Garage

Over the last couple of months I have finally had a garage installed. It is a colorbond garage, with portal structure.

To protect the brand new concrete floor, I decided to paint it with paving paint. Because the concrete was so new, the first step was to etch it, which I did with White Knight Concrete etching solution. Ironically, this turned out to be much more work than the painting!

The first step in etching concrete is to mix up the solution, then pour it on a small section of floor, using a stiff bristled broom to work the solution in. Then use a high pressure sprayer to rinse the solution off. Move to the next section of floor and repeat. One thing I did discover is that after the floor had dried, I needed to go back over it with the broom and then re-rinse with the high pressure sprayer, sweeping residue out repeatedly.

Finally, after waiting a couple of days for the concrete to dry, I painted it, using a decking mop to apply the paint. I also added non-slip pellets to the final coat.

Sinus Infections and treatments

If you do not want to read about respiratory infections and sinuses, do not read this post. Don't say I didn't warn you!

For the last few months I have had the worst run I can remember with respiratory infections. From April through to the end of August, I have been lucky to have a couple of days in a row where my sinuses or chest have not been infected with some variety of virus or bacteria. The constant fevers, difficulty breathing, and severe cough have been very debilitating.

I have been asking my doctor for the last couple of months what is going on. Up until a couple of weeks ago he kept insisting that this is just a really bad cold/flu season (which it does seem to be). A couple of weeks ago he came to the same conclusion that I had, that the number of infections I was getting was too many to be explained by a bad season. So he gave me a referral for a CT scan of my sinuses.

While I was waiting for the results of the CT scan, I had a chat to my sister, where I mentioned my ongoing sinus problems. She had had the same issue a few years ago, and in her case CT scans etc. had showed nothing. She recommended that I try daily Nasal Irrigation, which she had found very helpful.

I had tried Nasal Irrigation a couple of times when I was coming down with a cold, but not as a regular practice. After researching the options a bit more online, it seemed worth a try. My sister had assured me that the expensive sachets that came with the nasal irrigation kit were not necessary, and that common iodised table salt worked just as well. Armed with this information, I started a daily regime of sinus cleansing.

The first few days, the saline solution was quite uncomfortable, and the process took a long time. I soon worked out that I needed to hold my head at just the right angle to get the saline solution flowing through. After a couple of days the discomfort subsided, and I started to notice an improvement in my breathing.

By this time the results of the CT scan were back, and I went to see my doctor again. He told me that there were signs that the opening from the one of the left hand sinus cavities to my nose was partially blocked by inflammation. This would explain the constant infections, as the sinus was unable to drain properly. He gave me a prescription for a steriod spray, to try to settle the inflammation, and confirmed that the nasal irrigation would be helpful, and that I should continue with it once a day. He said that if this was not sufficient to resolve the problem, then the next step would be surgery, to widen the opening from the sinus to the nose. Hopefully the surgery won't be needed, but it is good to know that there is a fallback option.

I have now been on this regime (nasal spray and nasal irrigation) for a week, and so far, so good. I haven't started any more sinus infections, and my cough has started to subside. I am not fully recovered, but I am on the improve. From what my doctor has told me, it could take months to get back to full health, but at least now I am moving in the right direction!

Changes

The last month or so have been full of change, good and bad.

First up, my hail damaged car was written off by the insurance company. Fortunately I was able to replace it very quickly with a younger and nicer car, so while I am a bit out of pocket on the changeover, all in all it worked out well.

Then the project I was working on was suspended, so I was abruptly out of a job. I have been thinking for a while about travelling to the UK, and had shelved my plans until the end of the year because work was so busy. Suddenly that wasn't an issue any more, so I decided that this was a golden opportunity to make the trip. I have blogged about the trip itself in a separate blog:

vctouk.blogspot.com.

The final change is that my sister has had her baby, which makes me an aunt. Definitely a good change there! :)

Storm

Yesterday afternoon we had a major storm, complete with large, damaging hail.Here are a couple of pics of the aftermath.


