14 days to go!

The world cup kicks off in 2 weeks - bring it on!

bye bye hangovers!

Pleased to report that the 50 litres of beer that we brewed turned out very nicely - bottled the lot on saturday with Nat, Carl and Darren. Obligatory quality control tests kept us merry for most of the day once we had started, and mercifully no hangover to follow. The beer tastes a little young and fruity, but will apparently mature in the bottles. Must resist the temptation to drink it for breakfast.... :)

Coriolis effect

picked up a real humdinger of a did-you-know this weekend: the coriolis effect causes vines to grow anticlockwise up trees in the southern hemisphere, but clockwise up trees in the northern hemisphere. Who'd have thunk it? Does make me wonder about vines growing in forest bang on the equator, though.... interestingly, this entry in the wikipedia states that it's a fallacy that water goes down the plughole in different ways depending on which hemisphere you're on. Seems there more to this coriolis lark than I had originally thought.

Spent the saturday morning at Currumbin, where I managed to get up on my board on the face of a wave for the first time. Felt absolutely fantastic for the whole 1 second of that ride - damn those surf-schoolers who were right in my line of fire, causing me to lose it and fall off straight away :) Had a quick go on Nat's longboard, and found that I could get up on the face first time. I do want to stick at it with my mini-mal, but oh having a longboard would make life easy.... that's one for ebay, I think :)

we then headed inland to Murwhillumbah (great name) and the Mt Warning campsite. Nice place, very quiet, lots of natural bush (fnarr fnarr), kookaburras and open fires. Cheap too, at $16 for a campsite. We set up both tents and a tarp over the ground between them. Pleased with that, we're going to write up a wishlist for camping gear and pool resources with Nat and Al. Sunday we climbed the mountain. Fantastic rainforest on the lower flanks, really thick with tree ferns and shaded by absolutely huge forest canopy, including giant gum trees. Very difficult light for the SLR, but took a lot of photos anway (of course). The trusty SonyEricsson K750i also did an admirable job of doubling up as pocket snappy camera. But the 18-200mm on the EOS really came in handy when we spotted a mob of rock wallabies rustling the undergrowth nearby - got a lovely candid shot of one of the cute little guys popping his head up to check us out. Also got some good closeups of a genuine live snake - first one I've seen in Oz. We reckon it was a diamond python, so not dangerous to us unless threatened. Still, it was about 2 metres long, and was right alongside the path. All of the photos are here.

Work's been nuts for me, with lots of high profile hectic get-it-working-now jobs. Still, at least it passes the time :) My contract has been renewed for a further 3 months too, which is excellent. And Skye's hoping for some interesting work-related news, and possibly changes, soon... watch this space.

mmmm.... beeeeer......

As far as I know, this isn't available yet back in blighty, but someone should jump on the bandwagon. A great idea, take a micro-brewery and open it up to homebrewing hobbyists and amateur beer lovers, provide recipes reverse engineering 100 different popular beers, and charge the punters about half the price of buying the beer in the shops to brew up a 50litre keg of their own. Fantastic. Nat, Carl and I went down to Bru4U on saturday, picked the recipe for "Joags" (which is a copy of the James Boag's Tasmanian beer) and went to work. Great fun, and we found ourselves drinking cold beer at 10:30am in between tipping carefully measured amounts of hops into the frothing beer kettles.

And in just 3 weeks time, we'll return to sample and manually bottle our brew. The only downside to the whole thing is that with no artificial preservatives or additives, the beer must be kept in a dark and cool place, and drunk quickly to stop it spoiling. What a shame. On the flipside, there should be much milder headaches the day after - all good.