Mobile phone photos

I take a lot of photos with my Sony Ericsson K750i, mainly because the 2MP camera it has is excellent in the right light and with a steady hand. I rarely post the photos on fatcat, because they don't usually justify creating a whole album. So, I've ended up with a big collection of random photos that I haven't published anywhere - until now :)

"you can eat it, but it tastes like shit" - that's a Goanna in the car park at Noosa National Park.

A fiery sunset over Eagle Junction train station, Brisbane. Oh, how I wished I had my dSLR with me! Mind you, the cameraphone did a damn good job.

This is a shot of the legendary surf break "The Pass" at Byron Bay. Lovely spot.

Taken from a CityCat ferry on the way from the CBD to New Farm park - those aren't birds flying overhead, they're fruitbats!

Taken after a rare rain shower, that's a Water Dragon lizard in Anzac Square in Brisbane. I work in one of those shiny skyscraper office blocks.

...and thanks to the wonder that is google, all photos I post on this blog automagically get slotted into a Picasa web album, here:

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/ben.byer/TheByersInOz?authkey=Y7EnLCChQH4

Baby Byer, surfing, Ikea and home-baked delights

On the baby front:
* young Byer spends a great deal of time kicking Mrs. Byer, and also kicking Mr. Byer when Mrs. Byer chooses to snuggle up to me. I've made the hilarious joke that the hard lump of the baby's bum that can clearly be felt pushing up against Skye's tummy is in fact not the bum, but rather the Byer family nose.... Joking apart, this is real eye-opening stuff, feeling the baby kick and move around. Skye gets the most heart-warming look about her when it happens :) Pre-natal classes through the hospital start tomorrow night, and we've also booked into a Hypno-birthing course that starts on weds.

On the surfing front:
* my board is still in the shop, should hear something about what'll happen about the damage this week. In the meantime, I had a lovely little session last weekend at Currumbin. Small waves but no wind and a mere handful of people out. Well, at a Gold Coast point break on a Sunday "a mere handful" is 20+.... Anyway - I had 1.5 hours to surf, and set myself a wave count of 10 to reach, and made it. That's very good for me. The board I had was another hire board, a Donald Takayama Tuflite performance longboard. Very, very nice.

On the new house front:
* As I write this I have one of those heatbags sitting across my right shoulder trying to sooth the pain and stiffness from spending the entire weekend building Ikea furniture. We now have a nice new TV stand and bookshelves, all matching, all painstaking levelled and fixed to the wall, and painstakingly cabled too! Big plus points are that I now have all my records (well, all that I brought to Oz) out on a shelf, and one of my turntables all connected up and ready to go. And my tape deck. And all the hifi gear is well out of reach for the arrival of young Byer...
* the cot is now assembled and in the nursery. Just got to get the ikea chest of drawers and easy chair built too



I should also point out that Skye has recently turned into something of a superwife, making good use of all our selection of kitchen appliances and cook books. This weekend alone she turned out a loaf of bread, a tray of cinnamon rolls, some banana muffins and some savoury cheese and chive muffins. I had leftover homemade tuna sushi rolls for lunch today, and best of all, last week she got up early and made buttermilk and blueberry pancakes for breakfast, serving them up with fruit juice on the deck just as I crawled out of bed - how good is that!?!? And all this while happily carting my unborn child around in her tummy. Good stuff :)

...and finally, I've made my Youtube debut with a short, dry, comic film (rather like me, in many ways...). "Breakfast of Champions - Queensland Style"

28 weeks and counting....

We're well on our way with preparations for our new arrival - this weekend, we bought a cot! We had worried about choosing a pram only to find that there's a 6 month delivery time, so we got on the case with that a while ago and put one on layby along with a matching basinette and a car seat/capsule. Confident that we'd be right with that for a few months after the baby's born, we've been hunting around with no pressure for a second hand cot. I thought we'd seen every possible cot, and was ready to shell out $450 on a second hand Boori (over $700 new....) when slogging through saturday morning traffic to do the round of the "pre-loved" shops turned up a perfectly good cot for $129. Done deal :)

I've finished reading what turned out to be an excellent book - "So you're going to be a dad". I thought it'd be a load of american claptrap, but it is in fact pretty amusing and written about becoming a dad in Oz. I confess to chuckling out loud several times on the bus :)

We had probably our last camping trip for a while on the May bank holiday weekend, which was an absolute delight - very, very relaxing. We had one night booked camping at Peregian Beach near Noosa, so we took a long route there through the Glasshouse Mountains, stopping at Maleny and Montville to browse through the shops. After Montville, the tourist drive heads straight back to the highway, but we turned off and followed a dirt road through the forest and past the Kondalilla Falls National Park - I swear the Subaru starting grinning as soon as we got off the tarmac! I also grinned a lot :)


We reached Noosa at 4pm-ish, and to my dismay the ocean was like a lake - no swell at all. Nonetheless, I picked up a hireboard from Noosa Longboards for a dawn session the next day. While we were at the NL shop, we met Robert August who famously was one of the surfers in the legendary surf-travel movie "Endless Summer". He seemed like a genuinely nice guy.

I then went for a quick swim at Noosa Main Beach. While I was splashing about and body surfing, the surf lifesavers made some announcement or other, which I couldn't really make out, but I noticed that people started to get out of the water. I bodysurfed a couple more waves, then got out myself. Skye was waiting for me on the beach and it turns out that the announcement was something like "several shark sightings in the area, surf lifesavers about to end their shifts for the day, swim with caution". well, the most cautionary swimming when there's been shark sightings is not to swim at all in my book!!

Sharks aside, there was a fantastic sunset that evening - Skye and I got all arty with our cameraphones:


I didn't let that stop me surfing the next morning, although I did make sure I surfed where there were a few other guys (safety in numbers...) and I really freaked myself out looking down into the water and seeing a shadow that looked *exactly* like a shark, but which turned out to be some rocks beneath me. Phew. Had a really good session that morning at Tea Tree Bay, then returned in the late afternoon for an even better session. The resident Tea Tree Bay turtle popped his head up a couple of times near me - always a pleasure. In between surfing, Skye and I had a pleasant walk from the National Park to Little Cove and back, with a picnic lunch.

...but why was I surfing on a hire board? The sorry news is that my board is back at the shop. Again. I don't think I'll go through all the details here, as it's just too depressing. In a nutshell, a strip of fibreglass inexplicably tore off the underside of the nose halfway through a session at Currumbin. I'm hoping that the manufacturer will recognise that it's unacceptably poor build quality and replace the board, or will at least cover the costs of the repair. Here's what it looks like:

And on a final note, the ASP Billbong Pro at Teahupoo in Tahiti is on at the moment - here's an absolutely classic photo of one of the world's top surfers about to experience some serious pain: