Queensland floods

This is just a quick post to ask everyone to say a prayer for all the poor souls in Southern Queensland where the flood crisis is getting completely desperate.  There was a wall of water came through the main street of Toowoomba yesterday afternoon, then down the range and through the Lockyer Valley below.  There are at least 8 people dead and another 72 missing.  the rain continues to pour down, with major flloding expected throughout the south east of the state.  The Brisbane river has already broken its banks and parts of the CBD of the State capital are being evacuated.  The worst of the flooding is not due for at least another 24 hours so this is not good.

For us here in Mackay it is very hard to imagine as we have warm, sunny weather and no sign of any storms yet.  Our supermarket shelves will be even emptier, but that is nothing, we can live through that.

Doreen's blog has a link http://www.gumtree-designers.com/2011/01/we-need-your-help.html to Gumtree designers who are oranising an appeal for all of us to help provide kits for the flood victims after the floods have subsided. These would be sewing kits and I think it is a wonderful idea.  If you can help, please follow the link.

What's flowering in our garden

Our Euodia tree is flowering now and is full of shrieking lorikeets, which are amazingly hard to see, even with their bright colour!

I managed to get a snap of this one.  The flowers are very pretty and they are followed by clusters of black seed pods which the birds and the possums like  too..  I hope the vitamin content of the flowers has recovered.  We had a lorikeet fall out of the tree about a week ago, unable to fly.  The wildlife carer who collected the bird said lots of the birds were falling out of the trees as the nutrition in the flowers was inadequate from all the rain we have had.  I wonder how all the wildlife is faring in the flood zones all round Queensland and New South Wales.

I must have taken about 20 photos trying to get a picture of this Ulysses butterfly which feeds on the flowers of the Euodia.  It is a large butterfly with a wingspan of about 5 1/2 inches and flies very fast.  When it does land and closes its wings you can't see it as the underside of the wings is black and dark brown.  The upper side of the wings is the most magnificent electric blue and sometimes there are several flying around.  This picture is an image from wickipedia, I never did manage to get a photo

We planted two Pandorea jasminoides creepers on a trellis in the back garden to replace the things which were destroyed last year.  Look at it now, flowering beautifully, and even the lovely glossy green leaves look attractive.

This is not a very good shot of the allamander vine and the thunbergia mysorensis vine, both putting on a very colourful show.

The honey eaters love this creeper, which keeps putting out new buds on the end of the stem, so that eventually it hangs almost two feet from the first flower.

The rain has stopped for the time being.  We didn't quite make it to twice our annual average last year - we had 2975 mm - more than enough for any of us.  Of course, the wet season is only just starting so there will be lots more rain yet before the end of the summer.......uggggh!

Fibre Fever page for Marja

This is the page I made for Marja in Holland for December - her theme is birds.  I was going very cross eyed trying to sew this, so stopped with the simple image I have there.  I think I can see better now I have a prism in my graduated lenses, but I am waiting for my reading glasses to arrive.  Then I expect a miracle!!!!

The flame trees are all coming into bloom at the Gardens and they look at their best with grey skies - just as well with the weather we have been having.

These seeds from the foxtail palms are making a stectacular show right beside the deck where people go to the cafe.

We actually have a bit of a break in the rain, so Bill is out mowing everything he can get too without needing floats on the mower.  We shouln't complain, we have no flooding as such, not like the poor souls further south.  Everyone from Theodore has been evacuated now.  Pets were originally not being allowed to go, but thankfully that rule was changed.  Some of the old people were very distressed at leaving their pets behind.  I imagine Bill would flatly refuse to go anywhere if we had to leave Jock behind to fend for himself!

Our Gardens curator is in Bundaberg, not going anywhere in a hurry.  I think his family is on high ground, but there is a lot of flooding there too.  This reminds me very much of the 1950s, major flooding was a summer occurrence every year.  Graziers had to paint the names of their properties on the rooves of their woolsheds or similar so the army/air force could see where they were to drop food parcels - for stock as well as people.  There were no deep freezes etc then to store food for long periods.  Times have changed for the better.

We are off to celebrate with our 15 year old grandson tonight for his birthday.  The water table is level with the surface of the land out there so I will need my wellies to walk in to the house.  The land is dead flat so there is nowhere for the water to run away.  We will all still enjoy ourselves.

Wet, wet, wet

I hope you all enjoyed Christmas Day, wherever you were.  Our family came to us about 7am to open presents before the rest of the day's festivities, a lovely day made special by the excitement of the small children.  The rain did not dampen our spirits one little bit - we were safely inside.  The day was very wet and it continued today.  We went for a bit of a walk at the Botanic Gardens.  The lagoons are well up, covering the causeway, but not as high as yesterday afternoon.

The revolting water weeds have been washed down quite a way, but we need a much bigger flood to get them over the road and out to the mouth of the river.

This is looking in the other direction

I love the waterfall, really rushing in this weather

A misty view of the Gardens - the rain was getting quite heavy when I took this.

