Scooby Doo

learnt a new nickname for the Forester yesterday - "Scooby Doo" (rhymes with Subaru...). But more importantly, we bought some roof rack cross rails for our Scooby Doo yesterday - I've never owned roof racks before :) Largely, the racks will be used for surfboards, but I'm sure that there are loads more cars with racks fitted over here than I used to see on the roads in the UK. I don't think that's just down to surfing, though there is a lot more of that going on over here than there was in London(!), but I think there's also the general out-doors-iness of the aussie lifestyle. People do take it as read that Aussies are more outdoorsey, but a good comparison is that where Skye worked in London (global financial institution) most people in the office couldn't understand why she'd want to go camping - whereas in her office here (also a global financial institution) most people get away camping at the weekends or for their holidays.

Wedding news - we now have a band booked for the reception. That's been a bit of a saga, but I reckon we've done well with the final choice. This band even plays reggae, which ought to be perfect for a warm night looking over the ocean.

Work news - my CCNA is up for renewal, time to hit the books again! I've booked in for the CCNP switching exam, and with 2 chapters a night (with a couple of nights off) I'll be through the book with a week to spend on practice questions and revision. Not much fun, but worth gritting my teeth through.

....and I can report that I managed to catch and ride a wave on my own board last week, despite terrible confitions and a scarily strong sweeping current. However, the strong current really drained my paddling strength - time to buildup my surfing fitness and power :) I've started going to the Valley Pool a couple of times a week to swim some laps. Lovely to be in an outdoor pool (even in the middle of winter!), and it's actually a low-chlorine pool too, so it's not so unpleasant. It's a full 50m in length, which is twice as long as I'm used to - at least that means I have fewer laps to count!

Comfy

for the first time *ever*, we now own a comfy sofa! To top it off, it took so long to deliver that when we complained they offered to throw in our choice of coffee table for free. Nice little sweetener, that :)

We've just finished using the sofa to be *very* comfortable whilst watching the entire second series of "Green Wing". Hooray for BitTorrent, even as I type the first series is squeezing down my Internet connection and piling up on my hard disk ready for us to watch. Double hooray for the Speed Scheduler plugin for Azureus, which should mean I don't bust our download quota this month :/

Also - photos from my 30th birthday weekend are now posted on fatcat.

...and I've just noticed that I've been writing this blog for just over a year now :)

It's been a busy coupla weeks - world cup dramatics, travelling north and south, some new technologies at work and a small, but significant, surf.

Gutted that England fell out of the world cup on penalties. Again. We watched the game at a pub in Manly, Sydney, and I must admit that I was a little tipsy by the time we kicked off at 2am. My voice was hoarse from cheering, my "proud to be English" wristband proudly waved aloft all night. Oh dear. Not sure I should show my face in that particular pub again....

....the weekend in Sydney was great, otherwise. Met a great bunch of people at a friend's 30th, and hooked up with Jez 'n' Kez, who we hadn't seen since Nepal 6 months ago. Although it was cold and fairly grey, we had some good harbour moments, enjoying the sunset a couple of times and taking the ferry from Circular Quay to Manly and back again.



It can be a pretty spectacular city, but when we got back to Brisbane it felt comfortable to be back amongst colourful wooden queenslanders, and to be out of the endless traffic! We gave Mike and Al a bit of a hand with their final clearing out as they prepared to set off back to the UK.... and Mike leant me his surfboard and a wetsuit, which I put to good use and rode my first wave :) It was a fairly big day at Manly, and I'm not used to either surfing on my own or surfing a beach break. I'm quite proud of myself just for heading out into the surf, and very pleased with actually riding a wave. I'm less pleased with the fact that I had put the wetsuit on inside out, and so the ankles were bagging out with water and weighing me down!

We arrived back in Brisvegas late on tuesday night, and I was back at the airport at dawn the following day to head north to Mackay for a few day's work. A bunch of stuff that I suspected might go wrong, did, and then a bunch more stuff that I had no idea could go wrong, did as well. And in fact, all the wrongness made for a challenging, and therefore satisfying, few days. I came out of it feeling on top of things, despite not having achieved most of the set goals for the trip. My impressions of Mackay are pretty vague, but some key things were that opposite the airport there are sugar cane fields, and that looking along a side street running off the main street you can see the edge of town. It was nice to be in a popular pub in a small Queensland town to watch the final State of Origin match of the series too.