Happy Valentine's to my one and only!

 

Happy Valentine's Day to my one and only ... Dave and I had a wonderful day to mark the occasion. Lunch at the Stump Hill Café, at the McLaren Vale Visitors' Centre, then coffee at Dawn Patrol, then photo ops at Victor Harbor and Petrel Cove, and a meander around Nangawooka, before heading home for dinner and a movie. This is our 26th Valentine's ... hard to believe, but there it is! 

The Year of the January Green

 

Something so extraordinary happened (I should think it's finishes now, with the onset of real summer heat) that it's worth stirring from my recent torpor and blogging about it...

This ... Never ... Happens. I'm not exaggerating. In fact, I've been ransacking my memory for any other year in which the South Australian landscape was green as County Cork in January, ten days after the summer solstice ... and I can't remember any other time. There was a year (1971 or 72, I can't quite recall) when it drizzled until shortly before Christmas, but by New Year the hills were baked brown and the catchments were half empty, as usual. This year? Well --

 

This never happens. Except, apparently, in an El Nino year with some weird dipole values and a heck of a lot of monsoonal activity in the north and east. Put it all together, and you get a cool, sometimes misty, and rather wet summer for us, which translates directly into ... green. And I have to say, I like it. A lot. The climate could settle into this pattern and stay right there, if it were up to me...

These images were all captured after New Year, and as far apart as Victor Harbor and the Flinders Ranges, by way of Clare Valley, the McLaren Vale region, Mt Lofty Botanic Gardens, Nangawooka, and Brodie Road wetlands, which are in our own backyard. I'll say it again: Green!!!

Playing Catch-up With Myself: October ... Destination: Yorke Peninsula

We'd wanted to do a road trip for a long time, but with it being so difficult to rationalize taking accommodation where you're almost certain to catch the plague (or SARS-Cov 2, which is just harder to type), we decided to make it a day-trip. This has become our rule, though it's a rule we intend to break when the van has been fully refurbished: van camping is firmly on the agenda. But for now ... it's day-trips, as far as you can go by getting on the road at 5:00am and not getting home till about ten at night. So --

Destination Yorke Peninsula. 

Not that we haven't been there before (we have), but it had been a long time, and the Yorke is different enough to make it attractive. We do travel around a lot, between Burra and Clare Valley, to the tip of the Fleurieu Peninsula, as far east as Tintinara and points on the Coorong; and past a certain point, you've been everywhere so often, the idea of going again gets a bit "meh."

So: pack the day before, load the car at 5:00am and get out of Dodge as soon as you're functional. Point the car due north, hang a left onto the Copper Coast Highway, just beyond Port Wakefield, then -- go exploring. The Yorke is a nice place; a lot of people are clearly deciding it's a great place to live, because there are new housing developments everywhere you look. Moonta, Walleroo and so on are turning into yuppie suburbs, with expensive houses and marinas. O...kay. Perhaps people are retiring over there? Because it's difficult to see how so many people would find enough work in the rural centres to pay today's kind of mortgage.

But we were only there for the day, and the weather was great for a change...

It was a great trip, and in lieu of staying overnight somewhere, the day-trip is a happy compromise. But I'm looking forward very much to the van camping, I will admit. The freedom of being able to go out for two or three days is seductive. So the van is going in for service work very soon, and then -- as I write this Catch-up post in early February -- the plan is to head for Mount Gambier. This is going to be very cool, since we haven't been there in ten years or so. So long, I can't really remember when we did that last trip!

We had bacon and egg for brekkie in Port Wakefield, picnicked for lunch at a place with a table on a cliff, set among fields of wild gazania, and stopped for a good-sized snack on the river at Port Wakefield just as the sun was going down. From Port Wakefield to home is about 90 minutes, so we were in good time, and we came home with some nice pictures.

Playing Catch-up With Myself: October Arrives With a Whimper

 

October. What can you say about the first half it it? The weather was enough to make you weep, and we stayed closed to home. I was juuust starting to throw off the virus, and hoping to get out, get moving, but what you don't want to do is be halfway well and head out into sheets of freezing rain! 

