We're Under Siege!

They are coming to get us...

The creatures...

Creeping in from every direction...

Playing on our weaknesses...

Closer and closer they come...

AND THEY ARE TOTALLY FREAKING ME OUT!!!!!

Over 9 days we were beset with some of the most hideous happenings around this place.

Episode One... Saturday lunchtime July 31st.
The boys and I are going stir crazy.  I can be inside the house all day and not worry most day.  But I hate the Saturdays that Wolf has to work.  Those days send me round the twist, I count the hours until the shop closes and then I start to listen like a crazed woman for the sound of his car coming down the street.  So we I decided to get out in the yard and do something domestic.  I had been getting sick of seeing all the weeds growing into the boys sandpit so I thought I'd go and pull them out.  I set up the playpen with a large towel underneath it so my baby couldn't choke on nature and need an ambulance ride to the hospital like his big brother did, put the baby in it and set to work.  I kept my eyes peeled for my old friend but he was nowhere to be seen.  I got through that and looked around, I might as well keep going since the bin was only half full of weeds.  I decided to tackle the bindiis (bindy-eyes) that are trying to take over our yard.  So there I was right next to the playpen with my baby in it pulling out great heaps of bindiis and weedy vines hand over fist and shoving them down into this bin.  I reach out and grab a handful of vines and start to pull... two great big hair arachnid legs reach out menacingly towards me... I let go of the vines, step back and bend over to have a better peek... it's a whopping great bird spider ready to suck my brains out like a milkshake and then follow it with a monkey brain chaser.  Well, that was the end of that little bit of domesticity... I grabbed the baby and came inside... and then called from the relative safety of my house to the two big boys playing in the sandpit that it was probably getting a bit to hot outside and they should come in now.  Wolf came home and couldn't find the spider where I said it had been... he did find the sucked-dry skin of a big old frog tossed aside by a bird spider like last nights take-away container.  Did I mention this was RIGHT OUTSIDE MY BEDROOM WINDOW????  I did  NOT sleep well that night!

Episode Two... Sunday evening August 1st.
Wolf has said there is a smell around... I have little sense of smell so I'm not much good at locating the source of these things.  I figure it can't be that bad since he is just complaining about it and not getting down and finding it.  Eventually I go to put Monkey to bed and it's too much for Wolf, he decides to empty the dishwasher because he figures if the smell is in the kitchen then getting the dirty dishes out of the way will go a ways to finding the stink.  The next thing I know he busts into the bedroom where I am feeding the Monkey and thrusts a camera LCD screen in my face all the while gagging and heaving.  I can't quite make out what is on the screen but I can tell it's inside the dishwasher.  Monkey has been well and truly woken up so I take him out to find out what is going on.  It was indeed the inside of my dishwasher... the dishwasher that I had put on just before lunch the day before... for about 30 hours the contents of that dishwasher had sat undisturbed bar the removal of a couple of pieces of cutlery and two breakfast bowls... and there, on the bottom of the dishwasher was the body of a rather large green tree frog... or at least he was once green, before he decided to slow-boil himself in our dishwasher!  I'll spare you the photo... I can't stand to look at it again to load it on here I'm not sure if you're eating or not so I'll just leave it on the hard drive.  At this point I realised that I had used one of the breakfast dishes that had been removed and I started gagging too...  Eventually we managed to slow the gagging enough for Wolf to remove the trays and try to lift out the soft boiled frog.  But it wouldn't lift.  It turned out it was baked on to the bottom of the dishwasher.  I'll spare you the details and just tell you that a barbecue/paint scraper was involved in the removal of the frog and our dishwasher has never been cleaner... and we washed all those dishes again and try not the think about the ones we used!

Episode Three... Monday midmorning August 9th.
I'm sitting at the computer right beside the back door.  I hear a noise, kind of like the breeze blowing through the long grass at the back fence... but kind of different.  I've heard this noise before... My entire body does NOT want to move but not knowing is worse... I get up, I look out the back door across the patio to the grass... nothing.  Thank goodness, I could have sworn that was snake noise.  I go to sit back down and catch a glimpse of something move right at my feet (on the other side of the screen)... a two metre long snake is slithering past my back door!  My mind goes into bladder control mode and then reminds myself to get the camera so I can look at photos when I am trying to identify it later...

Yep, that's a snake.

creeping creepily across my patio.

This one is just because I thought two photos might not be enough for you.

