After a meeting and exchange of emails, I received a costed proposal from Peter Hall for the IT restructure of the website. The need for this was apparent from the moment the site became a Content Partner of EOL. In the intervening 2 ½ yers no new gallery images have been added to the site. By contrast I have over 550 frames in my facebook albums. Christina’s design will be retained, but I need to be able to upload content and Christina’s IT structure does not readily allow this to be done. I got in touch with Peter via a mutual contact. My thinking was that I had to get a grant to cover the cost and advised Peter accordingly. Today I also happened to receive a quarterly financial report which, lo and behold, revealed that I had sufficient funds in a poorly performing property trust to pay him.
Today I filmed some large white fungi in a garden. As often when I film fungi, I noticed some ant activity, though not a lone ant crawling over and under the cap, but the occupants of a nest scurrying among the blades of grass. The trick for me was to locate an area of grass used by a sufficient number of ants and large enough to show the paths they took without the individual ants being too small for me to adequately reveal their anatomy.
Received 2 emails from Vanessa confirming that our EOI for the public art project at the Queensland Museum had been submitted and receipt acknowledged. It was a lot of fun working on the submission which reflected a genuine pooling of ideas by Vanessa, Kat and me. The EOI had to be about our intentions and approach, rather than about our idea, which I think has a lot going for it. Only Vanessa has what one might call a profile in public art but it is not really established. I’m ever hopeful, but I am not holding my breath, as they say here.
Mark and I went filming in Witches Falls National Park on our quest for finding Harvestmen in daylight. I filmed a rather good fungus, a Donuca rubropicta moth for the first time in rainforest, a pretty red Shield Bug, another moth which was on a rock and so beautifully disguised that I thought it was part of the lichen on which it was resting, and male and female Harvestmen. We first saw a male here on a night shoot in February 2011.
This evening Steve filmed my introduction to the DVDs at the same location we used before, the last house Jaap lived in on the mountain, which adjoins a rainforest creek. He was pleased with the result. A week ago he was on the mountain and recorded 2 hours of soundtrack of the rainforest at night. He had to put up with a truck or two, climbing the steep road which is on the boundary of one national park and with a passenger jet bound for Brisbane flying over another, but declared the sound quality good and clear.
Received an email with John Caddy's flight information regarding his forthcoming week's stay with me at the end of the month. John and I only know oneanother via the internet and I regard him as a good friend. So I am looking forward to meeting him in person and sharing as much of our biodiversity as we can encounter. Other than Clive and Christina, John, who hails from Minnesota, is the only friend who has undertaken to visit me in the nearly 25 years that I have been in Australia so I'm extremely grateful to him.