I had friends around at the time of the storm, so I didn't really get much chance to assess the damage until this morning. The only real casualties were the rear window of my car, and the polycarbonate roofing between the house and the sleepout at the back of the house.

Initially I was going to leave the car window as is, with just a tarp over it, until a repairer could reach me. But due to the scale of the storm, it seems that that might take several days. In the mean time, more heavy rain is forecast. I wasn't confident that the tarp would keep the car watertight, so I removed the broken window, and taped a plastic dropsheet over the hole, then put the tarp back over the lot.


My insurance company is flooded with calls, so it may be a day or two until I can reach them. Not much more I can do now.

Woodshed

When I bought my place there was an old woodshed on the fenceline. From the looks of things, all of the houses built in the housing estate had them originally, although many have been removed. As my house has central heating, and I have mild asthma, using the wood fireplace in the house is not something I want to do. So the woodshed (full of wood) was just a home for spiders and rats. Last year my parents helped me move all the wood out of the shed onto the nature strip, ready for the hard rubbish collection. Not that that was needed, because the wood all vanished long before the council came round to do the collection!

This year (well, August 2009, which is strictly speaking last year...), I wanted to demolish the woodshed, and put the wood and roofing out for the hard rubbish. My parents loaned me a wrecking bar, and with that, a hammer and a ladder, I got stuck in.


The first step, and the hardest, was to remove the roofing iron. This was complicated by the fact that the roofing iron for the woodshed on the neighbors property, on the other side of the fence, overlapped with mine. I needed to buy some new roofing nails to re-nail the roofing iron for the neighbors woodshed by the time I had finished.



Next step was to remove the slats, and then the framing. Mostly that was just a bit of work, except for the beams that connected into the fence. I had to cut those with a bow saw.


The final step was to haul all of the wood and iron out to the naturestrip for the hard rubbish. I started with the roofing iron. By the time I got back out with the first load of timber, the roofing iron was gone, rust and all! The scavengers move fast around here! The wook took a few days to disappear, but even though it was a bit rotten, it all went before the council came around.

Job done!

Email upgrade

For a long time I have been using Microsoft outlook 2000 as an email client, largely due to inertia. I had it, it worked, why change. Recently I have been having a problem where when outlook shuts down, it doesn't shut down cleanly, making it hard to shut down the PC. So, clearly time for a change.

I had a look at a couple of freeware email clients, and finally settled on Thunderbird, mostly because I was already using firefox. I like the client and the look and feel, but the set up was a bit of a pain. Thunderbird happily imported my outlook folders (which was excellent), but it only imported half the account information. It didn't bring across the username/password, and it didn't provide any option to add them to the account it had imported. In the end, I deleted the existing mailbox and created a new one. The automated setting detection got the wrong info, but the manual setup (referring back to outlook for the correct settings) eventually worked.

The second part to replace was the Outlook calendar. It turns out that Mozilla also have a calendar app, called Sunbird. There is also a version called Lightning which is an add on to Thunderbird. I tried Lightning first, and found that the latest full release available on the Mozilla site (0.9) doesn't work with the latest version of Thunderbird that I had just installed. So I went back to Sunbird, which works fine.

I can see why people who are not computer savvy would have problems getting things working, given the amount of stuffing around I needed to do.

Still, now things are up and running it is looking good. And I can't argue with the price!

Bathroom tiles

When I first bought my house, I had a building inspection done. The building inspector pointed out a patch of tiles that were bowing away from the wall in the shower, and warned me that the wall behind the tiles could be damaged if they weren't fixed.

About six months after moving in I finally found time to remove the problem tiles. Much to my relief, there was no sign of any damage to the wall. However I was left with a large bare patch on the wall, covered only with old tile cement. In order to continue to use the shower, I hung a plastic drop sheet over the bare section. This was very effective in protecting the wall from water, but not really comfortable to shower with!

