Designer Stubble

I've worn facial stubble for years. My approach to lawns is similar: I detest mowing.

In my youth I was a beard man -- a sixties whiskers bloke who could grow several different styles  of beard per year.

It was a hobby and I was good at it.

I hate shaving and in those days it was fur or hairlessness. There wasn't any  perennial three-day-growth in betweeness allowed.

Men don't know how lucky they are to live in the 21st century with the de riguer option of wearing stubble without being marked down for being a bum. (Women on the other hard may have to fight for the right.)

Despite your  bristles you will be  accepted in the very best company. It's macho not to shave and  you may even be a bit pretentious if you decide to grow a beard.

So enjoy. Stubble gardening is one of humanity's great  lifestyle choices. 

It celebrates hair where ever it may choose to appear. It's ecological and sustainable in a way that  Brazilian Waxes are not.

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The Winter Solstice is upon us.

While our cousins to the north gird themselves for Midsummer and their traditional  excuse  for Bacchanalia,  we in the Antipodes must make do in reverse. In the Southern Hemisphere  the Northern solstice approaches, the time at which the Sun is at its northernmost point in the sky, which usually occurs around  June  22 each year.

Where I am -- on June 20th here in the sub tropics -- the sun will rise at 6:35am and set at 5:02pm. (It will rise at 7:35am, an hour later, in Melbourne).  During the days that follow, 6.37 am will be the latest the sun will rise to my north east before jumping out of its night bed, bright eyed and bushy tailed,  earlier bit by bit. So by December 22nd, it will be up real early at 4:50am and breasting the horizon a long way to the south east.

Such are my days....

Since I spend so much time outside and I'm located in a sort of solar hub here on the seashore I appreciate the fact that my house faces north and any day I know that to my left and right reside west and east -- always. So any wind -- registered by my trusty albeit now tatty wind socks -- are self evidently coming from hither or yon.

For the first time in my life I can talk about prevailing winds and weather with the confidence that I have had coal face experience of the conditions under which I live.

Glass House Mtns viewed from Bribie Island

WillyWeather helps too. A garden rain gage is another handy tool.  In a while I'm sure I'll be able to tell you with reasonable confidence how strong the wind in blowing -- in knots.

But having ready access to the  openness of the sea where I can see for 50 km all about -- so flat leading off into the horizon --  ensures I have a vista tool second to none.

Cape Moreton 40 km away --which I can see on any visit to the local bayside -- is one of the wettest places in South East Queensland and  its tackling hook shape seems engineered to grab moisture from the Coral Sea/Pacific Ocean and shepherd it across the coast so that so much of it falls on the Glass House Mountains.

We seem in a swirl of weather whose pattern is different from the big city capital to our south.

So while weather and the length of the days spent out in it registers  with me , it is the tides that draw me into the wondrous syncronicity of it all. If I don't know what's happening with the tide -- whether its coming in or going out -- my daily routine can be mucked up big time. The tides rule the beach and 'the beach' is  a variable that depends on how much water has come ashore and how much of the sand is exposed for foot traffic.

And then when King Tide come ashore.... It is a sort of festival of possibilities as the inundation breeds so much promise for fisher folk and other critters alike.

In similar mode, the bird life here -- always abundant and various -- shifts with the seasons. While we get shore birds flying in from Siberia to troll our mud flats, local bird species seem to come visit and go away in sync with ecological markers -- fruiting and flowering of native flora especially.

So my backyard is an aviary. Any day we may be visited by up to  a dozen  different species --and that's because we offer water. Of course add seeds  to the menu -- which we don't do --  then the parrots would invade in plague numbers. (Best to wait and  let them visit when the malaleucas and grevillias bloom) But go to the shore line or investigate the swamps....and the species mix changes sharply. And each wetland habitat seems to have its own customized mix.

So when out and about you go looking for what you know could be there: Sea Eagles near the river mouth, Black Swans on the north lake, Pelicans on the sand bar ...and maybe (always you gotta look for the off chance) Jabirus on the southern wetlands...and my favorite: Black Cockatoos in the Coastal Banksias.

When wading the waters: flying like birds submerged -- Estuary Stingrays and BanjoRays.

                       

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If you want to bathe in style, bathe in a tent.

Having moved residence to a place that does not boast a bath tub my often pained body yearns for a good soak in a hot bath. Haven't had one of those for many months.

What to do? 

Retrofit the bathroom at much unaffordable expense?

Go without? "Please, no," said I.

So we decided to 'put in' and outdoor bathroom.  Not as easy as it appears, this plumbing for bathing business outdoors.

