Drum Beat

 Beach walks have continued and if we thought the last day of Winter might let us off without any rain then think again.  We did have clear periods.  Down from the Dell, one of the huge blue barrels washed up. We have man handled these previously but this one is half full of water.  The other issue is the access to the Dell. There is a forever switch backed wheel chair ramp and an old service road. In the end we left it there to see if it might drain out.  I would be amazed if the council got to it first, although they do a regular check on the dell area.

The drum beat us

Short Ride

The rain stopped around 11:00am, so with some very dark clouds around, I got the bike out anyway.  I went along to the Jetty area where I spied a school class doing some canoeing. On the way back I detoured to check out the new bike track just down the way, which is now finished, although there are some empty platforms available for tables and chairs.  I confirmed it was bird swooping season near here as well. It was so open, I had time to put my arm up which confused the magpies no end.  Just nearby home is the largest junk pile I have seen outside a house.  It is the builders house, who we paid to do some work repairing our roof. He was the one who had his own portable scaffolding.  They were renting and have left half the household on the nature strip. 

distant house marked in orange

school's in

council problem now

Aussie Stamps

There are around 9800 Australian stamps with say 100 added each year.  The Post Office are sending me those extra 100 each year, so I am not strictly collecting them but rather having them conveniently packed and delivered.  I don't have every one of these but it must be at least 8000 of them.  I will still make bids on large lot items, old collections etc, however it is also time to get specific.  I have previously branched into maps on stamps and bicycles on stamps.  There are clubs specifically designed for these two purposes. I have joined the cyclophilately group, with maybe only 50 members in the world and free of charge. The Cartophilately group is similar.   

This is not getting any simpler as there are 3,000 bicycle stamps and 19,000 map stamps in the world.  However I have narrowed it down by trying to locate the first stamp from each country featuring a bicycle or a map. From what I can tell this seems to be a fairly unique approach. So there are roughly 200 countries with another 100 or so countries that no longer exist. This means a target of 600 hundred stamps but what are they.  I have been researching a list over the last week (not complete) of what stamps first appear with either a bicycle or a map from each of these countries.  I have used a few resources to do this but mainly an online database called ColNect where I can also purchase individual stamps as well. I have tried it for the first time just now but it might take weeks for those ten stamps to arrive.

My List - click for a larger view

A Painted House

 I think I got this book from one of those free book shelves that are set up around the place these days.  It is nothing like the intrigues that Grisham gets into such as "The Pelican Brief".  That one made a good film and this one was made into a film as well, in 2003, which I haven't seen.  It reminds me a bit of "The Grapes of Wrath" but you wouldn't put it in the Steinbeck class.  It's all about the struggles of cotton growing in the 1950's and how to escape from it.

Garden Growth

 While the Pure Bookkeeping projects are still going I have taken on the garden projects.  More correctly the grass project.  We never want to have an empty green bin when it is green bin day.  I got all the camillias I could find off the paths which half filled the bin. Then there was the lawn mowing which filled the rest of the bin.  Last time I did the gutter edging, so this time it was the edging around the walls which needed attention.  It is either the battery on the edger, or my fingers that run out before the edges are all done. The veggie patch is going to need a major clearout before long.  

Mussel Cafe No2

I wrote about the mussel rope a few weeks back where I had to wade in to untangle it from some growth and bring it ashore. Last night we went to the Mussel Cafe where the produce from the 'Sea of Plenty' is available.  This is a former pub in Port Arlington which has also been various other restaurants in its day.  Some years back the Mussel Cafe was inland aways and was a bit of a shed next to the processing plant.  This is a better location with views out over the water but when you sit down at a table the menu says Thai food all the way.  But there is also a  typed sheet in there which is the seafood part. All very weird. It seems that one kitchen is being shared by two restaurants to keep the costs down.  We had the beer battered fish but I still prefer the good old fish shop in Williamstown. I think it's the beer batter that puts me off.

