So good to be Home

I'm sitting in the dining area of my parents'-in law place. There are young magpies begging for food in a gum tree about 10m away.


(ours have white backs unlike the northern or western version. Pic taken in the Exhibition Gardens in Melbourne.)

Magpie Dad carols a little, making up for the ugliness of his kids' whining.


There's rainbow lorikeets winging past, screaming their apparent joy to the world. They stop and sit in a tree and start squabbling. (Pic taken at Tooronga station.)

A couple of wattlebirds are disputing territory. Some little whitter birds are whittering. There's gum trees (Eucalypts), sheoaks (Casuarina), wattle trees, hibiscuits (hibiscus) and melaleucas outside the window. I ignore the houses and the sound of traffic from the local major roads. They are peripheral.

My goodness, the sounds make me homesick for the place where I am!

Brienzersee

Two pics, nearly the same, taken from the train near Brienz, of the Brienzersee. Love the difference in colour!

Luzern 22 Sept 2009

A few pics from Luzern (Lucerne), Switzerland. Too far behind to do a travelogue!



Our feetses were very sore after this walk...





and we climbed lots of stairs too...



Not more stairs!

Austria - Salzburg

Last post for the nonce! Lots of photos to go but I've had enough for the moment.

I hopped on a train for a couple of hours yesterday and emerged in Salzburg. It was very interesting. I didn't go to Neuschwanstein as it was raining and what is the point of going to a fairy tale castle if you can't see the flaming thing? (actually if it was flaming, it would probably be visible even in the rain.)


(Excuse the wonkiness - I had walked about 25km in the three days before, this including 12km on Wednesday, and I've had enough of walking.)

I didn't do much running around singing about Maria or the hills being alive or even a little night music. I didn't even see the statue of Mozart. But I did see a fair whack of old Salzburg before it started raining.



Since it was being unpleasant and drizzling on and off, I took off back on the train to Munich. I managed to get lost by using the gopher holes that they use to go under streets and get into the underground railway lines. I popped up one road too late and ended up walking back to where I had tea by mistake!

Germany - Munich

Now that I have found a friendly net cafe that runs linux/Ubuntu boxes, I'm uploading some stuff and writing more blog posts up. I feel much safer using a linux box than a windoze box. I know the net can still have sniffers and things just waiting to steal my password but at least the box itself is unlikely to be infected with anything nasty. And I now have it working with an English keyboard, not a German one. And there's a couple of people with NO accent sitting next to me. We do get around.

So, Munich. Gosh I didn't have a good day the first day we were here. Want to hear the litany of disasters?

I couldn't connect to the internet in our 300 euro a night hotel. They charge a euro per 15 minutes after the first free 15 minutes in their business centre. 300 euros a night and no free wifi! Can't believe it. 60 euro a night places have free wifi. Crikey! This meant no looking up German words for please, thank-you, excuse me, etc etc.



No tea and coffee making facilities in the room either - you have to call room service for that. Now Nathan's work is paying for the room but y'know a 10 euro cup of coffee seems a bit overpriced. I went and bought an electric kettle for 30 euros instead.



A bird pooped on my pants, the lovely new pants that I had put on for the first time that morning.

I only had five hours sleep.



DH forgot to give me any cash. 5 euros does not get you very far when you have to buy some lunch with it.

I had been told that most people speak English, but most of the people I found didn't! Lots of pointing and hand flapping followed.

Oh there were other things but that will do!

I did find yarn in department stores. Nice sock yarn and some souvenirs for people in SJ. I also saw a lot of interesting buildings, which you can see scattered through this post.

I went for a lovely walk in the Englische garden. It was soooo green.


And I found out why some boys were carrying surfboards in the middle of Munich.


(That's surfing on a standing wave at the start of one of the garden's rivers.)

France - Dijon

Dijon was a very different place to Toulouse. OK it is smaller but its centre ville is quite different in feel. I am sure that Toulouse's buildings are not as old as they appear but Dijon has a lot of classical French stuff. It was also about 10C cooler.



There was still columbage (I am probably spelling that wrong), which is what I'd call Tudor



The main street had the flags of local duchies, etc, flying. Sorta odd given that I thought France got rid of all that a couple of hundred years ago. But the effect was great.




