This afternoon, Steve came to my place to show me the contents he has copied to the SSD and supervise copying items which I have compiled. Although the species videos have Steve’s abbreviated titles, they sufficiently convey the subject matter. Regardless, the best way to find out what the video contains, is to play it. By the time Steve left, the SSD was complete.

Today I compiled the index for the contents on the Legacy Solid State Drive. The first item is the link to my WEBSITE  in The National Library of Australia. It is followed by VIDEOS – Species Videos, The Rainforest at Night, Driscoll Lane, The Beauty of Overlooked Things and Looking out for the Overlooked. Next is KUTTNER IMAGE LIBRARY – Photos and Video Frames, then WRITING – My Book, the Brisbane Line and Other Essays and My Travels, concluding with KUTTNER ART – Videos, Slides, Artworks and Documents.

This morning, Steve and I went to Office Works in Burleigh to buy a two terabyte Solid-State Drive (SSD) to house all the data from my project which I wish to keep for posterity. Steve retired from Bond University last May and we are in the process of putting our more than twenty years of collaboration to bed. The website, unedited and edited footage are all officially curated, which is most pleasing. My digital legacy is of data that I have selected with Steve’s help. It will be the sole repository of my Image Library with its thousands of video frames and photos. Only edited video footage, primarily of hundreds of short species videos plus some longer videos will be stored. One or two of the latter may, or may not be available elsewhere. I am including all my essays, which also appear on the website. Some were published elsewhere online. I have added a brief text to these, to place them in their proper context. Steve is going through the many hard drives he has used over the years, to see what of value they contain. I will leave the SSD to Simon.

This afternoon, I dropped in to the High School with my Canon video camera, which I bought in 2016, seeking to donate it to their Media Arts Department. Unlike my previous cameras which required mini-tapes, the Cannon uses memory cards. I made an appointment to see one of the Film  and TV teachers, which gave me time to go home and collect the camera battery charger. The teacher was thrilled to receive the donation, so I returned with the tripod which has been kept in a succession of my cars since 1998. Hopefully, the camera will still be in working order, given that I last filmed with it in December 2021. As with the clear garage space, I delight in the gap in my bedroom occupied by the camera case for as long as the tripod was kept in my car. I couldn’t be without my point and shoot at close range, stills camera, which I make frequent good use of.

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.