The cyclone hovered out at sea and made a slow progress to the coast, which it crossed as a category one system just north of Brisbane. The delay allowed people more time to prepare. I bought two lights and a box of six candles at the hardware store. One of the lights has a magnet. I also bought some tins of food at the supermarket behind my unit block. The wind and rain picked up on the 5^th, but neither had the intensity of any of the previous tropical lows or ex-cyclones. I had fish and a steak in the fridge. As long as I had power, I opted to have lunch rather than dinner and cooked the fish on the sixth. The wind and rain were more constant, but nowhere near cyclonic. On the seventh I had steak for lunch and did a complete washing up, relieved that we still had power. Just as well that I did, because at 3.15 pm the outage began.

The cyclone was now close to crossing the coast and the weather deteriorated accordingly. On the 8^th the rain was constant and lashed by increasingly ferocious wind. I made good use of… Read Complete Text

Simon and Nicole and Pepper are safely back in Longreach, having arrived in Brisbane on December 21. What a contrast the celebrations this time have been to last year’s. My fervent wish was for the normal Christmas trajectory to resume. Our family Christmas lunch, just the six of us, could not have been more welcome and appropriate, and the weather was ideal. Kathy is doing extremely well after her heart attack, her morale boosted by the first visit to Australia of her brother David and his wife Joyce (her third). They were in Brisbane for a few days at the end of  November. Simon and Nicole spent two nights at a B&B on the mountain. I treated them to dinner at our best restaurant and we went to the Gold Coast Motor Museum – a stay planned for last year which had to be abandoned due the extreme weather event which cut off power up here for a fortnight.

Today I submitted my 24^th and final fortnightly piece of the year to the paper and I am gratified to report that every one of them featured material from my Animal Builders album. A recent item was about repurposing a habitable space which may or may not have been made by an animal. I had completely forgotten that I had filmed the subject in early 2016, so much so that the three images I selected are the most recent to be added to the album, which only happened at the beginning of this month.

The day after my birthday, I saw the urologist for the six month follow-up after the kidney stone removal. I was a bit apprehensive about the appointment, having endured another unpleasant bladder ultrasound a week ago. No new stones are forming and the urologist doesn’t need to see me again. I shall continue to take my daily anti-gout pill. The news could not have been better.

At our third attempt, after rescheduling because of the weather and a work-related matter, I handed over the hard drive to Dave. We met at 5 pm, at the entrance to Woollies in Oxenford, just off our nearest access to the motorway between the Gold Coast and Brisbane. Dave described me as a citizen scientist because of the Tamborine Mountain species data I have amassed. He could have a point, though I never considered myself to be one and the scientific content was provided by experts.

I emailed a letter to Robyn Hamilton, having previously spoken to her on the phone, offering my Image Library as a donation. She was willing to consider my offer, but was concerned about the number of images. Robyn is the curator who is currently preparing my video footage to go live on the State Library’s website. Dave Allen, who is head of digital conservation at the Library, gave me Robyn’s name and number. When I first collected the hard drive, and before playing the footage, I had phoned him to confirm the Library’s postal address and he felt that it would be safer for us to meet. I had to tell him, that we needed to first fix the error.

Today, Steve copied the correct content onto the hard drive, and gave it to me. I actually discovered the error on the time-coded version which he copied onto the hard drive I use for selecting video frames for my albums, and footage for my species videos. I wasn’t able to check the memory card before I gave it to him to copy.

I contacted Steve to tell him that the hard drive he gave me with the data files of the remaining unedited footage for the State Library, included a duplicate of Card 11. It was on Card 13, the final memory card I gave him to copy. I had already packed the hard drive and was ready to post it.

One of the things I decided to do having returned from my overseas trip, was to ask Steve to create data files of the last video footage for the State Library of Queensland (SLQ), for which I had to give him the memory card. I also thought I should find out if the Library would consider accepting my Image Library as a donation. Steve and I had been editing the video frames for the past year or two and they needed to be put onto a USB. I met Steve for lunch at Bond University and gave him the memory card.

I thanked the urologist for successfully removing the kidney stone. He wants to see me just before my birthday in November and will require me to have another ultrasound on my bladder. Meanwhile, he has prescribed a tablet to be taken once a day, designed to combat gout, which shares uric acid as a symptom with kidney stones. The hope is that the tablet will prevent a stone from forming.