Two out of Three

 I always figured while doing a beach clean that if I went back two days in a row I would still find a haul on the second day. Well I did go two days ago and again this morning and sure enough I got a decent half back of stuff on both days. Beach cleaning 101 says walk the high tide line like a sobriety test.  Todays winner was a constant string of cigarette butts.  There was also one of those small see ew sauce bottles they give you with the sushi.  Also plenty of rope pieces and plastics.  Beach cleaning 102 says pay more attention on the way back, especially if your shadow is behind now.  I saw two small green colours, one was a buried party popper and the other was a buried cap but just the peak portion.  The highlight from the other day was a full, heavy spray can of water proofing. 

Day 1

I also had to go into the water to retrieve a submerged bag. The water was crystal clear.

Day 2

Land of Nod

I found this small booklet in amongst all the photos that have been scanned recently. It has only got about 30 pages and contains 12 poems by EW Wilcox.  She is an American poet who used good old end rhyme as you did in the late 1800's.  This is the final stanza from one of the poems.

Down the river of sleep, our barque shall sweep,

Till it reaches that mystical isle.

Which no man hath seen, but where all have been,

And there we will pause awhile.

I will croon you a song as we float along,

To that shore that is blessed of God,

Then Ho! for that fair land, we're off for that rare land,

That beautiful land of Nod.

Cable Crazy

 I am still trying to get the best setup going here for my new laptop. Dell did not have cables to connect my old monitors to the new docking station, so they sent me some converters to put in between the ends to allow for connection. Ever since then, the monitors go black for three seconds at random times.  And now I have purchased two more docking stations for Williamstown, except there we have bought four new monitors which are all Samsung. They use HDML to connect monitors and the docking stations, being Dell,  have two Displayports and only one hdml port. So I have now ordered four separate cables to get around all this for an extra $100.  

Notice the two short connector cables coming out top left that I want to remove

Komarr

I have continued the reading route thru the maze that is the Vor.  Komarr is the last to be written last century and maybe the hero was being retired at the age of 30.  Then another 6 volumes have been written this century, none of which I have.   As it happens, I just received the first one in the series in the mail the other day. So I will be going back to the start of this space opera as the first book is set 200 years before all the current characters were around.  I should have spent more time trying to track down all the volumes first.  Easy to say when they are all out of print, not available in shops and not held by libraries.  Komarr is in the whodunnit group but with a heroine coming on the scene. 

PhotoMania

 I am copying the scanned photos six times to different USB thumb style drives. I found an extra 1500 photos not included in the previous tally, as I had worked on a box full at Williamstown using a second scanner there.  The fruits of my olive picking came home with us in a big jar yesterday from the Taylors.  It was part of the haul that Anna had processed some months back.  We will most likely wait til Summer to open the lid.  I have also unloaded the video from the Bundoora Farm. It was a bit overcast but the below clip shows the style of the place. 

We have the digital now for the physical

Redford not Redmond

 According to Lucy they were tossing up between these names but Redford is the ol fashioned cowboy name so that is the one that won.  There was not a peep out of him for the two hours or so that we saw him. Well fed and well slept.  Simon says he might do a Geelong show, so we will look out for that. Earlier in the day it was the Asher show.  We mostly did crafty things like drawing figures, colouring them in, cuttinmg them out and standing them up. Phew.  

Redford

Bundoora Children's Farm

We met up with James and Estelle at the children's farm in Bundoora Park.  Now this was originally the Police horse paddocks and before that a Victorian mansion.  We hired an apartment near here when Laura came down with Evie for a birthday a couple of yar ago.  This is quite a large farm also with some bush animals like kangaroo and emu.  We started with a general walk around and then it was feeding time with a bucket of oatey bits.  You name it they all ate this stuff including goats, horses, llamas, sheep and cows.  Next it was meet the guinea pigs and they were brought out for a hands on petting session.  The big ticket item was a ride on the electric trolley bus. This took us for a 15 minute cruise on dirt tracks around the lake and thru herds of kangaroo and emu.  We finished off with lunch in the cafe and before you know it Estelle is asleep after a busy day.