I chased it along to the next room and took more photos through the laundry door but they didn't work and it scared it and it scooted off into the grass.  Uh oh, I didn't like knowing it was on my patio but I REALLY didn't like not knowing where it was at all!  I rang Wolf at work, shaking like a leaf, and had a little freak out on the phone.  I spotted it over by the kids sandpit and had insane thoughts of grabbing one of their nets and getting out and catching it.  I didn't think those thoughts for very long.  I watched as it crept all over the boys toys and explored our yard.  Wolf told me to make some noise so it knew it wasn't welcome.  I had a baby asleep so I wasn't about to make some noise for an animal that doesn't even appear to have ears.  I remembered something about stamping on the ground when bushwalking will let snakes know that you are around and you are bigger than them... sounded good.  I put on my gumboots, tucked my jeans into them and went to go outside... I couldn't see it anymore.  Hang on, there he is... gingerly I open the door, he doesn't move... I go out onto the patio and stomp my little feet for all I'm worth... he still doesn't move... I edge over to the grass to get a better look... Hang on, if that's a stick then WHERE IS THE SNAKE?????  I hurry back inside and determine to never leave my house again!  After all, he's probably curled up on top of my garage roller door waiting to drop on my head.  I had a little vent on facebook and my sweet, kind cousin let me know that he was probably in my house by now... I went to close the window over the screen with the hole in it and shove a towel under the door into the garage.  I found that the garage door was open... he could be in my house!  Cousin P then proceeded to suggest what he might be doing in my house and give me photos of babies and snakes.  Yeah, I needed that.  My other male cousin from that side of the family Cousin A kindly suggested that I shake out my quilt before I go to bed because snakes like to make themselves comfy like that.  Thanks.  I was a neurotic mess by the time Wolf got home.  Monkey and I practically flew to the car to do the school and kindy run that afternoon.  Hooooo boy! I'm still getting the hibbidy jibbidies thinking about it now!

So anyone want to come and visit?

This is on top of the spider trapping me in the shower not too long ago.

They say that all of this nature and junk is a sign of a healthy environment.  Healthy, shmealthy, bring on the smog and pollution, I don't want all this nature getting so close to me!

Okay, you'll have to see yourself out now, I'm just going to go and curl up foetal position in a corner and rock back and forth for a bit.

Peer Pressure

Hi there, If you've popped across here because you've clicked the link in Lisa's post today under the misguided impression that you were going to be taken to a site all about Australia's vast beauty and desolate nothingness then I'm pretty sure the first post you see shouldn't contain huge amounts of ranting about the fact that my son wont poop so I thought I'd better get something else on here quick smart!

If you have come across from there please make yourself at home and start cleaning up a bit, the washing needs to be taken out of the machine, the dishes need to be loaded in the dishwasher, and the lounge room needs a good clean... leave a comment.  I'm pretty okay with most of this blogging stuff but I just can't figure out that stat counter thingo and how to tell who came from where and all that sorta stuff so please say hi, even if you are so scared by my rantings that you are never ever going to return.

If you would like to know about Australia might I point you here to see some of our local wildlife.  If you would like to learn the language my Australia Day posts from last year and this year may totally confuse you help you out.  Info on crocodiles that may or may not be accurate can be found here and here.  Feel like being thankful you don't have our spiders?  then go here.  Want to meet some more of our wildlife and find out about our day to day interactions with them? then this is the post for you.  One last little known beast that calls Australia home can be found here.

So, I hope you have fun finding out about our beautiful country.  One exciting piece of news is that we seem to have a man eating bird making his home in our back yard.  We are strangely excited by this.

Here's the big boys pointing to him (what? he's a man eating bird, not a boy eating bird!) under our poor little mango tree.

and here is a really rather dodgy close up of him.  He looks ferocious doesn't he?

So, kick aside the dried up bodies of our beautiful native green tree frogs and Barra frogs that have managed to get inside the house and not back out again (or perhaps had their insides turned into milkshakes and sucked out by those freaky spiders) and pop out onto the back patio to check out the lucky one that I rescued this morning, lovingly removing the dust bunnies from him and leaving him sit in a little dish of water to revive... or possibly leaving him sit in a dish as a meal for a snake.  (this link will bring up all the other snake related posts for you... you're welcome).

So, I'm sure this was all a part of some devious plan by Lisa to get me to do a new post and I have given in to the peer pressure by recycling all the old stuff and disguising it as new... clever aren't I?  She'll never notice.  Perhaps one day I will get a chance to do a post about our other native animals but everyone knows about our beautiful ones.  The Koalas, the Kangaroos, the Emu and the Cassowary.  Did you know Wombats poop is square?  Oh, man, I've turned it into another post about poop.  Time to go.

The Queensland School System and the way it's working with Lion

There have been a few comments relating to how the school system works here and how we are working it so I might just do a quick post to answer them all at once...

This is only for Queensland, they are trying to streamline all the states and territories to come under the one system but so far we aren't there.

