It's my last full day in Melbourne and I am touristed and shopped out. I have seen a fair bit of Victoria via a 580km drive west of Castlemaine via Ararat to Port Campbell and along the Great Ocean Road back to Melbounre. I have seldom seen such unremitting dry country which was ,however,relieved by eucalpyts of which there are 800 species. The folliwng day I went on a tour east of Melbourne through the Dandenongs to an animal sanctuary where I could see the weird beasties close up. And what a strange bunch they are, mostly nocturnal so you can't see them in the daytime. Then today I went down...
Melting in Melbourne
Date: 3 Mar 2004, 05:23 Place: Melbourne, Australia
Mood: Content and ready to go home
Broiling in Brisbane
Date: 25 Feb 2004, 07:23 Place: Brisbane, Australia
Mood: Content but unbelievably hot and sticky
I am writing this with a fan going full bore having swum in a pool that was as warm as tea. Outside the verandah of this Queenslander home are all manner of shrieking parrot like birds attacking a flowering palm- like thing. Soon the fruit bats with vast wing spans will fly into the garden and attack the papaya tree. I saw one last night and was told the wing span is about 4 feet long! It is hotter and stickier than almost any other place I have been in except singapore and Malaysia so I am just putting up with it. It was aro8nd 44 degrees here a few days ago but I was mercifully in Melbourne....
China pictures
Date: 11 May 2003, 19:17 Place: Bristol, United Kingdom
Mood: OK I suppose and pre-operative
Because I experienced eye problems in China, Beijing to be exact, I have not felt good about the place and hadn't wanted to post any pics. Byt now that I am about to have a vitrectomy to seal the hole and will have to stay face down for two weeks, I will put them up as it is now or never. There is nothing new with the pics but they will act as a prompt later. Chris had bought a digital camera in Hong Kong and shot many, many photos so I have just selcted a very few. I am struck with how gloomy the scenes look and have to remember it was the winter but in addition I am sure there was lots of po...
Spring on the M5
Date: 15 Apr 2003, 21:27 Place: Bristol, United Kingdom
Mood: All right and reearching vision stuff
Today I drove to Cheltenham to see an old chum. It's a trip that usually takes aobut 40 minutes but today took me an hour as I travelled mostly on the A38 to avoid the M5. There was a lot of haze about and white glare so it was quite hard going even with the goodish eye. I found it easier to drive slowly on the A road than the motorway. However, the Spring is really here and when I dropped down to the Severn's floodplains near Almondsbury and Tockington, the hedgerows were all in blossom and leaf and it looked hot and sleepy; all far too promising for this time of year. And worth waiting for ...
me and my macular hole
Date: 4 Apr 2003, 19:55 Place: Bristol, United Kingdom
Mood: OK I suppose but what a shame
Well folks, I have learned the truth aobut my eye. I have a macular hole. This is a hole in the macula, a part of the retina in which are all the doings for close vision for reading, driving and other close work. It is age and sex related. It affects 3.3 people in every thousand so is uncommon. Women are more affected than men and women of a certain age although I am a bit younger than the 64 year old average female who gets afflicted. And what's to be done you ask? An operation called a vitrectomy which is done under local anaesthetic extracts all the jelly and replaces it with gas which is s...
