she went wit the taxi driver who drives her to work to get gasoline but there was no gasoline and too many people. Apparently she was eventually able to acquire gasoline on account of being a doctor.

   Today being sunday, I actually took a day off work. It was rainy in the morning but actually quite nice in the afternoon and I went walking about along the river beside my village. There were many people walking about, either with their dogs or their kids. When meeting we would greet eachother in a friendly manner while edging around eachother to maintain about twenty feet of distance.

picture from my walk today

   I submitted a little article for the bi-weekly ("fortnightly") town newsletter today, but was told the issue after this next one might not go out as scheduled. Personally I think they should keep at it.

Current Music: Heavy Horses - Crooked Smile

March 25th -- 2,423 cases currently in Australia, up 287, which is actually less than the previous two days.

   In fact this chart seems to indicate its the second day of a fall in a row and lowest in five days. But I'm inclined to also think it's too good to be true. Possibly the more stringent stay-at-home orders caused fewer people to notice or report themselves or something like that.

   This morning I noticed a news item that the Australian PM had declared that "Level II restrictions go into effect tonight at midnight!" but couldn't find anywhere what those level two restrictions entailed. My friends informed me it basically just meant beauty salons are no longer classed as an essential service. Basically the interpretation thus far has been pretty much "if you have a job that's not in hospitality/entertainment, you're an essential service." ("that's a direct paraphrase" as my friend Greg put it). There did seem to be fewer cars on the roads today. Today there seemed to be really really hardly any cars on the road.

   Went to work at nine as usual. It was cold and dreary so I took the work truck home to maybe do some bottling or other such futzing around while waiting for it to get warmer. But looking at the weather app I realized Saturday would be a nice day in the upper 70s while today was supposed to peak at 63. It's not like I'm doing anything more important, so I decided to take today off and work saturday. I thought about emailing el boss man this minor reshuffle of my hours but he's never seemed to have any interest in such matters.

   But then two or three hours later I was sitting at my computer when I happened to see the exact make of his car drive by -- a blue toyota hilux with these beefy chrome roll bars that seem to be a standard option here. It's not a custom job, there's a few such cars around, but it was the exact same car he drives as far as I could tell. It would be wildly out of character for him to spy on me, but all of a sudden I started having paranoid thoughts that sitting at home with nothing to do, thinking about canning the beekeeping department, he had hthought to himself "what's Kris donig with the truck with weather like this?" and went on a driveabout to see if I was home. I really think it's not like him and its just a conspiracy theory but... I'd have to have had seen the license plate to distinguish that car from his.

   This weather today really didn't help the whole end of the world situation. I was already feeling a bit depressed about it, before my job came into question, and I miss Cristina a lot, and then for the weather to be extremely dreary and cold today really was the icing on the cake to make for a thoroughly depressing day. And you know there's a lot of missing in a long distance relationship but I think we handle it pretty well but I would have liked to be with her while civilization is ending.

   The sun finally came out around 3pm. I scampered outside and was meerkatting on my porch listening thoughtfully to the eerie silence of the new world, when my dear friend Koriander happened to send me a recording of herself singing the Mingulay Boat Song. It is a lovely somber and melancholy yet hopeful sea shanty that we would often sing on the boats at sunset as we headed back to dock. I wish I could share with you Kori singing it but she'd kill me, but she's a really beautiful singer. So in the sunny silence of our ruined world I closed my eyes and listened to her sing the Mingulay Boat Song.

Current Music: Mingulay Boat Song

March 19th - As of this morning there were 565 cases if coronavirus in Australia, and 111 new cases in the previous 24 hours.

   It is presently 5:51am in Venezuela and Cristina is on her way to the hospital for work. Since they'd reduced to skeleton shifts she's been off a few days, this is her first shift since they've gotten coronavirus patients. The hospital doesn't have disenfectant, gloves, masks or running water. It feels like she's going off to the front lines in a war ):

   In related news, in Italy (where they have first world protective gear in the hospitals) there has reportedly been an "'enormous' level of contagion among the country's medical personnel. At least 2,629 health workers have been infected by coronavirus since the onset of the outbreak in February, representing 8.3 percent of total cases."

   There is now definitely a flight ban in Australia for any travel other than returning Australians. Cristina's flight to Colombia has been cancelled so we're definitely going to cancel the other two legs. Both the Panamanian airline and United have announced we can cancel or change our flights, though it might just be credit with the airline rather than money back. We'll see. I'll be a bit grumpy with them if it's just credit, watch then to recreate the trip it will cost significantly more and we'll be locked in with them ):

   I have a friend in Costa Rica, a college frind who recently went there because her income all came from online stuff so it didn't matter where she was so might as well be a tropical paradise. There's apparently no shortages there, apparently because the economy is accustomed to supplying hordes of tourists who aren't present. She showed pictures of shelves full of toilet paper! Apparently Costa Rica has imposed alcohol prohibition to discourage people from having tooooo much fun during quarantine.

   I was surprised to see a fair number of people at the town pub when I drove past however. I haven't been able to find hand sanitizer but I've taken to taking a bar of soap with me in the car and just grasping it in my hand as I drive, switching hands every now and then. Should keep my hands (and steering wheel?) good and sterile yeah?

   My printer is refusing to work again. I swear it gives me the biggest headache of all work related things. I need to print labels!! Today was a really nice day, possibly the third day this year that actually felt like a nice summer day. Though the bees I was inspecting today made it clear they thought summer was over -- they had already kicked the drones out. Most of my hives are nearer Birregurra town and doing booming business, but these ones by the workshop aren't putting honey on. I'd move them to where the honey is coming in but with my luck the flow would cut out as soon as I got them there. :-/

   Someone from the local newsletter asked if I wanted to have a continuing column of my travel stories. I feel a bit self conscious that everything else in the newsletter is directly of general interest to the community but if the editors think it would be good then I suppose it could be fun.

   Presently it's just after 9pm here, rain is pounding on my house's tin roof, and there's a pretty frequent flashing of lightning and rumble of thunder. 9pm here, 6am in Venezueala. Cristina is headed to the front lines right now, and I feel very anxious about it.

