Gale force winds were back today and a yellow dust storm at dawn (not as spectacular or as grand as the one on Wednesday). This morning I went to the Powerhouse Museum near Darling Harbour (it's similar to the Science Museum in London), where there was an excellent exhibition called From Earth to the Universe, featuring photographs of the solar system, neighbouring star systems and beyond the galaxy. There was also a remarkable exhibit called Artefact H10515 [nb: I've just added this hyperlink to see it online] described as  "a life form that lives in a large display case. It moves, it breathes and it feeds on digital sources within and beyond the walls of the museum". Visitors can enter words in to a search engine, which then locates a best match website, and somehow (?) converts the data in to a physical representation which affects the 3D 'organism' in the centre of the room. Bizarre.

This afternoon Kit and I attacked the backyard - what with spring very much here. It involved clearing bag loads of dead leaves and twigs caused by the plants overhanging the wall and fence; it can't have been done for years (that's Kit in the photo on right). In England I would have found such a job quite dull, but here it has the added

excitement that you might suddenly discover something particularly nasty with eight legs - or (worse) something nasty with no legs. There were a few harmless spiders (it's not quite the season for them yet I don't think) and no snakes. But you never know - after the experience of the infamous 'snake in the outside toilet' incident out the back of the house in Glebe 10 years ago,  you can't rule it out. I never saw it, but Andy certainly did, and, as I recall, thereafter used the local pub instead.