In addition to replacing the damaged section of tiles, I wanted to extend the section of tiles further along the wall, as water from the shower was wetting the paint work next to the tiles. I didn't want a strip two tiles wide of a different color, so I removed the tiles next to the new section as well. I had a lot of trouble removing the tiles from above the damaged section, next to the new section, so in the end I decided to go for a diagonal edge, so that the two different colors would meet in a zigzag.

I tried to find tiles of the same size and colour to match, and was unsuccessful. The old tiles were matt beige, and I couldn't find anything similar. In the end I decided to go with some tiles that were the same size, but white gloss. I felt that a bit more contrast would look better than tiles that were nearly, but not quite, the same color.

Another problem was that the tiles were not attached to the wall with tile adhesive, but with some sort of cement, which was about half a centimeter thick. To get the level of the new tiles even with the old ones, I needed to use the same stuff. I found out what the stuff was called (tile cement :)) when I saw a mural that a friend was creating on her front porch, using broken tiles and tile cement. It was a very cool mural, I wish I had half that much artistic talent!

After locating and purchasing the replacement tiles, I still needed to remove the old tile cement from the concrete wall. This was a very long, slow, labour intensive task, involving a cold chisel and a hammer. I discovered after a while that heating the tile cement with a heat gun would make it more brittle, and therefore easier to remove, but the cement was still not a lot softer than the concrete I was chipping it off. The dust and grit factor were also large!



After removing the tile cement, I used an electric sander to sand down the wall. I then washed the wall thoroughly to remove any dust.

I mixed up some tile cement, and using a trowel I re tiled the first section.


Once the tile cement had had time to dry, I mixed up some grout and grouted between the tiles. I used a grout squeegee to apply the grout and I found that to be invaluable.


After the grout had dried, I used a silicone caulking agent to fill in expansion joints all around the re-tiled section. This will hopefully prevent the tiles from being damaged by building expansion and contraction. I then repeated the tiling and grouting for the second, higher section of tiles. Once everything had dried, I repainted around the edge of the tiles. Finally, I coated all of the tiles in the area, old and new, with tile sealer. This is a very thin, very nasty smelling liquid that can be painted onto tiles and grout to improve dirt resistance and water proofing.

Here is the finished result!



All up it was a lot of work, but I am happy with the result.

Bush fires - aftermath

I recently joined my parents up at their block of land, north of Buxton and Marysville. The landscape is pretty bleak, after the fires went through. The trees that were not burnt all the way up (leaves still there) all have scorched brown leaves. On the drive up we passed burned out buildings at the side of the road. Not much was left.

However by the time I went up, a couple of weeks after the fires, grass had started to grow on the open ground. A few trees had tiny green sprouts on them, high on the trunks, where new growth had started. And my parents dam has tiny frogs living in it. So the ash washing into the water hasn't killed all of the life. In a few years it will be green and lush again.

My parents were very lucky, they didn't lose the shed they had up on the block, with all of their stored stuff. This is partly because they put a lot of work into ember proofing the shed, with shutters over the windows and steel wool stuffed into all the gaps, but other people had the same precautions and still lost everything. So good management was involved, but so was a lot of luck.

Almost everything outside the shed burned though. It is a bit surreal seeing coils of wire, where the insulation has burnt off. The tires on the trailer were steel belted radials. The "steel belts" are still there but the rubber has gone. Lots of stuff like that.

I spent the day helping mum and dad to pile branches from fallen trees into piles, so they can be burnt in winter. Keeping dead wood from buiding up is a constant task up there, and may be part of why the fire didn't "crown" (burn up to the tree tops) over my parents land.

It was a fairly sobering day, but the signs of new life are encouraging.

Victorian Bush Fires

It has been a strange and horrible week. The Bush Fires that ripped through Victoria have devastated large areas and killed so many people.

My family and I have been very fortunate. Although my parents have a property up near Marysville (where the destruction was at it's worst), they live in Melbourne, so they were safe from any physical harm. Even better, the friends they know best up there seem to have escaped with their lives and with their horses and dog. They have lost their home though, which is pretty devastating. So, we haven't lost anyone, and the losses are only property. So many people have lost so much more.