We had 24 hours in Dijon. It was very pleasant, though cooler than we had expected (but Toulouse was warmer than expected too). I think I preferred Toulouse, though I didn't have to deal with anything like getting us from A to B in the living sense, getting food, etc, etc. We just walked or rode or took PT to town. In Dijon we were on our own. It was still verra nice!

France - leaving Toulouse

(This post has pics this time around!)

After a very busy but happy few days in Toulouse, we headed off to Dijon. We had to get up before dawn (as did our host) and the train was well on its way by the time the sun got out of bed.



The train was very pleasant and we had the carriage almost to ourselves for the first hour or two of the journey. This is first class.



The train also went super fast between Montpellier and Lyon. Gosh that was fab! 300km/h. Just a bit faster than I've ever been except in a plane of course.

Finally, six hours later, we arrived in Dijon. Cheers!

Munching in München

Well we made it safe and sound to München and gosh I cannot type on a German keyboard.

Our 300 euro a night hotel won't let us connect to the net. We don't even get coffee cups or anything. No pics cos this is not my machine.

Now I am off to find yarn shops. Tomorrow I am off to either that castle, Neuschwanstein?, or to Salzburg. Depends on when I wake up - the tour leaves at 9 whilst I can catch a train to Salzburg anytime.

It has taken me nearly 10 minutes to write this much.

Have fun!

France - cheers from Dijon

This morning we packed our bags and left Toulouse and our new good friends behind. I was sad to leave Toulouse but excited about seeing a new place!

We chose Dijon on advice of our Toulouse friends. Also we could get a train directly here but it did mean getting up at 6:30am on a Sunday morning after getting to bed after midnight.

My goodness, what a great choice!

I leave you with a few pics. On second thoughts, I won't cos we have low speed free wifi and it is baulking at the large pics. I can't upload them.

Cheers from Dijon!

Oooh la la! Toulouse!

On the 10th of September, we walked into town. Our plan was to hire Vélos but there were none left in the stands. So we walked.

Walking was good. Just as well. It is only a bit over 2km into the centre of town but we managed to walk more than 10km just wandering around looking at stuff (and today my feet are sore and Nathan's calves are complaining). We planned on getting velos back to here but umm, well it turns out that they don't like overseas credit cards (I can remember this being an issue in Paris not long after velibs were introduced there). But we survived, and at least it was not far to walk home!



We are fascinated by the narrow streets - they are not very wide at all. Cars park on one or the other or both or neither side (depending on the width), the narrow footpaths have green wrought iron barriers on them (presumably more to stop cars parking on the kerb and forcing peds to walk in the middle of the street even more than they do now), motorbikes, cars, bicycles and pedestrians are just all over the place. And the buildings are fascinating.



(I think that is the Canal du Brienne but I am not sure of the spelling or the French grammar but I know where to find it again.)



C'est fab! LOL



Today I hope to go back into town to find two yarn shops - we were only one road off them but one road is plenty far enough away! DH is not very willing to walk, and we need to do things like get stamps for postcards and fix up our I-94s, which the silly people in DFW airport did not take from us - they were running late getting us on the plane (that was fine, we were late too!) but did not do any passport stuff, unlike say LAX which wants your passport and takes the immigration card. We have to send off proof that we have left the US along with the card before we can get back into the States. Sigh. Oh and we need to book the next part of our train trip, which means deciding where we are going. 8-D

Ooh la la! Carcassonne!

Our host kindly drove us down to Carcassonne to look around the ancient walled town/fortress there. It was tres bon. (I seem to have lost the compose key I set up so I could do accents, etc. Ah, I've wrangled it back again.) C'est trés bon! Like really really bon. Trés fantastique!


(You really should click on all the photos in this post to see the bigger ones)

It was really interesting. I've never seen a walled town before - I've been to England but "only" saw ancient stone circles there, that sort of thing (which I loved seeing so don't get me wrong!). There are Roman parts, medieval parts and then the reconstructed parts. The Romans used small squared stones, the medieval parts are made of large, shaped stones and the reconstructed parts used very nicely squared off stones - they haven't had time to start dissolving in the rain.



I am not sure that I appreciated it as much as I could have. After all, I have absolutely nothing to compare it with. But it was totally fascinating.



We had a lovely afternoon walking around it, seeing it close up, being amazed by the tourist tat inside its walls - I guess that whilst the things sold may have changed, the shops inside have not changed all that much in the last hundred years or so that they have catered to tourist trade rather more than local rather. Cos oh yes, locals live there not just in the new town (ville basse) spread around the flanks of the hill.

