Crazy dog

 I finally managed to get a (slightly blurry) photo of Jock carrying his precious rabbit around.  He is now seven and was given this toy when he was only a  few months old.  he just adores it and carries it out to greet any visitors.  He also gives it a very hard shaking whenever he is annoyed with a passing noisy truck!  We are all amazed it has lasted all this time.  he has quite a few soft toys and he loves them all - he has never tried to pull them apart, which all our previous dogs would certainly have don within a few days.  Rabbit has needed some significant repairs over the years but just from normal wear and tear.

 My ardisia has been flowering magnificently this year.  I will need to prune it heavily shortly so there are no seeds on it.  Jock loves to eat them and some of the gardening books say they are poisonous so we will take no chances. At least the seeds on this variety are a boring black so I don't feel so bad.  I would be very cross about missing the glorious red berries on the common ardisia.

 The ruellia has gone on flowering for simply ages also, I think the plants are telling us something about the dry times we are continuing to experience.

Ditto the Whitfieldia, though this lovely shrub has bursts all through the year. The flowers last well in a vase also so that is an even greater plus.
The wind is still blowing and we have had no rain so I need to do some hand watering to keep my shrubs going.  I had just been watering the pot plants when I realised some of my garden beds were none too happy.  I am cutting back a lot of rubbish so I can get at the parts I want to mulch.  Thank goodness the hot weather has not really started here yet - has been much hotter down south - should be the other way round! Cheers till next time

It has been far too long!

I really have no excuse for being absent for so long, though I was having technical problems with my computer software for a while. Then I just seemed to keep running out of time as I am pretty slow at loading anything using my Magic software - and of course I need that to see!
So much has happened I am not sure where to begin.  We have been to Brisbane for me to be fitted with another artificial eye - looking just as good as the first one.  The socket apparently takes several months to settle down and this one is marginally larger than the previous one.  Thank goodness I won't need another one for at least three years, but I will need to go back annually for the eye to be cleaned and polished - that is a great excuse to take a holiday.
We had a lovely ten day break, visiting family and friends.  I did not even do any shopping, apart from grocery shopping, but we had lots if luscious morning and afternoon teas and lunches and dinners out - I must have done much more walking than I thought as the scales said I had only gained one kilo after all of that!
We visited my sister at Buderim after a few days in Brisbane.  While there we finally got to visit the beautiful Maroochy Botanic Gardens.  These gardens have been carved out of natural woodland and are just so peaceful.

 As you can see, the paths wind through thick scrub

 There are some brilliant sculptures placed within the area

This was one of my favourites.  I could have stayed for hours but of course there was not time, and the weather was quite showery, so we headed for cover.  Actually, we were extremely lucky with the weather all the time we were away.  South East Qld had been having some fairly unpleasant weather, but we did not get caught with rain or high wind whenever we wanted to go out at all - quite amazing.
Just before we went to Brisbane, the Garden Friends had an excursion to Rowallan Park, an environmental reserve which was gifted to the local Scouting Association about 60 years ago.

 It is a beautiful area with a lot of history attached to it and is only a twenty minute drive north of Mackay, so is very easily accessed by lots of community groups.

 This lovely gum tree stands just near where we had our lunch.

This is the drive in, with many sites available for camping - our boys spent lots of happy weekends there when they were scouts and now our grandchildren are following on.
My poor garden has been sadly neglected, but  despite this, the shrubs have flowered.

 The birds just love this Calliandra, which has finished flowering now, but I couldn't resist showing you the photos of it in its glory.

 My swamp orchids had to be tied up as the wind was blowing them over.  They looked wonderful.  Apparently there used to be acres of them in flower in swamps neare Caloundra on the sunshine Coast sixty years ago - though sadly not in the places we visited as I had never seen them till they were planted in our botanic gardens.

 I finally persuaded Bill that this Happy Plant had to go - I wanted it gone after the tree fell over about six years ago - it was only about a metre high then!  Look what happened, obviously the soil or something must have been what it wanted!

