some good, some bad

An eventful day, and time of year at the moment. We're in the thick of public holiday season right now - April has 2 days off for easter, then another for ANZAC day, mayday is another day off (making 4 public holidays in 4 consecutive working weeks), then the Queen's official birthday in June. All very good, except that us contractors don't get paid for those holidays :) When we finally get a full month's pay for the both of us it's going to be bloody welcome! :)

We went to the Brisbane city dawn ANZAC day service in the centre of the city, but we were disappointed. The landscaping of ANZAC square here means that you can't see what's going on, there weren't enough people handing out programmes so we didn't know what the order of the service was, the singing was awful (plus the lack of programmes meant that nobody new the words to sing along to). Couple of plus sides - the trumpeter/bugler (couldn't see him, of course) played the last post beautifully, and it was cold enough at 4:30am to wear jeans, jumper and my heavy winter jacket - hooray! I thought I'd never have a chance to use them up here :)

Took delivery of our new bbq (or outdoor grill, as perhaps it should be better known). I've joined the darkside, and bought a gas-powered model. In my defence, the manufacturer is "Jackeroo" - I simply had to buy it with a name like that :) Given it's mammoth dimensions (at least by my standards) I think I'll call it "Thunderdome" instead though.

Speaking of temperatures, it's warm enough to be wandering around the house with no shoes on pretty much all day at the moment - lovely, except that we're both stubbing our toes on things. I royally stubbed mine last night on a door frame, resulting in a loud crack, my little toe sticking out at a new angle, and 3 hours waiting at A&E :/ There's nothing that the doctor could do for me, except confirm that nothing was broken and tape the toe to it's neighbour. So today, I'm hobbling about the place, and Skye's making jokes about amputating the toe

Hello Internet my old friend....

after what feels like forever, we finally have an Internet connection at home again - phew! What's more, I think we've got a nice one. I haven't had a chance to fully test the throughput, but a quick speedtest showed over 8mbps download speed. Nice. We're on Optus cable, with a (large) quota. Celebrated the new connection with a flurry of long calls and video chats with the UK, followed by running a lengthy P2P download overnight.

Spent a great long weekend about 5 hours north from here at Agnes Waters, beautiful surf conditions, lovely coastline, and a fantastic campsite in natural bush setting. Photos are here. Unfortunately, there was no way we could manage to take a photo of the Manta Ray that we saw cruising near the surface clost to the shoreline - we watched him for a good 10 minutes, fantastic!

In other news - Big Brother has just started, which I gather is in sync with a new one in the UK too. Apparently, there'll be some globetrotting swaps from one house to another, which would be very interesting. The aussie female contestants are all lookers, with at least 2 of them managing to mention their boob jobs within minutes of being introduced to the house.... should make for some amusing catfights :)