The long and the short of it.

Some primal fibre someplace in my being is vibrating in harmonic sympathy with the turn of the seasons. As I sit here I imagine that some distant Celtic ancestor could not possibly imagine that a future descendant of theirs would not be painted blue and engaged in sacred ritual on this day. Timed by the movement of a shadow cast by a great stone monolith torches are lit and howling painted deadlocked tribe call out to natural forces as real to them as the air they breath.
So should you feel the sudden urge to run around in a forest it is probably a similar ancestral memory stirring, happy Solstice.
(Send photos)

Installing fiberglass wool roof insulation

I spent Saturday crawling and wriggling around in a friend’s roof helping to install insulation. It is dangerous and difficult being both physical and mental torture. The air quickly becomes filled with millions of minute glass fibres that itch and burn on your skin and are most probably carcinogenic or lead to silicosis. You have to take immaculate care to only weight the joists otherwise you would wreck the plaster ceiling which is only made from paper and chalk after all. The trusses that make up the roof confine and limit movement and the reduced vision through the foggy goggles made for head banging back wrenching fun. There are all the lights and electrical wiring waiting like punji sticks to electrocute you and whilst we wore masks and enclosed goggles to fend off the fibres we could see very little through the goggles and had to keep removing them and I am not sure how effective the masks were at doing anything other than helping to create a feeling of hot humid claustrophobic enclosure. I have thrown out the fibre contaminated clothing including my underpants. The beers afterwards were well deserved.
Sunday we went to a friends place for a BBQ which was infinitely more relaxing.
We are now counting down the hours before we fly away on a holiday to Port Douglass – Just north of Cairns, Far North Queensland, more commonly named “EF EN Que”

What is it with the Japanese and raw eggs?

We exist now

Until last night if you used Google Maps to define your world there were no streets in Australia. However in an orgy of asphalt every road in the entire continent was constructed last night. See, there are now roads.
Suppose we'll have a road toll now.

Pincushion Hakea

We have a Pincushion Hakea (Hakea laurina R.Br.) growing in our garden, ours is still a small shrub, now about 2 years old, that has not flowered yet. This is the tree it seeded from in a garden in Rosedale. I think it has one of the most spectacular flowers I have ever encountered.