This is the after photo - actually that was taken about three weeks ago and I should take another one as there are about ten shoots growing out of the stump!  I will definitely be pruning it severely in future to make sure it stays a reasonable size.
Bill purchase some tree loppers after we saw them demonstrated on Gardening Australia and they are the best thing ever!  Now I can get the garden back into shape without having to wait for Bill's strength to chop back the shrubs.  Everything has got so overgrown in the last couple of years, we really need to cut back to waist height, then fertilise and add compost and start again - provided we get some rain to water the plants.  That is not looking very promising as a very strong el nino event is forecast for this summer.  Hopefully we will get a few storms.
I had better sign off before I bore you too much. 

Crazy weather

No photos today, but I could not resist commenting on the crazy weather we appear to be having.  A week ago we had almost  record low temps for this area - and Stanthorpe in southern Queensland even had snow.  Mind  you the days were gloriously  sunny, even if a cold breeze was blowing, excellent tourist weather/
Now this week we are having almost record high temps for this time of the year, up to 25 degrees so it feels like spring is here.  Some parts of western Queensland have had absolute record temps for July - around 31 degrees.  I fear it will be a long, hot summer.  Hopefully there will be some good rain to replenish the water supply, especially for the farmers. 

Visitors

My sister was here visiting for 10 days, so of course we did lots of touristy things and generally had a wonderful time.  She brought the fine weather with her, though it also turned very cold and Barb had forgotten we can have cold weather so she had not brought enough warm clothes - but she survived.

 The Mackay Festival of Arts was on while Barb was here, opening with a concert under the stars with the visiting Queensland Symphony Orchestra string ensemble.  What a fantastic night that was - in the Botanic Gardens with an audience of around 2000!  We nearly froze, but we loved it.

 We went for several walks in the Gardens and I took this photo of an egret on one of them - I am quite thrilled, especially as about one second after I clicked, the egret found something to eat and moved like greased lightning.

 Further on in the Gardens we saw this cheeky scrub turkey  eating ripening bananas.  It is a male, but fortunately it is not breeding time so it will not be trying to build a mound and move all the garden mulch a couple of hundred metres to where he thinks he wants it.  I have never seen one in the Botanic Gardens before, but home gardeners hate them as they dig up all the young plants, making a dreadful, destructive mess.

 We made the most of the sunshine, driving north to Airlie Beach and Shute Harbour in the Whitsundays.  This is a photo of Shute Harbour, with lots of very large yachts moored.

 Back in Airlie Beach the water was a bit more protected.

 We were all wearing slacks and long sleeved jumpers with no desire to take anything off, but these hardy souls were sunbaking around the lagoon which has been built  there.  It is very crowded in the summertime and is a great asset for the area.

 Barb went home yesterday and Jock is missing her!  She used to have a banana for breakfast every day and Jock pleaded for a piece every day as well!

My cleaning lady brought a present for Jock this morning - a soft toy with a squeaker from the op shop.  He had us all in stitches, running round the house with the toy in his mouth.  He kept it beside him all morning, letting us all know it was his!  he is quite amazing with soft toys, not tearing them to pieces as our previous cattle dogs would have done.
Barb drove me all round the place while she was here - we did over all the shops, not really buying anything, but just getting to all sorts of places I can no longer access on my own.  We had a lot of fun, but now I have a large amount of office work to catch up on so I had better get started.

Some colour in the garden

One of the advantages of living in the tropics is that there is still a lot of colour in the garden even in winter - or what is supposed to be winter!

I

 I have pots of bedding begonias all round the garden.  I love them as they keep on flowering for months on end and always look so cheerful.  When they finally succumb to wet feet they are easily replaced.

 The nodding violets have also been flowering for months.  Bill downloads all my photos for me and he never edits them so you see all the background rubbish because I can't crop them - or I haven't yet worked out how to without my photo editing programme which will not work on this computer unfortunately.

 The zygocactus on the back verandah has been flowering its socks off, but the couple in the greenhouse are only just starting to flower now.  I am not sure what the difference is, but we are enjoying them for longer.