Some linky love letter for my city

In a bit more than a month, we'll be flying to Oz to visit our Home. I hope it still feels like Home when we get there.



There's been a few articles in the Home newspaper that I read that I thought I would share with you.

Catherine Deveny's Things that say 'Melbourne' (even more than a big M)



and a piece on a new endangered species, keeping the bush natural, and we ain't talking trees and shrubs here....



A love-letter to the Yarra River (apparently its proper name is Birrarung.) Oh I look forward to seeing you, beautiful placid river. People might dak on you and call you horrid names but you are beautiful.



Of course I am looking forward to seeing family and friends and cats and the garden etc etc etc but I am also tied to the place itself. It is a part of me.

(Pics around the Melbourne CBD in 2006, when I last worked there. River pics show the Yarra in all her beauty)

Today's odd noise

Mating squirrels make the MOST bizarre noises!

Like someone clicking their tongue only sorta dully and making a brrrm brmm noise without the b and also a noise like a wheel spinning combined with the noise of a cat starting to chuck.

Or at least that I what I assume is going on, given that there is a black squirrel with its tail up and a normal coloured squirrel chasing it but not in the usual fashion of "get outta my territory!" where they don't get near each other... No I would say the black squirrel is saying "Catch me if you can!"

Much catching up to do. So many pictures, so little time!

To our neighbours

To our neighbours, who whenever they feel hot at night
(and I mean hot in the temperature sense)
Please, desist from smoking pot.
It really peeves your neighbours
who have to close their windows
and put the fan on
and hope that the disgusting smell
this time of SKUNK!
not perfume
passes
and that they won't awake
with a sore throat
from YOUR need to relax yourself
and share with your neighbours.

RAIN!

It RAINED yesterday and drizzled today. Rain! In May!

This list shows the average precipitation in inches and (mm) for San Jose, California, over the year:

January 3.2 (81.3)
February 2.8 (71.1)
March 2.6 (66)
April 1.0 (25.4)
May 0.4 (10.2)
June 0.1 (2.5)
July 0.1 (2.5)
August 0.1 (2.5)
September 0.2 (5.1)
October 0.9 (22.9)
November 1.2 (30.5)
December 2.0 (50.8)
Total: 15.1 (383.5)

(Scuse the formatting - can't be bothered writing HTML table code. Plus I think they say 2.5mm on average in June, July and August cos once in 10 years a thunderstorm dumps an inch of rain in one afternoon, then no more rain is seen for ages.)

Of course when I look at the local rainfall data, it says no rain fell at *all* in the last day. That is because it is stupid, IMO. I know rain fell cos I was out in it! There was water running off the pavements. There was water running out the storm drain into the creek. It was not coming from sprinkler systems. It may have only been 2mm of rain but it was enough to make me use my umbrella.

In hairing off looking for local rainfall data (which took over an hour, I might add plus an extra hour for a nice diversion into looking at the seismic faults around here and pics and lovely stuff), I discover that noone particularly cares how much rain falls in San Jose. Weatherunderground has lots of little local weather stations but I get the feeling many of these are quite recent as their data peters out before 2008 or 2007. I eventually found that sfgate has a list of rainfall totals for the current rain year and the last one too. SJ had 80% of its usual rainfall (12" rather than 15"). As far as I can tell, Campbell (where we live) gets less than 10" of rain a year on average, which makes me wonder how on earth they grew fruit trees here - this whole area was an orchard and canned and dried all sorts of fruits.

It just gives me the feeling that people here are just plain not interested in weather. They are used to the weather being unchanging for half the year and barely variable for the rest of it. Where I come from, the weather is a major topic of conversation - it changes. We worry about rainfall, we gripe about it being Too Hot or Too Freezing, or Too Dry or Too Wet (rarely these days - rain is good!), we have a whole network of govt sponsored weather stations, I can look up a website to see how much rainfall fell in my local area in the last day, week or year (and get historical records too)... I guess we are just boring and obsessed at home with our interest in the weather and whether we'll get any rain.

On photographing wildlife

Now you see it:



Now you don't:


That ground squirrel (well that is what I guess it was) was very fast! It was sitting in front of us happy as larry at the elephant seals past Big Sur and then just VOOM! Ah the perils of photographing wildlife. At least it wasn't a tree squirrel - it probably would've run up someone's leg!

