Eucalyptus Country

Moving from Blogger to Wordpress….more painful than it is worth?

Well I have finally moved all my text content from Blogger to Wordpress, in the most painful manner possible. That’s right, cut and paste, alter time stamp to reflect the date of the original post and publish. OMG what a painful exercise! And before a lot of hip blogging techno nazis get on my case, yes I’m aware there is an easier way of doing it – if that is the import process would like to co-operate! After many hours of trying to get the Import from Blogger feature to work, I then tried importing using RSS. No love there either I might add! Tried removing video plugins, sidebar widgets and then even photos and hey presto, I get a message that it has been successful and hoorah I can start blogging in my new blog!

Not so.

When I go to look at my newly imported posts, guess what?? They aren’t there!! So after a few more minutes of mucking around trying to get it to work, I just went for the good old cut and paste method. GRR! I still have to put in all my photos and fix up all the old links but at least the main part is here.

I apologise to those of you who have come for a visit expecting some degree of cohesion and funny photos of my cats. You won’t find that here just yet. I have a big week coming up ahead – my final exam for my post-graduate qualification is on Wednesday, then I have a delightful date with my quack, followed by four days of respite in the lovely Barrington Tops region of NSW. After that, I will see about gradually fixing up my blog.

But the best part of moving to Wordpress? I can now take part in NaBloPoMo. I’m sure Leigh will be thrilled about it after all the effort she has gone to in order to get me into my new home here. Thanks again Leigh, and you’re quite right – Blogger is evil! *hehe*

NaBloPoMo?

Well October is over so I’m getting rid of the pink. I will go pink for a cause but as a general rule, I really don’t like the colour at all so I am more than happy to go back to my favourite blue.

November apparently is National Blog Posting Month and I would be more than happy to be in it. But the long weekend away next week is going to interfere with that unfortunately – and yes Leigh I am gloating about that aren’t I? But if I can’t be in this year’s NaBloPoMo then I will definitely be in it next year.

It can’t be that hard to write a post a day. Can it?

Playing with macro #2

A macro shot of the frangipani plant outside my house. It is now flowering thanks to a healthy dose of fertiliser.

This is why we need our "wild" spaces…

A few years ago, I had a wonderful opportunity to tour South Australia and Victoria with my partner, his friend and my sister. We flew into Adelaide, hired a 4WD and spent the next two weeks travelling through to Melbourne, stopping in at Kangaroo Island, Warrnambool, Werribee and Melbourne city itself. Photography is one of my interests and my favourite subjects are wildlife and landscapes, which South Australia and Victoria both have in spades. It was a very memorable trip and one that I will always remember fondly.

Environmental issues are a central focus of my study with wildlife and ecology being my specialties. With the exception of the sealions which were photographed in the wild, all the other animals you see in this post were photographed within conservation parks such as Monarto and Werribee – both of which are open plains zoos. Seeing the animals in large open spaces like they would be in the wild was such a thrill for me.

But conservation parks and zoos cannot replace the real thing. For these animals to survive in the wild, they need somewhere to live. Habitat fragmentation is a real issue, particularly in Australia, which threatens survival of endangered and vulnerable species. Some people might wonder what the value of wildlife is…..but how do you place a dollar sign on these animals? To me, wildlife and the places they inhabit have intrinsic value that is beyond reasonable estimation. For purely existing and enriching our world, surely we do not need to put a price tag on conserving our world as we know it for future generations.

These kind of furry (and not so furry) kids need our protection just as much as the ones we share our homes with. The next time you drive through a wildlife habitat, ease off the throttle and take a moment to immerse yourself in their world.

Happy Gotchaversairy Mischa!

If you’ve looked in my profile lately, you’ll notice today is my birthday. I should be another year older and hopefully wiser too according to the old adage! But today is also another very special day in my family – it’s Mischa’s Gotchaversairy today, a term coined by Leigh which I feel marks the occasion nicely. Sometimes when we get our pets, their exact birthday is unknown – that certainly is the case with all of my furry babies over the years – so I like the term Gotchaversairy.

I’ve previously posted about the day I picked Mischa up from the pet store, it also coincided nicely with the fact that it was my birthday. She’s a special furry friend, my first ever dog of my very own and I miss her very much now that I’ve moved to Brisbane. Fortunately, the rest of my family is joining my sister and myself soon and we will get to see a lot more of each other….oh and the rest of my family of course!

Happy Gotchaversairy Mischa, here’s to many more!

Taking photos at 100kph

Earlier in the year, we were fortunate to escape to the tropics during winter. Cairns is a place I’ve always wanted to visit but the dreadful summers that we got in central Queensland as a child was enough to put me off going up that far for my summer vacation. But the winter is a perfect time to visit the tropical north – I guess the tour operators have that well and truly sussed since that’s when all their prices go up.We were driving from Brisbane to Airlie Beach in one day, staying there for a few days and then heading up to Cairns from there. For the uninitiated, it’s around 2000km to Cairns….add in the stopover at Airlie Beach and you’re looking at almost 4500km round trip and around 20 hrs driving time. It’s probably not something I will be keen to do again in a hurry but I can imagine it would have been a lot worse with furry (or non-furry) kids on board.