Undaunted,we opted to  proceed by a cheap route. (Hot tubbing and spa baths are not cheap routes).

1. Bought an inexpensive bath tub.  (Tooltip: Try before you buy. Sit in and stretch out. After previously being sentenced to stubby bend-your-knee bathtubs with shallow sides  you value roominess.)
2. Spent  a lot of time hunting down the outlet connectors so that the outlet/plug gauge ran down to 13 mm hose fitting. And the hot and cold water had a switch valve at the bath end.
3. Bought a camping duo shower tent (pictured above). 
4. Cannibalised a couple of garden hoses and attached them to the outdoor tap and the laundry hot water outlet (unused as we launder in cold water).
5. Raised the bath above ground by resting it on sand bags. Plenty of sand here.
6. Connected the outlet to a garden hose to  harvest  the grey water created by our ablutions.
7. Turned on the taps...
8. Used a space blanket to keep in the bathwater heat
9. Bathed.

Ah: hot water bathing...

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

--Sylvia Plath

What pleasure. No better relief for all that all-over, non specific, crippling connective tissue pain I am so very familiar with. Guaranteed. I have gone so long without this respite and the glorious feeling of soaking while heating is such a pleasure. 

There is nothing like a hot bath. Nothing.

And when outdoors, you can open up the flaps and commune with nature...and nature can commune with you.

When the wind blows cold, you're inside, easily flapped up and cosy. *

A bathtub with a view.

If you want to bathe in style, bathe in a  tent.

*Afterthought: If I seal the vents maybe I can make up  a sort of steam room, a sweat tent-- like the Native American Sweat Lodge. by using a steam wallpaper stripper for extra moist heat.



A Crow sweat lodge.--Museum of the American Indian

My Boutique Note Taking : "Once heard, my dear Copperfield, make a note of."

WC Fields as Mr Micawber

The Moleskine

Since I use Google Chrome as my browser I am much taken with the Extensions available for any number of online tasks.

In normal everyday activity I rely on my Moleskine  which, while significantly dearer than most pocket note books, is without doubt the very best portable form I've ever used for out and about note taking.

So while I hand write my scribbles of this and that and standardly use the soft cover Moleskine to plot out my Mindmapping  -- a practice I am fortunately dependent upon -- there are times that I want to register my note taking online.

This is where a few Chrome Extensions are of use.

• For annotating pages to remind me about significant content I use Note Anywhere. I note my bookmarks with Note Anywhere, for instance.
• Since I'm not a calendar driven person I use RemindMe for upcoming events or schedules.
• And for my What is to be done lists I'm experimenting with Todoist...

This is not about being obsessive as I have cognitive issues as a consequence of my chronic illness. To be able to engineer some measure of technical control over my existence -- to plan what you do so that there is method in the mental mess -- is a discipline I am absolutely dependent upon in order to live a less handicapped life.

To be able to note down any odd or sod of information -- when you know that your mind won't do it for you -- is sort of empowering.

VIDEO Bicycling Culture can rule us all if we try: Copenhagenizing Beachmere

Where I live now -- in Beachmere -- the asphalt roads are broad with generous two metre wide strips along each side for bike riding. People walk these strips too in preference to the contours on the footpaths next door.  The foot or bike traffic along these pathways goes either way as they are broad enough to allow for two way traffic.

So Beachmere is a bike and scooter town. Every kid has a skate board or micro scooter or BMX bike and to or from primary school it is push wheel transit. The skatebowl is the juniors social hub.

Because of the significant number of retirees  here another primary user of the bikeways are electric scooter users -- people who have conditions that inhibit their walking mobility.

So on an evening you'll see aged electric scooter owners taking their dogs for a walk, battery driven,  just as early in the mornings the streets are occupied by the get fit cycling crowd.

Some women in their seventies who I know peddle their tricycles to the dog park each morning with their mutts on board.

That Beachmere is only 6 kilometres long is the main drawback and the two roads in are not cyclable -- unless you want to die: narrow, pot holed, with high car speeds allowed.

Within the town, these special conditions (and no cop shop) encourages cyclists not to wear helmets -- so a lot of us don't.

But  the rich cycle  culture of Beachmere -- a product only of the way the roads were built and the flat terrain-- suggests what could be possible if a more conscious program of cycle friendliness was engineered as a matter of course across the urban envionemnt.

Like in Copenhagen. This great video says it all:

Cycling Copenhagen, Through North American Eyes from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

To live perchance, not in Bendigo but Gympie!

