Dogs that eat mandarins

David is being annoying. Here I am trying to blog before the news comes on and he's putting his cold fingers on the back of my neck and distracting me.  Well we had a good day today, overall.  So excited about this block of land, I can hardly think. Its just going to be great!  We've met a builder we like and also a designer who might be up to the job.  Today we went out driving around the area looking to take photos of houses we like the look of.  This took us as far south as Smith's Lake.  David just called me a tart for not having my slippers on yet. Work that one out! Anyway, where were we?  Smith's Lake at The Frothy Coffee Cafe where there is a sign on the table warning of attacking kookaburras! But they had good chocolate mud cake.

En route to Smith's lake we went to Pacific Palms and at Boomerang Beach we saw this yellowtailed black cockatoo just a metre away, sitting in a low tree and whingeing quietly to itself.  Urrkk, urrkk, grrrkk. We think it was a young one.  It flew away after a few minutes.

The crescent of boomerang beach was like liquid aquamarine, and full of grommets on surfboards. A glassy sweeping curve of wave.  Made you want to leap in. I might have, if not for the cold and the grommets and their coterie of girlfriends.

Bit further on we were on the overpass over the Pacific highway approaching Nabiac when an oncoming vehicle clipped the side mirror with an almighty crack, and scared the bejesus out of us, and the other driver too. She was very apologetic. David can fix it but the window seal will never be the same.  Still it could have been so much worse...Here is a  photo of some beautiful grey gums at Failford.  We had calmed down by the time we reached Failford. I love their little woolly socks.

We took a little side road near the Wollamba River, just to see what was up there.  This pretty little tidal river feeds into Wallis Lake.  All along the banks are small acreages, and outside one of them there was a table with mandarins, lemons and passionfruit. So we pulled up and reversed back, accompanied by a crazy little dog that ran up and down beside the car, very excited.  The reason for her excitement became clear a few minutes later after we put some money on the table and started peeling a mandarin. The owner and a second crazy little dog appeared. They like 'em, he said. They'll eat 'em if you peel it. Turns out he had thousands of fruit and was trying to give them away. We had a good chat, about his clarinet playing, the geology of the river, his love of kayaking and his abhorrence for all things waterskiing. It's hard to believe it, but this "sport" was still being permitted to erode the banks of this lovely little river, just downstream. He had set up a system to measure changes in the leaning angle on the blackbutts overhanging the river, in the fragile bank.  They had been vertical 30 years ago, and now were in danger of falling in and taking a big chunk of bank with them.