Yesterday. appx 3pm - I am working under a sparce stand of tall yellowgum eucalyptus trees. The weather is hot and muggy. I'm wearing the light bee veil, the one that looks just a vague bag of netting over my head. And that's only because of these really annoying flies that insist on trying to get in ones eyes, especially when you're holding a frame of bees with both your hands and can't swat at the flies.
   The sky is an opaque white and visibility is only about a quarter mile before things disappear into the white haze. At the very edge of visibility giant windmills slowly turn in the smokey haze. For the last two days this smoke from the major bushfires consuming the eastern seventh of the state. Despite the sky appearing to be "overcast" more light seems to come through than if it was normal rain clouds, surreally lighting the landscape with just the faintest bit of an eerie yellowish orange tint.
   The "Vic Emergency" app dingles again with its weirdly innocuous sounding chime and I look at my phone again, but it's just another "storm warning," it's been issuing them seemingly every ten minutes for various parts of the state but here things have been calm. I go back to inspecting the hive.

   Hive Y121 Yavin has queen cells. Evaluation of various factors indicates the hive is building them to swarm (as opposed to replacing their own queen), which is very odd since it's long past swarming season and the hive isn't even particularly crowded, but bees can be quite inexplicable. I gaze at the slowly twirling arms of the nearest windmill for a moment in thought. The top appears to be more visible thna the base due to the smoke hanging low over the ground. These appear to be well-formed queen cells, I could take them back to the one hive at my house and use it to incubate them for the week it will take for them to hatch and then distribute the queens to hives that could use a new queen. I look at the four hives left to inspect in this yard.. I should move the queen cells quickly and besides I already finished both my water bottles on this hot humid day and haven't taken a lunch break yet, so I will deal with these queen cells, get more water, and come back to finish.

   Just as I close the door on my truck there's a flash that lights up the opaque hazy sky from indeterminate direction, followed a few beats later by a loud crack of thunder. As I'm driving down the dirt road the rain begins to fall. I roll down the window to smell the delicious scent of fresh rain on the fields. I rain soaks my arm resting on the windowsill but I don't move it, it feels so nice and refreshing.

   Ten minutes later I'm in the general store in the center of my village of Birregurra. I buy tonic water and a package of bacon and a milkshake, and sit down on the front porch under the awning to enjoy the milkshake as the rain pours down around me. The vic emergency app is now advising me of flash floods in various places.

   A woman comes in and says she wants to return some honey. My honey I see. I jump up and approach her at the counter:
   "What's wrong with the honey?" I ask with concern.
   "Oh, um," she says, a bit startled, as I am by all appearances just another customer "I just don't want it"
   "Oh.. nothing's wrong with it?" I ask,
   "Someone gave it to me as a gift but I prefer the liquid honey in the squeeze bottle"
   "Oh." I say, trying not to look judgey
   "It's for the kids" she says self consciously "you know, they expect the liquid squeeze bottle" uhuh sure lady. But I retreat back to my table.

   On facebook messenger my friends are asking who is going to pub trivia tonight. I've just written "Yeah I've got a lot on but I plan to go--" when the fire brigade app blaats its notification noise. I quickly enter out of messenger and read the message.
   "ALERT WSEA11 G&SC1 GRASS & SCRUB FIRE 675 INGLEBY..." which is all I read before I grabbed my purchases (and half finished milkshake), jumped in the truck, and headed around the corner to the fire station. Moments later I was looking out the window at the smoke filled fields outside town. It was no longer raining and was once again just the eerie white haze. I've been in firetrucks looking at smokey landscapes plenty of times, but usually in distant firegrounds. For my own town to look this smokey and to be seen through the window of a fire truck was very disturbing.
   The location described, "Ingleby" is an area I have a number of beehives. The location of the fire was hard to locate because while normally you can see the smoke, the smoke was in this case obscured by the fact that there was already smoke everywhere. But finally after some radio chatter to clarify the precise location we joined a line of three firetrucks entering the appropriate field. We pass singed sheep going the other way. Trucks already on the scene had already put out the worst of it and we just spent two or three hours or so putting out all the smouldering bits on the edge. At a slow moment while we refilled the tanker from the nearby creek I mentioned to our fire captain that I had a package of bacon in my truck and he called his wife and she moved the bacon from my truck cab to the firehouse fridge. "Legend!"

   It wasn't until I got home and was able to recharge my phone, which had meanwhile died, that I realized I had sent a message saying I was going to trivia at the moment the fire alert came in. Oops. Also of course the remaining half my milkshake was tepid and melted upon return to the station. I then installed the queens but I'm not sure how their several hours of uncontrolled temperature did for them.

   That evening I spent several hours proofreading my friend Billie's gender discrimination legal complaint against the forestry fire department. Last year the remote station she was posted to kept sending all the males to all the fires while all the equally qualified women were relegated to cleaning the firehouse and trucks and other menial tasks. She filed a complaint with the department and they spent five months claiming they were investigating before obtusely declaring that they had found no discrimination, and then they abruptly cancelled rehiring her. As she poignantly puts it in her conclusion:

"I am now writing this last, at home and ringing earthmoving contractors in the hope of securing a casual position offsiding, while a state of emergency has been declared, the whole of East Gippsland has been evacuated, and the fires have reached a stage of catastrophic intensity. International and interstate firefighters have been flown in, and the defence force has been mobilised, while I am unemployed, but fighting fit, qualified and experienced, 15 minutes from 2 DELWP depots, and 50 kilometres from the fire front. My ‘go bag’ is still sitting in the corner of my bedroom, packed with my freshly laundered greens and uniform, along with my helmet, now utterly superfluous. I cannot see this progression of events as any other than intensely personal."

So now she's preparing to complain to a higher authority. I hope it gets somewhere.

This kept me up until nearly 1am. Which is why I was sound asleep at 5:17am when the fire brigade app went off again about a brushfire in the forest by Barwon Downs 9 miles due south of here.

The major brushfires making the news are far from here and it's still been relatively green around here, but the heart of the fire season here is usually February-March so we've been saying it's not bad here yet but it will get bad when this area gets dry. This morning waking up to a second local brushfire nearly back-to-back with the previous one I wondered nervously, has the moment arrived?

Current Music: Danny Schmidt - Firestorm

I. The Greg Collection
   In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the checker-board patterned firmament, and me laying upon it, rejoicing in for the first time having an entire house to myself, even if I would only be renting. In the normal course of things, I think people seldom have no furniture. You go out from your parents house with a few things to an apartment, bounce around progressively larger apartments for years gradually accruing more Things and by the time you finally move into a house you've got baggage. But, having fallen out of the sky here like lucifer cast down from the heavens, I found myself with nothing ~~but the wispy smoke of brimstone~~. Can you believe Australians haul around even all their heavy appliances such as fridge, washer ~~dryer~~ (they don't have dryers) every time they move??