There I was  doing my homework. Industriously researching the geography, sociology, economy and ecology of Central Victoria with a mind to reside there.

As I reviewed and referenced by dint of my web browser, I honed in on specifics that seemed to serve me -- "us" really as it is a plural thing: me and the missus -- as working criteria.

Before I could say "Eureka Stockade, I have found myself in Bendigo (or Ballarat)!" we realized that Queensland had its own Bendigo (or Ballarat) by the name of Gympie.

View Larger Map

Gympie isn't anywhere as big as these southern cities.: 14,000 inhabitants compared to over 80,00 plus for either of the two Vic locations.

But if Gympie was in Victoria it would be utilized and gentrified  the same way that Ballarat and Bendigo have been by the Victorians. On a railway line -- the urban train network -- 2 and a half hours from the Brisbane CBD; in the Mary River valley with a gold seam that had been mined  since  the 19th century.

The irony is that despite the analogies, Gympie is a forgotten niche primarily because real estate and settlement in South East Queensland is obsessed with the sea. Harvey Bay to the north; and  Noosa and  the Sunshine Coast to the south east, attest to the fact the invading sticky  treacle of  development dollars have simply passed Gympie by so that the lifestyle dollar could purchase  ocean views.

In the nineties for a time, Harvey Bay was the fastest growing region in Australia. To get to it the retiring grey hairs trekking north for the sunshine had to pass through Gympie in their quest;  but the property largesse seems to have missed Gympie.

So housing -- good housing --  is cheaper than in Brisbane.

Three trains per day -- including the fast Tilt Train -- to Brissie or back -- and a lot of excellent assets, as country towns go, Gympie is an attractive proposition.

While the Mary River floods -- as rivers are want to do -- it is a river that still runs free after we all beat the state government and stopped the dam at Traveston.being built. So the local, unique and protected  lung fish, Mary River Turtle, and  Mary River Cod Fish still have a show of surviving in the catchment.

So the move, if it eventuates, has historical context. With the Traveston dam campaign still  fresh, just to the north,forming the eastern shoreline of Harvey Bay,   Fraser Island was saved from loggers in  another great victory for the Australian environment movement.

Is it time to move south from Sub Tropical Brisbane to Ballarat or Bendigo?

I live in Brisbane...and it's not the first time I've lived in Brisbane.

I lived in Brisbane -- during another existence -- October 1972 to January 23rd, 1974. I lerft as the 1974 drowned the city.

After that stint, I returned to Melbourne. and more of less stayed there until 1982 when I moved on:  to Newcastle (1982), to Sydney (1983), back to Melbourne(1984)...and then to Brisbane (1985 - today).

And now, because of the confluence of economic, familial, psychological,  social and physiological forces I have the option -- albeit a schematic idea in our heads -- to move back south.

But since a shift into Melbourne urban real estate is expensive -- and Helen  is keen on a regional  existence anyway --  the preferred option is to move south to the Ballarart or Bendigo region in Central Victoria. some 1800 kilometres away from where we are now..

So I'm doing my virtual homework exploring Bendigo and mapping the properties of  Ballarat. -- locus of the Victorian Gold Fields of the 19th century and the site of the Eureka Rebellion.

So we must fly a rebel flag,
As others did before us,
And we must sing a rebel song
And join in rebel chorus.
We'll make the tyrants feel the sting
O' those that they would throttle;
They needn't say the fault is ours
If blood should stain the wattle!

--Henry Lawson.

I gotta say that I like what I see.

Of course the two cities are great competitors -- see: Bendigo is so totally cooler than Ballarat  -- and   it is a hard call, especially from memory (as I have spent time in the district) and by dint of online research.

That we do have a choice is delightfully prescient  in the way we can project our lifestyle preference onto one location. But the challenge is to carefully weigh up what we think is important and what we want from a place to live.

What is important?

Well there's the rub: how do you rate one place against another?

Here are some criteria I've been working from. Not quite in order of significance but factors nonetheless:

• Direct fast rail service to Melbourne with a generous timetable.
• Easy access cross / intra city  transport options -- walk, bike or bus/tram.
• Lower house prices than Brisbane
• Rich local cultural and political  (eg:option of a SA branch) life
• A local  boxing gym ( eg: Lynden Hosking , six time Australian boxing champion, three times Oceanic champion and 1996 Commonwealth champion runs a boxing gym in Bendigo)
• Generous domestic heating options.
• On the lee side of the bushfire threat (ie:  south, east or south east of an urban centre at some distance from combustible bush or grasslands.)
• A local university campus.
• A population under 100,000 residents.
• Access to an exciting hinterland: (eg: the Grampions, the Great Dividing Range, lakes and rivers to fish, etc)
• A good local general hospital/health services

After the sub tropics, cold is a factor to consider. Winter  can be a tad coolish down south and my first winters on returning there in 1974 after being in Brisbane were  very hard to adapt to.