One frustration, for me and from what I can tell for most other people in Melbourne, is that there is so little I can do to help. I have donated money and blankets, but it doesn't seem like enough. But really, I don't have the skills or the fitness to fight fires, and if I went up there I would only be in the way. So, my thoughts and admiration go out to the CFA and all of the other experts who are up there helping.

Car cleaning

This morning I decided to clean my car, using grey water for the washing part of the job. I needed to clean my curtains, to reduce dust mite load, so I used the rince water from that.

Alas, I discovered that a large number of the dirt spots on the car bonnet were actually stone chips. So I have just spent about half an hour with a bottle of touch up paint, filling in stone chips. The bonnet now looks a little bit blotchy, but at least is now protected from rust.

New Year

So, it's a new year! And I finally finished blogging about the NT trip :) Only about seven months after the fact.

I have been on holiday last week and this week, hence the increased number of posts.

It has been a productive break. I have caught up with family and friends for Christmas and New Years Eve.

I have finished painting the eaves along the east side of the house. I still have glass to replace in two of the windows, and the wall to paint, and that side will be finished. I have replaced a window pane on the south side of the house. I have taken up four curtain drops, so they now are the right length for this house, instead of the last house I was living in. I have drilled holes in four pieces of wood that I need for installing a drawer in the kitchen, and have painted them. I have finished the tiling in the bathroom, including painting around the edges of the tiles, and coating them with tile sealer. I have made a start on installing a new awning on the north side of the house.

I did a day trip to Werribee Park Mansion, which mum tells me that I have been to before, but I was so young I don't remember. If I feel enthused then I may blog with more details over the next few days.

Either way, welcome 2009!

NT Day 9

On my last day in Alice Springs I drove to the Telegraph Station and visited the original site of Alice Springs. This is a photo of the original Alice Spring, located on one side of the (dry) Todd River. The original surveyor who first explored the area was hired to survey a telegraph route from Darwin through to Adelaide. Mid points were needed near water sources. At the time of the survey, the Todd River was in flood. Water was running into a small cave and rushing out, giving the appearance of a spring. The surveyor named the spring "Alice Spring" after his bosses wife.


The Telegraph station was eventually built near by.

This is a picture of the evapourometer, which was used to measure evapouration rates at Alice Springs.

Once the telegraph station was closed, the site was used to house "half-caste" aboriginal/european children, who had been orphaned or taken from their parents. The guide was one of those children. His memories of his time there were very positive, although from some of the stories on display, others of children felt differently. There seems to be general agreement that the women who ran the centre cared for the children, and tried very hard to give them a good life, but that the center was massively overcrowded and underresourced.

After seeing the Telegraph Station, and reading about some of the early history of Alice Springs, I drove to Alice Springs airport, returned my hire car, and took a plane back to Melbourne. It was a great trip, but I was very happy to be home.

NT Day 8

The next morning (Friday) I drove back to the MacDonnel Ranges, this time to Simpsons Gap. On the road leading into the gap there was a walking trail called the Ghost Gum walk, leading tot he Cassia Hill walk. I followed these and discovered that Cassia Hill was a small but steep hill on the surrounding flat landscape. There was a great view of the gap from the top of the hill, as well as some signage explaing the geology of the area.

On the way back to the car I crossed over the Larapinta trail bike track, which cyclists can use to ride from Alice Springs along a large section of the West MacDonnel ranges.

Simpsons gap itself had very little water in it compared to the previous two water holes I had visited, but had a lovely sandy beach. It was a very pretty spot.

The next stop was Standly Chasm. This was the first of the MacDonnal Ranges spots with an entry fee, used to maintain facilities in the area. I paid the fee, at the kiosk, then followed the really lovely walking track to the Chasm.
The walking track was through some of the greenest plant life I had seen in the Red Centre.

The Chasm itself is very striking. The red/orange color is magnificent, and the tall, narrow break in the mountains is remarkable.

