A bucket of prawns in the sun.

New Years Eve was spent with mum, Alex and the kids enjoying the tunes belted out by a local chick in the beer-garden under the country club. It has a casual beauty, sandwiched as it is between the bowling green and the golf club car-park it overlooks the ocean, dunes and lakes, kangaroos pause in a mob around the t-off just below the fence and a strong sea breeze brings a briny haze. A few locals are trying to make a go of a burger business, barbecuing up the scotch fillet stakes for filling the local fresh "still warm from the oven" focatcia style buns, the local market gardens providing the salad so fresh it still drips sap.

Entree is a bucket of prawns, literally. Enjoyed with a chilled sav blank and a Coopers or three.

It's a picturesque 3k walk back around the lake to mums house.


This is country.

Everybody needs a friend.

I used mine to hold up a tarp and keep the sun off our backs at a kids party.
Didn't want some of the cold blooded guests from getting to warm and frisky:


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Update: I've had several emails about the first pic - It's a bit of rock climbing hardware called a 'friend' or a cam that you use to help stop yourself hitting the ground when you fall. It's an indictment of what has become of my life that my friends are now used to hold up a tarp rather than out on a wild crag some place.

Last day of hol's, goin'-ome tuhmorra

The last few day's have been a blast.

Take today for example:

Today I managed about two hours surfing and a few more body and boogie board surfing whilst mum and dad built sand castles on the beach with the kids.

Surfing - If you haven't I can't explain the feeling. Waves, powerful enough that given time will wear down headlands and reshape coastlines. Powerful enough to smash you teeth as they pile drive you arse through your neck if you fuck up. But awesome fun to play with dancing on a 6' length of pointy fiberglass bristling with blade like fins. Surfing is big, for many it is life. There are the finer points of wax selection, of etiquette, of leg rope selection - the culture and fashion, wave selection, fitness, your skill, pin tail or wedge. It goes on and on - if you are not initiated you will never find a way in.

Today I had one of the rarest surfing experiences - fantastic waves, a peaky steep right, all too myself. I had the joy of ride after ride of consistent waves in crystal clear water, of being underwater watching my reflection in the surface whilst duck diving under 1.5m curls.

My base of my ribs are sore from paddling and my arms are sore from dragging the board through the surf - but it is a good kind of sore.

After surfing and lunch on a picnic rug in the park, where the kids and I devoured a few hamburgers, with beetroot cauz were Aussie we got back and enjoyed the heat and suffered the view whilst savoring the beer mum dropped in my hand. Had a rest and then drove up the coast a ways to pick up Patrick - a 16 yo school kid who lives on the neighboring property from school in the next town. He took me fishing out on his boat. 6 magnificent fathead later we were heading back in only to be stopped by the dolphins trapped in the lake. (vid later).

Dinner was a sav blanc and fathead fillets in batter - so fresh they were quivering.

Raff is playing a fellow Spaniard in Melbourne whilst I'm sipping the last of the West Australian white.

How was your day?

Huntsman for dinner

Business time

The students are finishing up their last exams and now it is time for us to roll up our shirt sleeves and get cracking on some IT work that we couldn't do when they are here in force.

Meanwhile I'm trying to write some web pages to replace a bunch of paper forms and reduce our data entry requirements. For the most part it looks as if it will work, but I'm doing some cheeky screen scraping to read other peoples web pages to get the info I need. The uni is comically inefficient at making that kind of information available.

Alex (wife) is heading off to the US for a whirlwind visit, mostly the mid north east and Chicago with a day in Memphis. She's looking at some gas facilities for a big project she is working on here. She wont have time for sight seeing tho. :-(

That of course means that I have to look after the kidlets by myself for a week. Think I may need a few wines to get through that one.

Selling a boat on ebay

Interviewing next week for one of my System Administrator positions - give me a call if your a smoking hot linux sys admin who knows PERL and can install and manage open source apps such as media wiki. A unix ticket would be a plus.

Here be Dragons

Back in August 2007 we took the kids for a walk around the STEP track. A year later Annalise is walking better and taking more interest in the environment around her; commentating on the birds, ants, flowers and trees as we walked. The last year has been dry and this time I couldn't find any of the endangered carnivorous sundews (Drosera). There is also noticeably more fallen timber, branches and leaf litter in the Terry's Creak Valley which is going to fuel a ripper of a fire when one eventually comes through.

And we saw a dragon



(apologies for the appalling vid but I'm crap at editing this kind of stuff)
photos

So, um, yep. we went down to Mum and Dad's place.

We took advantage of the long weekend and headed down to Tuross to spend the long weekend with Mum and Dad. It is always nice to slow down for a time and spend time with my folks. The kids are getting older - Adrian is almost speaking and is certainly interacting much more which was great for Dad especially. Annalise learnt to ride a bike (with training wheels). She got peddling together, can steer and can use the breaks, tho' not necessarily at the same, or at the right time. She also likes to look at where she has been and not where she is going.

One one of the nicest days we pointed the 4X4 at the bush tracks and forestry roads in the hinterland. Driving west on the Runnyford Rd which leaves the highway just north of Mogo we wound our way up and over the first of the foothills of the Great Dividing Range. The road winds around generally north-ish via an amazing wooden bridge at Runnyford and ends at Nelligan on the Clyde River. From there we took The River Road, another dirt track, north following along the west bank of the Clyde up to Shallow Crossing where you wash the dust off fording. From there you take The Old Princess highway through the bush back down to the coast. Not that you would usually call a dirt road a highway. We lunched at South Duras beach. Famous for, among other things, where Alex and I got married.

Amazingly I didn't put on any weight. I normally manage a kilo or three.

Oh, and dad gave me his boat. Now I just have to learn to drive it.

photos