Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Arrived in Christchurch from Sydney,  Saturday 11 October.  Met at the airport by the conference organiser. The drive into the city was just beautiful. It was a gorgeous spring day–clear skies,  trees with new leaf and spring blossoms,  lovely houses. Little sign of the earthquake devastation that hit Christchurch a few years ago… Until we got to the city centre. While a lot of buildings have been rebuilt,  others are being held up by struts and scaffolding… and shipping containers of all things. Some lots are razed to the ground and others are still rubble. There are a lot of empty spaces where buildings one stood.

But through it all Christchurch shines through! A group of us walked into town and around town last night and there is evidence of a sense of humour in the public art installations and a real sense of pride and love for this delightful  city. It felt like an incredibly safe place too.

Pictures to come if I figure out how to upload them from my tablet! We’re off across the NZ Alps on a train trip today,  so that should be fun. Conference starts tomorrow.

Quirky sheep warning barriers

Preserving a facade by supporting it with shipping containers

Tangled rebar on a building support

The house being built across the road from us is nearly finished. When I was working this week, I spotted this from my home office window. Guess they’re getting a pool. Memo to self: Get to know new neighbours 😉

When I was in Sydney last week, I had the final afternoon of the conference off. The Sydney Hilton where I was staying was only a couple of blocks from the Australian Museum, which is where Martyn worked (Martyn is the naturalist I’d been in contact with about the cockroach I’d found several years ago). So I decided to contact him and see if we could meet. Fortunately, he was still working there and working on the afternoon I had free, so we met at the Museum and spent an hour discussing all sorts of stuff over a coffee, including the fate of ‘my’ cockroaches, which all looked much like the picture below.

Female native cockroach on house wall

What happened was that the live female I sent a few years’ ago laid an egg case, and the babies hatched. The mother died after about a year. Some of her young mated with each other (yes, incest is common in many species according to Martyn and if anything it strengthens the gene pool instead of throwing mutations as it seems to do in humans… or is that just a myth perpetuated by religious leaders to prevent incestuous relationships?), but eventually only males were left and so there were no females to carry on the line.

For the full story of the cockroaches I sent to Martyn, see these blog posts (read them in chronological order from top to bottom):

• https://rhondabracey.com/2009/05/14/what-does-the-australian-museum-want-with-a-cockroach/
• https://rhondabracey.com/2009/05/14/heres-the-deal-with-the-cockroach/
• https://rhondabracey.com/2009/06/15/i-found-another-cockroach/
• https://rhondabracey.com/2010/01/04/im-a-granny-sort-of/
• https://rhondabracey.com/2011/01/27/cockroach-updates/

I mentioned that Martyn and I had a wide-ranging (and fascinating) discussion… From first meeting him to some 45 minutes later when the museum was closing, we discussed:

• incest in animals (including parent/child and brother/sister), which he said is very prevalent in many species, as is homosexuality
  
• genetic breeding in cattle to get rid of a heart condition crossing many generations of dairy cattle
• centuries of genetic modification in the breeding of racehorses (he said most of Australia’s racehorses came from three original males)
• bio prospecting (yes, that’s a real word) where pharmaceutical companies (was the CSIRO in Australia before various governments — especially the current Abbott government — cut their funding to the bone) are researching compounds in species like my diurnal cockroach for properties like sun protection and then synthetically recreating them to make products for testing and ultimately for human use
• how adding a couple of genes to E. coli makes insulin that Type 1 diabetics can inject without rejection and thus also prevent the formation of hard skin tissue at the injection site.
  

Spotted at my local shopping centre…

And no, this is not a ‘posh’ area. I think it’s just that these cars are more affordable than they used to be.

While I was waiting for some boots to be resoled the other day, I spotted a nail bar next door, so decided to have a look. They offered an ‘ion cleanse’ treatment for 30 minutes, so I decided to have one, being very skeptical of the claims made on the sign.

I’ve seen these foot tubs before at markets, and have been amazed — like others before me — at the change in water colour over time as ‘the toxins are eliminated from the body’. Yeah, right.

My feet were placed in lukewarm water in a special tub, wires were connected, and some salt was sprinkled into the water. The attendant then turned on the machine. And almost immediately rust coloured water and particles started coming out of the round black thing in the water. NOT out of my feet, but out of this container (the arrow shows this happening).

