Tea or Coffee Anyone?

First of all an apology. I have not responded to all your wonderful comments on my last few posts. As you know I have just started a new job which is very different from my previous one. So I have been working hard and long hours to get on top of the new role as quickly as possible.

Apart from anything else every conversation in the new workplace seems to be filled with acronyms I just don’t know! The Victorian Public Service seems to have a language all of its own! The good part is I seem to have fallen on my feet in terms of having a great team to work with.

Down to the business of today - as you can guess by the time we got to the weekend I was ready for a change of pace. Deb and I hopped in the car and drove to one of our favourite places.

I have posted about Mount Donna Buang before, but here we go again. As you know it is winter down this way and this past week we have had miserable and cold weather.

It isn’t too bad down in Melbourne but in the mountains around there has been snow.
In fact the Oz Alps are reporting a bumper ski season.

Mount Donna Buang usually has snow cover at the peak for much of winter and although there isn’t skiing there it is quite popular because it is so close to Melbourne. Any way as I said Deb and I shot up there today. By the way, a lot of these piccies benefit from clicking on to expand them.

When we reached the peak it was cold and misty.This tower was built for spotting fires in bushfire season. A bit redundant today!
I had a look in one of the shelters - there was a warming fire that someone had lit in the BBQ.People have been busy building snow men and snow sculptures. I thought this teapot was clever.
It was complete with cups.
I went traipsing around looking for objects to turn my camera on. I loved this boulder standing clear of the snow.After a while we were cold and miserable (I wonder why?).

So we jumped back in the car and drove the 4,000 odd feet back to the valley floor. Perhaps the teapot had given us ideas. Because we stopped at one our favourite eateries.

Wild Thyme Café is in the village of Warburton. It has great meals and good coffee.

But the thing they absolutely do best is cakes and pastries. The owner bakes the most amazing cakes you can imagine.

I had the baked continental cheesecake. It looked so yum I couldn’t help myself and took a spoonful before I remembered to take a piccie!

Deb had the lemon meringue pie. I am not normally big on sweets but the ones at Wild Thyme are as good as anything I have tasted anywhere in the world!

One last piccie. We sat in the front room of the café. I noticed a whole collage of reflections on the window. Nearly everything in this piccie is a reflection or a reflection of a reflection. The two legs in the foreground are actually just outside, as is the bicycle rickshaw. I have no idea where it originally came from, but the rickshaw is always parked out the front when they are open. Wild Thyme is that kind of place.
The blue car is actually further up the street and going the other way. The sunny park is about 100 metres down the road to the right.
The man sitting with his face to the picture is Alan, the owner of the café. He is not outside this window but at a table to the right on the footpath. It’s illegal to smoke in restaurants in Victoria so they have a table outside for those who have to smoke while they eat.

Swan Watch XI: Unseasonable Weather

I have barely posted recently and I have spent even less time visiting other people’s blogs. First I was away at my Mum’s and since then work and life have just been sucking up so much time. Hopefully you’ll see me around the blogosphere a bit more in the near future.

You'll have to forgive me for being so negligent in responding to your comments. I hope things might be getting more back to normal soon, but we will see.

Io did the swan patrol for me this week because Deb and I headed in the opposite direction. More about that in the moment.

First to the swans. Unfortunately, we have no more news about the injured cygnet. We’ll just have to hope that no news is good news.

On a cheerier note mother swan and the remaining baby are doing well. Io has captured some beautiful piccies to prove it.

The swans are very used to Io and Damian now, when they come down to the ponds edge the swans usually cruise over to check them out.Today they were back in their original pond, I liked this piccie of them coming closer through the reeds.The remaining baby continues to grow at an almost unbelievable rate. It’s hard to believe this strapping youth is the cute fuzzball of only a few weeks ago. I can’t help think of Hans Christian Andersen’s ugly duckling now.

But of course the sinuous curves of baby’s neck reminds us that he/she will be a beauty like mum before too long.Now to Deb and my weekend. Most of the good folk who read my blog live in the Northern Hemisphere and are half way through Autumn. We down here in Oz are halfway through spring and the weather should be warming up.

