The Bug Has Landed

We've been up in the air for many months now but finally we've landed on our feet. Our house in the city is sold and we've resettled our little family to a nice house in the country. We're half way up a mountain ridge about 5 minutes out from a small country town with a population of just over 2,000 so it's most definately a tree change for us and it couldn't have come sooner. This is the view from our back verandah so you can see that we are surrounded by a temperate / subtropical forest.

The place runs on tank water and apparrently practically never runs dry and there is some solar panels too so while we aren't totally off-the-grid we're pretty close. The first thing we noticed was just how quiet it is here. You can hear the birds and the crickets but no more traffic noise or late night drunken hooligans stumbling past the house. We sure won't miss that! The other thing is just how dark it is here. When the moon is new you literally can't see your hand in front of your face at night. The absense of city street lights means the night sky is full of bright and twinkling stars. I'll finally be able to pull out that old telescope my mother-in-law gave me and put it to good use to educate my girls about astronomy. There is a lot of wildlife up here I can teach them about too. We saw this little guy on the property the other day.

For non-Aussies, this is an Echidna. Kind of like an Australian version of the hedgehog and he was probing around our wood pile probably looking for ants or termites. On the 2nd morning we were here my wife was up early and spotted a wallaby (a small kangaroo) in our backyard but by the time she went for the iphone to take its photo it was gone. Plenty of birds here too - Kookaburras, Currawongs, Crows, Parrots, Rainbow Lorikeets, Black Cockatoos and the other day while exploring the property I found this :-

At first I thought it was just some random rubbish, but as I got closer I realised it was lots of different things. Milk bottle tops, candy wrappers, tape....all of it was stark blue. This is the remnants of a Satin Bowerbirds nest. I thought that was pretty cool to have such an exotic and unique Australian bird around, though having all this wildlife around is not all good. We were driving up the road the other day and needed to make a big swerve to avoid this guy :-

That's a diamond back python, which is not a poisonous snake so it's relatively harmless for humans though it gave the wife a bit of a fright. It's really just the brown snakes and the red-belly black snakes we'll need to look out for. Haven't seen any of those ones yet.

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Anyway, we're really happy to be here. I've got a seperate studio on the property that I can use as an office and we get the NBN hopefully connected on Tuesday so we're just about at the end of this little life transition. Very soon I should be properly set up to work remotely and that means I'll also be able to start writing regularly on STEEM again. I'm going to try and pace myself a bit with my writing and I have some fresh ideas for a new project I'm going to try and flesh out, so stay tuned. I'll be back in the swing of things in no time.

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