   I happened to be very lucky that my friend Greg had recently divorced and was living in his van ("the Gregvan") with most of the former contents of his house in boxes in the commercial building in which his company operated (making distilling equipment) and he was happy to give me all this stuff _for free_. I thus in one fell swoop got all kinds of things such as a toaster, microwave, knives and kitchen utensils, kitchen table and chairs, an armchair, bed linens... Also my garage is full of bits and pieces of stills now, which makes me happy though I haven't gotten around to trying to piece one together. But these copper tubes and kettles lying around make me feel like a proper mad alchemist. Collectively I like to refer to these things as "the Greg Collection." ("Your kitchen chairs are nice" "thanks they're from the Greg Collection")

My empty house upon move in. It looks like the first thing I moved in was that green glass demijohn :-D

II. The Washer
   After the Greg Collection and some other acquisitions I most notably lacked a fridge, washing machine, and couch. Several people also attempted to offer me TVs and seemed incredulous that I didn't want one. But the first of these remaining necessary items I found was a washing machine, on Gumtree (like Craigslist), conveniently from someone right here in Birregurra town!
   I drove over to the guy's house. He appeared to be in his early to mid 30s, a bit overweight. It wasn't immediately obvious from looking at him but he mentioned being on mental disability and from his rambling circular odd conversation this was evident. He was living at his dad's place and apparently bought and resold things on gumtree as a sort of hobby. He tried to offer me various things I didn't need or want, including a TV, though I did walk away with a chess set he offered me for like $5.
   Unfortunately, he proceeded to call me every few days after that. I think because we weren't too far apart in age, lived not far from eachother, and I had been friendly, he hoped we would be friends, but he often called while I was at work and it could be very hard to get a word in edgewise to excuse myself. And he seemed to not understand that I didn't have time to talk during working hours and he would become a bit petulant (And also, there's like literally three people in the entire world I don't mind just shooting the breeze on the phone with, anyone else I'd rather convey necessary information and get off the phone as soon as possible).
   On one of the last times he called me I had literally just pulled up in front of my friend Billie's house (one of those three people), She was out by her front door and waved at me and just as I went to open the car door the phone rang. I had never put him in my phone so I didn't know it was him until I answered. So then while Billie was awkwardly waiting to greet me I was trying to get a word in to tell him it was a bad time but literally couldn't get a word in for two or three solid minutes as he ranted about "fags" for some reason.

   Fortunately he stopped calling me. One later time I saw an advertisement for something and I started to dial the number but as soon as the number autocompleted I realized it was him and aborted. The washing machine he sold me broke after not terribly long and I ended up buying a new one from a store.

Greg securing the largest pieces of the "Greg Collection," onto my work truck, the Gregvan visible on the right

III. The Fridge
   My current fridge is a funny story. I also found it on gumtree. Though I corresponded with Lucy* on facebook to coordinate getting it I hadn't looked at her profile, but apparently she had looked at mine. My friend Trent went with me to assist in fridge moving. Lucy and her fridge were in the nearby little town of Inverleigh, which you get to from here by driving along dirt country roads. When we arrived at her place, I was surprised to find a very attractive woman, about my age, tattooed, with kind of a cute pouty lip, a casual air of authority, showing me her spare fridge. Because I'm not a creeper I didn't linger or try to gratuitously chat with her, just got the fridge loaded up and off we went. I'd later realize, after seeing her in her more normal state of dress, that she had fully put on her makeup and dressed cutely for the pickup.
   On our way out of Inverleigh Trent pointed out a faux-leather couch by a curb ("kerb" in Australian. WTF) with a "free" sign on it and we loaded it onto the truck (I had borrowed the work pick-up) as well. This couch has been on my back porch ever since and I'm very happy with it.
   Since Lucy had, after all, looked very attractive, and I was single at the time, I sent her a message the next day affirming the fridge worked ("Fridge is working and hasn't even a little bit exploded. Thanks! 😊") and thanking her. She responded in an encouraging (you might even say non-frigid) manner, soon we were talking about what beers I would be putting in the fridge, and gradually drifted away from purely fridge related business. It turns out she's a police sergeant in Melbourne, and single. After a week or two we went on a date. I didn't want to jump right into going on "a date," I just wanted to "get drinks" at the lovely old bluestone pub in Inverleigh. But then I was hungry, so I got food, and so did she, and suddenly it was a date. (when things are looking more promising I can put on a slightly better first date) Dinner was alright, but she scowled at me when I went to bus my own table and said "people were paid to do that!" and I noted this as an early red flag. Kindness is a guiding virtue for me, not transactional accounting of what is owed or obligated. Long story short we hung out a few times, I was also unimpressed when she seemed to think it was unmanly of me NOT to express road rage at other cars on the road ("flash that asshole your high beams. Come on he deserves it! Seriously you're not going to??"), and when she started expressing racist opinions it was truly over (the most common racist narrative here is that refugees are forming "gangs" in Melbourne making it unsafe, I've had drunk white Australians make me feel unsafe plenty of times but never an immigrant). But in the mean time, I got not only the fridge out of it, she also gave me two small bedside tables and sold me an indoor couch for a good price!

   I got a good year or two out of her fridge but after awhile it too disappointed me, gradually falling farther from a proper refrigerative temperature until it is now the prevailing ambient temperature.

The living-room side looknig more inhabited

IV. Quest for a New Fridge
   I think it was about a year ago I first noticed the fridge was falling behind. I called around for a fridge mechanic, which was surprisingly hard to come by and when I found someone he said he had a three month back-log before he could get to me. That was clearly too long... and here I am a year later.
   Billie gave me a spare minifridge she had, which I placed in my garage. It works well but is small, and it's a hassle going out to the garage (which is not attached to the house so I have to go outside) for things, especially in winter when it feels blizzard cold out there in my estimation and an inky blackness even flashlights can't penetrate falls on the land at about 4:30 (I may be exaggerating conditions very slightly, but only to emphasize how to feels to me being accustomed to paradisical Southern California).