Bunnies and bonnets

Our local council, Campbell City Council, holds a Bunnies and Bonnets parade every year. We just so happened to be in downtown Campbell and saw a bit of the fun.


There were marching bands (local high school, pic chosen to not show faces!).


Floats.


People on weird recumbent advertising bikes, including this Easter Bunny who had one of the ugliest, scariest faces I've ever seen on something that is meant to be happy and jolly.

Girls dressed in Scottish outfits dancing (have a video but again it is of kids and there seems to be some prohibition against showing kids on blogs without permission of their parents/guardians). Local pollies in porsches. Dancing girls, not doing gaelic jigs. People just wandering along. Old cars.

Americans seem to enjoy parades a lot. We don't have many in Oz. I think they are thought to be dicky and old-fashioned.

Near the end, before the fire trucks, etc, there was a pipe band! I videoed them :-)



Enjoy!

A drive up Mt Hamilton and back again

Two Sundays ago, we went for a drive up Mt Hamilton.

From down in SJ, Mt Hamilton is marked by some white lumps on top of a rather bald mountain to the east. It doesn't look like much from down here and our last attempt to get to the top of the mountain (about 14 months ago) was stymied by snow!


SJ foothills

Anyway, the drive up the mountain is fun. You first have to cross over the foothills, on a pretty narrow and rather windy road, cross a meadow/valley and then wind wind wind up to the top of the mountain itself. I would not recommend this road for anyone who gets carsick but for the rest of us? Woo hoo! It is soooo windy that you can't actually go that fast up it, especially when much of the road is stuck on the side of a rather steep hill - one side is often cutting/cliff and the other is a biiiig drop. And when the wind blows (it is windy as well as windy!) then it can be exciting indeed!

But we were just as enamoured of the spring wildflowers.

Just over the top of the foothills we found these in a sheltered, northfacing cutting;



Dodecatheon hendersonii - shooting stars. I was so excited to see these. We didn't see any last year but we didn't go to the right places. They are fairly common but to me they are the orchids of the primula world and I love to see them.


Californian Buttercups

There were also nemophila and some other things I cannot recognise due to low light and lots of wind blurring the pics.


I am fascinated by the oaks here - they are all twisty and gnarly :-)





One particular sheltered hillside was a riot of all sorts of things.


Delphiniums and dodecatheons dominate this pic. I didn't realise there were so many delphiniums (larkspurs) and so many lived here!


Cynoglossum grande - the flower looks like a very large forget me not. It's in the same family.


(This pic is best seen in a larger size so click on it to see delphiniums, dodecatheons, blue dicks and others. Yes, there is a plant commonly called blue dicks. Ahem!)


I think this is a blue dick (Dichelostemma capitatum). They were pretty hard to get pics of due to the wind and our unwillingness to step into the verge. We have a complete paranoia of poison ivy/oak and also hate squashing plants.


D'oh! Two deer, two (presumed) female deer!


Out of focus lupines and a nice valley.



After winding winding winding our way up the road, we came in sight of our destination



Now with fricken lasers! Really! They now use laser spotters to help line telescopes up. This telescope is over 100 years old and is still in constant use. It was and still is an amazing piece of machinery. It is so delicately balanced it can be lined up by a single person. You can read more about it here and more about the Lick Observatory complex here. (I am very pleased with this handheld shot - it is quite sharp and is limited only by the ISO of the camera rather than me shaking the shot.)


The Lick dude himself, well a bust of him. The guided "tour" (we didn't go anywhere, just stayed in the observatory itself) described him in glowing terms but I am not that sure he was a fantastically nice guy.


Me, chilling outside the observatory (which was rather cold!).


Nathan chilling even more in the brisk wind - he forgot to bring a jacket.


A bad pic of us at the observatory.


I call these ouchcones, not pinecones.


The long and winding road.


All of these hills and valleys are caused by the Pacific Plate grinding against the North American plate. They are very scenic when they are green.




Nathan called this a mushroom farm - I can see why!

On the way back down we saw other plants,


like these Indian Paintbrushes (Castilleja foliolosa I think)




Lathyrus vestitus?


Checker blooms in the middle of common fiddleneck (I think!)


Lupines and poppies on the foothills roadside.