Rhonda Bracey: At Random

For the past 10 days, the south-west of Western Australia has been blanketed with smoke from bushfires south of Northcliffe, some 360 km south of Perth. The smoke has extended right up past Geraldton, some 600+ km from the source of the fires. We’ve only had a couple of days of respite from the smoke, so everything gets locked up tight and the air conditioning goes on to try to filter the air. The PM10 recording in Perth one day last week was 89 (normally 13!), which compares to polluted cities like Bangkok.

Here are some photos I took of the smoke in our area a couple of days ago. Click on a small photo to show it full size. The scenes of the estuary are telling because there’s a long range of sand dunes on the other side of the estuary, which is almost always visible. Not with this smoke though.

See also:

• https://sandgroper14.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/smoke-from-margaret-river-fires/

I’ve now picked FOUR tomatoes from the EIGHT bushes I planted in spring last year (the saga of me growing these bloody tomatoes: https://sandgroper14.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/i-think-ill-buy-my-veges-thanks/). And they’ve been TINY. I picked three of the four today, and can see no more on the tomato plants, so I suspect that’s it. That was an awful lot of effort for basically nil return.

Here are the tomatoes I picked today to show you their size against blueberries and a store-bought tomato. I had all three for lunch, and they weren’t even particularly nice. Not as sweet as I’d hoped; in fact, they had a slightly tart taste.

(received from an older relative; source unknown)

The Green Thing

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.”

The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”

She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar/tram or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person.

Remember: Don’t make old people mad! We don’t like being old in the first place, so it doesn’t take much to piss us off.

February is the height of summer here in Western Australia. High temperatures; strong, dry easterly winds; extreme fire danger; total fire bans (including any hot work, BBQs etc.). Or, if you live further north, cyclones (destructive winds, flooding, etc.).

FESA is the agency that coordinates all the emergency responses and alerts the public to anything they need to be aware of. They have a web page where all the latest alerts are posted, and I have it bookmarked as it’s a site I check regularly. This web page is updated every 5 minutes, so if you are in danger, you have the latest information on which to act. Since November, there’s always been SOMETHING on the alerts page — I live in a big state, after all. (BTW, there’s an Android app and probably an iPhone/iPad app for FESA alerts so you can get the latest alerts on the go.)

But today — 6 February, slap bang in the middle of summer, fire season, and cyclone season — there was nothing!

It’s not often you see that!

Wow! FESA has nothing to report! That's a relief.

We have two very large and very old trees on our property. They are the only substantial trees that would’ve been left after the old farmland was converted into acre blocks. And the previous owners (and original builders) of our house preserved them. They are lovely.

But I’ve been a bit concerned about their safety. So it was time to get them assessed by an arborist to see if they needed ‘trimming’ for both safety and fire risk reasons. The tree guys came today and about three to four hours later they left after giving the two trees a BIG haircut!

I felt for the trees — this was probably the first time they’ve ever been assaulted like this — and I was also concerned for any birds that may have used these trees as nesting sites. Likewise any possums (we saw a Western Ringtail possum on the fence at the front of the house one night). But the peppermint tree had branches that were close to the house (a fire risk), other branches that were growing into each other, some that were overhanging the driveway, and several dead branches that have probably been there for years. The tuart tree had a huge branch overhanging the neighbour’s fence (I figured it was cheaper to get the trees lopped than to replace the fence!), another huge one overhanging the driveway, and several other branches that were particularly heavy or growing in such a way as to unbalance the tree after those big limbs were removed. And those big branches I was concerned about always moved a LOT when we have high winds.

Here’s the peppermint tree before they started and when they’d finished:

Peppermint tree before its trim

Peppermint tree after its trim

And the tuart tree:

Tuart tree before its trim

Tuart tree after its trim

The guys were very good — they were polite, they wore all the safety gear appropriate to the work they were doing, and a big one for me: they cleaned up after themselves! In addition to the big mulcher coming in to chomp up the branches, the guys raked and used the leaf blower to get the last of the twigs, small branches etc. You’d hardly know they’d been… except for the missing parts of the trees, of course.

If you’re in the Bunbury area of Western Australia, I can highly recommend Kings Tree Care.

Oh, I did see a lone monarch butterfly looking very lost near the peppermint tree, darting this way and that. I suspect it lost its home 😦 Hopefully, there were no birds that used the lopped branches as their permanent home.

One other thing… I asked about blowing the bark mulch onto the garden but the chief arborist told me it wasn’t advised as it would be too acidic and would kill the plants. It seems such mulch has to sit for 3 months to a year before you can put it on the garden. Which was a shame, as I would’ve liked to see the tree branches returned to the soil from which they’d sprung.

Having experienced a few cyclones when I lived up north, this isn’t the eye of a cyclone.

But it’s a weird radar image from the Bureau of Meteorology, just the same. It looks like there’s some sort of alien force field centred on Rockingham and Mandurah. Everywhere else is copping fair amounts of rain (left over from what was Cyclone Iggy), but not Rockingham and Mandurah. Very strange…

Some of the horses I see on my morning walk. This paddock has about 13.

The ‘headbands’ are used to keep the flies out of their eyes and thus stop infection. The eye parts are shadecloth-type mesh.

Last week, there were some devastating fires in the Margaret River region, about 90 minutes south of where we live. The smoke blanketed the entire southwest, including Perth.

Here’s the sunset from my home office window on one of the very smoky days. You can *just* make out the ridge of sand dunes in the far distance — they are normally in clear view — and you can’t see the estuary at all.

Here’s that same view on a normal morning, a week after the fires:

Recently, we’ve had a plethora of large moths, but I don’t think that it’s the moths that the crows have been after — I think it’s something much smaller (ant? spiders? midges? mosquitoes?). Sometimes the crows (and magpies) peck at the corners of the floor to ceiling windows in the spare bedrooms — it’s loud enough to sound like someone’s knocking at the door! Occasionally, they’ve jumped on to the window ledge outside where I sit in my office and attack whatever little beasties they find lurking in the crevices and nooks and crannies. So I took some pictures of one of them the other day.