She is back!

Miss Elliot is back in The House! She looks a little bit worse for wear, but quite contented to be back, meowing (ok, a little hoarsely) and purring. 

The fluids from the abscess caused infections on her legs, and hair loss, so the vet decided to boost her dignity (you know what cats are like ...) and shave her front legs and tummy. She´ll come good in time.

She´s on three (!) feeds a day at the moment, as she needs to regain weight and strength. A combination of dry and wet food, and some additional anti-biotics will hopefully get her back to where she was before this mysterious affliction set her back...

For a few days she´ll need to stay in Anjes´room so we can make sure she´s back to normal, in terms of feeding, drinking and toiletting, but then she can will be able to join her friends outside  (an avian prey) again. We´re all very happy she´s back in the fold.

A musical morning

On Saturday morning the living-room of our home was changed into a music studio - when my partner in business crime, Phil Pyne, set up his mobile studio. Tess and Yarrow were lending their voices to the Magic Adventure project, which my love and I have been working on. This morning Phil needed some lead vocals, harmonies, choruses and other supporting vocals for the songs we have written for the second level of this series which aims at 7-year-olds. We´ll soon hear what musical delights Phil and the girls have in store...

What´s in a name...?

Browsing this month´s National Geographic I came across this website, which allows you to find out where your surname occurs most. A fascinating insight into people movement. Not surprisingly my surname, Mol, occurs mostly in Europe - but what I had not expected that, apart from the Netherlands, the name is highly frequent in... Poland! Poland? Try it for your name, it´s fun! Josephs may find that their name occurs with the highest frequency in ... India! (as well as being used a lot in Wales, the US and Canada) And Witsels should seek for their namesakes especially n Holland, Hessen (Germany) and the French-speaking part of Belgium, Wallone.

Where Mols tend to grow roots...

Did you ....?

Today it´s only 14 days till my love and I will be reunited again!

Another trick

Tess and Yarrow, with one of their circus friends, did a performance last night at the Byron Entertainment Centre, where the Big Top circus lives. Great performance, girls! And cool make-up.  I´ve got a video on my phone, but I need to get it off ...

An update on Miss Elliot

I just spoke to the vet looking after Miss Elliot. There is some good news. We´re not out of the woods yet but she´s in there with a fighting chance. She was actually able to use her tongue this morning to groom herself! And she is eating dry food independently, which is a good sign. She´s still on a drip for fluids, but if she shows she can eat wet food and lap up water in the course of today, the catheter might go. So, all paws crossed for Ms Elliot and hope she gets through this difficult period.

Miss Elliot in the vet hospital

Miss Yarrow comforting Miss Elliot

A big box for a small Kittie

Evening update: Yarrow, Tess and I visited Miss Elliot at the Racecourse Veterinary Clinic in Ballina.

Anj ... YES!

This morning at breakfast Tess and Yarrow are expressing their joy and approval of the fact that ... Anjes has decided that she IS going to come to Australia, in August - initially for a period of 6 months. Isn´t that the best news! I had talked with her earlier, when she was still deliberating, about such decisions often  showing themselves in an instant, not unexpectedly but clearly and with conviction, and this is what happened. She was walking to the railway station yesterday morning and decided (not entirely on the spot, but after many talks with her friends and her mum) that, yes, she was going to take the opportunity! Wonderful, Anjes - we think it´s fabulous and we are so looking forward to having you in our midst! And we´ll all be here to make your stay a great experience! And who knows what life has in store for you, once you are here. We can´t plan for such things, so Carpe Diem: pluk de dag, seize the day, and enjoy it to the full.

Animale of the day

I met my friend Pedro, the Praying Mantis, this morning. He seemed to be moving aimlessly through the kitchen, a bit perturbed, or lost perhaps even. It´s rather fascinating to see one of these beautiful creatures turn their head decisively in your direction when they spot you (?), a blob (?), a temperature change (?). They are predatory, after all.. It´s funny how we look upon these creatures with fascination, when they belong to the same family as termites and cockroaches... They are definitely not crickets or grasshoppers. They most remind me of Star Trek´s species 4872...

Web

Whether or not the Internet is ´the biggest ever experiment in anarchy´, as a Mr Eric Schmidt once seems to have said, or ´a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a 'modem', can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo´, it´s been  a hot, very hot, day with endless and frustrating Internet problems, and long, long (and I mean ... LONG) phone conversations with friendly but oh so unhelpful  and either linguistically or technologically challenged Telstra techno people. 