While I'm a city boy (Melbourne bayside) , my forbears come from the North East of Victoria -- that's north of Ballarat and Bendigo around Yackandanadah and Corryong.  So I'm not going ancestrally home. But then a distant relative of mine, a leader of the  Cornish Association of Victoria,   represented the Labor Party for Ballarat  in the Vic parliament , 1980-1990 -- John Mildren.

I still have cousins in the district and my father's family -- not North Easters but  Irish working class (originally from transported convicts) -- always staid at Daylesford guesthouses through the 1930s, partaking of the mineral waters. That was my first introduction to the region as before that, a 'holiday' was staying on relatives' dairy farms in Yackandandah or Lang Lang.

Sop I'm casting my thoughts southward..

These lines from  Judith wright's poem, South of My Days. have popped out of my head:

Oh, they slide and they vanish
as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror's cards.
True or not, it's all the same; and the frost on the roof
cracks like a whip, and the back-log break into ash.
Wake, old man. this is winter, and the yarns are over.
No-one is listening
South of my days' circle.
I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.

Next step: I come visit and will be in Victoria this year during the coldest month of July..

Making the most of a pork pie hat.

One of my ambitions -- of which there are indeed many -- was to adorn my cranium with a pork pie hat.

 I can now report that I have achived what I set out to do and am now wearing -- even as I compose this tract -- a hat that can be classified as pork pie.

A pork pie hat looks like a pork pie crust when viewed from above.

But with the current fashion for Trilbys and Fedoras, pork pie hats are seemingly passe except for some archaic jazz musoes and Buster Keaton -- now very much dead.

So when visiting the southern climes this month I ventured into City  Hatters  under Flinders Street Railway Station in Melbourne where my da always bought his hats  and grabbed the first officially labeled pork pie hat that appealed to me.

Much taken with my purchase I have been wearing my new hat with much savoir-faire  these last 5 days since I first placed it upon my head at that magical moment just shy of 2pm on a Saturday arvo.

It was love at first sight.

I am not a felt hat person  outside the few cold months of mid year  -- although I have notched up much head wear and tear under Akubras and Kangol caps as well as the the occasional beanie. This far norther they are too sweaty for my tender psyche housed below.

So I wanted  my embrace of pork pies to be  one of meshy texture which allowed for cooling breezes  across my short haired dome.

With such comfort and coolness above my ears I am now dressed and in character --  being significantly pork pie-ed any time I am out and about.

My marriage to the hat of my choice soon proved to cross gender boundaries and I seem to have purchased a womens hat. While pork pie hats were originally  an item of ladies attire,  men embraced the style after the turn of the 19th century in time for Buster Keaton to wear a very flat version in his silent films.But my hat was built and designed  for a woman's noggin . (So it is soft and not at all abrasive to my tender skin. It even puts my underpants to shame in that regard -- that is if I were to wear them on my head which I hardly ever do)

So I am cross dressing -- albeit ever so secretly as well as quite publicly-- and no  one would suspect that I in fact, despite my brash machismo, have a penchant for ladies millinery .

A Pork Pie Crust.                                             A Pork Pie Hat (felt)

Dave Riley is so pleased that he has handed down his Summer Fedora to his one and only son who seems to have now nailed it to his own head. Dave is convinced he has a 'pork pie' head and is a pork pie person and celebrated the discovery by watching both French Connection I and II as he is a Popeye Doyle -- as well as a Clete Purcell and Buster Keaton -- sort of guy.(That is if he was fictional which he is not.You lucky peoples can interact with the real thing).No matter what happens to a pork pie person they always retrieve their hat after fisticuffs, tumblings while drunk, or in cicrmstances of a big blow .

A millinery warning:

Verna: What're you chewin' over?
Tom Reagan: Dream I had once. I was walkin' in the woods, I don't know why. Wind came up and blew me hat off.
Verna: And you chased it, right? You ran and ran, finally caught up to it and you picked it up. But it wasn't a hat anymore and it changed into something else, something wonderful.
Tom Reagan: Nah, it stayed a hat and no, I didn't chase it. Nothing more foolish than a man chasin' his hat. 

Millers Crossing ( a film with much hat style)