My Year with Bluestone: Friday House Day (6): Under House to Under Water

Today the Friday House blogging moves inside, and under water. Fifteen years ago we did a major renovation on the old house. We pulled off all the wooden additions to the original brick building (the kitchen with its raw cement floor and gaps between floor and walls, the half-built bathroom, funny little spare bedroom, laundry, outside toilet and utterly shabby but delightful-in-winter sunny passageway. And Paul dug a cellar into the bluestone.

More on the cellar next week but today we feature some of the bluestone rocks Paul pulled out of the ground under what is now the pantry, and stored around the garden for five years till we got this big fish tank. Just as he used them to landscape the garden, he used them here to "riverscape" the tank. These are mostly South American freshwater river fish: catfish, discus fish, clown loaches and a very shy but enormous sailfin gibbiceps who could not be tempted out to appear in the home movie. (The cats, by contrast, made sure they prefaced the movie with typical behaviour: Orlando finding a good spot; then Wulf muscling in and chasing her off.)



The driftwood came from various expeditions: most recently to the Grampians last summer. If you look at the big lump of volcanic stone on the far right, you can see the plane where Paul would have split it with one of the successively larger jackhammers he had to use. Tune in next week to see how he did it, with the help of two small children.

Bad rufous night heron! bad!

Early dusk, and the pale yellow light of a rain-drenched Hallowe'en shone on the huge reddy brown bird, perched solidly on the edge of the fishpond, amidst growth that after all this rain can only be described as verdant. And shining.  I summoned the others to marvel at its beauty, then we ran outside, shouting loudly, to frighten it away from the fishpond. It flew away; but an hour later was back, perching high in the citriodora. We looked it up, and it's a nankeen or rufous night heron. When it's breeding, it has an elegant white plume down the back of its neck. The one we saw had a plume about eight inches long, as opposed to the much shorter one in the picture here. I understand it's feeding itself and its young, but after such a visitation, we don't see our fish for days. And even if we could frighten it away, it would still come back and be feeding at night. It was huge, solid, and placid. And hungry. Trick or treat, rufous night heron?

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Fish, water, wind, trees and sun

For the record: it's currently 42 degrees outside at 3.00 in the afternoon, and climbing. That's hot! And it's just day 1 of the four days above 40 we are promised this week.

My plan for today was to put on my old white cotton dress, which weighs little more than about two handkerchiefs, and sit quietly in my study at home, which is still pretty cool in the old downstairs brick part of the house. I had just opened up email when it turned out today had to be the day that we emptied the fishpond. There is a little leak, and the wonderful Bill was coming by this afternoon to start the repairs. This meant the pond had to be emptied and dried out by 5 this afternoon. The drying part was not a problem, in the sun, but the emptying was horrible. It is quite a complex system, and the process involved moving most of the rocks and plants to make sure no fish were left behind as we emptied the filter and ferried buckets of water around the garden. Which may at least mean the plants have a chance of surviving.

It was really more than a two-person job, so this meant persuading the resident teenager, who was all showered and changed (Obama t-shirt and cherry red jeans bought second hand for $5), and ready to go out, to change into old shorts and spend half an hour ferrying water. He did do it, but he said only because I made him feel guilty. Which I guess was fair enough...

There's not much wind, so while it's hot, at least there is not that soul-destroying northerly wind we sometimes get in summer, but every now and then, a little breeze would float by, and the citriodora would drop, as if on purpose, a little group of leaves it had decided it could do without. A bit like the whomping willow in whatever Harry Potter film it is, when one leaf drifts slowly to signal the beginning of autumn, and then the whole tree gives itself a shake, and they're all gone. Giving a whole new meaning to the word "deciduous".

Anyway, we scooped up bucketloads and ice-cream container loads of water and all the regular muck that's always at the bottom of the pond, at the same time as trying to catch fish and move them into areas we weren't emptying. (It is quite an elaborate system, with different levels.) Some of the perch would leap out of the net as soon as we caught them: remarkably frisky, and suddenly a whole lot bigger than they normally look. When the water was ankle deep, I was standing scooping out water, and they would come between my feet and nip me. Cute! We lost only one that got caught out in the shallow hot water when we had gone inside because we were starting to feel faint.

It was a horrible, job, really: very hard on the back, and very hot. But I kept thinking: this is the pond, and these are the fish that gave me such comfort when I was convalescing, so it was not that hard to keep shovelling. And all but one poor fish are now safe in cool deep ponds. It's hard to imagine it ever raining enough to fill up the pond again when it's fixed, though: I think we will probably have to buy some water.

Now I'm back in my white dress, about to read an ARC draft, translate the last stretch of Havelok for our reading group tomorrow, then reading another chapter of a PhD thesis. Haven't even put the fan on yet...

P.S. Aaargghh! Weather pixie has put her bikini on!!

Picking up the phone for the planet

I've just made a great phone call. Within five minutes, all our domestic electricity is now solar powered!

We've always gone with green options for our domestic power bills, but yesterday we got a leaflet explaining the difference between accredited and non-accredited green power, saying that for the same modest premium we were paying we would have our accredited green power increased from 20% to 25%, but that our 80% non-accredited renewable energy (i.e. hydro energy from plants built before 1997) is no longer considered as helping to develop sustainable energy programs, and so is no longer part of the scheme.

So for an extra 5.75 cents per kilowatt hour, all our electricity will be provided from solar energy. We feel quite elated! It's not just the computers and our music and lights that we love: we also run two filter systems for fish, one inside and one outside, that pump water all day. It's wonderful to know that these are now entirely sun-powered.

We had planned to put solar panels on the roof during the recent re-building, but the cost was just too much for the final stages. We do have solar hot water, though, which has been great, and has cut the gas bill substantially.

The night after the federal budget, we had also been to a meeting in Fitzroy with a man who had left his executive job to start up a company that was gathering households in groups of fifty and ordering solar panels from China in bulk. With the government rebate of $8000, it would cost just over $1000 for a small house to have its own solar panels. But now that the rebate is means tested, it is just out of our reach again. We'll start to save, but in the meantime, we are happy to pay this extra premium. We'll try and keep reducing our usage, though — and now that we are paying more, we might be even more scrupulous about turning off the lights...

Here's the website of this government Greenpower scheme: http://greenpower.gov.au

This move has come at just the right time. I have started to feel quite unaccustomedly despairing of our planet's future in recent weeks. I know that one household is small beer, and that industry and agriculture and air and car travel — and the general proliferation of ... stuff — are much more serious issues. But it seems impossible to do nothing, so trying to lighten one's ecological footprint seems a good idea.

Want to measure your ecological footprint? Go here. (If everyone lived as I do, we'd need 2.7 planets to sustain us: I was probably doing ok till they asked about air travel...)