Feel free to not read this if you just don't care because it's not all that exciting :)

• Our school year is January to December. You start a new grade in January and finish in December.
• The first year is prep then 1 through 12
• You can start prep if you turn 5 before July of the year you start. Ummmm... kids starting prep 2009 will have to turn 5 between 1 July 2008 and 30 June 2009.
• Many schools offer pre-prep the year before and a lot of places that were once off campus pre-schools are now "pre-preps"
• Before that is just daycare but we have called it Kindy for Lion and will continue to call it kindy even though he is "pre-prep" age.
• Only grades 1-10 are compulsory
• Prep is flexible, state schools will not start a child early but will let them wait a year if their parents feel they are not up to it. Private schools will start a child a year ahead but only if you are really really really special or something like that.
• Years 11 and 12 are required if you want to get into university (along with certain subjects but I assume that is like anywhere) but most kids continue to year 12 even if they aren't going to uni.

The old system was a year of kindy (usually a couple of days a week) the year you turned 4 (like, the January to December year) if your parents wanted. A year of pre-school (couple of days same as kindy) the year you were 5 if your parents wanted then you started grade 1 the year you turned 6 and it was compulsory schooling from then on.

So Lion went to daycare that we called kindy for one day a week last year because he was so inquisitive and seemed ready for learning that I couldn't keep up with at home. He is going to daycare that we will still call kindy for 2 days a week this year and wants to go more than that but mummy couldn't cope. I asked around about the pre-prep programs and then asked his kindy teacher what the older group did and if he would be missing out on anything and she said that it's pretty much the same but the kindy needs to be more flexible with class ages and sizes. They use curriculum based learning and encourage them to start reading and writing (which a lot of pre-preps don't do) but are more flexible with learning through play because it is still "just" a daycare. And I can have a certain amount of choice as to how often he goes unlike friends with pre-prep kids who got to choose a 2 or 3 day week Monday-Tuesday or Wednesday through Friday. Next year he will go into prep. I don't want to loose him all week long, it's making me sad thinking about it now *sniff*. I know I cant hold him back but I want him home with me. He's going to be in the older half of his class as it is with his birthday in October, I think it'll be good.

North Queensland

Life in North Queensland. Beautiful one day Perfect the next... As long as you can stay away from the crocodiles, sharks, snakes, ticks, leeches, jellyfish, stonefish, spiders, man-eating birds, bunyips and dropbears. Okay, maybe the bunyips and dropbears are still to be verified but the rest are for real!

Warning this is going to be long so I left out the bunyip and dropbear, google or wiki them if you have never heard of them. Then after you get off Wiki you can tell me about where you live.

My last post prompted some questions on why there is a post on the beach with vinegar in it. So we'll start this little tourist brochure with that... We have stinger season here. November - May (yep, right alongside cyclone season, what a blast!) you must swim in stinger nets if you are swimming in the sea. I'm pretty sure stingers are just jellyfish that have venomous tentacles. If you do get stung by a tentacle (even in the stinger nets) you need to pour vinegar over it to wash off the tentacles and deactivate any little venom thingys that are left on the skin. We have some great stingers here Box jelly, Irukandji are the only ones that have caused fatalities though. You can get some degree of stinger resistance by swimming with nylon stockings covering any exposed flesh and staying in the enclosures helps but again it's resistant and not completely safe, the netting is generally about the size of chicken wire. A tentacle seperated from it's jellyfish can still sting, the little venom bits fire instantly on contact with skin. The head of an Irukandji is only 5mm but it has tentacles 1m long.

Irukandji

While we're in the ocean lets also be careful of the sharks. Unless you are landlocked or living somewhere REALLY cold you probably deal with sharks. Sharks eat people. We get in their territory we have to expect that they will try to sort us out, they dont like eating people we arent their natural food but we wear flippers and look like seals, we splash around like a fish in distress, you have to admit a human looks pretty out of place in the water so you cant really blame the sharks for having a go at them. There are some that are okay, I have swum with a white tip reef shark (completely unintentionally, I just about wet myself and got out of the water as quickly and as calmly as I could) and they are in theory safe but I'd rather not be the first to find a cranky one. So we have drum lines and stuff off the main beaches to keep the sharks away and if any are spotted the beaches are closed until they move on.

Tiger Shark

Now we have established that the ocean isn't safe lets move into a creek. Just watch out for crocodiles. They are also in the ocean and any sightings close the beaches. They are confusingly labeled saltwater and freshwater crocodiles with the "salties" being the dangerous ones (still wouldnt like to meet a cranky "freshy") but the salties can still live in fresh water. They are most common around mouths of creeks and rivers but will happily venture further upstream. They will attack your boat, can jump out of the water a long way (you should see the height of the fences at the crocodile parks), will finish you off without a trace and they get gout. so the last but isnt so dangerous (for us anyway) but I think it's amusing that a crocodile can get gout. Take a dog or a smaller sibling swimming with you and you will be safe, they take the smallest of the group if they have a choice.

