Sunday 29 June 2008

Lily and Lee's birthday party

I tried to get some more fencing done this morning but not a lot of it went on...because today we went off of to Lily and Lee's birthday party.

It actually started at 2pm and the kids went with Nanna for about 2.30. The bouncy castle was wobbling well when we arrived at about 4, and continued until we left at 10.30! It was a great castle, with a maze inside that had obstacles and a slide that rose to about 12 ft! All went well with the slide, and most of the adults tried it, until I decided that it would be prank to pull the plug out. My intention was just to let it sag to the point that people noticed... and then plug it back in. Problem was that when I plugged it back in, the motor in the fan was going in reverse... because the air had started coming out of it the other way. There was nothing I could do...and everyone got pretty freaked out. Luckily, the thing got the better of the situation and recovered...but I was not popular! Had I realised this at the time of course, i'd have squeezed the input tube to allow the thing to get going....but I didn't realise.









But all the kids had a lovely time, and after they'd done face painting with the grown ups doing the kids, Phoebe decided that she'd like to do some on me... and two or three others joined her.... after which quite a few other parents ended up getting blathered too. A bit 'Braveheart' don't cha think?



Dave got the same treatment...



...and Ian.



The cake had sparklers instead of candles.... and was really pretty.



Lily seemed to like it anyway...







Still not heard anything about the prelodgment meeting, but it should be soon. If we get through that I'll put some pics of the house plan up.

Monday 23 June 2008

The week in brief...

This week was a testing one at work. My immediate boss, who's position was mooted to be mine when he moved on, handed in his notice.
For various reasons, and after some 'little chats to self' I realised that I wasn't ready to step into that role yet. I declared this to his immediate boss, and he agreed that I wasn't ready...a fact that made me all the more relieved that I'd made that choice and saved myself the process of being turned down.
I wonder if they'll actually replace him though, and I suspect that I'll just get the elements of his job that I am up to, and they'll probably live without the other bits.
The budgets were finally approved this week too, and I derived an immense satisfaction for my part in getting various people's salaries up to a near acceptable level for the work they do.

Matilda got her report this Friday, and some chocolate.... We were happy that she'd done so well. She seems to take it a bit for granted, and we find 'certificates' of achievement in her bag sometimes, that she's forgotten to mention. Under the brash full on façade, there's a shy kid trying to stay in! I asked her permission to put this on:


Phoebe is also doing good stuff, and has suddenly got the basics of word construction... in an almost classic example of they'll learn when they're ready. She's seen that Matilda is getting a lot out of words, and decided that she wants in. Phoebe reminds me a lot of Molly at this age, and has some of the preoccupations that Molly had like counting the number of friends she 'has' and an obsession with what she's wearing.

Indeed Molly is still like that.. and sent me some pictures from her photography project about a film called 'This is England' about some skin heads in 80's Britain. She assures me the cigarette is a prop:





...I quite like them actually, and they are self obsessive enough to be considered art , or certainly art(y) even! She does seem to be too concerned with the rebel side of her nature, but I think she's still quite 'earthy' when it comes to things that matter, like judging people. Only a few weeks now till we see her over here.

Josh is in India, but we've heard nothing from him this week.

The girls all went to the coast to 'Sea World' yesterday (Sunday) and I did fencing. Matilda was really made up that they had a Dugong (Sea Cow) there. She's been doing a sort of project at school about them, how they are shallow grass grazing, and how they are damaged by outboard motors. It was their cousin's birthday (Lilly) and the trip was part of the celebrations. Next week there's more. Andrew and Fran are split up, and the kids have the same kind of deal going on that Josh and Molly had to put up with. Its not ideal, but you have to make it work. So next week there'll be a party at Andrew's house with a bouncy castle and lots of kids.... I cant wait! (No really...it would be better if the kids weren't all there...thats all! Ha ha) JOKES!

This is a late posting, I was up making sure the tooth fairy came...

Sunday 15 June 2008

Flippin 'eck...that hurts!!!

I thought I'd get the car Sandra is using sorted by lunchtime Saturday, and be onto fixing up Daile's in the afternoon, with Paint-balling on Sunday morning and fence posting in the arvo. In the event, Saturday didn't work out like that and it took all day on Sandra's car which proved to be a bit of a number.

The week before last, I changed the cylinder head gasket on it. It's big straight six and its quite old. They call it a Ford Fairlane NA. The cam chain tensioning device is quite simple and reliable, but somehow I'd managed to crush it when I put it back before, and since it was running rough when I'd started it up, I was hoping that was the reason. However, it wasn't it. I wondered if it had jumped a tooth whilst I'd run it without the tensioner working properly (although unlikely)... and tried a series of different positions for the chain....as well as cleaning all the ignition and injection systems before running out of light at the end of the day. Its frustrating when you draw a blank in anything, but especially when your knuckles are damaged from sharp bits of car that they've been rubbing against because the Ford designers, in their infinite wisdom decided to put the distributor so far under the inlet manifold that you need to rip your fingers just to release the clips. Getting the high tension lead on and off the coil is a twenty minute job too as it's buried against the block under a maze of injector bars and manifolds with no room even for a screwdriver to act as a lever.