I had to take this photo last night - an improvised wind shield!!!  We have been having very strong winds which interfere with cooking on the BBQ more than somewhat.  I was cross that Bill had not disposed of the cartons when we purchased three new office chairs, but he knew there was a reason why - he can always find a reason to hoard everything!
The wind is still almost gale force today, with occasional showers, but the forecast for rain earlier in the week was wrong.  The three day show was held in brilliant sunshine - really great for those who wanted to attend.
Now I had better get some lunch.

Better late than never

I have been trying to do this post for several days but at last I am here!  The Friends of the Gardens finally made an excursion to a local beach an hour's drive north of Mackay.  The day was fine and the wind was not too strong so we were all happy.

 A friend took most of these photos.  This is a blue tiger butterfly feeding on snakeweed flowers.  We get huge swarms of these butterflies in the Gardens quite often, they make a lovely show.

 We had a park ranger in the group, who said this is the case of a cicada larva.

 He also identified this gorgeous tiny bat as a northerrn tube nosed bat, it would fit in the palm of your hand easily.

 There were a couple of young children in the group so John was explaining to them how the hooks on the legs of this caterpillar, one of the swarming locust varieties, work.  i would like him to have killed it then, but i don't think he did!

 Just showing you what some of the vegetation looked like

 There were quite a few melaleucas flowering

 One minute you are in dense scrub, then a few steps further on you break through to the beach!

 Of course we had to eat after all the walking! The Seaforth Progress Association has erected some wonderful BBQ shelters and picnic tables for everyone to use - they even have lights so can be used at night.

There were two of these lovely Burdekin ducks wandering round and round the shelter, obviously hoping someone would throw them some bread.  Usually they are quite shy, but not this pair - sorry there is only one in the photo.

The weather continues to be quite crazy and still not cold - or not for most people anyway.  Minimums have made it down to 14, which is much higher than the maximums I have been reading on the weather chart for Tasmania!

How I see the world

I thought you may like to see images of the technology that lets me read and be able to communicate with the world.

This is my computer with the 30 inch screen which has a very high definition.  I can change the colours on t he screen, but for reading text I usually have yellow text on a brown background.  The keyboard is a special one to go with the software and when I want to look at photos I can press a button and the screen has normal colours.  Photos do look rather strange in the colour scheme above!  There is a very convenient wheel on the left side of the keyboard which allows me to magnify or decrease the size of what I am viewing.  There are also lots of other buttons to change bits around which I have never really learned how to use - probably because I am comfortable with what I am doing.  You learn what you need, then get lazy!  I have learned to do  a lot of scrolling however as what you are seeing in the screenshot above is only half the page.  Bill goes crazy trying to whiz across the page but I have got quite used to it.  Fortunately I was always a fast reader.

This next gadget is my wonderful portable scanner called a Zoomax.  It fits in my handbag so I can take it to the library and continue with my voluntary work in the history room there.  As well as magnifying the tesxt you can change the background colour to the yellow which is showing here, or reverse the background - white text on black background.

I don't often use this facility, but I can plug the Zoomax into the AV on the TV so it really magnifies then.  I can also take a snapshot  to capture a piece of information like a phone number which I have looked up in the directory and I can save till I have dialled the number.

Lastly, here is the scanner which sits on my kitchen table and which I use every day.  So far I only use pretty basic operations on it, but there are all sorts of different operations available if my eyesight deteriorates.  I do the crossword each morning while having breakfast and that is an interesting exercise.  I am reading a vertical surface while writing on the horizontal surface below - sometimes takes a few seconds to locate where I should be writing!  I also never see a whole crossword so I need to remember a bit more - and my brain is not always working as well as I would like it to.  They do say that mental activity keeps the brain working, but perhaps I am not doing enough some days!
Thank goodness for modern technology.
I had hoped to post some photos of an excursion planned for the Friends of the Gardens.  We should have visited a local beach last Saturday to see some interesting plants but the weather was against us - cold, wet and windy!  At least we received some useful rain - 19 mm on Saturday and 21 mm on Sunday. We have rescheduled for next Saturday so are hoping for fine weather then.  I am rather doubtful as the temperature is far too warm.  I am writin this dressed in a T shirt and shorts - and this is mid June!!!