   I've been meaning to call that Fridge mechanic back or find a fridge somewhere but haven't gotten around to it for months. Finally I happened to mention my nonfunctioning fridge to my across-the-street neighbor Trevor, a jolly round red-cheeked gnomish jovial man I like a lot. Since I mentioned it he's been sending me about three links a day to fridges on gumtree. Because it feels rude to let his effort go to waste I've dutifully looked at them and contacted them if it looked like it could be The One. Most of them were snapped up before I even contacted them, apparently it's a seller's market in fridges around here. But this morning the seller of a $100 fridge in the coastal town of Torquay said "yeah come and get it." It was a bit far (40 min) but for $100 to finally get this fridge problem sorted I was down.
   I asked my friend Joe if he could help me unload it (reflecting that while Trevor would probably be willing he does not strike me as a very physically impressive specimen fit for moving fridges), and just for old times sake I asked Trent if he wanted to help me move a fridge again. He didn't have work today and sounded willing to help if I really needed him, but I admitted I had help on both ends and probably didn't actually need him so he didn't join me.

   The seller, Samuel, was a skinny young man who looked to be in his early twenties, blonde haired, very skinny, notably his head seemed almost too skinny for his features, his eyes and teeth both seemingly sticking out a bit.
   Looking at the fridge I was concerned to see it looked abnormally wide. His mother came out as well and mentioned that the reason they were selling it was because it was too wide for the space they had for it. My fridge-space is also constrained between cupboards and the oven, but I hadn't bothered to measure it or ask because it's more than wide enough for my current fridge and looked wide enough for any _normal_ fridge.
   This fridge looked too wide, but I didn't want to have driven all this way on a wild goose chase for nothing. This was a long way to drive just for a gander! I called Trevor, whom recall is my across-the-street neighbor.
   "Heeeeey Trevor? Could you do me a huge favor and go measure my fridge space??" I asked. He cheerfully said yes he would right away. What a great fellow.

   While Trevor got his tape measure and headed across the street, "Samuel" got his own tape measure to measure his.
   "It's 90" Samuel reported, at roughly the same time Trevor was trying to tell me the measurement he got.
   "It's 30 inches" Trevor reported
   "Whats that in metric?" I asked.
   "oh um ... 770" He reported
   "Oh this is 900 that will never work" I said
   "Oh, no, it's 90 inches!" Samuel said indicating the tape measure.
   "What? Oh what's that in metric?" I asked, and then to Trevor "Trevor, what's 770 in imperial?"
   "...2 feet 6 inches" reported Trevor, once again while Samuel was trying to tell me the measurement on his end, this time HE reporting in metric.
   "oh it's 89 centimeters" said Samuel. By now I'd forgotten what Trevor had originally said.
   "What's 89 centimeters in imperial?"
...
   Eventually after a relative comedy of one always reporting in imperial while the other compared it in metric, we finally determined that the fridge was 89 cm wide while the available space I had was 77cm. Not going to work.
   (Also, his initial reporting that the 90 was inches was obviously wrong but while trying to wrangle two conversations in two different systems at once that didn't click in my mind at the time.)

   I headed home. He texted me apologizing that it didn't suit. I texted back saying I should have checked the width before I headed out. I thought that was the end of things but then he texted back, presumably joking, that I could have taken it to see if it fitted.
   At this point I'm thinking, a bit nervously, I really don't need another gumtree seller carrying on a correspondence after our business is done. I responded merely with "ahaha" and he fortunately hasn't messaged again. My fridge may be broken but my heart remains frigid.

A small fermenter makes a lovely table centerpiece

*name changed

I'm trying to get out of the habit of only posting when I have something that's really too long to post. This is one of several stories I recently posted as an overly long facebook post, I'll try to get around to posting the others here too.

So this past weekend was the annual big festival of my little village, "Birregurra Festival." The weather was great and it was fun. While I was walking the 100 meters or so from my house to the festival with my friends Mick and his girlfriend, our route took us past the flow hive in my neighbor's empty lot and I was like "Oh Hey Mick have you seen a flow hive lets go look at it"

While there we encountered said neighbor himself, Trevor, mentioned here before, a very jolly fellow. He was sitting on his back veranda with his wife and a friend. "Hey, when are you bringing me more bees?" he jokingly pressed me, "I've got the second stand built and ready!" Really its the ethical dilemma mentioned before that had prevented me from already providing him with bees, since enough bees to start a hive cost $120-$150 and I dunno about providing a SECOND lot of bees even to my favorite neighbor for free. (see previous post for full ethical examination)

But just then Mick says "Hey, what about those bees?" and we look and he's pointing to a swarm of bees just BESIDE the new stand.
"Oh, how about right now I say?" and we all have a good laugh about the quick turnaround on this request. So I trot quickly home, all I can find is an empty box (no frames) someone else had given me a swarm in that I was going to return to them, but it'll have to do. So there I am in my nice clothes, trying not to get grass stains on my pants, moving bees by hand into this box.

We did a pretty halfassed job, since unlike most swarms I would be easily able to return to this one, so we ignored the many bees on the base of the pole saying they would clump up again and then I'd move them too. When I came back later they actually had also moved into the hive!

Today after I checked the now five hives I have in my own yard, I enjoyed being able to bbq right where I'd just been working, and then I put some ice cream in my leftover coffee in this cute little cup and it was delicious.

I actually took my laptop outside and am writing this in location pictured as it rains all around me (:

Part II
Day 2: I came back with a proper hive box with frames the following day and transferred them. I actually had the queen in my hand twice but didn't have a queen cage at hand (I'd had it an hour earlier, I don't know where it got to!). Bees will to a certain extent do what they want, and at a certain point they all started flooding out of the hive and collecting under the box an at that point it was carrying water up a hill with a seive. So I left htem hoping they'd get cold overnight and move up.

Day 3: I came back, they hadn't moved up, so I put the box under the stand, ie under the swarm, and shook them all into it. Kept an eye out for the queen but never saw her. Then placed the hive back on top and they appeared to be content to stay inside. Just in case I put a queen excluder under the box (ie between the bulk of them and the entrance), though having seen this queen I reckon she's small enough to slip through (and when they slim up to fly with the swarm they're more able to do so, and this one had been very flighty the day before).

Then I walked to the health center to book their meeting room for a planned community beekeeping meeting. While talking to the receptionist she said "you have a wasp on you!"
To which I said "oh" and cupped my hand gently around the bee and walked briskly outside to release it, as she called after me "careful it could sting you!"
I hadn't even glanced at it, but when I released it and it flew away like an overlaiden B-24, in a roughly straight line away from me right to the ground I was like waitaminute waitaminute. Thats how QUEENS fly. Went to examine her and... yep it was the queen! She had hitched a ride on ME!!

