tBlog

Fremantle Prison.  A study in doors.

Sunday’s weather was the warmest and sunniest it’s been in a while, so I strapped on my bike helmet and took off for the Brisbane Botanical Gardens at Mt. Coo-tha.  Opting to wear my Five Fingers while hiking around the site, I was inspired to give them a moment in the spotlight.

A couple of weeks ago, Brisbane hosted the 2010 Scrapbook and Papercraft Expo.  Being Australia’s number one papercrafting wholesaler, the Print Blocks gang was there to show off all the new products and to craft up some exceptional Make ‘n’ Takes.

Last weekend I went on a bike trek out to see the ocean.  My ride took me out to Sandgate, then North across the bridge to Redcliffe and then all the way through the Boondall wetlands before landing me back in Hamilton.  I can’t think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon!

Just a couple of weeks after Alex moved to Innisfail to fill his rural service teaching requirement and become a full-fledged QLD teacher, I hopped on a plane and flew North to visit.  Since Innisfail is such a small country town, we booked a room at Le Cher Du Monde in the heart of Port Douglas and took in some of the finer sights of tropical Far North Queensland.  We saw the sights in and around P. Douggie, drove up into the hinterland to see Coffee World and collect some tropical fruit wine, and even took the ferry across to the Daintree Rainforest for a very muddy private guided night walk through the jungle.

After continued exposure to the handmade crafts industry and seeing all the great stuff our designers put together for this issue of the Creativity! Magazine, I was inspired to have another go at digital scrapbooking.  I’m not sure I’ll ever go so far as to have these layouts printed and bound in a book, bu they’re fun to make and will look nice as part of a slideshow on my digital photo frame!

Working with all of this scrapbooking stuff has set my little designer brain to churning, and the task of designing a site that crafters feel comfortable and familiar navigating sent me scouring the web for digital scrapbooking inspiration.  Here’s my first shot at putting together my own 12 x 12 spread of our family trip to Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary.  The koala art I snatched up from DeviantArt is ©2007-2009 *lastscionz, and I truly hope he doesn’t mind my borrowing it for this little project.

Despite their popularity, the emu is not the only enormous flightless bird to call Australia home.  The Cassowary is dangerous, more exotic, and has been around since the age of the dinosaurs (and so is by default a much more fantastic animal than the Emu, which you can feed kangaroo pellets to at the petting zoo).  The cassowary was also a highlight of our trip to far North Queensland.

We never got to see one in the wild, but have plenty of cassowary photos to share.  Best put by my sister-in-law…

SARA: Oh and don’t forget the cassowary poop too–it’s our only evidence that they actually exist.

Enough said about our wild cassowary sightings.

I hadn’t realised how popular the cassowary was with FNQers until we really started touring around.  As it turns out, the big black bird with the crazy blue head is the icon of the Aussie tropics, and our little group had their own feelings about it.  Before we left the rain forest, we had spent more time searching for cassowaries in the wild than almost any other activity, since, according to the road signs we spotted frequently, they are roaming all over the area.  Since they weren’t popping out of the bushes around every turn as we had hoped, we started to come up with our own ideas about what they’re actually like…

…did you know that they’re actually a highly advanced species that houses mounted lasers in the crests on their heads?  The locals will tell you they’re dangerous, but never about the lasers.

As I was chatting up some of the locals (one of which was bleeding from a head wound), it was revealed that the local male cassowary was ejected from the area for picking on humans who came to frolic along the ocean side.  What he didn’t care to elaborate on is that the feisty birds will lock you in their hypnotic stare and you hardly have a chance to get away before they unleash their deadly raptor talons on you, slicing out your intestines and lasering the shit out of you.  My guess is that the head-wound man eats this certain cassowary’s leftovers twice a week.

We also decided that Samuel L. Jackson’s newest blockbuster should play off his prior successes, and be titled “Cassowaries on a Plane.”  If you have a good think about it and consider the lasers, they’re way scarier than snakes.

During our nocturnal rain forest tour, the guide advised us that earlier that day, his tour group had happened upon the local cassowary couple mating.  We were not to be so lucky in the middle of the night.  We did, however, discover that it’s a delightfully corny and enjoyable in-car passtime to randomly shout out “CASSOWARY!!” and point at absolutely nothing besides sugar cane at the side of the road.  Not funny in text?  Trust me, you should have been there.

Enough stories for now…the family and I can rehash them when we’re together again…

that is, unless the cassowaries rampage down from the North and gun me down.