Epic Volcano Ride

I had organised a rail trail ride out of Camperdown which we have not been on previously.  It is a 2 hour drive to get to the start and we went via the historic Inverleigh/Cressy road to get there.  This is worth a follow up at least to try the Bakery.  The road also took us via the Corangamite lake system where it squeezes between two huge lakes of the the mud flat variety.  The rail trail has a lake at the start and I was expecting similar flatness. Wrong.  We rode to the top of the volcanoes for awesome views of volcanic lakes on both sides.  But where is the rail trail. We rode all the way down and out of the Volcanoes to intersect the old rail line.  The actual train line section was 10km from Camperdown and that will have to wait for next time.  We turned around and rode the volcanoes all over again to get back to the car.  The 15km took 2 hrs and was quite steep but it's good to know we have still got it.  Lunch was at the Delgado Cafe in main street Camperdown.  We went passed the Camperdown race track two miles long, on the way out. Do Dah Oh Do Dah Day.

Mt Elephant Volcano

No such train up here

Lake Gnotuk

Up then Down

No rail trail here either

Delgado Cafe

Edgewater Creek

The front yard is continuing its transformation.  I never thought I would be wheeling bags of rocks thru the kitchen.  The path of the creek is winding its way across the area and so far has reached the pinnacle of the veranda.  There is a lot of spade work in this to get the depth and to spread the pebbles.  I keep hearing how the physical stuff will be managed but so far today it has been at least 4 hours of shoveling. 

Edgewater Creek

Holiday Houses

When we first moved in we were invited to lunch two doors down, so we had a good look at that house which was a rabbit warren.  They had to sell up soon after and the new owners transformed it with a huge renovation. But it is now a holiday house. That makes two holiday houses in a row next to us.  We spoke to the immediate next doors about using their house at Christmas. They have now agreed we can use it.  And today I became the unofficial contact for the other house as they have put it on airbnb.  So potentially we have a second house we can use at Christmas to cater for the hordes of Clancy's who can stop over a couple of nights.  Hopefully the airbnb people don't make too much noise. The first customer's are the long weekend.

Garden clean slate

The newly cleared garden canvas has begun to be filled in.  The process will take a while but so far there is a new pond, a two tiered one.  I was out with the trusty poison pump, giving the cleared areas a spray, to make it an even cleaner work space.  Today was also a stamp auction day. This is the first one of these Sydney based auctions I have tried, although I did buy a passed in item a month ago. These guys do not have a very sophisticated set up.  I received an email at 9:00pm last night saying that I was losing one bid and still leading in the other, of my two bids. I read this at 8:30am and the online bids closed at 7:00am. 

Aerial View

Garden Cam

Database Performance Hit

It's like I have gone back to my working days. My stamp database is unresponsive for minutes at a time. This also happened a couple of weeks back but the problem went away. It started again today. Even after a reboot and with just the Access database running, the Unresponsive Message comes up.  This is generally caused by a background program taking resources.  I now have task manager running and performance graphs running and CPU totals coming up and I can't see the issue.  While I was typing this, the database came back with fast response again. It's current size is at only 10000 records and can easily go past 100000 in an Access database.  I will have to get the analysis graphs up quicker next time it happens.  There will be a next time.

Produce Bearers

It seems it is the coldest start to Winter for 70 yar.  Today is a smiggen better than yesterday.  It's not all bad here. We had a visit from the Carneys.  North of Daylesford, they wake up to zero and it did not get higher than 6° yesterday.  They work the land in order to stay warm, by leveling a space, which also needs roo proofing with a 1.8 m fence surrounded by a bed of anti roo plants.  I advised not to put in too many olive trees on the plot.  This will be ready for some Spring planting while their Summer haul was good. We scored jars of fig jam and chutney.  Last week I still had olives which they love, but not this week.  Note to self, to keep some olives next year.

Asher Yard Queen

How does Winter know it is Winter? That today is the first of June and that a cold biting wind  should blow today or that the rain right now is soaking the clothes I put on the line.  At least it's a good stamp day and also a day for working on some video.  I have yet another Asher video of us not doing much.  She knew something was on the other side of my camera but it has the ability to flip the screen so that the subject of the video can see the action being filmed as well.