So I picked her up, finished talking to the receptionist whilst pretending not to be holding a bee in my hand, popped her into the queen cage I now had at hand when I got back to the car, and placed her in the hive!

Current Location: Birregurra

A rose in my front yard

   I tend not to post unless I have a lot to say, but I need to get out of that habit, smaller entries are much easier to digest after all. (:

   So swarming season has begun. That's when beehives reproduce by sending out a "swarm" of 5-10,000 bees, that land on a branch or overhanging roof while they look for a new home, prompting people to call around for local beekeepers whilst exclaiming "you won't believe this!!!!"

   In California because Africanized bees swarm so much and are hard to deal with, the phones of anyone people can get ahold of about this ring off the hook during the season -- at Bee Busters we'd get 30 calls a day! And people would be shocked to learn that no one would take them for free -- but there was just a burdensomely large number of them.

   Over here it is quite different. I absolutely want every swarm I can get my hands on. It actually presents some interesting ethical issues. I am happy to come get the bees for free, I am happy to have the bees. If I were to buy an equivalent amount of bees it would cost me around $130-$140 (AUD, so like $100US). If I know a friend or neighbor wants bees I am happy to give them the bees even though it means I'm forgoing a thing thats worth $130 to me that may be legitimately mine once I've taken possession of it. Interesting they've discovered some Roman law tablets specifying who owns a swarm of bees under what conditions. But I'm happy to give them away just because, I guess, my having them at all is a "gift to me from society" and me passing them on to someone else is just me "paying it forward" on that. I would not pass the bees along for free to another commercial beekeeper but to individuals I know yes. Individuals I don't know I'm more undecided about -- I do have one woman who called me asking for bees and she's neither a friend nor a neighbor and I think I might sell her a swarm ... but it still feels shiesty selling something I received for free earlier in the day.

   Neighbors often insist on paying me, which again I feel like, these bees were free to me. How would the people forwarding me the calls or inviting me to come take their bees feel if they knew I was turning around and selling them at a substantial profit?

   But I've come up with a solution! After one neighbor particularly put the "come on let me give you something for this" on me it hit me. "You can make a $20 donation to Bee Aid International if you'd like?" And since then I've suggested that to others who wanted to compensate me and they are only too happy to. I feel like this conveniently solves all the problems. I'm not personally profiting, they're feeling like they gave something back, the people calling me to take their bees are in essence making a donation themselves of the bees, and Bee Aid International which has really had a lot of trouble garnering any donations at all finally has a small donation stream.

The hive in my backyard

   I really enjoy stopping by to look at my neighbor's hives. When I stopped in at my across-the-street neighbors the other day they were in the garden having a glass of champagne each because he had just sold the business he's retiring from and they insisted I join them for a glass. It was a wonderful sunny day.

   Friday and this morning were cold and rainy. It was nearly freezing last night. Another neighbor called me today saying he thought the swarm he had newly boxed on Thursday was dying from cold and asked if he could warm it up. "Sure, like wrap a blanket around it?" I asked
   "I was thinking like take it in the house"
   "Ahahaha I don't think anyone would think of that here" I said "but that's what they do in Ethiopia in winter! Absolutely go for it!" He's closing up the entrance of course. But its too cold for them to be out foraging so the bees won't be missing anything for it.

Also I've officially broken out the grill for the season! Sadly I was out of saeurkraut today (I'd been famously working through a 5 pound jar of it), and that small amount of mustard was the last of that too. Guess I need to go to the store soon!

I. Prologue
   For awhile now I've had this idea to do a "Portrait of Birregurra," initially because I was new here so it was worth painting the new setting, but now it's been a year, but during the intervening year I've been thinking a lot about how people don't write about what to them is most familiar -- who writes a travelogue to their hometown? I even finally made an America tag and tagged the entries from last year's Epic Roadtrip 2017, during which I first tried to treat even Los Angeles and So Cal as travelogue-worthy subjects. If nothing else, as a writing exercise I think writing about one's local town in a manner that would give the idea of it to someone who hasn't been there (ie, as if in a travelogue), is a great writing exercise -- forcing you to overcome your own assumptions of what's familiar to everyone whilst writing about something one is thoroughly knowledgeable about. Which is to say, I would love to see anyone else try the exercise. And without further ado, Birregurra: A Portrait.

II. Getting There
   Melbourne is the gravitational centre that defines everything in here, in descriptions of state-wide issues here, talking heads often use "Melbourne" interchangabley with Victoria, even though the Eastern corner of the state is six hours away, and the northwest corner is seven and a half. Knowing full well I live two hours outside Melbourne, Melbournians will ask me "so how do you like living in Melbourne" without seeing anything weird about the question.

   Melbourne, when one is here, one assumes is naturally the Center of the World and everyone of course knows where it is. But if you'll suspend disbelief with me for a moment and assume someone reading this might not know their Perth from their Darwin, Melbourne is on the southern edge of the Australian continent at the top of a big bay. It take 15 hours to fly here from LA, usually with a stop in Fiji or New Zealand, and nearly two days from Europe with a likely stop in Abu Dhabi, and the last eight hours of the flight are over the monotonous red deserts of central Australia.
   The Tullamarine airport is on the northwest edge of Melbourne, which is fortunate since I can skirt the city on the ring-road. Some times there is traffic but even then it's not the stop-and-go of Los Angeles but a mere increased viscosity of cars on the road, like trying to pour cold honey, as we wend our way along at no worse than say 35mph. For the first half hour one is surrounded by warehouses and other industrial looking buildings, with the city's skyscrapers off to the left, and then rather abruptly one crosss the Werribee river and one is driving through open plains. I'm not sure if this is some kind of protected land or a flood plain but it doesn't appear to even be grazing land, just flat plains, as the skyscrapers fade out of sight in the background. The bay lies off to one's left, parallel to the highway, but is not visible. Twenty minutes later a single Lonely Mountain named the You Yangs rises up out of the plains, and one sees signs for the town at it's base, Little River. Then, if one looks carefully one can see the giant hangers of Avalon Airport ("Melbourne's OTHER Airport" Melbournians smugly call it, because it's totally not basically in Geelong or anything). Then there's the flaming minarets of the oil refineries, and the dock where they seem to be forever loading an interminable load of woodchips into bulk freighters (I imagine it's part of some Greek curse where for one reason or another the ship will never be full)
   And then one comes up around a hill to see the suburbs of Geelong draped over the next hill, and in this valley what looks like the ruins of a roman aqueduct comes up, and stops at the highway, but clearly formerly continued up to the top of the hill on the left where, now surrounded by suburban houses, the silos of an old concrete factory stand like a castle. One then swoops down over the Boorabool river, keeping thick quarter-acre-lot suburbs on one's left and farmland on one's left, over another hill, over the Barwon River, and up and down another hill or two, the highway seeming a dyke that keeps the suburbs on the left from flooding the farmland on the right. Over at least one rise one gets a sweeping view of the city, the most memorable feature of which the the standium in the middle which appears to have a dozen giant spatulas rising into the air around it like some great temple to baking.

