Deal Island record rain reported on the news

Our record rains were reported on the news last night. I missed it. The rain has stopped and the weather today reminded me of a crisp fall day in Maine. It will be windy for the next few days and with a southerly wind (perhaps from Antarctica) and I had to find my wool socks [...]

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Jack jumpers and spiders

I think i stirred things up with cleaning and blogging. I cleaned the house and the next day awakened to several small, dead spiders in the house. Maybe they ran out of insects to eat or I destroyed their webs. I purposely left two spiders as sentries over the doorway to the sun room to [...]

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Dinner aboard the Young Endeavor

We received a phone call in the afternoon from the Young Endeavor, anchored in Garden Cove. She is a 44 meter Naval Training Vessel, with a youth training program for kids aged 16-23. It focuses on personal development and growth sort of like Outward Bound and 10,000 kids have done it. This year they sailed [...]

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Sunscreen vs. the sun

A domestic aside. The sun is amazingly strong here. My eyes take time to adjust every time I venture outside. Sunglasses have to be close at hand and are usually dangling around my neck. Skin cancer rates are almost epidemic in Australia. We are both fair, so we use sunscreen recommended by the Dermatologist, Neutrogena [...]

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Needles and spindles

After two weeks of dry sunny weather, it’s been raining for three days. Not as much as up in Queensland where rivers have flooded and an area larger than Germany is covered in water. Five towns there were wiped out in the past couple of days with loss of lives and major property. We’re just [...]

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Above the lighthouse

The Deal island Lighthouse doesn’t actually sit on the highest point on the island but it’s close. The lighthouse is officially at 305 meters and is 12.5 meters high. We climbed to the peak just next to it, which is higher but wasn’t a good site for the lighthouse because it’s only dirt and rocks. [...]

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Island and house guests

I only need to look around at the rocks to find all sorts of interesting things. I met a GP from Sydney the other day who was happy to learn she wasn’t the only one seeing things. I am not the only one who sees a duck here, am I? I wish I was imagining [...]

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Our grid

We don’t have one. We depend on no utility companies, only the wind and rain. (Except for Telstra internet and phone and we haven’t had internet for two days). We are well stocked with power and water. We get our energy to run a freezer, refrigerator, lights and computers from a solar array which generates [...]

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We speak the same language, but just use different words

We all speak English here. First of all I still can’t believe the US has not adopted the metric system when the whole world uses it. So I have to translate all measurements and weights, kms, grams and cms. But there are words here I haven’t heard before and we often have to ask what [...]

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Every picture tells a story

We are lucky to share the island with fairy or little penguins. They live in burrows down by the coves and right now their babies are in the burrows all day. The parents leave before dawn to fish all day then return after dark. Some walk quite a way up the hills to their burrows. [...]

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