And all I wanted to do was to install a new modem. That´s not asking much, is it? After all, The Lady had said: ´It´s better, faster, and has more coverage.´ Not. It seems to have no coverage at all.  It seems to have less coverage than a pole dancer in a seedy night club. (Not that I know anything about pole dancing. Or night clubs. Or seedy ones.) Anyway, won´t tire faithful readers with the boring details and the fact I lost at least five liters of  precious fluids due to excessive frustration-leveraged, erm, sweating.  

Were it not for the fact that I simply cannot be without Internet for my work, I would not have worried. But, I have the old system up and running again and will patiently await the coming of a Telstra Technician who Will No Doubt Sort It All Out. Suffice it to say that this was not how I had envisaged spending my warm, summery Sunday! 

Fortunately the day started and ended with wonderful  and calming chats with my love in Lisbon who is, likewise, buried - but in her case in her work. We are both REALLY looking forward to the time when we don´t need  slow, sluggish or sedentary Internet because we are permanently (!) in the same time zone. Also, at the end of the day Tess and Yarrow arrived back (thanks, Mieke for the Towel Of Wet Comfort  (or was it the Wet Towel of Comfort?) during what was, unfortunately, not to be the last phonecall of the day). 

As the American writer and humourist Dave Barry said: “While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our "CONFIG.SYS" settings.” Oh, let´s get a life...

Yarrow & Tess @ Work

Yarrow started her first job today! She was working with / for our friend Peter Higgs, who has started a popcorn business, selling scrumptious popcorn from locally grown corn (in, wait for it, the nearby village of ... Corndale. Yurp.) He´s popping them in kettles which, apparently, is the ´Old´ way of doing things. Yarrow really enjoyed the opportunity. Peter set up his stall today at the Lismore Car Boot market - so every fortnight Yarrow will get the opportunity to earn a bit of cash (and save...). Tess, in the meantime, is on the lookout for a new job. Her work at the Eltham Pantry has sort of dwindled down (what with staff changes, cutbacks and bad weather) and she has been advised that if she can get another job to take it. Wonderful experiences for both gals!

Miss Elliot

Our lovely Miss Elliot (top left in photo) is in a bit of a pickle. The other night she came in, looking all bedraggled, dirty, ponging and unhappy. She was drooling and seemed to have difficulty eating and drinking. I imagined she´d been in a fight with another animale, perhaps, and decided to wait till the next morning to see, after she would have had a chance to clean herself up. Imagine my surprise,  when next morning she had not groomed herself at all, and was constantly sitting at the drinking bowl, inert and forlorn, frequently lapping water up with difficulty and spilling it all on the floor outside the bowl. She looked decidedly unhappy, poor thing. 

So, I decided veterinary attention was required, and called Yarrow (whose cat Miss Elliot is), and we trekked off to Willa,  our friend the vet,  in Ballina, who quickly diagnosed quite a serious condition, perhaps beyond remedy. We braced ourselves, uncomfortably recalling that last time we had a cat with a very serious (and expensive) condition, we agreed that in future we would not spend large sums of money to keep them alive. 

On first inspection, it looked as if Miss Elliot´s tongue was curled back against her esophagus, which would make it impossible for her to eat (swallow) or drink (lap up water). She was dehydrated and undernourished. Mind you, here is a cat who looked perfectly fine and fit as a fiddle until the day before. Just goes to show how quickly things can take a turn for the worst. The only ´unusual´ activity I could remember was that the day before she had slept on our bed all day, in exactly the same position, and that when I ´caught´ her in distress the night before she had been drooling. quite badly.  

A few hours later Willa had been able to ´put her under´ and take a closer look. She was quite confident that what had happened that Ms Elliot had had a pharyngeal abscess in her throat which had burst and had caused her tongue to get ´adhered´ to her pharynx.  The drooling must have been the abscess spilling out. Poor diddums.  Knowing how concerned cats are about personal hygiene, she must have been very aware of being unwell. 

Why the abscess was there, is anybody´s guess. Ms Elliot has been put on a drip to rehydrate and anti-biotics. If all goes well, she should be OK but we will know more by tomorrow. Her beautiful long hair has been shaved on her belly and inside legs, just to make her less conscious of her condition...

DD, Big Boy and ´Come on!´ say hi...

Just before dusk today I said hi to them horsies ... and they a special hi to Niki!

 

 

Mittens

Jumpered up...

Mitttened up...

