Weather...or not... as it turned out.

The broadband is back on for now, so here's an update with pics:

As I mentioned in the last entry, we all set off for Moreton Island on Wednesday, rising at 5am to get the car packed up. It was a lot of stuff, as it always is, and Josh was getting fed up with the amount of stuff he was having to pass up to me onto the new roof rack that I made. (Roof racks are not cheap... so I built a BIG one from scratch on Monday and Tuesday)

We got off late, and it was a bit of a dash to the terminal in 'Port of Brisbane', but Janice and Ewan were running even later so we didn't feel too bad. We all got on the ferry OK and settled in for the hour and a bit trip.



Given that the island is THAT close to the city, it's a real surprise that it is so amazingly untouched. No timber from the island is allowed to be burned, so you have to import anything you want to make a fire with, and all rubbish is (theoretically) removed from the island and dealt with on the mainland.

When you disembark from the ferry, it's straight into full on 4wd mode as the sand is soft, and depending on the tide, you may end up driving through the surf, which means that if you stop, the car is a gonner. We were staying with our mates in a place called Bulwer which is about 12km up the beach... and is marked by some wrecks. It's absolutely beautiful, the units are about 100m from the beach on the other side of a dune, and the girls were straight into the sea - Tild didn't even wait to take off her clothes!



This was one of the wrecks at 5am... when I woke up and went out to see what was what...



When everyone else got up, we went for a tour of the island. First stop was a place called 'The Desert' where we did some sand tobogganing - but the pics didn't come out very well.

We stayed for an hour or so and then went off further down the island. This was our lunch stop;



Perfect though the beach appears, Ewan makes it a habit (as we do) to collect rubbish that other people leave behind. The bag below contains rubbish from a casual stroll along 100m of beach! It beats me why people will come to an idyll like this, and leave their waste...! Don't they get it?





You can see the rack in this pic...



Just before we left this area, we spotted some Dolphins... and though you can't see them in these pics, (cos I blew it) that's what everyone is looking at.









Then we set off further south to see some crabs that skitter across the sand in little groups...

When they scurry, you can hear this kind of whispering sound... it's a bit freaky....and they're amazing. Eventually, they all bury themselves to get away from you.



...unless someone like Matilda pics them up...



Eventually we came to a bar at the southernmost tip of the island called 'The world famous Gutter bar' at Kooringal. Daile and Janice in the foreground... it's hard to get pics of these two!





I asked the landlady why it was 'world famous' and she said, 'Well it's like this, we are a small drinking village, with a fishing problem!' The sign shows how much you need to pay for an excuse... (click on the pic for a larger one). The snakes skins were found on the beach...

This was a sandy rock about 4km up from the southern tip...from left; Feeb, Daile, Anna, Josh, Jack, Tild, Moll and Ryan.





These plants are known as 'black boys'... apparently because they are black at the base, and they look like spears....or so the 'clean' version goes anyway!



This is Jack.











At the end of my stint..(I had to leave early as I had a previous commitment to teach a life drawing class)... we had a ceremonial watching of the sun going down. Given that the forecast had been for rain.. this was an unexpected pleasure... even if the bottom of the sky was obscured by cloud, and we didn't get the full orange thing going on....















Lovely!

Why the Brits always talk about the weather....

OK, what do you call an English disease that only really happens in the collective and is context dependent? I was thinking something like Rain-glish, or Eng-rain-itis.
Shortly before Josh and Molly arrived in Oz, we heard a news article that stated 'Australia set for the hottest September in 40 years!' and I actually wondered if the weather was likely to reach the sort of heat that is debilitating in the Summer....

I needn't have worried.

The combined presence of all of us English people, coupled with the plan to take a holiday at Moreton Island has rendered September the 'Wettest September in 40 years' (I kid you not). It has rained solidly for the all of yesterday (the first day of my holiday) and is predicted to continue in the same way until Sunday... the last day of my holiday.

Good eh! Oh to be a BRIT!