   Then one turns right and after passing between two hills with high walls on them feels as if one's been shot out of a rapids down into the countryside again. One is headed west now, parallel to the southern coast, and can continue most of the way on this two-lane-per-side divided highway, and I do after dark to avoid kamikaze kangaroos (kangikazis?), but otherwise I soon turn off on the two lane country road known as Cape Otway Highway, which my GPS pronounces as "K Pop Highway." After just a few minutes one arrives at a railroad crossing and across it a little store with a big facade that declares in faded letters "SUNSHINE BISCUITS!" -- this is the Moriac general store and beside it a now closed saddlery store -- welcome to the country. I used to live 2km outside this town near a buddhist monastery before moving to my current location.
   Continuing on west from here to Birregurra it it gently undulating countryside, driving parallel with the green someone stumpy Otway mountains on the left, and the crumbles smooothing out into the "Golden Plains" to the right. In the evening, my favorite time to drive through this area, the sun casts a golden glow on the dried grass of the countryside, rectangular black cattle seen from a short distance resemble schools guppies nibbling on a lake bottom, and bounding squadrons of kangaroos fly up the hills like leaping salmon, traversing fences as if they weren't there.

   About forty minutes out from Moriac, 25 since the turnoff for my work, one crosses a short floodplain that fills with fog in early winter mornings, and the three steeples of the Birregurra churches emerge from the trees and/or fog on the far side. One rumbles over the bridge (once again over the Barwon River, much diminished now), and one is in Birregurra town!

Just about... here

III. Birregurra Town
   Birregurra is arranged like a tic tac toe grid, except only the main east-west road and one headed out of town north is actually paved. In this day and age most of our roads in this town are still not paved. Most houses are quaint and old (mine is casually 101!) one story weatherboard cottages. This is not to say they're dilapidated or run down, property valued in Birregurra utterly eclipse everything around because its such a delightful place to live.
   On my first visit to Birregurra I was traveling through it with my boss to Colac the very first week, he was kind of showing me around, and of Birregurra he said "this is Birregurra ... that was Birregurra" as we passed through it in about thirty seconds. Upon crossing the Barwon River and entering town, one proceeds two blocks through these quiet shady residential streets, which one can do in seconds at 60kph, then crosses a small second bridge over Birregurra Creek, and the two lane country road becomes extremely wide. I'm told these old country towns are all designs so you can turn an ox cart around on the main street, and indeed, I can _almost_ even do a u-turn with the work Navara here. On the left there's a park, on the right the pharmacy, then it's houses on the right and on the left a row of half a dozensmall shops with facades like an old western town. A provedore (which I've learned means "food for hipsters" -- but they are a really nice young couple and carry all local products); an art gallery; the pub everyone complains isn't very good; an art gallery; the general store (actually has the best burgers I've found in Australia!); the post office; in a very solid looking building that was once a bank, a gluten free bakery (which I refuse to go into because gluten free is such a fad); an art gallery; this small used book store with a really great selection; and a barber shop. I really have no idea how we support three art galleries.
   Walking from "down town" to my house one crosses the park, goes over a little wooden bridge over the creek, crosses a little bit more park and walks along beside a pasture with cows in it, a house that's actually an old church, complete with stained glass windows (and a beehive in the wall everyone mentions to me), and then crosses the street to my house.
   I have one neighbor between me and main street, and usually they aren't there since it's, I believe their "weekend house" from Melbourne. They've never introduced themselves, which makes me feel a bit resentful when they show up on weekends blasting music on into the night. For a long time the house on the other side of me was vacant as well but now a guy with dreadlocks (not a hippie though, a construction worker, usually seen wearing his high visibility uniform at all times) and his family has moved in, apparently his parents live in the church across the street. I really quite like the neighbors across the street from me, a lovely older couple. They just moved from Melbourne, the man is easing into retirement and still works a few days a week in the big smoke. The houses on either side of them are vacant, I think both locked in a similar kind of situation where the grandmother of the family was living there and died and now the younger generation who currently owns it lives in Melbourne but doesn't want to give it up so it just sits there vacant. So at one point it was me and my across-the-street neighbors surrounded by four empty houses. Three red chickens sometimes wander around my street.

   As you may gather from all the art galleries and provedores and gluten free bread, Birregurra is a bit more artsy than your average country backwater (we're more like a delightul lagoon!). Early on, I was so fortunate to be invited to a party at the historic Tarndwarncoort Homestead just outside of Birregurra, and there around the outdoor bonfire by a 150 year old bluestone building, drinking locally made wines (and mead I brought!), eating locally made cheeses and such, I chatted with many locals and learned that most of them, involved in various interesting artisan businesses, were in fact locals. Something in the air here it seems, makes people instead of getting stupid tattoos on their necks and growing rat-tails, connect with their community and start very interesting local enterprises.

IV. The Surrounds
   Just twenty minutes south of town stretches the temperate rainforest in a small mountain range known as the Great Otways, and beyond the forest is the famous Great Ocean Road (everything is great!). These and the wineries in this area just north of the rainforest, as well as the "44th Best Restaurant in the World" just on the outskirts of Birregurra draw a fair number of tourists through in the summer. Brae, the restaurant, doesn't feature much in our lives since it's like $250 a plate so locals are only likely to go there for like a 50th wedding anniversary or similarly momentous event.
   Just fifteen minutes south, just on the north edge of the Otways, is the tiny townlet of Dean's Marsh, with its own general store and The Martian Cafe which frequently has live music though I've never been down there for it. The Martians (as residents are called) seem a friendly community oriented lot who fall a bit more to the hippie side of things than Birregurrans.

