Lily?

Common as dirt. And lovely. And I don't know what it is. (UQ)

I wasn't a fan of my photos today. But I did like the stamens of this. One of the things I like about taking photos of flowers is that I generally need to magnify the image and in doing so, I see in the photo what I don't see when I just look. So here, when I see these normally, I see the ragged flower, but today I saw the stamens standing quite free of the flower. And the parts with all the pollen are hanging quite vertically, yet the flower itself is all over the place.

And the paperbark flower below, seen carelessly, looks something like a bottle brush, but when you see it up close, what an amazing structure it has.


Paperbark. UQ.

Sunlight

Sunlight through the grass

Taken a long while ago and has just one comment on it in Flickr, but I came across it while hunting for some other photos and I still think it is beautiful. And I also love that very slight morning moisture in the air, invisible, except that it captures the shafts of sunlight.

Putting up this photo reminded me that I had wanted to go out in the dark to get a photo of the Kigelia, whose buds I had noticed the other day. Such a beautiful flower and only visible by flashlight. It's so elegant, as it hangs, like a living candelabra.

On the way out, I disturbed the nesting lapwing, nesting for the second time this season in the very safe spot of the grassed college roundabout. I very evilly took a flash of it, and it made appropriate menacing cries. She/he (is it the female who keeps the eggs warm?) has been sitting there I think for almost a week already. Seems an awfully long time to go without food, and by sitting there it reminds you of the miserable weather it must endure, which you tend not to think about when birds are on the wing or sitting on a shady branch.


Kigelia pinnata. African sausage tree. UQ.

Unable to walk

Lily leaves. Southbank Winter morning

It's been an interesting week. Completely incapable of walking and in pain, things have been pretty miserable.

But the extremely upside of it all has been that I have become so bored with reciting my tale of woe that I am now finally, finally, starting to talk to the people in college. And enjoying it.

I have also learnt that the UQ security service exists not just to protect the denizens of UQ, but picks up the moribund and less than moribund from anywhere on the campus and takes them to anywhere on the campus.

So, on Saturday last, I fancied a swim. The security service indicated a possible delay ("Saturday's our busiest day"), but took me to and from the college to the pool. How about that? Not bad, eh?

En route

Kigelia pinnata
Walking to the ferry through the UQ campus


Walking to my building on the QUT campus


Leaving QUT via the Goodwill bridge. Low tide in the mangroves


Through South Bank past an artificial creek to catch the 109 bus back to UQ

Going to work, and coming home.

At College

Early morning view across one of the lakes at the University of Queensland


Giant pandanus along the path by the lakes

Finally, the move has been made. I am now in Brisbane.

The colleges are on the western perimeter of the lakes, which are just a part of a more extensive parkland which surrounds the south-west of the university as it bords the river. In the morning I walk amongst immense tropical trees to the ferry, with birds foraging: ibis, geese, moorhens, coots, corellas, a brush turkey and a willy-wagtail. In the evening they are settling down, with much noise, to roost. And as I take my swim in the pool under the darkening sky, the sound of screaming birds from the trees above the pool is remarkably soothing, and not unlike the evening shrill of cicadas on a Sydney summer evening.

So, however stressed I am by making this move, I have a wonderfully calming start and finish to each day. All I have to do is hang in.