Still working

As a student engineer in 1980 I purchased a new calculator. From memory it cost about $150 an expensive purchase for me then.

It was designed to fit a shirt pocket - an engineers tool. It uses reverse polish logic to minimise keystrokes; it can do calculations with complex numbers and matrices and is programmable.

I used all through my student years and then my career. I really enjoy using it. It is technology that was built to last. Of course it is made from plastic. It will last as long as batteries are available for it.

A bit of grass

Planted a few Carex appressa down at the creek. I grew these from seed at my house. The seeds had no special treatment - they were just sprinkled on sand and the sand was kept wet. Carex is suited to the soils that remain damp below the surface even through the dry season.

Year Reset

I spent today potting Acacia fimbriata seedlings into tubestock.
I had gathered the seed a few months ago, cleaned it, soaked it in hot water for two days then put it into seed trays. A great success about a hundred seedlings germinated.

I had less success with Acacia complanata. I only planted 20 seeds because so many were malformed or damaged. I was not very attentive when the seeds sprouted; only one seeding survived to be potted.

I look forward to planting them out later in the year.

Frog Motel

As a child in north Queensland I would find frogs hiding inside galvanised pipe fence posts. My recollection is that nearly all fence posts had a frog inside sometimes more than one.

A couple of years ago I mounted a couple of 90mm pipes vertically on a fence under a tree. They were to be frog refuges. I have never seen a frog near them.

Frogs do live at my address I hear them calling from the trees occasionally.

Listening to the radio recently I heard a representative of the local frog society recommending the vertical pipes as frog motels.

I have purchased some 40mm pipes (which is closer to the size of the galavanised pipes) to make more motels.

Colour confidence

The current fashion is definitely for all interior walls to be white. Its what you see on architecture shows on TV and in apartments on real estate websites. White on white on white - no offence and no personality.

I prefer colour on the walls.

I found a book in the library Colour Now by Kevin McCloud (2009, ISBN 978-1-84949-219-5). It has lots of complex colour combinations. To translate the colours into an obtainable paint colour I took the book to Bunnings and asked for the full Dulux Colour book I then compared the colours to select the Dulux equivalent. The paint desk at Bunnings had some natural light which helped getting the colours right.

The combinations in the the book gave me confidence to be bold.

Peak flow

The housing density in my suburb is increasing.
Formerly on a eight hundred square metre allotment there would be a single storey 3 bedroom house with a gravel driveway. Sixty percent of the area would be garden and trees. The downpipes from the roof would discharge onto garden or into a rainwater tank.

After development this same area will host two two-storey houses each with five bedrooms and a concrete driveway and a very small garden. The downpipes discharge onto the street.

The roofs and concrete driveways are impenetrable (I would hope) to rain so it must flow off. This makes the peak flow after a storm higher than before.

The solutions include rainwater tanks, soak pits and using gravel instead of concrete. Also leaving room for a garden would be nice.

Storm recovery

There have been a couple of intense storms lately. The creek is no longer a dry bed - it is flowing. The grasses, shrubs and trees around the creek are looking much better.
The intense water movement shifted a lot of debris. Many of the plants the environment revival group planted have become buried in flotsam. In other spots overland flows have scrubbed the soil away exposing plant roots.
So the group has spent a couple of hours digging around to ensure the plants survive the flood.