Lion with a croc warning sign down the road from us.

And in both fresh and salt water you have a chance of standing on a stone fish. These little darlings sit on the bottom looking for all the world like a stone (um, yeah, you probably figured that) and you come along and stand on them and they put up their spikes and they pump their venom into your foot. Not long and you can be having a heart attack or suffering paralysis or all sorts of other problems depending on the fish. They are aparently the most venomous fish inthe world.

Stone fish

Attractive isnt he??

So we arent safe in or on any water unless it's a swimming pool. Lets go bushwalking... Just remember that Australia has the biggest population of deadly snakes inthe world. Brown snakes and Tiapans are very agressive and it's unlikely they will back off in a face off. Death adders are more placid but just as deadly (hence the name!!!) they will let you step right over them (I have) and the person behind will step right over them (nope my scream scared the horrid little thing off) and then a few people back the snake will have had jack of it all and bite. There are others but these are the fun ones.

Death Adder

And if they dont bite you a tick probably will. they get in your ears, in your groin, in your hair, between your toes and they hang on. some are just uncomfortable but there are a few that can cause serious problems with some of your major organs. And dont just pull them off - you can leave their head behind still doing it's damage, you have to twist them and make sure they are completely gone!

But if rainforests are more your style, swimming in the crystal pools far above the reach of the sharks and crocodiles watch out for leeches. Little ones, big ones, REALLY big ones.

Then the spiders. There's the redbacks (related to the black widow) that people seem to be most afraid of. They are shy little things, that you really need to provoke (even though sometimes it's accidental) before they bite. There's the bird spiders (because they eat birds, also called mouse spiders, whistling spiders or the Australian Tarantula) we had one of these in our house. It was a small one, about the size of my hand, aparently they grow to the size of a dinner plate. They can kill a dog with their poison. I threw every shoe I could reach at the horrid little thing and they all hit and it didn't do a thing to it. I found out later that they can jumo really well, boy I wish they would wear some sort of flashing sign so I know these things before I throw all my shoes at them. Wolf came inside to rescue me and convinced it to climb into a tiny little jar where it was all crunched up but he figured it wanted to get away from the psycho lady throwing her whole shoe basket at it. Then there's the funnel webs, YUCK.

Bird Spider

Now those man-eating birds. okay this one fits in with the drop bears and bunyips but it's a great story. These birds squeal like a woman in distress. We had a work colleague come and stay with us from brisbane, we had just had the spider incident I described above, he was a little worried about the gecko's crawling around the walls squealing gekgekgek. I think there might have been mention of the size we grow our cocroaches to up here and then he heard this bird. And it just came to me... "That's nothing, just a man-eating bird" "A what?" "man-eating bird, they only eat men, they sit in the bush and cry out like a distressed woman so a man comes to rescue her and when he comes close it attacks and eats him." "......*silence*......" "yeah" "and my bed is a mattress on the floor tonight?" "yeah". You could probably actually believe this about the birds to see them, they are weird looking birds that stand nearly 50cm tall.

Baby Curlew Man-Eating Bird

So, North Queensland is a great place to live. This is pretty much the first lecture the first year photography students get, there are a lot of international students and they want to head out to photograph beautiful Australia. Not such a good idea if you dont know what else is out there. It can be safe it you are aware of what else is with you. So come for a visit,

North Queensland

Beautiful One Day

Freaky Dangerous the Next

Do you think I could get a job writing tourist campaigns?

Simple Pleasures

We took the boys to the Kite Festival on the weekend. I'll post pictures of that later but I wanted to share the boys exciting finds from their play on the beach with everyone. Wolf took the boys down onto the beach and I stayed on the grass with my sore toe, when they showed no signs of returning to me I went down to join them. Lion found some very precious seaweed. He was holding it like it was made of the finest silk, it was so lovely and although it was strewn along the whole beach like a great long scarf, he felt that only this particular handful was worthy of presenting to mummy. I'm the most spoilt mummy on earth!

Not to be outdone, Dragon needed to present mummy with a gift. Driftwood. It aparently was a very special piece of driftwood. He was sooooo excited about it and kept dropping it because he was too excited to hold onto it properly. It is actually quite a large piece of driftwood for this beach.

So what beach are they playing on?? It's one of the local "gem's" that the council brags about and goes on all our tourist stuff. It really is quite a lovely beach compared to what it once was (I would call it a man-made beach but the council insists they just gave nature a helping hand) , there is a free waterpark, plenty of cafe's, family friendly dining, parks, play equipment, stretches and stretches of beach, regular shark and crocodile patrols and vinegar and stinger nets in the stinger season! Fancy a North Queensland holiday???