So we didn't do much of anything for the first couple of weeks. I slogged around the house, walking aimlessly to get the legs moving, lifting embarrassing flea-weights, doing Qigong, when and if my body would allow it; and sometimes it wouldn't. 

Still, by the mid-point of the month we were able to brave the conditions and head south for a blustery afternoon. This, above, is Second Valley. Looks like the dead of winter, but in fact, we were six weeks since the beginning of spring, and I'd started to fret that the summer heat would hit us without warning, with no appreciable spring to speak of. (It sorta, kinda did, but not quite as suddenly or as hard as I'd worried).

The high point of that afternoon was the Singing Honey Eater who came to check out the picnic bags we'd put on the mosaiced concrete table near the jetty. And just to prove it was spring ... the pink version of the Raging Fumitory was in full bloom. The pink one seems to bloom well after the white one ... oh yes, this was spring -- though you wouldn't have known it at the time!

Still, onward and upward. Time to make plans to go somewhere, do something. And what we had in mind was a daytrip over to Yorke Peninsula. Now, BC (Before Covid), we'd have done it over two days and stayed overnight at a nice cabin in a caravan park somewhere on the south tip of the Yorke --

After Covid? Nope. How can you know for sure that the last people staying there weren't riddled with Covid, coughing and sneezing all over the cabin, then vacating it and handing it to you?! You can't. And since we know the virus can live for 72 hours on fabrics, and it's transmitted via touch, Dave and I long ago made the decision to stay out of accommodations until/unless a proper vaccine comes along that cures this thing. I mean CURES it, not just lessens the effect while your brain turns to glue wi8th repeated infections.

So -- the Yorke Peninsula daytrip was on, and planned, and we did it on October 20. This will be the next of my Catching-Up With Myself journal entries, and I'll get into it tomorrow. 

Yes, you could be assured that it was spring, grey skies notwithstanding, because --

I'm going to congratulate myself on this last photo: Yay! I managed to rescue "Fire and Ice," which I'd once thought was so dead, it was due to be transferred to the bin. Let this be a lesson: never give up, not if there's one spark of life left. Fire and Ice is now one of the most beautiful bushes in the garden!

Catching up with myself: mid-late September: The Covid Experience

 

Covid-19 is weird. Don't let anybody tell you it's not, because this thing plays mind games, as well as knocking you flat with symptoms that can oscillate back and forth from a heavy cold to something that feels like full-on pleurisy or pneumonia, inside the same day. One day you think you're getting better; the next, you feel like death is imminent. 

The only thing you can do is play it by ear, take each day as it comes, handle it on its own terms. When you feel bloody awful, take it easy ... when you feel a bit better, try try try to get some exercise and fresh air, because as for getting over this thing in 7 - 14 days and putting it behind you? Ha! That's a lousy joke.

So, as things warmed up, and/or brightened up, while I was in the throes of ploughing through this, I would grab the camera and stagger out into the backyard, where everything was in bloom and the birds, bees and butterflies were a-frolicking among the flowers and plum blossom. This is all you can do: get out there, sit on the bench or on the top step leading down into what Dave calls "the plum pit," sit with the camera on your lap and wait for a bird to come, or for inspiration to strike. 

As it happens, they both came along.

If you miss the garden at this time of year, it's such a loss, because by Christmas it'll be bare, right down to woodchips and sand. Scorched earth. As I write this, it's February 1 (I still have four months to catch up), and almost nothing is blooming, there's just ... woodchips. It's all been weeded, pruned, cut back. The occasional flower here and there is not enough to woo the eye or lure the birds back, so ...

In retrospect, I'm so glad I got these photos. Checking through the archive, I see dates corresponding with the time when I almost headed for the ER on a couple of occasions! Hard to think, this was happening thirty yards away, and outside, while I would be huddled in a blanket, struggling for the next breath, and worrying that those pains in my chest needed professional help. At the same time, one knew what was going on at the hospital -- 

I told Doctor Tim, the GP, the story a few months later, and said how I hadn't wanted to "die in a car park." He didn't pooh-pooh the concept, contradict or admonish. There is is. And at least I got into the fresh air often enough to have something pretty to look back on from these days. Miss them, and you won't see them again for a year --