   Fifteen minutes in the other direction is the town of Colac. With a population of 12,411 to Birregurras 828, it is the cultureless gas giant our little moon forlornly orbits around. Colac is on the shore of Lake Colac and yet, they don't even know how to make use of a lake and have not developed the waterfront in any manner other than ruining by putting a parking lot right on it. Restaurants overlooking the lake? Water sports? Nope, parking lot. Mention Colac to anyone in Victoria and as reliably as an Arizonan will say "but it's a dry heat" you will be told "did you know Colac is the STD capital of Australia?" Colac is only good for groceries and even then I usually make a once a week trek to Geelong for the better grocery stores there.

   And so that, you see, is Birregurra -- the last little outpost of civilization at the edge of the world.

Current Location: Birregurra
Current Music: Trampled by Turtles - The Outskirts

Photo credit photographer from the Geelong Advertiser. From this fire

Yesterday, 1800 hours - It was a beautiful evening as we drove along the highway towards Colac in silence. The sky was grey but the fields and hills seemed to glow with the gold color of dried grass, the black cattle standing out upon it. The sun shone through the clouds in several shimmering rays ahead of us to the west. I was riding in our station's mobile command vehicle, a hilux wagon, with Dave, a member of our brigade I didn't know very well. He was a bit stout and badger-like. Grey haired, he later mentioned being 58.

   Several side-by-side brushfires out west had already burned 6,000 hectares since Saturday, destoryed 18 homes, 42 sheds, and an unknown number of livestock. Arriving at the station in Colac town, we joined a handful of other volunteer firefighters from the surrounding area and boarded a small bus that had been chartered to take us to the staging area. That took about another hour, traveling west into the twilight. I noted that this area has beautiful walls of uncut volcanic rock that run for miles and miles surrounding paddocks. The houses we passed were often cute little victorian cottages, squat, weatherboard, with several brick chimneys rising out of their peaked roofs; or else sad dilapidated former victorian cottages; or else ugly brick modern houses of a low lying 70s lookng style. These three types of houses dotted the countryside at large intervals, and finally we pulled into Camperdown town, which was a concentration of all three around a very broad main street with a tree lined central median.

   The staging area was the town fairgrounds. As we pulled in, several staff of State Emergency Services (SES) in flourescent uniforms the color of orange sherbet checked us in at the gate. A line of DELWP's light firefighting vehicles were parked to our right, the red CFA firetrucks were lined up ahead in the oval, and buses and other vehicles were to the left. We parked and followed the crowds to the central building. Before I knew it a plate had been thrust in my hand and I was standing in a hot food line. And here I had stuffed my face with ramen before leaving home thinking i wouldn't get dinner! In line and at the cafeteria were about 20 of "the boys in green" from DELWP (pronounced "dwelp" in my head) and about an equal number of us from CFA in our mustard yellow. The Dwelp uniforms look almost identical to ours except for being asparagus green. They looked mostly in their twenties though, while the average CFA age is probably 58. Dwelp is about 90% male, I think I saw two female firefighters, while among the CFA I haven't seen a female in other than a staff role. Dwelp stands for "Department of Environment Land, Water, and Planning," though I recently heard they've entirely been moved over to a distinct department of Forest Fire Management? They had Parks Victoria on their uniforms anyway. DELWP is typical of what I've seen of Australian government though for favoring incomprehensible five letter acronyms and then changing them yearly.

   Food was very good, roast beef and gravy and some mashed squash and broccoli. Our "Strike Team" met up after eating. We would be a small strike team of just two tankers and a command vehicle. Dave and I were teamed up with two guys from the Wye River brigade and assigned to the tanker from Barongarook. The Wye River guys consisted of a short fellow named (Bartley?) whose name I very clearly had in my head until the exact moment I learned the other guy and I was never able to catch it again, but the other guy was tall and lean, bald, with a hulk-hogan mustache, named Wellesley. The short guy had kind of shaggy hair and a big loop earring in his left ear, making him look a bit like an aging rockstar. Bartley and Wellesley obviously knew eachother well already and from the get-go and throughout the night they were joshing eachother good naturedly. Dave had a lieutenant stripe on his helmet but that was from before he transferred to Birregurra and apparently not his current rank, so Bartley was in charge and Dave seemed perfectly content with that. All in all I found my team to be great, keeping up a positive attitude and good rapport all night -- I've seen many old CFAs guys quick to squabble and get grumpy with eachother.

   As we approached our assigned truck Dave pointed at hte bubbling in the reflective checkers around it, saying "guess she got a bit hot!" and just then I opened the door and the warm acrid smell of wildfire wafted out. As we prepared to drive out I noticed the guys working on the truck in front of us also had the same uniforms as us, which also said CFA, but their uniforms were sky blue. After noting how busy they were on the truck with various auto mechanic tools I think they must be CFA mechanics?

2020 hours -As our strike team left the fairgrounds oval, not to be overly dramatic, but it rather reminded me of the scene in Black Hawk Down where the UN armored units leave their stadium staging area, as our big trucks rumbled out of the entrance to the oval and out of the staging area into the darking twilight. We proceeded south to the small town of Cobden and arrived at the fire station there, which appeared to be the command center for this specifc sector of the firegrounds. We found ourselves sitting around a briefing room here. Someone made a joke about all this "hurry up and wait." Finally our strike team commander, grey haired and looking unshaved, face covered in black smears of ash, came and briefed us. The fire is actually fully contained now but we would be putting down any flare ups. Our first mission was a distressed residency with fire near it. Soon we were back in the truck headed for our location. I sat behind the driver, Wellesley drove all night, Bartley sat in the passenger side navigating and handling radio communications.