In short time, the water turned rusty brown, and over the 30 minutes my feet were in the water, that water got progressively darker and more rusty and more horrid; there were even small particles of ‘rust’ floating on the surface and attaching themselves to my ankles where the barrier was between my feet and the water.

Did this process remove toxins? I doubt it! It seems a simple case of take your money for putting your feet in water with some salt and a simple electrolysis (?) process. Money for jam as the attendant only has to deal with you at the beginning and end of the process, unlike nails, where they actually have to work.

Did I gain anything from it? Well, surprisingly, my feet weren’t wrinkled like prunes when I took them out, and they did feel good for the next few hours. But that’s it.

Never again.

Supplementary reading:

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228292/: Objective Assessment of an Ionic Footbath (IonCleanse): Testing Its Ability to Remove Potentially Toxic Elements from the Body. J Environ Public Health. 2012; 2012: 258968. Published online 2011 Nov 29. doi: 10.1155/2012/258968

Spotted this circular cloud on my drive home from the shops the other day. Strange.

I needed some reticulation (irrigation, for the Americans) work done and have had mixed responses from various contractors. Unreliability has been the big issue — saying they’ll be back ‘next week’ to do the work, never to be seen again. So it was with some trepidation I approached the most recent landscape/garden maintenance contractor, but this time I hit paydirt!

Dave and his team of two guys have now been to the house several times, working through my list of priorities. After getting the sprinkler system sorted out (moving existing sprinklers, adding a new control station to separate the bore stations from the mains, putting in safety valves to prevent the bore water going into the mains water system [why did no-one else pick up this up???]), they started on the list of things to be done that were the ‘nice to haves’ like pruning back all the dead stuff and removing any dead plants. We’re on an acre, so there’s a lot to be done, and my once-a-week efforts to fill up the wheelie bin don’t really make many inroads. Dave and the guys have all the tools to make the job quick and easy, have big trucks and trailers to cart away the green waste, and have better backs for this sort of work than me!

They’ve turned up every time they’ve said they would, they’ve offered advice, they’ve taken initiative, etc. Sure, they charge a little more than some of the other contractors, but I now know I can rely on them to get work done in a timely manner. They also now know the layout of our property intimately (including where all the valves and solenoids etc. are).

I’ve already asked them to put me down for some maintenance again this time next year, prior to the mad rush of summer, when everyone wants their retic system sorted out.

If you live in the greater Bunbury area in Western Australia and need work done, contact Dave at Country Landscaping (https://www.facebook.com/countrylandscapingby).

Spotted this guy on the road side of the property fence on my drive into town the other day. We’d had a storm the night before, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a bit disorientated.

He was just standing there, I slowed to a stop, then he became the Qantas tail symbol as he bounced away 😉

I took my Sweet Sixteen to my dealer (http://www.handcraftershouse.com.au/) the other day to get the latest software upgrade. My dealer and the technician from the other side of the country were hard at work. They had machines coming in all week.

These pictures are just the machines they had ‘benched’ the previous day and that day ready to work on. More were due over the next five days… You can sorta see why she’s been Australian and International Dealer of the Year a couple of times!

And no, I haven’t had time to use my machine since the upgrade so I can’t comment on it yet.

Just for my own records… My previous C-pod (motherboard) had 6.2 million stitches on it, and the one before that had 8.5 million stitches, so I’ve done 14.7 million stitches on my machine so far. As the C-pod is totally replaced with this upgrade, my stitch count has reverted to zero. My dealer is awesome though, as she keeps these records too!

Yesterday was one of those amazing winter days — clear blue skies, green everywhere, mild temperatures, no wind. A perfect day for a walk. So I took my new camera and set of on the ~3 km walk ‘around the block’. Normally this walk takes me about 40 to 45 minutes, but yesterday I was gone nearly two hours as I stopped along the way to take lots of photos (more than 150!), took little detours off the path, etc.

The photo below is a sample of what the day looked like. In this photo are some winter ponds (these are mostly dry in summer), and in the far distance is the estuary, and behind the estuary is the sand dune peninsula between the estuary and the Indian Ocean. And no, I don’t know why the owners of the 5-10 acre property shown here have a yacht in their backyard! (Click on the photo to view it larger, then click on it again to view it full size.).