Whilst I was doing all this, Daile and Sandra were putting some last touches to the rental house, which has been advertised for a couple of weeks, but without any interest so far. We've put it with an estate agent, in the hope that things may get moving. The kids were hanging out with the girls next door in the play room, and they all managed to trash the place, as they always do when they're all together.

I would have liked to carry on with the car today cos I don't like to be beaten, but I'd been invited by the lads at work to go paint balling, and it was an early start in the country about an hour north of here. I borrowed Wayne's sat nav and set off. It was a beautiful morning, clear blue skies and a remnant of mist over the forests.

When I got there, down a long muddy dirt track (great...made me look forward to my trip with Molly to Frazer), most of the other lads were already there and waiting. We made our way to the kiosk windows through which you register and are supplied with overalls, and paint balls (in a pouch) The standard issue is 200 balls. I got mine and made my way to the covered tables where we were putting our kit on.





I quickly realised that most people had considerably more balls than me! I've always suspected this, but never-the-less, it was a bit of a worry under the circumstances so I went back to the queue and got another couple of hundred. You're issued with a complete face mask and not allowed to remove it until you get back to the 'safe' area. This is no joke, these things can really hurt if you cop one at close range...

The gun is basically a hopper and high pressure canister which doubles as a butt. The cannister is at 3000 psi, and the paint balls are about 20mm diameter. You can imagine that they come out with some force .. and as fast as you can pull the trigger.



What you do is divvy up into two teams...in our case of about 50 men each. The teams are set objectives akin to the sort of thing you'd expect to find in combat... like taking a well defended flag or some such. There's cover for you to creep up, but there's a lot of guns looking for you. If you do anything 'heroic' you get absolutely blathered. I tried to be heroic for a couple of games...and then got a whole lot more sneaky.

This is me after the first couple of games.



being a sniper....



This is Jamal, in the background is Andrew.



Ryan, Matt behind...



When you cop one, it can leave a bruise.... I'm currently covered in welts.





This is Rohan. I like this man. Bit pedantic, but really smart.



All these lads work at Moreton Hire bar the lad on the extreme left.



and then the nice dirt track again....



...and some of the evidence. I've got them all down my sides, my back, my legs...



Daile and the girls went to a kids theatre thing on the South Bank in central Brisbane. They
said it was really good. Its about dinosaurs. Here's a link so you can see the idea;

http://www.qtix.com.au/movies/Gondwana/index.htm


Phoebe got up on stage and did some dancing at the dance workshop, and there were making and music workshops too. Then they went off to the art gallery;

http://www.qag.qld.gov.au/kids/activities/sunday_at_the_gallery

and as if that wasn't enough... they went to the state library for;.. 'deadly stories' from our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Queensland. Come and join in the circle, bring some snacks, sit back and let yourself get swept away into the Dreamtime! Needless to say, they' re knackered.

I went and did some fence posts this arvo as planned, albeit later than expected.

Josh made contact on Friday night to say that we was about to go to India that night. Earlier in the week, we'd had a skype 'chat' (i.e. the typed conversation) in which he described Bali. He'd decided that he did have enough money to detour via Bali, and apparently it was amazing! He's going well, and is expecting to be INJA for about 3 weeks. I confess that I'm impressed that he's made it thus far, and that I'd assumed that he'd get home sick like I did at that age. He continues to surprise me.

Not a bad weekend all in.

BTW all, I'm always interested to hear from you... I know that I don't e-mail as much as I ought to do, but I sort of spend myself here if you know what I mean, and it means that the updates can feel a bit one way for me. Do please mail me when you read this to let me know what you're up to.

:-)

Sunday 8 June 2008

Auger us a new telephone line would yer!

This week was, as quite a few have been lately, pretty full on.

I finally got the ticket for Molly's trip out here. She'll be coming out via Singapore on the 4th of August and will arrive here on the evening before her birthday. We're really looking forward to seeing her of course... and i'm taking her up to Frazer Island for about 9 or 10 days to do camping and hanging out. At some point we think we may go over to the Tangalooma resort on Moreton Island where you can stand in the sea with Dolphins and go out Whale watching. She'll be here for a month.

Daile was 'surprised' at the beginning of the week to hear that she had pulled another high marker out of her nether reg... an embarrassing 94%. Its a funny thing, but she seems to worry the mark up there... and was genuinely surprised that it was that high. The course is pretty heavy going, dealing in that particular assignment with, amongst other things, the re-uptake of dopamine from the synaptic cleft into the presynaptic cell... and how 'blunted' dopamine transmission is associated with individuals that have a history of heavy drinking. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of pleasure when it is displaced from the presynaptic cell into the cleft, and certain drugs are able to both induce displacement and inhibit its reuptake, inducing feelings of a high. We discovered separately that its also the case with smokers... and felt compelled to read around the subject. Like so many of these subjects, we have found ourselves entering into a fascinating and mysterious world of physical and chemical wonder. She's enjoying the work, but finds the calibre of the questions she has to answer leaves much to be desired, much as I did when I was doing my course.

