Rain

Some pictures of the water left by today's hour or two of heavy rain: back of house, side of house, drainage ditch (normally empty). Three men in suits inspected the flooding near us; they now have very wet shoes. Must be city folks; locals would go barefoot, as I did. We hope the suits now believe residents' claims of drainage problems. And this wasn't really bad rain: heavy but not many hours, so far. No water into houses but some unoccupied places are very close to getting flooded. We're still okay.

New awnings for house

On Monday two men from Townsville Blinds & Awnings installed new curved metal awnings on the front and the eastern side of our house. Already we have noticed an improvement in blocking of both sun and rain. This is the same company that installed our other blinds, awnings, and interior coverings for some windows and the patio door. We've been very happy with their products, their work, and their friendly, on-time service.

Whistling ducks?

Eric took this photo early one morning (6-6:30 am) with his Kodak Z740 digital camera on full 10x zoom. These are just a few of the birds in the flock wading in the drainage ditch near our house.

After consulting the bird identification book, we've concluded the closest match is the Crested Whistling Duck, although these don't show the very small crest and are a bit darker than the one shown in the book (which could be at least partly due to the low light conditions).

Rescuing data from a drive

Thanks to goodies from Eric's gadget box, I was able to rescue some files off a 500GB drive with a broken connector. (The drive was otherwise in good condition, as was the data on it.)

Six wallabies and a cat

This photo was taken by Eric around 6AM on his walk around Carlyle Gardens. He saw lots of other wallabies, but this cluster (featuring a cat as well) was particularly striking. The quality of the photo isn't great, because it was taken with an iPhone (which doesn't handle low light levels nearly as well as our other cameras) and I had to lighten it quite a bit in GIMP to make the wallabies even slightly visible.

And then there was the little wallaby who wanted to read the newspaper, but was having difficulty getting the plastic wrap off...