Parrots of our garden

From time to time we get visitors to the garden, with variably-destructive outcomes.  Actually, the mad bird life here is something I particularly enjoy, and even the 6am Kookaburras make me smile.

The bottlebrush tree is particularly attractive to Rainbow Lorikeets (Swainson's Lorikeet).

 

Sulphur-crested Cockatoos prefer the magnolia, however I'm assured they'll try to strip the orange tree just before the fruit is ripe (so probably a month or so away).

Not sure what this tree is, but Australian King Parrots like it.  This is a girl - the flashy boy was squawking from a distant gum.

 

A new place (a month ago)

A month ago (or closer to two months ago), we moved into a new place.  It's older than the last few places we've lived in, but far more of a home - so it suits us to the ground.

It comes with shiny blue sky, and barely-visible solar panels:

A generous, well-lit back porch is perfect for those extended brew days.  Comes with convenient water supply, power, and drainage.

Of course, these photos were taken before we actually moved in - but the lazy is too strong in me to take more at the moment.

The decent garage holds all of our beer paraphernalia, and bicycles.

Finally, we have a back yard and vege garden to play in.  We've been missing those things since we left NZ in 2008.

 

Among other things, the garden has a passionfruit vine, but it's yet to produce fruit.  Flowers are nice, though.

Graduation

Finally got around to doing the graduation thing - video available here, courtesy of Massey University and the power of internets.

 

  

Kate made a fabulously awesome graduation cake - absolutely appropriate, given the Sheep of Destiny's resemblance to chondrodysplastic Texel sheep (barrel-chest, wide-based forelimb stance, etc).  More spectacular cakes are available to view/order at her website, woohoo cakes.

 

Mobility: We have it.

Hyundai i30 SX hatchback, 2.0L, 5-speed manual. We finally have it, and are very happy with it.

Stuff!

The joy of having stuff.... Our junk finally arrived from Oregon - but of course now we need somewhere to put it (unsurprisingly, our 2-bedroom studio doesn't have that many places to store things). We're impressed with the packing/moving company - nothing was damaged.

The only this better than getting stuff is unpacking stuff. Also, building a wall of packing paper.

Randomly, I finally have a plant. He's called Mr. Brainley, pictured below alongside is favourite tequila.

Here's our resident blue-tongued lizard, being relatively photogenic:

More furniture!

A most exciting day yesterday - the rest of our furniture arrived! No longer do we sleep on the floor:

We also have a matching chest of drawers to hide thing in. Clothes, mostly.

Additionally, we now have a dining table - with chairs. The dining suite has replaced the chairs in the murder nook.

Old news: on the flight back from Iowa to Oregon (after sitting board exams), I made a lucky (or so it turned out) pathology scarf for the new resident at OSU: a really neat two-sided pattern from the Autumn '11 issue of my favourite online knitting magazine.

Comfort strikes

After spending about a week in the hostels on campus at Camden, we were quite happy to move into a rental studio. Luckily, we found a place fairly close to campus that we could take pretty much immediately.

The kitchen is quite nice (and now the holes are filled with a fridge and microwave):

... But we were otherwise indoor-camping without any furniture to speak of:

Happily, this weekend we finally managed to buy some items of comfort - including an excellent mattress and a small lounge suite. Two recliners are currently nestled in what I like to call the "Murder-Nook":

We also have a sofa for when recliners aren't quite lazy enough:

Additionally, a bedroom suite and dining suite are arriving next week sometime - buying all this furniture has been an interesting experience. And the fact that we now own furniture polish.....

In slightly more social news, we caught up with Marjorie in Sydney, and Manfred is back on the town:

Beginning to catch up...

So... Yeah. There's been a huge gap in 2011, mainly due to preparing for, sitting, and passing (!) ACVP board exams, then fleeing to Australia to start a new job. There's a bit of catching up to do.

Of course, there have been more socks - basic pattern with Zitron Trekking (XXL).

As part of the master plan to take all the brewing paraphernalia with us to Oz, we picked up a new burner - a bit sturdier than the last one, and it can boil a flamingo from 20 metres.

I finally finished the top/tunic thing I've been working on intermittently for the last couple of years - knitted in lace-weight alpaca, the pattern was made up on the fly.

More preparations for moving across the Pacific - since we were shipping the computer, we picked up a cheap laptop for Mort to use in the mean time. Sometimes packaging is nearly as entertaining as the content:

Horace!

This year, like last year, we were graced with the presence of Horace, the "dog vomit" slime mold. But this year I was quick enough to get photos of him/them over the three days of transition from plasmodial to sporangial phases (I think).

Ribbons

Mort worked his arse off yet again this year coordinating the local homebrew competition - so of course we entered. This time, we came away with three ribbons - a first and two thirds for various styles:

First went to Simon for a Dry stout:

A third place to the Weasel for a Weissbier (the same recipe as last year, but a different batch):

And a third place for Andrew with a delicious Eisbock:

Silent auction scarf

Apart from study, study, study, I'm still managing to get in a little knitting. Often as a reward between groups of journal articles. As part of a silent auction fundraiser for the local international veterinary student group, I knitted a double-sided pawprint scarf (about 1.7 m long) - learning how to do double-knitting in the process.

If we were moving to a cold climate, I totally would have made one for myself - probably not quite so necessary in Sydney, though.

Edit more than a year later: here is the print pattern I ended up using:


The leftovers turned into a very functional tea-cosy.

Below is Mort playing with his new beer gun, which lets him bottle carbonated beer straight from the keg without exposing it to oxygen - making the whole process quick and keeping the beer more delicious.