2112 hours - only ten minutes or so out of the station, driving through complete darkness now, we started to see spot fires to our left and right. We drove past the house in question, out in a rural area, and into the field behind it. Climbing out of the truck, into the moon-dust like ash of the burned-over field, fires were visible glowing in the dark in all directions, which was a bit disconcerting. It seems the fire had swept completely around this house but it had been saved. We set to hosing down some nearby flaming stumps. The darkness of night made it easy to spot any flames or glowing embers. When you get the hose right on a really hot spot it makes a very satisfying hissing or even roaring noise. While one person hosed two people would set about with rake-hoes exposing and breaking up the hot area. We spent quite some time hunting and destroying hot spots. When we finished that field we drove down neighboring roads, which were lined with cypress trees, which had mostly survived but many hidden smouldering places underneath them threatened to reignite if unchecked. I found myself walking along beside the dark bulk of the firetruck, slowly rumbling foreword, the line of trees ahead surreally lit with alternating red and blue from the lights. I was holding a smaller hose with the "high pressure nozzel" on it, which was kind of gun shaped, with a sort of pistol-grip and forward grip. Every twenty to fifty meters Bartley, who was walking ahead would call back saying "here's one!" and indicate into the trees. When I got there the first sign of fire was often the smell. Then I'd see a glowing ember, point the gun, brace my legs, and pull the trigger, sending in a high pressure jet of water, playing around the area of the ember until I got a satisfying "SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!" hiss back. After a thorough dousing I'd let go of the trigger and Dave would attack it with the rake hoe, while I stood ready to hit it again or looked for nearby smouldering areas which may have been missed. About once an hour or so we had to return to return to the station in Cobden to refill our water. After protecting the house the next mission we were assigned was the put out fires on a large shed which had already been destroyed but was still smouldering.

0315 - The moment of equinox came as I stood in the dark night shooting water into a burning stump, which was roaring at me. And thus the Australian summer officially ended and Autumn began. The fire continued roaring at me, though when I finally got home I did find a very autumnal covering of leaves on my lawn.

0330 - Fell asleep for the first time, and only half an hour after I'd had a red bull! While sitting in the back of a fire truck! Proof that I can sleep anywhere! It was just a quick nod-off while we drove between hotspots.

0520 - "Hey, you're ALL asleep!" objected the driver, Wellesley, in mock outrage, as we were driving. "Bartley here was snoring in fact!" By now we were spending more time driving without seeing anything to get out and hose down.

0600 - Returned to Cobden station. What seemed an entire platoon of Dwelpers also came in. We'd been seing them out there too but I didn't realize we had so many in our sector. I think our strike team was the only CFA force here. There appears to be no rivalry between CFA and Dwelp, nor did there appear to be, well, any interaction other than official coordination, at all.

0630 - returned to the central staging area in Camperdown. Was soon in line for breakfast (sausages, hash browns, beans, bacon (well, Australian bacon, which is like thinly sliced ham) .. weird scrambled eggs that I took a nibble of and left alone). Sat down to eat by and greeted a Birregurra brigade member I knew who was there to begin the day shift. As the sky began to turn from black to a dark blue we boarded our bus back to Colac. The morning gradually became greyly lit. In Colac transferred to the command vehicle, which I was surprised to find parked in a different place, but I guess the members of the shift we had relieved had driven it back to Birre, and the shift relieving us had driven it back to Colac.

   Got home exhausted just after 8am, 14 hours after I left. I had planned to go to work today but it just wasn't in the cards. Despite that I suspected I was totally grimy with ash, I went straight to sleep.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Cry Cry Cry - Cold Missouri Waters

Presently driving along (well, dad is driving) through central Tasmania, here looking like open parkland on gently undulating hills, on yet another beautiful sunny day. Every day I plan to update my blog before my infamously terrible memory gets too far behind, but we're just too busy and I'm diving too tired by the time we call it a day or.. the Olympics are on. Normally we don't watch much television but the Olympics have always been an exception, so my usually wide open evenings are taken up with cheering for Norwegians or Swedes or Americans or more obscure countries I have some connection to.

Anyway my parents arrived on Friday, February 9th, about two weeks ago now. We were going to come to Tasmania halfway through that first week but discovered the ferry over was booked out entirely until over a week later -- Sunday night of the following weekend. And even then we'd have to be in separate cabins

But in the mean time, on Day 2, Saturday, February 10th, we walked a segment of the rail trail from nearby Colac town that heads ultimately into the deep forests down near the coast, where the narrow guage rail used to be used to extract timber. This was a lovely walk of about 5k through the middle of forested land. We also tried to eat at the Botanical Garden Cafe in Colac, which I'd heard was one of the few places worth visiting in said town.I was shocked to find that even though it was the middle of the day on a Saturday afternoon in summer the cafe was closed. It's hours are 10-4 Monday through Friday ?!?! This despite being located on a promontory within the botanical garden just beside and overlooking the large Lake Colac. Seems like weekend afternoons in summer would be their best time!! I've noticed some other places around here with similarly bizarre hours.

Saturday evening we went down to my friend Udis billabong and threw some chicken on his "grillabong." Sadly the weather turned await cold just as we were starting that but it was still enjoyable. I believe we saw around 30-40 kangaroos this day.

Day 3, Sunday - mom and dad both swam in a race at Indented Head, about an hour and a half from my place out on the Bellarine Peninsula. Mom swam the 500m race and dad 1200m, from the beach, out and back. I was perfectly satisfied to stay ashore

Monday through Friday I worked and they seemed perfectly happy to occupy themselves removing my cobwebs, removing mold from my bathroom ceiling I0hadn't even noticed, getting my knives sharpened (I had noticed my main kitchen knife had become more likely to bludgeon soft fruit to death than cut them), and other such things.

On Thursday I met them for lunch at my favorite cafe near work, the Black Pearl Cafe, run by my friend and neighbor (block over neighbor anyway) Joe, who happened to be in. Mentioning to him my lawn needed mowing (and I still have no mower) he readily volunteered to come over after I got off work. Sure enough he came over and we blasted through my yard with0his complete set of lawn care tools, Just after I'd mowed over a small depression in the ground I saw a scaly black back that looked to belong to a thick snake, causing me to jump back in alarm since we do have mostly very deadly snakes here. Then I saw an arm on it which meant it was a blue tongue lizard, which looks very much like a short snake w legs. I was now very concerned it may have been mangled by the mower but that didn't seem to be the case after examination. I coaxed it into a cardboard box and put it on the veranda to be out of harms way for the remaining mowing.

Worked till four on Friday and then my parents came by and headed from there to go to the east side of the bay for the weekend prior to the Sunday night ferry departure. There we saw penguins and things but I'm gonna save that for another entry because I'm missing the views here!!

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The Agrinautica

Tales of a Beekeeper Errant

Entries tagged with birregurra

Weekend around here.

Floods

Bees in Birregurra

An Antipodetember Evening

Rodent Plague

Uncovering Bridges

Spring At Last

Sanno At Last!

Eostre Weekend

Sinking of the Pilgrim

Sunday

The Autumn of Society

Into the Fray

Tinderbox

Questing for Appliances

A Festive Swarm

Swarm Ethics

Birregurra

Putting Out Fires

Field Report: My Parents Visit 2018 Part I