Up up and awaaaaaaay

Look what we saw from our deck the other morning...ahhhhhhh

What's the dog looking at...?

hmmmmm...? You'll need to click on the photo for an enlargement...then look towards the middle! Kanga and doggy eyeing each other down...hehehe.

Meet 'Strangles'...

...hehehe...my Mum is gonna have a fit when she sees this. Meet Strangles (thanks to Lisa for the name!), my 'studio snake'. He's the carpet snake of the other day. Seems he's moved into the house now. I was cleaning the studio after the workshop and lo and behold, there he was. Not in a hurry to move off either. I let him alone for a while to see if he wanted to make his way outside but he was quite content to stay there so eventually I plucked up the courage to keep working while he hung out on the ceiling. He wasn't bothered by me at all and certainly didn't want to gobble me up. Now, let me say once again so my Mum doesn't freak...these carpet pythons are NOT harmful to humans...but he might catch a mouse or two!

A joyous sight!

It's just a shot of our water tank...not very interesting to many...but for us this shot speaks of fabulous soaking rain! Amazing how much more connected we are to the 'natural world' these days. How much more appreciative of rain we are since we rely totally on it for our water. It's been very dry since we moved here, having only had rain on about half a dozen days in almost three months. You can imagine how we felt when we saw our tanks overflowing!
The other shot is of Curt's make shift solution to a sudden leaky roof...in the studio...the day I'm holding a two day clay retreat! Oh no! But he's a genius at coming up with the quick fix ideas when you really need em...which is just as well since this place is full of little challenges like this. Anyway, he saved the day again by creating a plastic wrap 'gutter' underneath the leak so that instead of the water dripping all over the clay table, it was channeled down to a more out-of-the way area, straight into a bucket! It's been raining pretty solidly for four days in a row now...it's raining as we 'speak'...
I've got more news on my clay blog if anyone's interested in the news of our recent clay retreat...
http://clayhappenings.blogspot.com
Till next time...:)

Feeding Shadow

This funny looking room is to the right of the kitchen, just off the deck. It's a laundry room but we've converted to a tools and store room and a place to feed the doggy.

More reptiles

A goanna this time! He's been on our roof for two days now so may be taking up residence! We don't mind, he's rather gorgeous to look at through the perspex roofing...

House next door

Our next door neighbour has literally built his house from the trees on his block. It's very 'organic' and certainly not up to council code...more like a Robinson Crusoe house. He built two places, the one you see is the latest...and something we would actually love to do here sometime. See that wild balcony handrail...those are featured a lot in his places, looks fabulous. All very open. He's not on the grid at all, uses solar power and has his own water tanks.

The drive home

It occurred to us that you don't have any idea of what the drive 'back home' from town looks like...so here are a couple of shots. You'll see Mt Chincogan again and the cane fields I was talking about earlier. Our house is located on that big ridge on the left (top photo).

Doggy fun in the park

We often take Shadow with us when we go to town for supplies. There's a lovely park (Palm Park) by the Brunswick River where we can throw the ball for him. The last time we went, Shadow found a little friend who wanted in on the action.

6th anniversary

It was our anniversary the other day. We had a wonderful day of lounging around on various surfaces, eating great food, cuddling and generally just savouring the moment. Here's Curt cooking anniversary breaky on the barby!

Lounge at night

A pic of our place at night...taken from the computer 'room' down to the sunken lounge...

Us!

Just in case you forgot what we looked like

New camera

We bought ourselves a new camera! YAY! This one is so much better than our old one and hopefully will inspire us to take more pics. These are all taken from around the house. The one with the pointy hill is Mt Chincogan, a local Mullumbimby landmark that can be seen from our property. Just beyond the trees in front of our deck, you can see a fire. That's the sugar cane farm below. They set the whole lot on fire, then harvest it. Awesome to watch.

Permaculture...starts with carpet

It's looks weird now but in a few months, we're hoping to have piles of mushroom compost thrown down on those old carpets and veggies galore growing out of them. This is all on top of the area that Curt cleared from all that elephant grass. Great way to recycle those old carpets we ripped out of the house. Since the soil is pretty poor (very dry hard clay type soil) we thought we'd better build up the 'permaculture way' instead of digging down, which is near on impossible. Our rocket salad which we planted when we arrived has come along pretty well doncha think?

Snakes alive!

Check out this fella! He's a huge carpet snake (python) climbing up to our roof. Amazingly beautiful and not harmful to humans, we were happy to have him around.