emo_snal, posts by tag: birregurra - LiveJournal

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!

   When my friend Doug asked me if I wanted him to bring anything here from the states, I took the opportunity to ask for a heating jacket you can wrap around a 10-20L bucket of honey to warm it up so it flows through filters or tubes for bottling. One wants to very carefully heat the honey to about the internal temperature of a beehive, 37c, much more than that can damage the honey. These heating jackets aren't available in Australia and I had been coveting one. He obligingly brought it and even refused to let me reimburse him for it!

   Finally this past Friday I got around to hooking it up around a 14kg (2.64 gallon) bucket. It had a short cord and I didn't have a spare extension cord at hand, so I had to set it up on the carpeted portion of my house. Normally I try to avoid any honey related activities over the carpet because the mess would be hard to clean up, but I thought to myself, what could possibly go wrong, the honey is entirely contained in the bucket. I set it up, plugged it in, and went in to my office to watch The Expanse on amazon prime. Normally I never shut the door but on this occasion I did so that there wouldn't be light pollution coming in from my left diminishing my watching experience. Man the Expanse just gets better with passing seasons. I feel increasingly confident to say it is the best sci fi series there is.

   After watching two episodes I called it a night and emerged from my office. The whole livingroom area smelled _very_ strongly of honey, way moreso than it usually does when I'm doing any honey related activities actually. To the degree that I was immediately alarmed. The bucket of honey being heated was behind a table from where I entered the room but I quickly went around to it... and to my absolute horror bubbling honey was flowing out from the top and across the floor -- probably about two square feet of carpet were covered in the honey lava flow. Thoughts stammering in my head in panic and confusion I put my hand on the bucket, it was extremely hot! I desperately yanked out the cord. I examined the bucket for leaks, if it didn't have one already maybe the thing had gotten so hot it had burned a hole in the bucket. There didn't seem to be one. I carefully picked it up with the handle, and after making sure it wasn't actively dripping, brought it over to the slate part of the floor where a stove had once stood, and removed the heating jacket.
   I had assumed the thing would have a thermostat inside it but apparently not, it just depends on how hot it naturally gets from the incoming power (for $130 surely they could have included a god damn thermostat!). US sockets run at 120 volts but Australian standard power is ("220-240" (why the variance?) so this thing was running at twice the intended temperature and actually boiled the honey -- thus ruining an entire 14kg bucket of honey and of more concern... possibly my carpet!!
   Using a whole bunch of paper towels wetting with the hottest water I could stand I cleaned up the honey on the carpet and then scrubbed the carpet area effected thoroughly.

   I woke up still groaning to myself about the disaster. I dread what kind of trouble I'll get in with my landlord if the carpet is permanently ruined. As of now (Monday evening) the effected area still has a damp appearance)

   The weekend passes, there's an art show in my village as well as a farmers market, I do some beekeeping, Weather is nice until Sunday evening.