I was happily talking to my loveliest of loves this morning,  as we do every day during our usually twice-daily cyber ritual. Sleep was slowly creeping up her eyelids in the shuttered Lisbon night, and then she showed me how cold it is there ... I mean: mittens, a jumper! It was raining quite voluptuously here today, ponds and rivulets forming all around and the pool topping itself up again, but cold it was not. Poor Niki!

Anniversary picture

The happy couple on 26 January 2011

Faithful readers of this blog will have noticed a change of the image heading these ramblings - this is my love and me at our 2-year anniversary dinner on 26 January... a lovely dinner at Byron Bay´s Balcony.

Valetine

Tomorrow is St Valentine´s Day, and in Days of Yonder, as witnessed by a few memorable lines from the Bard, this was perhaps not as innocent a day as it nowadays is - certainly anonnimity could not be maintained as a result of these lines:

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

You can find an interesting article, with lots of historical background, about Valetine´s Day here.

Heartbeat

The CD which my friend Peter and I have been producing over the past three or for years is nearing completion. At the moment, though, things have come to a standstill as Peter and his lovely wife Trix are going to very taxing times. Hang in there, my dear friends. I just came across these photos, taken by Trix, of when Peter and I had another of our musical nights, and they bring back good memories to hold on to.

A quiet drink before an inspired recording session

A toast to Trix - still toasting, Trix - hang in there!

Home alone

Not wanting to whinge (...), but having dropped the girls off at Mieke and John´s, for the week and Niki (as I type) flying from the UK to Portugal, Home feels big and, erm, empty ...  Not that anybody is happy with the situation, as the photos with this post prove beyond doubt...

Not happy, Jan

It´s a hot evening tonight, but suddenly a dip in the pool doesn´t seem that attractive if it´s just me in there (oh, and the resident native frogs who, uncannily, seem to exactly know where they are heading ... my shoulder, or the skimmer box). 

Not happy, Jan either

When you read this, my love, you will be back on your other home ground for a while, but I´ll be sure to join you there soonest! (In order to lady-nap you - well, you are no longer a kid, after all, so I can´t kidnap you) back to our home here....

Tess, Yarrow and I (me, myself) are sending you lots of love and hugs; and others say hi, too. (For instance, I ran into Maxine the other day, who was on horseback galloping down Pearces Creek Hall road and sorry she had missed you to wish you a good trip.)

Parting is indeed sweet sorrow, as the Bard had it, because sorrowful though it is, it also by its nature implies reunion - and, as the clock to the right (top) indicates, reunion is imminent!

Oh, and I cannot find a photo of myself looking as silly as these three girls do / did...

Certainly not happy, Jan...

Best Practise

In good and thorough Niki fashion, Tess, Yarrow and I confronted The House on Saturday morning and cleaned and tidied from top to bottom and back. A thorough bathrooms cleaning; vacuuming and mopping all floors and general selecting, moving and throwing away of Stuff did the job! Homely shopping in Lismore ensued (well, after the NRMA had come and gone to put a new battery in the car, that is...) 

Early evening, Tess was picked up by Lochlan´s parents (and said Lochlan) to be taken out for an early Valentine´s dinner in a French restaurant nearby. Apparently, Lochlan´s parents were going to have dinner in the same restaurant but at a different table. How cute is that! Tess was very excited. Yarrow and I spent a pleasant evening having a scrumptious dinner of ´aardappelkoekjes´ with snowpeas and watching an excellent episode of Midsomer Murders

So now, sitting in bed, looking out over a misty valley on what promises to be a rainy day, I miss my love who has, in all likelihood, fallen into a jetlagged sleep on the sofa in Polebrook...

Going

Today I took my love to the airport, for the next stage in our journey. Niki is flying to Taipei as we speak, and then on to London, for a short visit to her parents. On Sunday she will then fly to Lisbon., to  start work at the school and the uni. immediately. 

It is, to say the least, curious, to be separate after such a long time - neither of us were very happy possums today. But we also know that it can´t be otherwise for now. In a few weeks we´ll be together again. My love - me Tess and Yarrow are sending our deepest of love to you. Bon Voyage, and find out about the Chinese sense of humour on the long flights. I know you have been looking for English joke books written by Chinese writers, but I doubt whether they exist...