The morning we left Cairns to come home, it occurred to me that while we had some wonderful shots of the region and the various wildlife that we found (mostly in parks), I hadn’t taken a photo of the sunrise or sunset. This is something I try to do when I’m on holidays, particularly if the clouds and sunlight mixture is just right and you get that lovely sprinkle of pinks, oranges and reds through the sky.

So zooming along the highway at 100kph, I decided to take a few shots. The top shot is sunrise just outside of Cairns at around 5:30am….I forget the name of the mountain but if it follows the naming convention of most things Australian (that is, named in the most obvious fashion possible), it will probably be called Mt Pyramid or something like that. The next shot I took around 12 hrs later as we were drawing closer to our stop for the night in Rockhampton.

Why do I procrastinate?!

Okay so I have been studying for a long time now and I have gotten pretty good at polishing off assignments in a short space of time – providing I have all the information at hand, which I usually do. You see at the beginning of the semester, I feel all gung ho about studying and I dutifully go to the library, research the available topics, decide on which one works best for me (based on personal interest and availability of material), sign up for my topic and get all the information I need to write the essay. I write out an outline, put in dot points and my sources and then…..

….I LEAVE it till the last minute to write the actual assignment!! I do this unfailingly EVERY SINGLE TIME! Why do I do this to myself???

You see dear readers, as I am typing out this little blog post about my problem with procrastination, my big fat essay on cyanobacteria and waterways is sitting open in another window. Despite the fact that it is due tomorrow, I’m instead in my blog writing about why I’m NOT writing my assignment. God is there no help for me? LMAO

It’s funny really. After so many years of not having enough hours in the day to study, work and keep up with my social life, I have grown accustomed to doing assignments at the last minute. It’s now to the point where unless I feel truly panicked that I won’t get it done in time – I just can’t think of anything to write! Fortunately, the panic is starting to set in now, so hopefully after I have finished this post, I can get back to the assignment and finish the damn thing. But I am willing to lay bets on it, that even if I have *most* of it done by dinner time, I will set it aside and do it in the few hours I have available before I go to work tomorrow at lunch time.

The Great Outdoors Project – Stage 1 complete!

Here is the photo of the completed project as promised….well Stage One anyway. By dinner time tonight the tiles should have well and truly dried thanks to the hot dry wind that is blowing our way. I can’t wait to clean all the tools away for however long it takes us to get Stage Two (the Spa) in motion….we’re guessing a good couple of weeks at least.

I reckon it looks pretty jolly good….not bad for a couple of DIY hacks I think.

Top 10 reasons to hate DIY!

So we have spent the last two days building a DIY deck with decking tiles. Relatively easy to put together, until you realise that the people who built your house (who shall not be named for fear of lawsuit) are incapable of building anything in a straight line. Resulting in a lot of deck tiles needing to be unscrewed, slats and supports removed, cut back and rescrewed on with an old-fashioned screwdriver because someone forgot to charge the cordless one (which made it a lot easier once it WAS charged). So the tiny bit we had left to do turned into somewhat of a PITA as we had to borrow a circular saw – which of course had no instructions and we have never used before. Nevermind, it all got done after some minor technical difficulties and we just have to oil the remainder of the tiles that were laid yesterday. After I have a finished product, sans sawdust and tools all over the place, I’ll take another photo. Needless to say I didn’t get a chance to watch the sunset with a cold drink in hand yesterday because we were still putting in tiles at that point.

Which prompts me to bring up my Top 10 Reasons to hate DIY!

1. Splinters and sawdust get everywhere…..and I do mean everywhere
2. Nothing is ever as easy as what it seems
3. To make it as easy as it seems, it is helpful if your builder can pour a concrete slab in a perfect square. Ours apparently could not.
4. Downpipes although necessary make the job more of a PITA than it already is.
5. Repetitive manual labour, if you’re not accustomed to it, makes you very sore very quickly.
6. Cats incessantly complain about you being outside working hard and not being able to be inside serving their every need….consequently they make it their aim in life to keep you awake the majority of the night so you cannot get the sleep you need to recuperate properly.
7. Being too sore because you were doing a lot of DIY over the weekend is not a good enough excuse to call in sick.
8. The washing that you thought was safely hung around the corner of the house has to be rewashed because it is covered in sawdust, thus wasting water.
9. No matter how good a job you do, someone always has to find the one part of the project that went a little awry.
10. The only people who appreciate your hard work are those who actually helped put it together and can appreciate how difficult it really was.

The deck is starting to take shape!

Well we have been hard at work all morning, painting the underside of all the decking tiles and now it is starting to take shape and I’m painting the top surface with decking oil as fast as John puts them down. I like the way it’s coming together, can’t wait to show off the finished product! We’re about a third of the way done now.