   Sunday evening I finish beekeeping, putting away the work truck at the farm. It's a 24 minute drive from there to home. I can either take the Princes Highway, a big typical "freeway" style four lane road, or the "Cape Otway Highway," which despite the name is just a two lane country road. I prefer the Cape Otway during the day because it's much more scenic, the straight Princes Highway bores me to death, but I always take the Princes in twilight or at night due to fear of kangaroos jumping out at me on the smaller road, or livestock being on the road, which I'd heard of happening. Occasionally lately I've gotten lax/bold and gone down the cape otway when it was pretty much twilight.
   On this occasion, I had just driven to the farm on the Princes highway to bring the work truck there and the prospect of getting right back on it to go the other way seemed dreadfully boring. It was around 8pm and the sky to the west (the direction I'd be headed) looked very beautiful, the setting sun lighting up dramatic storm clouds with golden glow -- it would certainly look better on the Cape Otway!
   It wasn't raining when I started, but about halfway it started pouring very hard. To the degree that even with the windshield wipers going at maximum I was having to lean forward and really peer hard to see the road ahead. And then through the wet blur I made out, several white blobs stationary on the road ahead!! It was hard to judge distance but clearly I would hit them in just two or three seconds from the time I first saw them. I slammed on the breaks and swerved as far to the left (which, recall, is the side we drive on here) as I dared -- there was an embankment off to the left so this was only so far as to get my left wheels just off the road. The road being wet, slamming on the breaks wasn't slowing me fast.
   My first biggest fear was that what I was seeing were people on the road. Fortunately, before I hit the objects I was able to discern that they were in fact cows. I like to think if they were people I would have ditched the car entirely off the road. As it was, as much as one could do a risk assessment in a fraction of a second I felt that to go any further to the left would definitely comprehensively destroy my car where as it was hitting a cow might cause a lesser amount of catastrophic damage. I felt the massive jolt of impact as the front right corner of the car impacted the cow, putting me immediately into a spin.
   I spun back across both lanes of the road. As I traveled backwards along the opposing lane of traffic I remember thinking surprisingly calmly that if there were any cars coming the other way I was probably about to die. I just braced for impact as best I could. I'd like to romantically say I looked at the picture of Cristina taped to my dash but its a bit too off to the left to look at during a crash -- if it was front and center I think it would be distracting.
   As luck would have it I didn't die. Next I was traveling through bushes on the other side. There are often stone walls or gateways on the properties fronting on the road so my next fear was I'd hit one of these. And even if I didn't the embankment would probably do some damage -- I remember at this point thinking "fuck, my car is about to take some serious damage either way."
   I actually seem to have gotten really lucky. I flew right over a deep boggy ditch it seems, and the car rotated another 90 degrees to finally come to rest ... on a solid driveway, perfectly aligned to it, all four wheels on the ground.
   Naturally I sat there for a moment in shock, taking stock of the situation. Everything seemed fine from here, there wasn't any smoke coming from my car, nothing looked damaged from here, I wasn't injured. Then I turned the car off and opened the door, which opened with a bit of resistance and a crunching noise. Getting out into the crisp evening air, I could see the front right corner of my car was badly smashed, the headlight destroyed. A gaggle of adolescent cows came trotting quickly towards me. Still feeling jumpy, for half a second I thought they were charging me in revenge but then I realized that was silly. I looked to see if one was visiby injured or if there was an injured one on the road where I had come from but didn't see one. Wow I guess they can just walk off being hit by a car? I thought to myself.
   It was no longer raining. Looking around, and this seems strange now, but I thought to myself that the sunset looked very pretty and took a photo. I regret that I didn't think to actually take any photos of my damaged car in situ where it came to rest, which might be useful for insurance claims and such, but no I for some reason at that moment thought the sunset looked nice. I suppose there was something psychological going on there.



   But then I realized they were still standing on the road and headlights were approaching! (actually you can see them just becoming visible in that photo) I started trying to herd the cows off the road, but it was a bit like herding cats. Fortunately the driver saw if not the cows then me waving my arms at them (and I made sure not to get in the road myself), they slowed to a stop and asked if I was okay. I said yes I seemed to be, they asked if I needed any help and I thanked them but said no I couldn't think of anything they could do and they went off again.
   I walked down the short drive to the house that was there. A car was in the driveway but no lights were on. I rang the doorbell, waiting a few minutes, and decided no one was in. The cows meanwhile had followed me down the drive and now seemed to be communicating with cows on the other side of a fence here. Nor did they follow me back to the car, so I felt the cows-on-the-road situation was under control. Went back to the car, turned it on, and crossing my fingers that it would still drive. It did, though it made some noises like sometihng was rubbing on the tire. I proceeded home at a slow speed without further incident.