Pony Up

grass for the guinea pig

forearmed

Williamstown Painting

 No we are not taking classes, the whole village is being painted and our street is currently underway.  We have a new dark garage door and most of the guttering and walls have been done. There are some glaring holes that need to be filled near our front door which are being ignored so far. It was a good thing we had cleared some trees from near the walls earlier as they have been hacking at the vegetation.  This should be finished in another week or so.

more orchids

OCR converts to yiddish, rubbish and gibberish

 I tried an el cheapo Optical Character Recognition program that I have had laying around. The ABBYY finereader has been supplied with most scanners for years but when you get something for nothing then maybe that is what you get.  Unless you want to pay lots extra I don't think using OCR will help much in getting written pages into typed manuscript word format.  These written pages are in your traditional cursive flowing style on different papers with different pens and over a long period of time have fading problems as well.  The results I got from this program were totally unrecognisable.  The process looks encouraging as colours are cast down the page, highlighting here and underscoring there. You are meant to do a manual intervention here, so I just saved it into a file that turned out to be complete hieroglyphics.  The best thing here is just to sit down and patiently retype every word into new word files.

As far as I could tell the green area was what it found, the red area was to be deleted and the white area was totally ignored.

Photo Scan End

It has taken 8 months but I have come to the end of the photo scanning project.  There will be some duplication along the way as this really started 10 yar ago when I was getting Beryl's  camera unloaded and sending them off to the photo shop.  Then there were the albums I was given to scan, a few at a time over some years and finally there is the section where everything else that could be found in the unit has now been scanned.  That includes all frames, albums, packets, negatives and loose piles.  There are around 17,000 photos in these folders requiring 7Gb of space. There is no organisation of them.  When you get a copy, good luck trying to navigate your way thru.   The last few days were spent on negatives and todays were those tiny thumbnail ones.  I scanned them at a large resolution of 1200.  Now I have to get copies onto USB drives.

The ride you don't really want.

The very last scanned image

Muscle for Mussels

 We did a beach walk with rubbish bag in hand yesterday and gathered a lot of smaller plastics but nothing major. However there is an annoying barrel, actually a floatation device that had come loose from the mussel farm.  We have had this before with the giant blue barrels and they can be heavy with water. This is the first time I have seen one of the black barrels but it never quite washed up on the beach.  After a few days we knew it was snagged on the under growth.  I waited for a sunnier morning like this morning before wading in to unsnag it.  The tide was at ½ a metre and rising to1 metre this afternoon so I went in before it got any deeper.  There was another guy on the beach who had found them previously and said don't bother ringing them as they never come to collect stray barrels.  This one had a long rope which is what the mussels grow from. There was not a mussel to be seen as I dragged it all the way along the beach and up to the bin.

Mussel rope

No sea bounty attached here

Estelle Splahes In

 We met James and Estelle early at the pool. It was a reminder of what those pools were like 35 yar ago and this one would not have changed. It was a different pool but it had similar decoration, slippery floors and foggy glasses.  We had to take them off, as it took 30 minutes for them to clear. We could still see what was happening. I noted the particular way you should exit the pool.  Place forearms crossed on the flat section and use core strength to rise up to a point where you can hook your knee on the ledge and climb from there.  I need to try this.   As for Estelle she can dive, jump and be thrown into the deep end with the rest of them.  James led us to a cafe where we had a late breakfast and after a short playground session we were off to Grandma and Grandpa's for more catchup.  

Asher Artful Colour

We had an afternoon into evening Asher and Kaia session yesterday.  Asher is showing some talent at her painting and drawing desk, so much so that Bianca is going to frame one of them.  Kaia seems happy to watch so far.  We did a drawing of one of the Guardians of the Galaxy and then the colouring and cutting made  quite a good standup figure.  As Daniel and Bianca were ready to head out, the Women's soccer was into the penalty shoot out phase.  I have never seen that phase go on so long and after 20 pings at goal they finally got out the door.  We had two mostly sleeping kiddies for the rest of the time.

Rocket

Underwater Phone

I still can't download videos from Google photos after they have been backed up to the Google cloud from Debbie's phone. I can get individual photos but not videos. So I have plugged her phone into my computer to get a copy.  The snorkel with phone has a clip below. The plastic case kept the water out but half way thru the swim lost focus. I have removed most of that. I would say the plastic at first, was nicely against the lens but perhaps separated slightly during the traverse.  Not sure what can be done whilst the mayhem of swimming, currents, rocks, corals, fish, turtles and waves is going on round about. I might also try combining the video camera with the phone video to see how seemless it mght be.

Our start point as we walked out of the forest.

                                               I am carrying our reef shoes in the back satchel.

