© 1984 - 2025 Adrian Tritschler
a punnet of beetroot seedlings and one of snake beans planted out
Both survived their first night without devastation by possum. Seven snake bean plants, five against the back fence and two against the garage wall – probably too gloomy for them. Dozens of beetroot seedlings, some in the raised garden bed and some between the orange and lime trees.
The "yellow rose of root stock" is about to open
Walking around the suburbs everyone else’s roses are out, we’ve got buds all over ours – some eaten by borers or beetles.
The pink and white rose buds on the front fence are being eaten by borers of some kind
Alpine Classic changes organisers
Interesting. Audax Australia has sold the Audax Alpine Classic to SME360 – the mob who run Amy’s Grand Fondo. Wonder what this will do to pricing?
One "Charles de Gaul" rose in bloom, possums haven't found it this season
curly leaf and two small fruit on the potted peach, near nothing on the other
The peach tree in the front garden looks to be nearly dead with only a few tiny leaf buds, the one in the pot in the back garden is covered in leaves, has two small fruit, but has a fair bit of leaf curl
the meyer lemon is covered with large lemons, some so heavy the branches nearly touch the ground
callistemon in full flower, the snowball plant just turned white yesterday
orange tree covered in blossom, Jo's small flowering bush covered too
I can’t remember what it’s called – planted between the roses in the front garden and finally uncovered from the weeds after a solid few hours’ work by Jo.
dead-headed the grape hyacinths and iris
Decorative powerline warnings
Riding back along the railway works through Clayton, all the overhead powerlines have protective red flags to warn the backhoe drivers. They remind me of Chinese lanterns.
cool, grey and damp on the ride to work, a pair of currawongs[1] flew lazily overhead, calling with their distinctive voices
[1] Pied currawong
a visitor to the garden, a Pied butcherbird[1] flew in and sat on the fence, poking around under the bay tree
[2022-08-18 Thu] – I suspect I was mistaken and that it was a Grey butcherbird[2], but I’d not seen them up close here before [1] Pied butcherbird [2] Grey butcherbird
evening Ballarat walk
We walked through the bush from Silver Creek to Ballarat, light when we started, dark as we got to dinner. Cam chased a rabbit that was hopping around on a lawn, quietly trying to eat.
Hard rubbish this year seems worse than before, or maybe I'm getting less tolerant
So many piles and pieces left uncollected by the council’s contracters.
Oakleigh redevelopment
The corner shop on the corner of Golf Links avenue and Princess street has finally closed, after years of me wondering how it managed to still be there. More apartments coming.
Less than 10°C and with an icy wind – feels like something around 5°C – a very wintery ride to work
Logistical problem – we've run out of bread. A single slice and a crust remained, just enough for Cam's half sandwich
home lighting fettling
A final success after a day of battling crumbling light fittings and small bayonet light bulbs. Somehow I managed to blow the two remaining bulbs in the five-bulb fitting while removing the old bulbs, but with a full set of new bulbs and much fiddling, we now have all five lighting the bedroom.
Messing with Spotify analytics… by accident
Found a great way to mess with an app’s analytics – a friend sent me a playlist last week, I opened it in #spotify and listened for a while, didn’t like it, closed the laptop and went home. Came back on Monday to find it had played on repeat all weekend, so #spotify now thinks I really love all those songs
lost and found
The boy’s lost things; a school jumper, one glove, a snackbox. Found things; a school jumper. One down, two to go.
I guess it rained
Must have been a massive downpour just before I left to ride home. The creek is overflowing, trees are down, huge pools of water everywhere.
A sudden warm spell…
A sudden warm spell and some plants have thought Spring arrived today. The dark purple magnolia on the corner of Euston road had dark buds on the way to school this morning, open blooms on the way home.
Our first magnolia blossoms are opening
Curiouser and curiouser
Reviewing old blog pages as I migrate from jekyll to hugo and I came across the page for 2002-02-29. Nothing unusual, except that there wasn’t a 29th of February that year.
There’s not much more I can add to who I am.
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.