Today, during an hourlong operation, the urologist removed the kidney stone from my bladder, using a laser to zap the stone. This was the first time I have had a general anaesthetic and the first time since my birth that I have spent a night in hospital.  In fact, I spent another night and was collected by Steve and Paulina on 28.4.24 who drove me home. I treated them to a roast lunch at Bungunyah.

PS By 3.5.24, the tenderness and bleeding had stopped and I was well on the way to recovery. The urologist booked me for a de-brief on 27.5.24.

This afternoon I saw the urologist. His surgery was as busy as a railway station waiting room. He showed me a photo of the stone which he described as large and told me that I would need a general anaesthetic and be kept in overnight. I chose to have the operation at the Pindara Private Hospital and spent time with the doctor’s administrator dealing with the paperwork. I ended up hand-delivering the forms at the hospital on April 4.

At about noon on March 6, I noticed blood in my urine and went straight to the medical centre in the shops behind my unit block. I was prescribed an antibiotic and told to book an ultrasound on my bladder. For two or three days I was glued to the toilet and experienced pain and discomfort. I booked the ultrasound for the following Monday. I was told to drink a litre of water an hour beforehand, but given the UTI, I only managed 600 ml and even then, went to the toilet twice. The nurse had difficulty in conducting the ultrasound because I had to have two more visits to the toilet.

I was booked to see the doctor on the Thursday, but he had not received the result of the ultrasound. I had hardly recovered from the UTI when I had a recurrence a fortnight later. My regular doctor prescribed an antibiotic and promptly chased up the errant ultrasound report. I again spent two or three days glued to the toilet. When I saw her, the ultrasound showed a kidney stone in the bladder. She referred me to a urologist who ordered a CT scan of the… Read Complete Text

As luck would have it, I was in Brisbane and didn’t return home until late afternoon on Boxing Day, so I missed the freak weather, subsequently acknowledged as a derecho, a more than two hundred kilometre wide, tornado-like wind front, by the Bureau of Meteorology, which struck parts of the Scenic Rim, Tamborine Mountain in particular, and the Gold Coast on Christmas night. I saw the full impact of the weather system during the two days I was on the mountain without electricity.

People couldn’t access their tank water, because the water has to be pumped by an electric motor. Driving around the mountain, I saw houses destroyed by fallen trees which had cleaved them in two, or with their roof blown off and walls collapsed. The trees which weren’t blown down, were stripped of their branches, something I had not previously seen. Along the ridge on the main access road, power poles were snapped or leaning at a crazy angle. The power lines were draped over the vegetation or simply strewn along the road for kilometre after kilometre. The power outage lasted for two weeks. There may not be another community in Australia with a population as… Read Complete Text

Years ago, a unit owner, long dead, planted three trees, two next to the road out front and one next to the retaining wall in the backyard. They all flourished, growing to an impressive size. The two in the front are a buckinghamia, whose flowers have a fragrant aroma, and a golden rain tree which sheds its leaves and flowers on the cars parked beneath it. The tree in the backyard has for years dropped its seed pods and squishy, tubular white flowers onto the lid of the inground tank and the washing on the clothes hoist which is fixed to the lid, not to mention the bird poo which also soils the washing. The material falls for several months of the year. But the biggest nuisance are the roots which have moved part of the base of the retaining wall and grown between one of the protective buttresses we installed, and the wall. Nearly as bad is the fact that the tree casts a shadow over the clothes hoist, when the sun is at its highest. I wonder what the late owner was thinking, when he planted the tree. I have always been outvoted on removing it, but… Read Complete Text

I attended the launch of Julie Lake’s book on Hilda Geissmann who was born in Brisbane in 1890 but lived most of her life on the mountain. She married a Curtis. The Geissmanns and Curtises were two of the mountain’s most prominent pioneering families. In her twenties and thirties, she closely observed and photographed the mountain’s flora and fauna with considerable artistry and in so doing became a social pioneer in a predominantly man’s world. The launch was well-attended. Julie was the star and the afternoon tea was a close second. I bought three signed copies of the book. Am greatly looking forward to reading it.

Today, I had the last sentence of the PRESERVATION paragraph on the home page removed. It read: The Image Library is in the collection of the Queensland Museum.

On January 7, I uploaded a post about updating my Image Library for the Queensland Museum and expressed disquiet because the Digital Asset Management System Administrator, Donna Miller, was unaware of my donation when we spoke on January 6. On January 31 I was told by email, that since the donation was made, the Museum had adopted a more rigorous and time-consuming system for adding images to its digital collection and the resources to process my images in a timely fashion did not exist. Moreover, the curation policy requires that the Museum image portals hold the most appropriate, unique and quality images for either staff, public or researchers. This information and the sense that Donna was unfamiliar with the library’s content only intensified my disquiet. I was nonetheless permitted to re-edit my photos from 2014 to 2018 as per the March 11 post.

On March 29, Donna sent me an email rejecting the donation. In yesterday’s reply, I told her that I could not help feeling that she was… Read Complete Text

This afternoon, I sent a USB with the re-edit of my photos taken between 2014 and 2018, plus the related data documents, to Donna Miller, who is in charge of Queensland Museum Images. As I told her, it was necessary but enlivening and fruitful work. The re-edit completes the up-date of my Image Library for the Museum.

The USB also contains 24 video clips shot in 2014, 2015 and 2016. I was surprised to find four night photos dating from January 2018. The camera is used for point and shoot at close range work, which is usually difficult in rainforest, especially at night, in the restricted illumination of the spotlight’s beam. Several entries in the original data documents were listed as unidentified. I was able to update the information for some of them from my website and have received partial or complete attributions from experts whom I contacted, for others. Some subjects simply could not be identified, of which a number may be undescribed species.

The files are date-listed until April 6, 2016. After that they are listed numerically. In order to only list the correct image number, I was be-devilled by Microsoft Word’s automated set-up and… Read Complete Text

Jesse Jarnow listened to the recording of my recollections of the Bickershaw Festival, for which I produced a firework display, and some other reminiscences, which Steve sent him and was very pleased with it. Jesse mentioned that attendees who were interviewed were pretty blown away by the fireworks, which is nice to hear fifty years later.

This evening, Steve and I recorded my comments for the Grateful Dead podcast at one of Bond University’s sound studios. It seems to have gone well.