Casso Hunter

 I am working thru the last of the video, except for the phone versions that are on Google drive. I need to work out how to get copies of that stuff.  This video was our wettest day and originally was meant to be the day over on Dunk Island.  Captain Dry rang us up and said the numbers are down so I am shifting to the day before. Then it turned out we were the only ones to go.  Any way we got the better day out.  But we still went out in the rain trying to find cassowaries.

Fanning the Fan Palms

Fitzroy Island Walks

We did two walks on Fitzroy Island both of them steep. There was no attempt to lessen the grade. In the case of the tower it was war time and no time to finesse so they went straight for the site.  As for the top of the island, the National Parks Service also used a direct approach and put in many rock staircases to get there.  The view from the top included a view of the tower below and some sand cays out on the reef. 

Port Douglas Ride

 I am editing videos from the last two weeks across a number of sources being video on land and underwater as well as phones on land and underwater.  Also I am doing it on the new computer where Dell supplied me with an over the top professional video editing suite which goes beyond what I want.  The tried and true Movie Maker has long gone before Windows 10 and now with Windows 11, I am working my way with ClipChamp.  This one is a ride we did with hired bikes in Port Douglas. As with all these blog videos they are severely cut to around three minutes and with the chunkiest resolution.  I have HD versions of all these and longer to boot.

coffee half way

the Sandy way back

HoHum Lawns

The lawns and paths have been neglected for a few weeks and it is a slippery business going down the sideway, so some cleanup was needed.  The camelia drop problem was not so wet as I had thought. In fact all the blossoms were very dry on the ground, so there must not have been too much rain here lately.  The grass was damp but not from rain and there was a lot of it which filled the bin.  Checking out the orchids again, shows there were a couple we missed in the previous count including two spikes from a faded but now returned Grandpa orchid pot. There must be something in the air as we have had a number of orchid resurrection successes here.

This one is a late bloomer. There are six more coming.

The Grandpa pot. Two splikes here.

before

after

Snorkel Film

It always seems to be a bit of potluck as to what you might find on the video from the underwater camera.  I had not used this Kogan one before but it does record well.  The swim below is the one where I lost my flippers and had to get them back on. In doing so, dropped the camera, which Debbie was able to retrieve. All that was going as we were heading back, after we used the camera and did our filming.  So it doesn't explain why the best part, with Debbie swimming with turtles, is not filmed.  It must have been off but not sure why.  There are fish and corals but no filmed turtles.  Better luck next time.  This is a small portion for the Blog.  PS Total sunshine all day long here but it is colder. Current temperature 13°.

Soft Coral

 

IconsCairns

We have 90 minutes before boarding and have found a stylish cafe where they are bringing our order to the table, how original.  The checkin was straight forward.  The forecast says 50% chance of rain, not sure what Melbourne will have for us.  Overall we have found new things to do and try and a few more for another trip to the area.  The Mission Beach Reef resort we would not use again.  Also we would try a different hotel in Cairns as we have been doing, as there are plenty of choices.

Icons Cafe

Kewarra Picnic

 Last full day here so we headed to a beach that we found last year with our sandwiches and a champagne bottle.  Kewarra is a palm fringed beach but you need to walk to the left (North) to get away from the dog beach section.  It was overcast and high tide but the Sun started to break thru around 3:00pm.  There have been some changes here like the new bicycle bridge being constructed across the creek (river).  Also the Kewarra resort has shut down for two years for a $10 million upgrade.  Put that on the list to try in 2025. Not to mention trying the new bike track. We have dropped off the car tonight so we are set for an early exit tomorrow.

Kewarra

unfinished bike track

Cairns Esplanade

 We have tried most of the hotels along the esplanade here and this one is the Hilton Doubletree.  It is leisurely day today trying to dodge the rain. The table across was just one row too close to the front.  They got wet.  This was breakfast at the Villa Romana. We have been here before and the omelette in the pan is the best. Last night we ate at Splash restaurant. No prizes for guessing this is seafood and lots of it. I had kingfish fillet, very tasty.  An interesting aspect is the maps that are everywhere in there, even on the tabletops. 

Nautical charts but what are all the numbers?

Here it comes

Pan tastic

Nice Library