These are are some of the beautiful spotted gum trees where we sometimes stay at Guerilla Bay.
photographs
Cool photos of Beck
(photo credit: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)
Laughing Squid is one of my long time favourite blogs; I enjoy the mix of tech and visual arts, and Scott Beale’s photos. Today Scott has the best photos of Beck’s puppets I’ve seen yet, taken at Yahoo! Hack Day.
Mia Dyson: Thredbo Blues Festival
I’ve just got around to making a Flickr set of photos of the Thredbo Blues Festival in January. Thredbo is one of the skiing resorts in the Snowy Mountains up near Mt Kosciusko, but in summer the blues festival takes over the village, casual and cool, for a weekend. The highlight for us was seeing Mia Dyson. She is a young, fabulously talented blues singer, guitarist and slide player. But we also saw the Foreday Riders, Ray Beadle, and others, and took a ride up the Kosciusko chair lift.
From my garden
I happened to notice this tiny baby gecko trapped in a spider’s web outside my studio window yesterday. It was only an inch or so long. At first I thought it was one of the little sleek brown skinks, as we have lots of those, and the gecko’s distinctive pads on its fingers were not easy to see. I’m fond of both, but especially geckos, and I don’t see them very often.
It’s tail was very securely fastened to the web, which made me think it had been properly caught, rather than had just wandered into the web and got tangled. Perhaps the spider was waiting for it to weaken, because it hadn’t been poisoned or wrapped up more. I didn’t search for the spider, but maybe it was one of the black house spiders that live under the external window sills. After I had taken a few photos, I rescued the gecko and it ran away into the tanbark. It surprised me thinking about it afterwards that it hadn’t shed it’s tail to get away as both geckos and skinks can. Maybe tail shedding ability only comes with age?
Also from my garden, a moth with great camouflage, sitting on a towel on the washing line the other day. From other angles it was even more the colour of the towel. Underneath though, it was very colourful, and it had masked face like a bandit, and a shape that made me think of stealth bombers.
There are a few more photos in my Backyard set at Flickr.
Leafcutter ant
I’m getting quite fond of this little leafcutter ant I made recently. (It’s only about 15 cm long). I might get to make some big ones later this year.
Moose on the Loose: Flip top thumbs and other goodies!
Of ‘full, woolly, activity-unfriendly thumbs’ in knitted mittens, Tanya Ewing at Moose on the Loose says ‘Quite frankly I won’t use them.’ Quite right! Tanya has the all-important recipe for how to put a flip top in your thumb on her page of knitting patterns, Homegrown recipes for woolly items, which also includes a simple earflap hat, a less pointy hat, and earflaps in stocking stitch. I love the little ears on this hat!
Tanya’s site also has a Kiwi-Aussie dictionary, some great scenic photos (she likes clouds) and a cool collection of sign photos, and, my favourite amalgam of both: Tim almost taken by a glacial surge wave at Fox Glacier. She is also the coolest ironing extremist I’ve ever seen.
Updated links 2015
Cutflat: Tim Raupach’s photographs
This wonderful photo of a hill somewhere near Omarama, South Island, Aotearoa/New Zealand is from Cutflat, Tim Raupach’s new photoblog site. His photos were previously here.
Tim takes some breathtakingly beautiful shots, as well as looking at things from unusual angles and with a humorous eye. He is also a rockclimber, and – a disclaimer! – my son.
Uopdated links 2015
Love
On the back of a door in the women’s toilet in a roadhouse just outside Balranald, NSW:
Taking the plunge
There ought to be a word for the reticence I feel about jumping back into the online world after some time away. It’s so strange, because I mostly love the online life, and I am brimful of things I want to blog about. So to break the ice, here is an early morning photo from the beach house bedroom at Encounter Bay, looking out to Wright Island, and Seal Rock in the distance to the left. The best thing about staying at Encounter Bay is rowing out to the island when no-one else is there. The one time I was able to do that these holidays, there were a few dolphins around the boat at one point: magic.
(Click to enlarge)
