I shaved today, unlike my friend

This fella isn't the Eastern bearded dragon (Pogona barbata) I chatted with this morning, but possibly his dad. (The picture was taken a week or two ago by my friend Baz le Tuff. Click to enlarge.)

When they feel you're getting a bit close, they puff up their bodies and make their spiky beard stick out, as this photo shows.

I see the big one in the picture most mornings depending on the direction I take, and less often a smaller one, both in among the scrub beteeen me and the sand. The big fella likes to sun himself on one of the fence rails. Today's Pogona was about half of the big fella's approx. 50 centimetres, much darker in colour, and much readier to stare me down with his, or her (I must find out how to tell) beard sticking out and bright orange mouth wide open. On close inspection I realised that I could see almost all the way to England in there.

I'm learning all the time, but I don't know enough about the creatures who I share this earth with to call myself a lizard sexer. Twelve months or so ago when I was living about 50km south of here at Repton near the mouth of the Bellinger River, I had a 60cm Eastern water dragon living at my back door, whose name was Leonard until he got fat, disappeared for a few days, then came back as Leonora, with three dragonettes. I was very fond of Leonard, who came to expect a morsel from me at least once a day -- often right up the steep wooden stairs and to my door.

The swell was big today, drowning out even the cicadas, and bright and early there were plenty of surfers up the south end. As my landlord says, if it's big at Sandy, it's enormous everywhere else, and today's sad news confims it. Five people drowned in the state this weekend and the size of the waves must have been a big causal factor. Having almost drowned on two occasions, I have a pretty deep respect for the power of the pacific, and I hope people will take extra care when a swell like this is up. With temperatures of about 30 degrees and a mild SW breeze, it has been real beach weather and it's easy to let excitement get in the way of caution.

I'm no surfer, but I think surfing is superb. It's one of the few pastimes developed in this country that is predicated neither on beating another human being, or the environment. And it's beautiful to watch. Which is just what I did atop the headland as the big breakers rolled in from the blue South Pacific. I just have to get a camera and take a panoramic series of photos and see if I can blend them together in Photoshop. On a blazing, blue day like today, with those waves, it's like looking down on all creation. It was just me and a crowd of terns (Lesser crested tern, Sterna bengalensis, I think) lazing on the grassy heights.

The warm weather means having the window open in the Ponderosa, just in front of Esmeralda the Computer, where a very large spider has spun a web (but ran away when I stuck the webcam close to get a shot). Having the window open has its perils, because this week the tree ferns that I wrote about on January 4 are spawning to beat the band. Like most rugged backwoodsmen of the Grizzly Adams/William Buckley/Alexander Selkirk school, I suffer from allergies that welcome such tiny entities as the spores of Dicksonia antarctica which lightly dust my desk as I write. They put me in bed for some of thursday, though it might also have been the mould as we've had a lot of rain and humidity's high.

As my mate Luke the Chef told me a few days ago, it's the sort of weather that makes a lot of people in his industry go down at this time of year with 'Chef's Crack'. He reckons it's worse than allergy, but I didn't look into it. Looking deep into a bearded dragon's gaping mouth is quite enough for this he-man's week.