This Mackinlaya flower head is poking out of the Eungella Cloud Garden.  It will turn into beautiful deep blue berries in another month or so.

There are roads flooded all round us, some of the inland places will be cut off for several weeks yet, then there is 40 degree heat and bushfire warnings in Western Australia , as well as snow warnings in Tasmania.  We do live in a large country!!

Fabric page from Lise

 This is my December page from Lise in Norway - her explanation of how she did it is shown below.  Click on the phots to enlarge for the detail.  they are lovely.

She added this postcard as well, with the explanation written on the back.

I alway thought Willy Wagtails only ate small insects, but this one was having a lovely time with a small skink, eventually ate the lot I think.  Jock and I were standing very still, but a walker came from the other direction so the bird flew away, still with the skink in its beak.  I was amazed how still Jock stayed.

This photo is a close up of the pink cassia - Cassia Javanica - Blogger won't load the other photos of the tree at present - perhaps later.  The tree makes a beautiful show at this time of the year.

Now I need to run away and make a few more preparations for Christmas, which has now been moved to our house - too wet at our son's place.  The forecast is for somewhere between 200 and 500 mls rain over the next three days - I hope they are wrong!  We will have fun anyway and this may be better than the white stuff in the northern hemishpere.  Have a wonderful Christmas wherever you are.

Yeeaaah - my camera is working!

My grand daughter Hannah came to visit yesterday and I was able to take photos again!!!  The problem turned out to be a flat battery - not the AA batteries which I periodically replace, but a tiny disc controlling the date/time stamp! Bill finally found it, thank goodness.  I had been backwards and forwards through the manual umpteen times and had never found anything about this one............grrrr.  Now I guess I can take another 1000 orso photos before it has to be replaced again.

Hannah decided the tree needed even more stuff on it - I think it is grossly overdecorated, but the kids love it - that is wht matters.

Then it was on to icing the cake.  Hannah had lots of fun rolling out the marzipan and then the icing and measuring and helping me to put it all on the cake.  She doesn't like fruit cake, but she was happy to sample some of the left over icing.  She loves helping me in the kitchen, hope she continues to think cooking and cleaning up is good as she gets older.

After that, she wanted to have another go at the sampler she is making of the stitch variations on my Bernina.  She is getting more proficient with the foot pedal, so maybe she will be a bit more creative later.

These are a few Christmas decorations I have made - and I will have to come back to tell you the link to follow to make the birds.  I forgot to write it down and I can't look stuff up on the web while I am in the middle of a post - I know, I should learn, but somehow I haven't!

Aha, I have checked out Geninne's Art blog:  When you get there, scroll down to Tuesday 14 December for a wonderful tutorial on how to make them - much better than mine are.  The fabric stars are much paler than the picture makes them look.  I am not doing any more till I get some new glasse.  Hopefully that will solve lots of problems.  I really can't see to sew closeup stuff at present - my optometrist says my eyes are fighting each other when I try to look closely at things because I have an astigmatism in my right eye and need a prism in my lens.  I think in a roundabout way this is good news - he hadn't bothered with the prism for the last script as my left eye wasn't doing anything.  I suspect the lucentis injections are finally making some improvement in the vision of my left eye - isn't that a wonderful Christmas present!  Now I just need to get my new glasses back before Christmas, that will be even better. 

A post withut photos

My camera is not talking to me at present and I can't work out what is wrong, but I suspect I will need to take it to a technician to have it looked at.  This is NOT a good time of year for anything like that, they are all in holiday mode and probably shutting down completely for at leat two weeks after Christmas.  You don't realise how much you use it till it is not there.

Our grandson Hamish turned five today - a very big day in his life as he was then old enough to be able to go to the children's workshop at the Botanic Gardens!  he and his older brother Alexander made some lovely christmas decorations, now hanging near their tree at home.  We have just returned from having dinner with them, we had to admire the Christmas lights they have strung on their windmill - they look lovely, a windmill makes a wonderful shape and looks like a tree at night.  Of course I can't show you what it looks like ........grrrrr....

I have been making a few Christmas decorations myself, and at last I have made two cakes.  I have cut up fruit for the first boiled plum pudding, so I am starting to get my act together for Christmas.  The grandchildren have overloaded the tree with every piece of tinsel and bauble they could find, but they had heaps of fun doing it and they think it looks lovely so that is all that matters.

The rain has gone away for the moment and the heat has arrived in a big way. We had to cancel the Carols in the Gardens, the ground is so soaked that people could not possibly sit on it.  Of course, the sun has been drying it out so Dale, our curator, is most upset, but the storms are getting closer to us all the time and we would only need a couple of millimetres to have a lake instead of a lawn!  There have been massive hailstorms in south east Queensland, with over 70,000 homes blacked out early tonight.  I am glad that is not us.
I will try to take some photos tomorrow with Bill's camera, this is frustrating.