An endangered species...

I found this seemingly newborn phone box the other day. Incidentally it is located at one of Melbourne's most notorious road intersections and railway level crossings.

Tall Timber

This is the lemon scented gum in our front yard. It's a big tree but it is dwarfed by the gum tree across the road. Late this afternoon there were quite a few Rainbow Lorikeets (you'd think there were more by the noise they make!) feeding on the flowers, but because they are so high up, and surprisingly well camouflaged they are not perceptible in the photo. Last year we had a number Flying Foxes feeding in the tree, I'll have to check latter on tonoght to see if they are back. We are only about 2 km from the Yarra River so it's not unusual to see the dark silhouette of Flying Foxes overhead at night. The only problem with these trees is that they occasionally decide to drop limbs for no apparent reason. For some reason they always land on our neighbours telephone wire, luckilly last time the wire was there to save our neighbours shiny new car.

Something I discovered while writing this is that the lemon scented gum is in fact not a Eucalyptus but a member of the closely related Corymbia family.

Oooh pretty flowers...

While walking home tonight I noticed that this Bottle Brush (otherwise known as a Callistamon) was bursting into vivid red flowers, which stood out in the briliant late afternoon sun. I think I'm looking forward to daylight saving.

Caged

Or behind bars even...

The afternoon of August 25 2006 at Camberwell.

Tramit 2006

Last Sunday I attended the Tram It 2006 Family Fun day in Harbour Esplanade Docklands. It was a great opportunity to see a large number of past and present Melbourne trams in the one place at the same time.

The tram you see in this post is Hawthorn Tramway Trust tram number 32 built in 1938. It remained in service in Melbourne for many years before being used in Bendigo right up until that system closed in the early 1970's. 32 has recently been restored in Bendigo and now once again roams (as much as trams can roam) the streets of Bendigo in it's original HTT livery on the Bendigo tourist tram service. Bendigo tramways have a website which you may or may not find interesting.

Anyway You may also notice that this photo is hosted by flickr. I sighned up to flickr a few months ago and decided to finally put some photos up, including a few taken at Tramit 2006. My flickr address is http://www.flickr.com/photos/ben7k/.

This blog is coming to you from the not too distant past* (10:48pm AEST on Thursday October 12 2006 to be exact) owing to the fact that blogger appears to not be working. Notepad is probably the most versatile program that comes with Windows, I love it. This probably explains the abundance of txt documents on my desktop...

Any way I know I've been a bad blogger lately. Despite having the odd moment of inspiration (no more than usual), I basically haven't been bothered with using the computer at home much as I spend all day using a computer (and surfing the net while waiting for work computer to do it's thing). So my life has been pretty much, get up->Go to work->work->come home from work->watch TV/cook dinner(depends who's home)->more TV->maybe check emails->go to bed, rinse and repeat...

The reason I can now sit here and blog is mostly due to the fact that I now have an LCD monitor to replace my fading with age CRT that gave me bad eye strain. I have a bad history with PC monitors, for some reason they keep blowing up on me. The CRT was a 15" "temporary" solution that I've been using since my fantastic 17" CRT just decided to make loud hissing noises and flashing noises one night about 2 years ago. I love my new LCD, I've found space on my desk that I never dreamed existed.

As for adventures... Well I did go fishing on the AFL grand final day at Sugarloaf reservoir (yes the same Sugarloaf Reservoir that is supposedly full of human faeces pumped out of the Yarra River), so I'll probably post a few photos and a bit of a write up soon. Other adventures included Tramit 2006 last weekend, which was a display of many current and former classes of Melbourne trams, I'll probably post about that too...

Anything else I think of I'll get back to you with that too.

**Well more from the past, brought forward to the future and then back dated to the past again. Hopefully it won't result in a tangent in the space time continuum causing all kinds of anomalies that could include, waking up back on the old 27th foor of my asshole stepdad's Hotel/Casino, after getting knocked on the head by Billy Zane (the easy way), with my artificially endowed alcoholic mother comforting me...