Change

A few days down the week, and my love will travel back to Portugal to embark on her teaching at the Nova university. We´re not enjoying the prospect of this separation, brief though it may be (4 weeks), but we both realise that it has to be this way. I can´t be away too long from Tess and Yarrow; and Niki has to get back to her school, fulfill her contractual obligations at the university, and monitor her properties in Portugal. I will follow her soon but in the meantime we´ll familiarize ourselves again with the ways and whiles of Skype, email and telephones. Despite all of this, all is good, very good: after all, we´re healthy, together and happy!

Pig

A lot of our recent posts seem to have something to do with animals - the Daily Animale, as Niki calls them. The other day we were driving back home from somewhere when we saw something through the dirty front screen of the car: we thought it was a dog but as we came closer it seemed like quite a big and oddly-shaped dog. As we passed it, we saw it was a big, black pig ... It must have escaped from the pig trucks that are forever trundling down this road to the slaughter house in Booyong. We haven´t seen it since, but it was quite an alienating experience...

Possum lair found!

Remember the possum we wrote about a week or so ago, who stealthily moved through the tea trees alongside the pool at dusk? Well, my love and I had been wondering for weeks where it lived. We thought it might live in the old camphor laurel. When Red rocked up today to do some work on The Bails, we had to have a peek in the attic and, lo and behold, there Mr or Mrs possum was, curled up under the eaves. We´re still sort of confused as to what route it takes at night, because it always ends up on the roof of the deck and waddles across the roof of the house to go into the Moreton Bay fig for a nocturnal feed. Niki also went up the ladder to have a look and took this cure photograph.

Anniversary!

On 2th of January my love and I celebrated our 2-year anniversary with a delicious meal at the Byron Bay Balcony restaurant. We had a lovely time, looking back on two fascinating years of love and laughter, of growing together, of journeying, of creating a family and a home. Thank you, my love.

Trix and Peter

Sometimes in our lives fate deals us a bad hand ... My good friends Peter and Trix are going through a tough time, with many health scares for Trix. Niki and I are with them in thought every day, although we´d like to be closer to them to offer support and a helping hand. For those who know them, too, send good thoughts!

Bridging

Today my love and I, accompanied by Tess, drove off to the Gold Coast again to the Department of Immigration to arrange the Bridging Visa which allow Niki to travel back to Portugal to do her work for the university in Lisbon. Thanks to the kind help of the staff there,  and a letter from the University confirming Niki´s contract, the visa was quickly arranged. While Niki and I are abroad the application for the partner visa will stay in place and be processed. Because processing times are between 6 and 9 months at the moment, it´s not likely that we´ll hear before we return. We´re looking forward to this being the last bridge...

Bats

A few nights ago my love and I decided to witness a rather special phenomenon which occurs here with daily regularity: every day around dusk hundreds of flying foxes trek into the valley, from the Booyong rainforest reserve down the road, from Alstonville, Fernleigh and other localities. We sat down, about twenty minutes before dusk, on the little bench next to the bonfire and waited for the cicadas to start their evening concerto, the kookaburras to burst out in laughter, and the skies to darken to an opaque red-grey hue. Suddenly, the flying foxes appeared out of nowhere, from all directions. Weeks earlier we had seen them flying in through the valley towards the big Moreton Bay fig in front of the house, but this time we saw them do their in-flight dances from close by, circling around the tree, cutting corners mid-flight, chasing each other in and out of the foliage, screeching and screaming. A beautiful sight.

Sunny side

Would you believe that for most of the last week, the sun has been out? On Wednesday we spent the day going up to the Gold Coast to visit (does one ´visit´ such a place?) the Department of Immigration Office in Southport to make inquiries about a Bridging Visa Niki needs. We came away with more information, and we need to go back this week to hand in some papers. The whole application may take 6-9 months... 

Anyway, the Bridging Visa will allow my love to travel back to Portugal on 9 February and come back to Australia by the end of May. It´s going to be a strange time, as I won´t be immediately traveling with her - I will fly to Portugal on 12 March, and we´ll spend 6  or 7 weeks together then. 

So, back to two time zones, Skype conversations, phone calls, text messages and emails  Neither of us is looking forward to this, but we also realize that it needs to be this way for a bit while Niki fulfills her duties lecturing at the university in Lisbon, and we know that it doesn´t take anything away from our committed relationship.

Talking of which ... on 26 January (four days from now), it´ll be two years! Even though it wasn´t until 8 March that we physically met, we´ve decided to celebrate 26 January as our anniversary... the start of our journey!

Just a worky update

One of my publishers, Macmillan, keeps a part of its website to introduce their authors to their clients. A fresh update of where I am at, can be found here.

