Tree Frog Season

The rainy season has arrived and with it the tree frogs are making their presence known. They live in the downspouts and are in hibernation much of the year.

Perhaps in the natural world they live in hollow trees and caves, but since every house here has a bunch of downspouts, they have adapted easily to that environment.

Now the one difference is that they start to sing when it rains. "Sing" is probably too strong a word for it, they croak. Or whatever frogs do in your language. In Swedish they go

Kou ack ack ack, kou ack ack ack,
kou ack ack ack ack kaa.

as in the song Små grodorna, which the Swedes perform while dancing around the maypole.

Anyway, the tree frogs croak or kouack or whatever, but it gets severely amplified by their being resident in the downpipes. So rain here is inevitably accompanied by an orchestral chorus of treefrogs resonating from the downpipes. And once one frog sings, all frogs sing.

Its a noisy neighborhood.

Global Warming...

OK, so I have just been having drinks with some of the neighbors, one a retired chemical engineer. Inevitably, the topic turned to global warming and Copenhagen. Pretty much most of the company were skeptics, but trying to argue with people like that is a losing proposition, they have their views based on bias and faith and ignorance and little more. So this guy, retired engineer from QAL, basically says, how are you going to power the refinery without coal?:

So here is how you argue with morons like that.

Two centuries ago coal was a major export from Africa. Coal was an absolute essential to keep the plantations running, to keep Europe supplied with cotton and to keep the landed gentry and the mercantile industry functioning and in the wealthy lifestyle to which they'd become accustomed. As the plantation owners would argue "without coal, how would we ever operate... we have to keep on shipping coal or we will have to shut down. Our spinners and weavers and the clothing industry will shut down. Children will freeze to death because they won't be able to afford new clothes. It will be financial disaster on both sides of the Atlantic. Our whole town and associated industry is based on cheap coal and we just can't change that overnight. Besides, if you cut out the trade in coal, all the coal traders will be out of jobs, "

Arguing that it is necessary to keep burning coal to keep the coal trade and heavy industry running today is functionally equivalent to arguing that maintaining the slave trade was necessary to keep the slave traders of two centuries ago employed and the plantation owners in their opulent lifestyles.

Coastal wildlife...

So I have found one minor issue with living right on the coast. I mentioned Pauls run-in with a tree snake in his office, well I can top that with a coastal taipan in my bedroom.

My buddy John's son Andrew has a rubber snake that he has been known to leave lying in places where it can be found by impressionable who suffer from Ophidiophobia. So I'm tired and heading for bed and I look over at the bedstand and think "Andrew, you little %#&*^&, I wish you wouldn't leave that think lying around, some people don't find it that funny...". Then I think "hmmm, Andrew hasn't been here for a couple of weeks and I'm sure I would have noticed it before...". Then I realize it's a real snake.




It seems to have taken up residence on my bedstand. Now I have no particular problem with snakes, even highly venomous ones (I grew up with them in the back yard on the banks of the Yarra river in Melbourne), but having one in your bedroom is going a bit far.

So I enlist my next door neighbors help and we manage to get the thing out of the house. Seems like he has had similar problems in the past, we live right on the beach and there is a lot of undeveloped bushland next to us. We're hitting the hot, rainy season, and the things are getting active. Just why it decided to visit is unclear, probably looking for a nice dry spot.

I usually leave all the doors open at night when I'm home, I figure I'll have to be a bit careful now. And I often get up in the middle of the night and stagger round the house in the dark... from now on I'll be turning the lights on before I do anything.

And the thought just occurred to me that my bedside lamp is usually sitting just where the snake was - I took it away to use somewhere else a few days ago. The switch is on the power lead - I have this vivid mental image of groping around the dark for the switch and grabbing that instead!