Easter, Gone!

Well that was over too quickly. We were fortunate to have Nan and Pa and Lou-Lou and Noel visit us over the Easter break, it was great to see them.

While they were here we tried to check out a few of Brisbane's interesting sites.

I wanted to check out a fishing spot on the Breakfast Creek junction with the Brisbane River and needed an excuse to visit it. I saw there was a park called Newstead Park at the junction so we took a quick trip in to look around. I am glad we did it was a wonderful spot. Newstead House sits atop a small hill just above the junction of the two tributaries and is surrounded by amazing gardens and lawns.

Newstead House

The girls had a great time running around the gardens, they were fascinated by the old tide gauge cairn, Rosie was particularly impressed when she found a small monument to the Bathurst class Corvettes, it is worth noting the information on the monument varied greatly to the info at wiki. She was even more impressed to discover that there was a Bathurst class Corvette called the HMAS Ballarat.

There were some enormous old Fig trees throughout the gardens. Emily and Rosie spotted an interesting tree and rushed back to tell me how old it was, Emily was certain it was really old cause it was planted in the 1950s. As we headed back to the cars we were startled when a tree started to talk to us! The one shown in the photos below was set up with motion sensors and when triggered told the story of an old tree, well you the look on Emily's face when the "tree" told her it was old in the 1850s was priceless!

Newstead circa 1850

Newstead current

It turns out that the fishing spot was not what I had imagined, not many structures and not great access for the girls.

We have done some more gardening with the help of our gardening gurus, Nan, Pa, Lou-Lou and Noel, some replanting, new planting and garden design work kept us busy for a few days. The scary part is we are only just beginning. The excavator is back on site today and hopefully this afternoon I will be able to post some more photos of the earthworks and pool progression. There is so much more work to do!

Whilst working in the garden we came across what looked like spew, I was wondering what the dog had eaten - thinking the worse and wondering if he had tried some local variety Cane toad, fortunately for Charlie the wonder dog, upon closer inspection it turned out to be some form of interesting fungi/slime/mold growing. No doubt the best way to describe it's appearance is to call it dog vomit, and unsurprisingly images of the slime mold appear when searching for dog vomit slime, thankfully it is a harmless garden oddity.

Dog vomit mold

As I stated previously I have commenced work with Australia Post as a motorcycle PDO. My first day was a torrid introduction, the muscles and bones took a pounding spending 7.5 hours on the CT110. The next few days the muscle stiffness and general soreness began to subside and hopefully in the next couple of weeks or so I will have fully attuned my portly frame to sitting astride a motorcycle, spending my days poking stuff in letter boxes. Getting to know where the boxes are and where the mail run goes is not as difficult as you would imagine and the sheer volume of mail varies greatly from day to day, another thing I learnt is that some people put their letter boxes in the most inaccessible and out of reach hidden away places imaginable! 

We have chosen our tiles for the pool coping and feature wall, it is apparent that most people get their tiles for pools from The Pool Tile Company. We have chosen to go with granite tiles in Mushroom colour, for the feature wall we have gone with a glass mosaic called Sea Green Pearl.

Pool fencing is another Pandora's box, the rules and regulations regarding pool fencing is incredible and over bearing, if you have a few hours of your life you don't need and have nothing else worth doing then peruse the QLD legislation and regs document for all you need to know about pool fencing, or not!

Autumn in QLD brings on the annual rut, the local Red and Fallow deer stags spend the night hours trying to impress the lady folk by hooting and hollering, it is quite interesting to hear one start then hear the others reply as the calls echo through the valleys and hills that surround our place. The calls are quite different and you can easily distinguish between the two, so I am not sure why Reds respond to a Fallow call and vice versa, it is most peculiar. Over the weekend, just for shits and giggles I might keep the girls up a little later and see if we can get the local stags to respond to our calls.