Getting serious

As much of Queensland (and we´re talking areas the size of several European countries) flood, the rain in the Northern rivers doesn´t abate either. More storms and bad weather is predicted. Fortunately, it doesn´t look as if we will be badly affected here, but recent photographs of what is happening in Brisbane (a mere 2.5 hours North of here), tells you it´s getting quite serious. And yet, some people maintain their sense of Aussie humour, witnessed by the Brisbane resident who placed a Plan B bathtub in their garden... I just love that photo!

Dragons

We encountered another beautiful creature when my love and I had a quiet Sunday cup of chai and coffee at the Eltham pantry: two red-coated dragonflies, a fornicare in sky-born fashion, as they are want to, zoomed past and landed on some flowers.

Awesome

Rain, rain, rain ... Sorry to say that not more news can be forthcoming... We were just observing the other day that it has been raining solidly now since, what, early October? Sure, with the occasional sunny day, but still ... 

Anyway, that´s not going to stop some of the critters around us. It is the season of animal reproduction, and a day or two ago, we (almost literally) ran into the golden web of one of the many Orb spiders, and what a wonderful web she had weaved.  It was triangular and hung between the branches of a tree and a fenceline, about 2 metres long. Interestingly, we caught her (and an aspiring male) in the advent of sexual adventurousness ... the male perching himself precariously above her (OK, on the other side of the web, but oh so close to her deadly fangs and surely she would know the secrets of her web as she weaved it... ).  Isn´t the photo beautiful? (Taken with Niki´s new camera). Just to give you an idea: the male was approximately an inch long...

There are many Orb spiders, I found out when I started to research them on the web, including the terribly ugly but very impressive Garden Orb. If you are of an  arachnophobic bent you might not want to read this link. The setting we ran into is described in much detail, with lots of interesting background information. Worth a read.

New Year´s Day

 We thought it might be a good idea to spend the first day of the new year doing, well, nothing. It was also bucketing it down, s a visit to the beach wasn´t on, really. We ended up taking our friend Kat, who was staying with us for a few days, to Gold Coast airport, and stopping along the way in Brunswick Heads to have lunch with Tess, Yarrow, Byrony, Mieke and John at what locals know as The Brunsa. After lunch, despite precipitation, we briefly ventured onto the beach and got very, very wet...

Possum

On our evening swim we heard rustling in the bushes surrounding it. After initial suspicion that either Chicco or Malouf were on the prowl, we noticed an animal unlike cat or dog moving through the branches. We saw it had a long tail, but only discovered once back on the deck that we were dealing with a lovey possum... How cute is that?

Happy New Year!

For all of you whom we couldn´t speak to in person: Niki, Tess, Yarrow and I wish you all a wonderful 2011, with hope, health and happiness! We spent an enjoyable evening at Mieke´s and John´s who had built a lovely outdoor fire. As you can see, some of us danced the night away. From a distance, we watched fireworks go off in Byron Bay and Bangalow.

Rewards after a rainy day

And after all those days of rain, to be rewarded with such beautiful skies and colours, is simply awesome...

More Xmas cheer

Mieke sent us some photos today, taken during this weekend´s Christmas gathering, Beautiful photos, aptly encapsulating the lovely feel of the day.

H2O

And the rain keeps falling, falling, falling ... the Northern Rivers is making itself up for flooding ... mind you, more often than not these floods don´t actually happen, but they´re good stories. Ton was boasting of a 9m waterfall coming from his property (and showed us a photo as proof) but unfortunately by the time we got there, the rain had stopped and the sun even peeked around the corner of a cloud. As I´m writing this, the creek in the middle of the valley has burst its banks, but the cows don´t seem perturbed. Niki is chopping basil, Yarrow is cracking nuts, the cats are eagerly awaiting their dinner. The sky looks laden with more rain but apparently it will be moving away, making room for a drier spell. Fingers crossed.

Snakes alive...

Despite the Big Wet (which, compared to the real Big Wet in Australia - the monsoonal weather systems of the Northern Territory and North Queensland, is absolutely nothing but still annoyingly persistent) some critters are alive and kicking, as we witnessed driving down Houghlahans Creek Road, where Niki and I saw a beautiful carpet python cross the road. Slowly, deliberately, but not really much bothered about the car that skidded to a halt just centimeters from it to avoid killing it, it disappeared into the bush in an appropriately leisurely fashion. Carpet pythons are a much-loved pet in Australia, as you can read here.