Jellyfish

Otherwise known as 'the day my aunt walked on water'!

If you're from Western Australia and you've spent any real time at a beach along the South West coast then you would be familiar with the annual plague of STINGERS!! These nasty little seaside menaces are a type of Box Jellyfish. They may be tiny but they pack a real punch. Nowhere near as bad as the Irukandji jellyfish that plague the northern waters-those little nightmares will kill you. The Box Jellyfish we get here just have a really painful sting in long red welts. The thing is the jellyfish are completely transparent, a square cube shape with the stingers appearing like black threads out the four back corners. It takes calm water and a practised eye to spot the jellyfish swarms in the shallows.

When I was a child I had an aunt who lived on Geographe Bay. We were on a farm about an hour inland from her but used to spend many school holidays visiting her since she was my mum's favourite aunt and mum loved the beach.

Aunt was a very big lady, very "well proportioned" if you know what I mean. Sadly its the family curse since a large proportion of the women in my family are built this way...not as big but  certainly "large boned".

Aunt used to love to tell the time she had a rather...personal...encounter with Box Jellyfish. She had headed out for her daily swim, the beach was only one street away from her unit. Once on the sand she kicked off her shoes and peeled off her wrap then started wading out into the water. The waters in some areas of the bay are quite shallow so you can be quite a way out till the water is waist deep, the point most adults like to get too before they dive in and start swimming. Once Aunt was out far enough so that the water was up to her waist she dived in....and disaster struck.

Unwittingly Aunt had dived straight into a large swarm on these jellyfish and the low front of her one-piece bathers had acted like a mini trawl-net, scooping dozens of jellyfish straight down her cleavage!!

Aunt reckoned she performed a miracle that day, she walked on water she was gong that fast in her haste to get back to the beach and get those nasty, stinging, slippery little invaders out of her bathing costume.
She was also madly struggling to wriggle out of the top half of her bathers and said later that she didn't really care who was there to witness her.

Homebrew

I've just finished bottling up my latest batch of home brew. I'm still in the early phases of this whole brewing caper but so far its proving pretty easy so far. At first I started out making Ginger Beer from scratch. That meant making and feeding a 'mother plant' for a week before mixing it into a sugar solution. Some batches were great. Some very dry. The worst was a recipe I found in an old cookbook. For some really strange reason it involved instant coffee...all I can say is YUCK!! Avoid that one if you can, its NASTY.
I also tried one of those Ginger beer kits-in-a-can. Not bad but it came out really sweet. Like so sweet I had to cut it with lemon juice in order to drink it without gagging. I've talked to other people and they've had the same problem so it wasn't my fault. I've now put the brew back in a tank with more yeast in an effort to brew some more of the sugar out of it.
This latest batch, the one I've just bottled is a beer. I can't drink it for at least two weeks but it smells okay.
I was shocked at how expensive brewing equipment is. The kits they sell in the shops range between $60 and $80. I made my own for about half that. Just went to Bunnings and bought a 25L openhead water tank from the camping section, along with a plastic tap; then off to the specialist brewing supply place for a airlock tube. Total cost about $30. Once I got home it took a couple off minutes to drill a hole in the lid for the airlock and I was in action.

Anyway, all this talk of home brew reminded me of my younger brother N and his adventures with brewing at home. Years ago when I was a kid my father dabbled with making his own fruit wine. Not very successful. For years there was this huge green glass bottle in a battered cane basket that my parents used as a doorstop. Apparently it was filled with one of my father's failed brews... zucchini or something equally gross.

N was poking around in the shed and found all my father's abandoned brewing equipment and hatched a plan to have a go at brewing himself, a spot of moonshine...should I mention that N was just 13 years old at the time?! Don't ask me how he managed to buy the beer product kits, given we grew up in a small town and everyone should have known his age. Still, N was always tall for his age and very confident; he'd been buying alcohol from bottle shops for several months already and kept a mental list of all the places in several towns that were scarily slack about checking customer's credentials.
So N set his new project up in his bedroom wardrobe and was soon in action. Some of his batches were killers, especially after someone told him that you could up the alcohol content just by manipulating the sugar levels. Mum was always terrified that he's blow the house up. She knew what he was doing but turned a blind eye.