Update from the underside

Hello again. 'Spect you're wondering where I've been...? Well, here's the thing; we have a very extortionate deal with Telstra in which they charge us $129 for a measly 10 gigs of bandwidth, because we are 'not in an area that has ADSL, and so we have to get online using a mobile phone connection, typa thing...or so we thought. I'll come back to that.
So anyway, the allotment of bandwidth is renewed on the 25th of each month, and most months we manage to eek out this allotment of data transfer to last the whole month.
This month, the big kids arrived the day after the renewal date, on the 26th... and both of them brought their flash Dell laptops... and wanted to get on line. By the 3oth we were all used up and had been reduced to 56k.
During some of the ensuing and frustrating discussions we had subsequently with Telstra, one of the women I spoke to said that Internet access is a luxury. I'd contest that, I DID contest that. The opposition party just lost the election at least partially on this platform in fact, claiming that Labor [sic] was wrong to be planning to spend large amounts of money on rolling out a state of the art broadband network across Australia. Not that long ago, people would have argued that the telephone was a luxury, or the car, but whilst those things ARE luxuries in basic survival terms, in an industrial nation in 2010, you pretty much have to have them to function.
So 5 days into our month, we're all metaphorically camping out in terms of being unable to access the now indispensable Google et al, and it is for this reason that I've been so remiss with the blog since the kids have been here. Uploading images is untenable.
Turns out the kids are using a program called 'Utorrent' which is a file sharing program that works on the basis that users download data from other users and once they've done so, the program keeps the data in a file that is accessed by more users that are after the same files... and the more people there are that have copies of the data, the more 'seeds' the downloader has to access the data, the better the process works for them. The program allows a trickle of upload data the whole time that a 'seed' is online, and whilst it isn't enough to affect the performance of any download you may be doing, or to noticeably detract from your surfing speed, it DOES work the whole time. We found that this amounts to about 3 gigs of upload per day! This, no doubt Ali, is what caused the problem of over use with your bandwidth recently whilst Josh was there... and explains why he was so adamant that he'd not been downloading all THAT much... which it turns out will have been right. Needless to say, I've had them turn the damn thing off.

All this was particularly frustrating for Daile, who was about to do some heavy downloading for some applications that she's been looking at regarding applying for a clinical psychology masters, that requires references from some of the academic establishments she was involved with in the UK. She had found out in conversation that some of our neighbours DO have ADSL and phoned up Telstra to find out if we could get it. They said that we could have 200 gigs of bandwidth, a telephone line that would be transportable to our new house when it's built, free calls to mobiles and landlines at certain times, and some extra channels on our Foxtel TV thing. The price for all this extra was only another ten bucks! So we signed up for it, and waited. Daile spent several hours on the phone and we finally got the telephone line in. We were due the modem last Tuesday but it didn't turn up, on Wednesday lunchtime I called them to find out when it was arriving...the deadline for Daile's applications was rapidly approaching...and after another half an hour on the phone they finally told me that ADSL is not available to us.. and this after we'd got the phones! I'm sure you can imagine how chuffed I was about this! I wont go into that... but needless to say, we didn't accept this 'breach of contract' and we're now waiting to see if they can make an exception. It's long winded, but the long and short of it is that they have to find a technician, get him a donkey and a bed roll, send him out for two days out into the bush, to access a remote connection box and then have him ride another two days back before we can be told if there is a spare connection. I kid you not, this state of the art organisation claims that it takes four days to ascertain this, I asked them if they'd ever heard of keeping that kind of data on a bit of paper.

Meanwhile we limp on with '64k' which of course really is more often 3k or less.

Molly has been getting into the painting, and after a bit of a shaky start, has been looking like she's going to be pretty good at it, which is very encouraging. I've been having a go too, but my use of colour is still rudimentary and proving to be the big obstacle for me... although the process is utterly compelling at the moment.

I've had a bit of a thrash around at work this week trying to get everything sorted out so that I can take a week off next week, and despite working longer hours so that I could get everything all tied up in neat bundles for everyone, the fact that the company manager is off, and that I'm running 15 projects concurrently has meant that I've got to make a short visit on Monday, ostensibly my first day off, to run a briefing session to ensure that everyone knows what they're up to next week and who to call when they can't ask me for each respective project.

...and the washing machine blew up!

I took it apart last week and found that the main control circuit had blown a chip. I ordered a new board and installed it today, checked the pump and the door switch for short circuits (as Electrolux recommend with control circuit burn outs) and which it passed, and was therefore pissed off when the circuit blew again almost as soon as it was switched on. The price of the circuit, and the price of getting out a technician meant that we decided it was more sensible to just go out to the shop and get another. Kerching!

Next Wednesday we're all off to Moreton Island with some mates of ours and they've arranged for us to stay in a chalet near to one that they're staying in. This should be the antidote to stress that we all need with a bit of luck. Moreton Island is very beautiful, with a Dolphin sanctuary and Dugons, lovely sandy beaches, four wheel driving, etc. Should be lovely.

Hopefully, by the time we get back, the broadband will be up again, and I can send you some pics.

Big happy family...

Last Thursday Josh and Molly finally arrived, and we all went to the airport in good time to meet them. The girls were both very excited and had not been sleeping all that much as a result. We got good vantage point right by the exit and waited for about 20 mins in all. I positioned myself a little behind them when the first people started coming through, hoping to get a nice picture of the reunion - imagining that they would come to the barrier to hug the little ones.

However, as you see, I'd barely got a couple of pics off, before Phoebe had gone... dashing down to the end of the barrier and up to meet them. Matilda followed her example almost immediately, so all I got was a blurred few images.







Since then, they've been dealing with pretty bad jet lag, and we've all been hanging out. Tonight, Molly took me to pick up the girls in Daile's car...(aka Molly's car whilst she's here) and I was very impressed. It's a real right of passage when one of your kids takes you for a drive...!

It's lovely to have them both here... and I'll be taking more pictures soon.