Mostly September 2016

September and October are the wettest months in Penang. It wasn’t that wet last year instead we were rewarded with inhaling burnt Indonesian trees. This year we have been spared the singed vegetation inhalation but the rains have arrived with a vengeance. Nature photography ……at least fieldwork is put on hold. Alternate pursuits have to be found or you risk getting a spousal red card. Setanta rugby channel partially comes to the rescue although there is a risk of yellow cards for swearing at incompetent referees or butter-fingered players. I also have to compete for the best viewing spots with the in-house football goalie.

Helen continues with her English teaching but it is also not the season where locals travel and the AirBnB business has not exactly been flourishing. Part of this is because a plethora of new hosts has been recruited in the area. Hosts may not realize that their interests are not the same as the parent company.

Last year in the photographic down-season I started making bread and that has continued regularly….with our mainstay wholemeal loaf, together with fruit and cinnamon loaf and fruit and cinnamon buns. Recently burger buns have been added to the list. I also made some Sourdough bread, which was nice but it is a bit of a hassle to keep the culture going. Ginger Beer and Kefir is regularly coming off the production line.

 Pies were later added to the construction menu and this photographic down-season the target was sausages and burger patties. I sourced hog casings from the UK and purchased a Kenwood mixer with a meat-grinder/sausage stuffer attachment.

Sausages are expensive to buy in supermarkets and there is not a lot of choice. While lamb and beef are not readily available pork and chicken is cheap and plentiful at the local market. I can get a kilo of pork shoulder for 16 MYR, which is a bit over $5 NZ. I now have on the sausage and burger patty list; Cumberland, Breakfast, Thyme and wine, Chorizo  and Merguez Sausages. It has taken a bit of time to get all the parameters to my liking but we appear to be there now. 

When making sausages I have a fan base…of at least one who is waiting like a slips fielder, mainly underfoot, with great expectations.

I have maintained a steady photographic entry in Nature Salons and it is going pretty well this year so far….with 90 awards at the time of writing. 

The German Bird Photographic Library has also decided to add some mammal images so it took a while to dredge those out of files and submit them. It brought back memories of ‘The Brothers’ and exhausting Lion sex.

The island offshore has made steady progress. They are constructing a boulder boundary and infilling that with sand. I am no engineer but dumping sand on thick silt seems an insecure foundation. We shall see.

The part of the Straits of Malacca that washes the shores is usually a dirty grey colour and you can see quite a lot of flotsam. Recently we had some king tides and the wind direction corralled the debris and a few giant waves dumped a lot of it on the foreshore. Boaties have warned of the mass of plastic debris and this was a sobering illustration of how bad it is. To their credit the maintenance boys have most of it swept up…..and put in landfills!!!!!

The local otter population does not seem phased by the island building and a week ago I saw 9 of them around 6.45am busy having a family elimination on the rocks. It always makes me happy to see the otters. 

The following image seems to sum up the current balance of wildlife and the folly of man. We have junk deposited by waves, dredges offshore that are ready to dump sand for the new island and a little dot on the left side of the image is an otter eating a fish (double click on the image to get full size).

The pub quiz continues on Monday night and our results for the last 6 weeks have been; 5th, 1st, 3rd, 2nd, 2nd. I had a go at being quizmaster on one night and the universal opinion was.....it was too hard!!! Oh well sometimes we miss the target.

Helen and I joined a few others and went to the races in early September. I picked around half the winners but still lost a small sum. Helen figured half the animal kingdom could pick better than her.

Bad weather, deposited flotsam, slow horses, difficult quizes and unwanted islands are all forgotten however when the sun shines and it is time to go fishing.