Grandma and the Abalone

When I was a child my grandma Norma loved to tell the story of the time she found some abalone while at the beach. Gran was swimming at a beach near Adelaide in South Australia and stopped off to explore some rockpools. While poking around the rocks she found several large abalone, a time of mollusc - like a sea snail. Somehow Gran managed to prise them off the rocks. I don't know how she did it since most people who harvest wild abalone use a knife blade or flat-head screwdriver since the mollusc is very strong and will clamp itself to the rock if disturbed.
Anyways Gran managed to prise several abalone off the rock with the intention of taking them home to eat, since she had been told that they were delicious,  a real delicacy in some countries. It wasn't until she had gotten them off the rocks that Gran remembered that she had no way to get them home. She had caught the bus to the beach and hadn't bought a bag since she wore her bathing costume under her clothing.
However, being the creative one, Gran stuffed the abalone down the front of her bathing costume before heading off to the bus stop. It was only once she was on the bus that Gran realised one uncomfortable problem...the abalone were still alive!! Initially the abalone had frozen in fear but they soon re-woke and began slithering around exploring their new (temporary) home.
Gran said it was one of the most uncomfortable bus journeys that she had ever taken. Trying to keep a straight face and sit still as these snails slithered wetly around inside her clothing. I never remember her saying how they tasted or if they even ate them at all, in the end.

Emily Barker

I've just tracked down the website of a young singer named Emily Barker and I've really been enjoying her latest tracks. You can find her via http://www.emily-barker.com/, or go to YouTube or iTunes and search for "Emily Barker" or "Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo" or "The-Low-Country".
The Low Country was the name of her previous group and they classed their music style as Alt-Country. My Mum has a copy of one of their CD. Lost track of her for a couple of years so she must have broken up with The Low Country.
I was at school with this girl; or rather she was a year below me. She was a singer then and had an amazing voice even then. At school Emily was part of a four-piecee all-girl group calling themselves RAJE, based on their initials. Both her parents were teachers, I never had her mum Ingrid as a teacher but her dad Don was my year 6 teacher. Her dad had a big interest in horticulture and they had a beautiful property on the banks of the Blackwood River in Bridgetown. However my biggest memory of Mr B as a teacher was getting taken out on numerous excursions to go birdwatching as that was another one of his loves. Emily's siblings are also musicians, singers and artists.
Emily Barker was not only a good singer, but was also a really nice person. I used to be a journalist for one of the local papers and remember writing stories on Emily and her successes. I was glad to find that she was still a really nice person and that fame definitely had not gone to her head.

getting woken in the middle of the night.

There is something rather surreal about watching a house burn down. Even more so when its 1am, your standing on the lawn in your pyjamas and its the neighbor's house that's being consumed by the flames. 

It was summer time and I had left my window open to catch the breeze. I was woken by lots of people talking and shouting and by a strange crackling sound. I lay there for a few seconds wondering what was going on before raising myself on one arm and using the other to pull the curtain aside. At that stage ot much of the fire could be seen just flames licking out around the loungeroom chimney. Most of the fire was within the roofspace, hidden below the corrugated iron.

I must say, it took me a further minute or two before my sleep-fuddled brain processed what was going on next door. It took a further minute or two to pull on trackpants and stumble into the next room shouting to wake my housemate. By then the house was well alight. The only thing I could do was move my car which had been parked along the side of the house facing the neighbors. I had to be quick since the firetrucks were already arriving. The neighbors on the other side of the housefire were frantically detaching and moving the four LPG gas tanks that are on the side of their house in the direct path of the fire.

The house was owned by an old Italian couple. She became quite frail and even though he was still pretty active, he wasn't really physically capable of looking after her. She was moved to a nursing home in the city up the road and he went with her. Their grandson, his wife and baby lived in the house for a while but they moved back out to the family farm and the house has sat empty since then. I didn't realise it, but all the elderly couple's possessions had been left in place since grandad used to like to re-visit his house. Now all that is gone up in smoke. Standing there on the side lawn beside the old couple's daughter, son and grandson we could only watch in disbelief as the firemen swarmed like ants.

Our fire department is made up of volunteers but they did a marvelous job. There was little they could do to save the building so it was just a matter of putting the fire out as quickly as possible. All they saved was a bundle of framed photographs and a couple of vintage cameras. Mopping up the last of the hotspots took ages. It was a good four hours before everyone packed up and left and I could go back to bed. I managed to get a couple of hours sleep before work in the morning. Getting out was rather interesting by dodging the police cars and media crews. I even had the chance to be interviewed by a news crew but ducked out. This face belongs on the other side of the camera lens, thankyou!

At least I had a great excuse to explain why I was so dopey at work that day!

A cool shower on a hot day

It has been a very long, hot and dry summer. At the end of another hot day I like to go up the back yard, turn on the reticulation in my vegetable garden and then settle back to watch the show. Within minutes of the sprinklers starting a flurry of small birds come flocking in. They are a small dark green bird we call Silver-eye. Soon there are a dozen birds gathering in the bushes on two sides of the vegetable patch. After a quick chirpping discussion they swoop down to enjoy a cool shower. Some like to just swoop through the spray then back to the safety of a thick bush to preen. The boldest of the little birds will come right down to land in the plants closest to the sprayjet. They ruffle their feathers in delight or seem to be rubbing against the wet leaves or catching the waterdroplets rolling off the the leaves around them. The show lasts for about half an hour before they head off again. The little bird in the photograph above is perched among the leaves of Kohl Rabi plants.