Andrew and I have been drilling holes out for the fencing at Whitlam Drive today, and down at his house too. Its a petrol motor, with two handles a bit like the sort of thing you get on a lawn mower but wider, and with a 250mm dia auger bit on the drive shaft. It drills a couple of feet down through our hard as nails clay soil in less than 40 seconds. We managed to drill through the telecom cable, luckily though it was just for our house, not the neighbours! Tomorrow I'm putting in 18 fence posts using a bag of cement per post. I've never done it before, but apparently what you do is put the post into the hole and brace it vertical, put the concrete into the hole (dry) and then add water. Then, when the concrete is dry, (you get the quick setting sort for this) you bolt the lateral timber on to them and nail on the slats. Its great...I've acquired some really macho tools for this... like a vintage nail gun, which Andrew has given me, that he's replaced with a more modern and light version. This, for those of you unfamiliar with them is a large and heavy air driven glorified stapler..but for nails. This gun fires up to 75mm (3 inch) nails through solid hardwood in a 10th of a second. The recoil is quite a shock at first.

Tonight we went out to dinner with Cindy and Hilton at their new house in Indooroopilly. (Read posh area). Cindy is Daile's cousin who's just arrived in Brisbane from NZ. Hilton is an interesting man about my age, who's done some pretty amazing things, and until he decides what he's going to be doing for a living here, is working as a chippy for Andrew's company (that is the company that Andrew works at as a manager). Hilton did an apprenticeship in building, and has had a lot of experience in that field, but for the last 7 years he ran his own estate agency in NZ and as a result they are apparently in a 'good position' (allegedly...sorry Cindy!). Anyway, as a result, his hands and his muscles are considerably softer than they might otherwise have been, and he was telling me about a 'nail gun' that he was using the other week that makes my newly acquired (1988) gun look like a pop gun. They have a gun on his crew that fires BOLTS! It fires chemical bolts into concrete to a depth of 150mm (6 inches) !!! The process breaks chemicals in the bolt cartridge that glue the bolt in place. The recoil apparently blows your arm off, like firing a rifle with your arm outstretched!

At work this week, I've been finding the same as last week, namely that I'm buried under it all by about mid day Monday, and don't really surface again till Thursday lunch. As a consequence I spend the early part of the week doubting my ability to do the job, and the latter part feeling almost smug! I say almost because of course at my age, I'm too wrinkly of neck to really feel smug, and content my self with some kind of tentative short approximation.

Matilda and Phoebe have had a pretty good week. Matilda got a commendation for her poetry, and not to be outdone, Phoebe wrote some too, and insisted that it was read out to all and sundry at the nursery. Actually, it wasn't too bad! Both of them are going through a bit of spurt in interest, with Feeb suddenly 'getting' word formation like 'cat' and 'pat' etc, and Tild taking to communicating with us by spelling out her words to us rather than saying them.



I've spent a considerable amount of time over the last couple of weeks in the evenings, drawing up our house plans, into a fully worked out contour map. I've developed the contours from the survey we had done a long time ago now, having realised that until I'd done that thoroughly, nothing that I design would be worth much since it might not fit the land. In particular, the issue is that we have to extend the driveway about 30 metres up the hill and then it needs to become a turning and parking area. We've been warned that the single biggest factor that will take our money is excavation and building concrete retaining walls, so the house is on stilts as much as possible. We've engaged a structural engineer, and he's going to have a look at the developed design when I finally get it done, prior to going to a pre-lodgement meeting with the council. We're starting to feel like we're making some progress on this for the first time since we've been here!

Tomorrow, we're going to a meal with some other friends, (so a pretty unusual weekend in that respect, since we've not done much socialising for a while) and Hilary Rose (Daile's NZ mate from London) is coming to see us for a couple of days. She's been delayed flying out of NZ for 12 hrs due to snow in Christchurch, and Feeb was pretty disappointed as Daile and she were going to pick her up from the airport early tomorrow and she'd taken herself to bed at 6.30 so that she'd be ready!! Bless!

Josh is back in Thailand now, and I believe is in Bangkok prior to flying out to India. He's been having a 'reasonable' time, but both he and Emma are 'templed out' - referring to the number of them that they've seen. I heard that a highlight was a visit in Laos to the same temple that they filmed the Tomb Raider film in that is a remnant of a former civilisation, overgrown with trees. I've seen that in the film and assumed that the trees were dressed onto it and that it was all a set. Fantastic to think that its real .. nature just takes over if it gets left for long enough.