A long time ago we used to travel overseas. There were plenty of places that featured old bicycles in the garden. Some were yellow , tour de France style. There were also towns that had bicycle decorations all over the place as they repurposed old bikes. So we have been on the lookout for an old bike with the right shape but could never decide. Then Debbie found the purpose built garden bicycle complete with pot holder.
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| Audrieu France |
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| Backyard Australia |
I was on a roll unloading video today. I started with the gopro, piecing together a short underwater clip from our snorkel the other day. Then I got on to the other camera which had a few back dated videos in it as well. There are not to many fish to been seen, although there is a good closeup of a big jelly fish. Debbie glided right passed and never saw it. There were plenty of birds way up and one way low.
We put in an order for a mighty large shade awning months ago. There were many delays. When you look at the brochure and order model 348, it's not just sitting on the shelf. Every component is then sourced so they can put it together which took months, especially getting the right sized motor. And today at the exact same time as the drilling and the hammering, Pure Bookkeeping was hosting an international author on our webcast complete with background noise. Not much you can do about it. The shade size is 6 metres wide and extends out three metres to cover the courtyard with push button precision. No more Sun in there now.
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| Before |
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| After |
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| let there be shade |
It has been a few years since I started dawdling words on this BLOG and now I have reached my 2000th annotation. I just went back five years to see what I might have written then. There was a spiel about halloween and not being able to avoid it if you were in the caravan at Collendina. We have solved that issue here, as if you don't have a pumpkin on display then you wont get tricked or treated. I notice the Hallow part is being holy so maybe the Ween part is being tricky, although the dictionary says to ween is to think.
I should really mention todays goings on which involved birds. We have a spot over the back door which is good for them to build a nest but not good for us. Today the battle was full on. Three times so far huge clumps of material have been knocked down. We have started going out every hour this afternoon and they are still on the prowl.
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| Approximately 30000 times this blog has been read with 431 comments |
Suddenly it is full on snorkel weather here. We got all the gear together, snorkel flippers and masks within their bags x 2. Largish umbrella, wind break, two largish folding chairs, backpack of cameras, books, phones etc, Large jumbo bag of lunch items, towels and cool bag of drinks, a pump, a tyre tube, a tennis set etc This was put into the new beach buggy for its first use. Getting thru sand is tougher but there are seaweed and grassy pathways that are much easier.
The water temperature allowed us to go out deeper but not as far as we have been last year. I guess we can work up to this. There were no spectacular fish around. A large scholl of minnows, one big jelly fish and the usual puffy type flutter fish. The very shallow area is inky black with dead sea grass unless it is low tide. It is not supposed to be a holiday here but there were quite a few people around anyway.
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| beach buggy- we are now going to use the garage door for beach travel |
An ideal picture postcard day of 21° no wind. Debbie is concentrating on more garden projects today so I went over to the beach and had my first groyne to groyne swim this Spring not quite Summer. The water is very clear but that green foggy growth is still hanging around some of the sea grass beds. I saw one ray completely submerged in sand except for the eyes. The tide was out so I swam close to it but there was never a flinch, it just ignored me.
Do we look like paupers here? Needing to sell our produce out the front. Our lemons have reduced in number over the last week to about 12 or so. We opened up the letter box and people have been putting money through the slot. A tidy sum has been building up. If we wanted to set up shop maybe we should have squeezed them and started up the lemonade stand. We have olives by the kilogram, strawberries, lettuce and enough tomatoes to start our own tomatina. Con the fruiterer beeeeeeeautiful lemons.
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| All three lemon scent, lemon sent and lemon cent |
We took the bikes back to Inverleigh. This time we combined the Leigh River with the Flora Park by using some dirt tracks I spied leading up the embankment away from the river. We had some sandwiches in the park beforehand, so it was a 50 minute drive then a 30 minute lunch break before we rode. The dirt is well compacted along the river. There were two choices to scale the heights so we took the better rideable track to the top which came out into an estate with large one hectare alotments. Onthe other side of this estate was the Flora park. The sandy nature of the trails was tricky on the bikes, however I was the only one to come off, being in the front and a tad more aggressive in the sand. We stopped for drinks and some more orchid hunting. We found the elusive Donkey Kong orchid. This was on a tallish stork with a number of flowers. The large kangaroo I spotted charging thru obviously missed eating this one out. The way back was all down hill and also off road on a gravelly path back to the car.
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| Lush Leigh River |
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| Dry higher reaches |
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| Donkey Kong |
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| 50% turned out to be fat burning standard |
