1st November 2011

1^st Nov 2011

Any winners in the Melbourne Cup? I picked two horses that didn’t exactly disgrace themselves but weren’t in the money. The French connection certainly performed well when you consider the jockey had never been to Flemington before and only walked the track the day before. Even though he had ridden the horse before I still think it was a great effort.

Still no action with the house, the on-going saga with Brisbane City Council and Building Certifier is quite disheartening it would appear as if each time the structural design engineer responds to one of their requests they must sit and think what else they can ask and check on and then make another request for information one item at a time instead of compiling a list of requirements so it can be dealt with in one hit, it just goes on forever and we thought it was all through a week or so ago.

Halloween was celebrated in a big way in Manly Village last Saturday. There were activities going on all day, some roads were closed from 9.00am until 9.00pm, a lot of big showground rides were set up on the Esplanade road, there were food vendors set up everywhere, market and craft stalls, live bands, a well supported Halloween street parade and a good fireworks display later that night. The place was packed and I imagine the organisers who had obviously gone to a hell of a lot of effort would have been delighted with the turn out and public support. Lisa, Nancy and I walked along from home for and hour or two, watched the parade, had the obligatory Gelato double scoop and strolled back in time to watch Doc Martin. (good dry Pommie humour).

For those gardeners out there, we have been collecting self-sown wild tomatoes out of the garden. We have an area that obviously was a garden probably in the last century by the look of it, but is now where we throw all of the grass clippings and shrub trimmings and is a tangle of weeds and wild vines etc. Several weeks ago a self sown tomato plant sprung up, or should I say spread it self like a creeping vine amongst the weeds and organic rubbish and started producing small bright red tomatoes just a bit bigger than the little cherry tomatoes you buy for salads. These tomatoes are so sweet and juicy, eating them like cherries they are absolutely flavour bombs; we have been collecting ice-cream bucket loads daily for weeks. So the moral is if you want to grow tomatoes grow your vine weeds first and sow the tomatoes in amongst them. There was not one bug in any of them and we haven’t seen any evidence of birds getting at them. Even Nancy got excited and picked some.

All for now

Mean looking critter 

Monochrome portrait in watercolour using basically only three tones.