After visiting Standly Chasm I had seen all the sites I wanted to visit in the West MacDonnal Ranges, so I returned to Alice Springs.

My next stop in Alice Springs was to visit the Reptile Centre. The Reptile centre is fairly unimpressive from the outside, as it is housed in an old suburban house. However inside there are two largish rooms with many snakes and lizards in enclosures. The back yard area also has snakes and lizards, as well as a crocodile. Two of the lizards in the back yard area, in a large enclosure, were Perentie, a kind of giant goanna. The were easily a meter and a half long.

After looking around the displays, I returned to the main room for a talk and demonstration of some of the reptiles. At the end of the presentation, the audience were able to handle a few of the lizards and one of the snakes.



The snake pictured is a black headed python, and was very placid. The scales were surprisingly soft and warm. Because snakes are cold blooded, I expected it to be cold to the touch, but of course snakes are actually room temperature, and the room was kept fairly warm.

I really enjoyed the reptile centre, particularly the chance to interact with the reptiles.

*Edit*

That evening I bought some Possum food from the place where I was staying, and fed the rock wallabies that come down for a feed at the back of the motel. They were very tame, and would even eat food from my hand.

NT Day 7

The next morning (Thursday), I drove out to the Western MacDonnal Ranges. The sealed road only runs as far as Glen Helen Gorge, so I stopped there, with the plan of working my way back to Alice Springs, seeing the accessible sites on the way.

When I go to Glen Helen Gorge I stopped at the guesthouse there, and walked to the Gorge, a short distance away.

This was the largest open body of water I saw on the whole trip. The tourist attractions along the West MacDonnel Ranges are mostly a series of waterholes, which attract wildlife, and allow plants to grow. Glen Helen gorge is fairly small, but with a large waterhole.

After seeing the gorge I headed back to the guesthouse for lunch. After lunch I was able to attend a Ranger talk about animal signs (tracks and droppings). The ranger had a large mat with stencilled animal tracks, and a series of plastic containers with sample droppings. He challenged us to match the tracks and droppings to the animal that left them. Very interesting. He also had a few bones and skulls from animals, which he handed around and asked us to identify. Some of the animals were wallaby's, dingos, emus, a large lizard, and kangaroos. After the talk I found myself keeping an eye open for tracks and droppings, and was able to identify a number of them over the next few days.

After the walk I drive back towards Alice Springs and stopped at Ormiston Gorge and walked to the waterhole.

The waterhole here is smaller, but with a kind of sandy beach. It is apparently a popular swimming spot in the warmer months.

I then drove to the Ochre Pits and waked down to see them. The Ochre pits were a source of Ochre used for ceremonies by the indigenous peoples of the area. Ochre was traded up and down the continent, so good sources were highly prized.

By this time it was getting late, so I headed back to Alice Springs.

NT Day 6

On my first morning in Alice Springs I took it easy, getting some washing done, and generally taking a break.

In the afternoon, I headed out to the Alice Springs Desert park. This is effectively a Botanical Gardens, with sections devoted to the types of terrain found in Central Australia.

There are also a number of large aviaries, with local bird life, and a nocturnal centre. This building houses a number of nocturnal animals, as well as some reptiles.

The final display I visited was the Birds of Prey demonstration. I sat with a number of other visitors in a small amphitheatre. After a while, a large owl flew into the amphitheatre, and a ranger gave a talk about the owl. The owl was fed, and flew out, and one by one several other large predatory birds flew in, and were fed. It was a great experience, and one I recommend. I have some photos somewhere, but I need to dig them out. I will upload them to this blog when I find them.

NT Day 5

The morning after doing the King's canyon rim walk, I checked out of the King's Canyon Resort, and drove back to King's Canyon. This time I did the Creek walk, down the centre of the Canyon. This walk is much easier going than the Rim walk, but still well worth while. I got a completely different perspective of the Canyon.

Here is a shot from the end of the creek walk, plus a shot of a large rock that has fallen off the canyon walls, into the creek.