It isn’t! This is the scene at Kinglake yesterday. It hasn’t snowed where we are (it almost never does in Melbourne and near the coast). But it has been so cold that it has snowed in the hills around here. We can see Kinglake from our street.

I have never heard of snowfalls in the country near Melbourne in October. But there it is.
Higher up at Mount Donna Buang it was still thick.

This is the road to the summit.Being a kid at heart I couldn’t help but walk up to the summit.

Past this gate.To the top where it started to snow again.On the walk back down.
This wattle peeping through the snow further down the mountain is a reminder that it is supposed to be spring.

Tumbling Down and a Maths (Math) Lesson.

A quick post tonight.
I have been staring at the computer screen for hours, working on the website I am designing for Veiled in Shadows. If I spend too much longer I am sure my eyes will go square.

Yesterday, Deb and I went for an early Valentine ’s Day lunch out at Warburton.
(In keeping with Aussie abbreviation rules, the locals call it “Warby”.)

After a thoroughly delightful meal we went for a wander along the main street. While Deb tried on a few clothes I took a few photos.
I am posting these few to show how near the mountains are to Warby. This first really gives a sense of how they loom almost over the main street.

And this one of a local Café (not the one we ate at) has Mt Donna Buang behind.
The treed slopes of the mountain belie just how much higher it is than the town.
Warby stands at 159 metres (521 feet) above sea level measured, as is traditional, at the post office just out of frame to the left. Mt Donna Buang is 1250 metres high (4101 feet).

Now that is not particularly high by international standards, but if you do the maths (mathematics is maths in Oz, not math) it is 1091 metres (3579 feet) higher than the main street.
Not bad for something that is (almost) literally in their back yards.

After our stroll, we climbed up the side of the mountain next to Donna Buang (not to the top but I think about half way).
On the way back down the slope I paused to take a piccie of a very energetic stream that tumbles down the mountainside, before falling across this little road.
The motion of the water has been captured by a very long exposure that I had to use to cope with the dim conditions under the trees.

A Few Thoughts

Deb and I stayed closer to home last weekend. We went out to Warburton a mere hour away.

I took a few photos down the main street.

Now these are not great photos, it was rotten weather, I was not thinking about composition and I quite simply snapped away.

They are nothing like the sort of picture Uncle Harry would want to show on one of his infamous slide nights.

“Wadda ya mean infamous?”

Oh go back to sleep!

The photos are nothing special

But then I had a closer look.

Warburton is in the upper Yarra Valley, with high mountains all around.

The mountain in the background is called Mount Little Joe, and it is as close to the town as it looks. Mount Donna Buang lies just to the north.

In short Warburton is surrounded by bush.

If you look closely at the second photo - I’ve enlarged a section for you here.You can see protruding from the forest canopy, up on the ridge line, the skeletons of many dead trees.

These are the remains of Mountain Ash trees that were killed by the heat of bushfires in the “Ash Wednesday Fires” in 1983 as the flames raced up Mount Little Joe.

By good fortune and a favourable wind Warburton was spared.

This past summer the fires of “Black Saturday” came to within five miles before the wind eased. Over the next few weeks fires approached Warburton from three sides to within a few miles.

Fortunately the weather conditions of “Black Saturday” did not return and fire crews were able to contain the fires using fire breaks and by conducting back-burning until they burnt out.

This sunset photo was taken during this period near Warburton.

What appears to be cloud is actually smoke from burning bushland.

Tuesday was the first day of spring and Victoria has been experiencing drought conditions for eleven years. In spite of a little rain during winter, the bush is tinder dry.

I look at charming little places like Warburton, and remember Marysville and Kinglake where dozens died last summer, and quite frankly I am anxious about what the warmer weather will bring.

“Stop whinging you useless bastard. We’re Aussies we’ll deal with it. Now I’m going to shoot through, probably head down the pub. You comin’?”

That’s my Uncle Harry, a bit rough, but not a bad old bugger.

And now, as Monty Python were so fond of saying, for something completely different.

Above are both sides of a promotional card I picked up while in Warburton on the weekend.

Apparently Tuesday was also “Equal Pay Day” designed to highlight pay disparity between men and women.

Oz is a great place, but it seems even after decades of supposed equality, there are very basic things we still just can’t get right.

