Friends, Fish and Wildlife

We had a visitor for the weekend, Steve's good mate Tony.  The boys planned a weekend of fishing, beer and reminiscing about past fishing adventures.  They had a couple of outings and were happy enough with their haul of skippy, orange wrass and something unidentified that looked like a big parrot fish.  It is to be noted that Tony caught the thumper skippy, a whopping 43 cm long!

 

Nice haul of big skippy and an orange wrass just for me because I think they are yummy!

 

 

Tony and his haul of fish.  He looks very proud.  

 

Good mates doing the awkward man hug thing for the photo.  Our daughter Michelle was very rude about this photo..... to quote... "Dad has his flanno tucked into his trackies - special occasion?"  Dreadful child. :-)

 

 Goodbye Tony, it was lovely having you to stay, come again soon. :-)

When Steve and Tony left for a early morning fishing trip, they stopped to take some photos of the fantastic mist over the water.  Doesn't it look gorgeous.  (mum, click on the photo and it will take you to a larger image if you don't already know that  xx)

In the meantime, house update.  Last week the rest of the house was delivered via another big truck.  Squillions of Pink Batts for the external walls and the roof space, doors, tiles, oven, skirting, dunnies, bath, you name it, it's here!!  Unfortunately now this means the house has to be locked up unless there is a tradie here working, so we can't wander around inside on our own.  Never mind, we just have a stickybeak when the workers are here.  

We are almost finished painting the outside of the house, another couple of determined effort days and I reckon it will be done.  Then we'll have a painting breather for a while and get back to the neglected vegie patch.

This is the natty little crane on the back of the truck for lifting the loads off.  It has a cool extension arm so the driver was manoeuvring the loads in between the verandah posts to put the stuff under cover.  I was watching very carefully to see if he scratched off any of the paint on the posts, but he was a deft handler and everything was left intact.  :-)

We popped into town last week and had great fun finally ordering our solid fuel heater for the house.  After much research we chose this one, a Saxon Walnut.  It's not too big, heats up to 17 squares, and it has a lovely bay window.  It has a fan to distribute the warm air and we paid extra for decorative mesh over the flue, which looks lovely.  Can't wait to use it!!  We've got so much cut wood piled around from the trees that were felled to make way for the house, it pleases me that we are using a renewable resource from our own property.  We've bought some blue gum seedlings to plant lower down the hill for our own woodlot later on.

Speaking of cut wood, isn't this interesting.  I took this photo the other day of these jarrah logs that Steve cut about 3 months ago.  I think that bright green ring that's developed is fascinating and very beautiful.

Steve was moving some logs the other day and came across this little fellow.  It's a young King's Skink.  They get to be quite big and can give you a bit of a shock!  This one was rather cute though, albeit rather cross to be disturbed.

 

 Spring is in the air and we are seeing a lot more birds again.  Our regular vegie patch guards are always around though, just love the Scarlet Robins.

The new bird find we were very excited about is this one, a Red-Tailed Black Parrot.  They aren't seen very often so we were thrilled to see this male and a female in the jarrah trees behind the house.  They are big birds and this boy was not at all happy with me walking near him to take a photo, his crest went up and he screeched and screeched at me!  If you click on the photo for the bigger image you can just see a hint of the red in his tail, it's not until they take off that the brilliant colour becomes apparent.

 A very blurry shot, but it was the best I could manage of this cross boy taking off. Look at that tail!

 Our broad beans have trillions and trillions of flowers on them, but they are not being pollinated so no pods yet.  I did a bit of reading and discovered that it's still a bit cold and also that bees are the primary pollinators of broad beans, so I was very pleased to hear the buzzing of bees around the flowers on warm and sunny Saturday.  There is a bee's bum hanging out the bottom of the flower if you look carefully, and hopefully it is pollinating that flower to turn it into a broad bean pod for us.