After finishing the Creek walk (an hour, rather than the nearly four hours for the rim walk), I drove back to the highway and continued South. I stopped at the Kathleen springs walking track, and walked to the springs. The walking track is less spectacular than King's Canyon, but still interesting. The waterhole called Kathleen Springs is very lovely, well worth the relatively short walk.

I then continued south, stopping at King's Creek station for lunch. The hamburgers there are excellent. I filled up with petrol, flinching a bit at the price ($2.18 per litre), but for such an out of the way place it was probably very reasonable. I enquired about the helicopter flights, but was told that they needed at least two people to make it worth while to go up. As I was travelling alone, that was not possible, so I headed back to the highway.

As I was in a 2-wheel drive, I needed to stick to sealed roads, and was therefor unable to take the round trip to Alice Springs. So retraced my steps south, back to the Sturt Highway, (only a couple of hundred kms!) and then drove east to Erldunda, then North to Alice Springs. The drive took nearly 5 hours, so I was pretty worn out by the time I got to Alice Springs. I was staying at the Heavitree Gap Outback Lodge, on the outskirts of Alice Springs, which is located right next to the Heavitree Gap. This is a pass through the MacDonnal Ranges. I checked in, and had a very early night.

Northern Territory Day 3 (Evening)

The final night of my stay at Yulara, I took a short star-watching tour. We were taken to the Yulara observatory, and given a guided tour of the constellations above. The stars are very clear from Yulara, without all of the light pollution of a major city.

For the final part of the star-watching, we were set up with a couple of telescopes, and given the chance to see some of the highlights of the local sky. I got to see Alpha-Centauri, as a binary system (I think I managed to see the third dot of the trinary, but I may be kidding myself there). I saw Jupiter, and the four largest moons, and Saturn and it's rings, which were amazingly clear. Friends tell me that you can see this stuff from out in country Victoria if you have the right equipment, but it was new to me, and an amazing experience.

Northern Territory Day 4

The morning of the fourth day, I checked out of Yulara, and headed towards Kings Canyon. I stopped briefly on the roadside, to look at Mount Connor in the distance. Mount Connor is located on private land, so the only way to look at it up close is with the camel tours run by the owners. I decided to skip the camel tour and make do with a distant view.

I drove on to Kings Canyon Resort (about 400 km from Yulara by sealed road, and about 7 km past Watarrka National Park, which contains Kings canyon), and checked in. I then grabbed some lunch from the local milk bar, and headed back to Kings canyon.

I decided to do the Canyon Rim walk that afternoon, and started out from the carpark.

This is a view of the canyon from the trail from the carpark.

This is the initial steps up to the canyon rim. If you look closely, you can see the line of people making their way up.

Because I have an injured knee, I used a walking stick to take some of my weight, and made my way up the steps very slowly and carefully. I followed this principal for the whole walk, and only needed to stop once to put an ice pack on my knee. I highly recommend the use of a walking stick as a cheap hiking pole, it made a real difference to how secure I was when scrambling across uneven footing.

The top of the canyon rim is covered with mounds of stones, almost like giant beehives. These mounds used to be sand dunes, millions of years ago, but have been compressed over time into rock.

Some of the rocks show wavy lines, from being at the base of a water way.

One section of the canyon rim contains a "miniature" version of the landscape, called Liliput.

At the back of the canyon, the path descends down stairs, into an oasis called the Garden of Eden. Permanent rock pools here are filled with water that sinks through the sandstone, then hits a layer of waterproof shale.

The path then continues back up to the other side of the canyon rim. There are some amazing views from here of the canyon.
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Finally, the path heads back down to the carpark. The descent is not as steep as the ascent.


All up the walk took me about 4 hours. The guide books list the walk as taking between 3 and 4 hours, so they are pretty spot on. The walk is often a scramble over rough ground, and it is sometimes hard to spot the next route marker, even in broad daylight. I wouldn't want to be on the walk after dark.

It was an exhausting walk, but also beautiful and amazing. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.