“Fair crack of the whip, there you go again. Wadda ya want, that they make you an honorary feminist or something? You’re probably just pissed that your missus earns more than you do. ”

Uncle Harry? I thought you’d gone to the pub.

“Nah, heading down there now.”

(Just a little note on Australian English. Terms like Bastard and Bugger may be either terms of endearment or abusive. What is important is the context of their use and more critically the tone with which they are delivered. So you might call someone a "bit of a bastard" and have them either hug you or hit you depending on delivery.)

Of Humble Pie

We have developed a strange obsession with going out into the wide blue yonder what ever the weather. Today for example it is another cold damp day and blowing a gale. What do the household do? Curl up in front of the fire with a good book? Sit and watch the latest DVD? Do anything warm and cosy?
No, not a bit of it. Instead we head off for a picnic.

But the plot thickens and humble pie is called for.
At the insistence of our eldest, we again headed for Mount Donna Buang, in a quest for snow.
Now anyone who has been following my blog during its brief existence, will remember that just under two weeks ago, I wrote very disparagingly about the snow cover up on old Donna.

If a picture is worth a thousand words

As you can see same place but now definitely not the same story.
Admittedly only about six inches cover at the moment, but definitely snow.

My eldest is still girding her loins in preparation for her “wet-pracs”. She says she is feeling a bit more able to face the idea. But the poor thing is still very apprehensive about being physically ill come the day. What is keeping her going is the long term goal.

Given the title of this blog I had better say a little about my literary endeavours.
Basically they can be summed up as: word count - 0.
Too many early starts and late finishes just lately.
Writing and the day job don’t necessarily go together.
Truth be told I am probably spending too much time looking at other peoples blogs as well. But a boy has to have some fun from time to time.

Then again writing or researching are fun, but I find I need much more energy, more focus to work on the book. If I write tired, more often than not I just junk that material when I reread.
So speaking of tired, I ran breakfast at work this morning (we try to provide a service 365 days a year) which means a 5:30 am start. So without further ado goodnight and talk to you next time.

Wish Me Luck!

I have had an interesting possibility come up regarding my manuscript. In a case of who you know rather than what you know, I have an editor from a UK publishing house reading my manuscript.
Oddly she is the daughter of a colleague of my other half. Does that make sense?

She is home in Oz to see her family and the cheeky approach has paid off.
There are still a lot of if, buts and maybes. Firstly, she has to like the book. Secondly, although she is in publishing, her field is not fiction. So even if she likes it, the most she is able to do is suggest me as a possibility to some of her colleagues. Still this is the closest I have got to getting someone on the inside to read the piece so I am happy.

And of course nervous

Cold, cold, cold again today.
Once I came home from work (among other things I run a breakfast service for homeless people) our eldest was bouncing around saying "Let's go to the snow today. There's bound to be snow on Donna Buang."
So after warming up with a cuppa' we piled into the car and drove about an hour up to Mount Donna Buang.
There was snow, I took a photo of it (of all of it I might add) just to prove it was there.
And just to prove it here it is! See it does get cold in Australia.

The sign in the picture (which I accidentally cropped) says "no tobogganing", I suspect there is not much danger of that rule needing to be enforced at the moment.
It was cold and wet, but apparently not enough for snow. What was there has well and truly melted.

So after waiting in the cold for someone who shall remain nameless,

we piled back into the car and drove back to Warburton at the bottom of the mountain for the much more civilized pursuit of drinking hot coffee in one of our favourite cafes.

This evening, for a change I went out in the cold again. I have been wanting to get some shots of the city at night. Tonight was a first experimental foray. I spent a lot of time driving around looking for places safe enough to stop (traffic, even on Sunday night is quite busy around the city).
I was moderately happy with some of the results, but I think two things will improve my shots:
I had the ISO set too high and most of the shots are over exposed; and a darker sky would give better contrast, tonight there was low cloud hence a lot of reflected light from the buildings below.
Anyway I was happy enough with what I took to try again another night.

Just a couple of photos I took tonight to finish off.

This one is St Patricks Catholic Cathedral, just east of Melbourn CBD.

This is the Bolte Bridge down at the docklands area of Melbourne.