   Arriving I found my housemate Trent just taking some trash out and showed him the damage. Then I went in and poured myself a glass of my favorite peach tea concentrate--and--tonic water. Trent, who doesn't normally linger in the kitchen if he isn't actively having dinner sat at the table and drummed his fingers nerviously.
   "Feeling musical?" I asked, dryly, trying not to be snappish though I was feeling in a very decidedly bad mood.
   "Just think you're over here pissed off about the cow on the road, the farmer is probably over there like 'fucking driver1' because you hit his cow," Trent joked in an absurdly missplaced attempt to lighten the mood with "humor."
   I took a deep breath trying really hard not to fully snap at him about this, and responded as deadpan as I could "they would have to be a colossal asshole to be thinking that, being as its highly illegal for their livestock to be loose on the road at night and someone could have died."
   "Oh, I guess" he conceded with a nervous chuckle. I was reminded that just the other day he had said that when he toured auschwitz he couldn't help but laugh because he didn't know how else to respond. And at that time I remember thinking about how i'd read that laughing is actually often a reaction people have to what would seem like a really depressing or frightening event ... though be that as it may I would have given him the dirtiest look if I'd been with him at Auschwitz. For my part, though my normal demeanor is sort of a satirical level of cheerfulness in times like this I have no interest in humor and withdraw to a sullen deadpan and try hard not to be rudely snappish.
   Presently Trent excused himself, I put away all the condiments that had been building up on the table, made some ramen, and then went to watch another episode of Expanse. God that show is good.



   Monday morning I went to the mechanic around the corner from my house right when they opened at 7am. He looked at the damage and said it was more than they could fix and the car was probably totalled (this car, the "USS Trilobite," incidentally has been totalled already). He also said the farmer would be liable and I should go talk to the farmer before I did anything else. He did bend some of the material around the wheel well back into position so it wasn't rubbing on the wheel.
   It was only 7am but farmers get up early so I decided to head down there, though I was a bit apprehensive I might find some salty old farmer who'd deny his cows had been out.
   Arriving at the location, first I walked back past the accident site to see if by light of day there was a dead cow there or something, but to my relief there was not. Then went and rang the house's doorbell. A cat watched me from the window as I waited a few minutes. Was just about to knock again (the car that had been parked there before was in a different position now so I felt confident someone was in), when the door opened, and a surprisingly attractive young woman (23-25ish?) in pajamas, before I had a chance to say anything, immediately said
   "I'm so sorry, I don't know how the cows got out I could have sworn they were all locked away." Okay good no worries about them trying to evade blame. She asked how me and my car were, and then I asked how the cow was.
   "Dead."
   "Oh."
   She said her boss would give me their insurance details and to follow her, if I'd give her just a moment to get dressed. She went back in and came out moments later. I followed her in her car down the road a few hundred meters to where we turned up a drive to some farm buildings. There were various people in gumboots busily doing stuff, and a small brown cow lay off to one side with some of its guts hanging out.
   The young woman quickly got her boss, a 30ish woman herself. She was apologetic in a businesslike manner and we exchanged details.
   "Is this the casualty?" I asked about the dead cow.
   "Yes." I resisted the urge to apologize -- I'd certainly done all I could and its death hadn't really been my fault -- and in the developing legal situation I didn't want to open any window to being at fault even if they were being very cooperative. I felt regret that I hadn't found the casualty the night before though, I hope it didn't suffer.

   From there I proceeded to nearby Colac town to get quotes from two smash repair places. Both said my car was probably totalled, and that if they were to do any repairs they couldn't do it until at least mid December.
   As I said about the USS Trilobite's previous incident (the "Permian Impact Event"), I hate cars almost as much as you can while using them daily. I hate thinking about them, I hate making arrangements for necessary maintenance. I really really really hate shopping for cars. All these car related chores that have now dropped into my lap do NOT make me happy.
   And then, despite if being about 40 miles to work, I drove to work -- the car had seeme to be running fine thus far, and indeed all the way to work and back again its been fine. Not pulling to one side or another, or making any disturbing noises. I suppose I'll drive it until they can repair it and then, even if it costs me a few more thousand than I'm compensated for I'd rather repair the car I have again then spend even more money on a new used car. And/or, considering my car is currently in very questionably drivable condition, I wonder if I could get a rental car in the mean time and bill that too to their insurance?

   Today I feel depressed, which is very unusual for me. I don't know if it's because of all the car related chores and questionable reliability of it now, or because the cow died in the incident. I really hope it didn't suffer undiscovered in a roadside ditch all night till it died.

   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.

   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???

   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).