The Byers in Oz

Teething Troubles

2008-02-19T16:33:00.005+10:00

How many times have I used that phrase around the office? Sitting in a grey-walled meeting room, framed newspaper clippings and tech-vendor awards on the walls, explaining the readiness of a technically complex new product to the project manager:

"the platform will meet the product requirements, will be scalable and redundant, and will be well-documented for acceptance testing and operational handover in time for the planned launch date. However, we must expect some teething troubles shortly after launch"

That kind of teething trouble is only metaphorically teething trouble. And oh, is there a difference between the metaphorical and the real....

It isn't the sit-there-inexplicably-whinging type of teething trouble. It isn't the I-used-to-sleep-well-but-now-I-don't type either. And it certainly isn't the wake-up-at-1:30am-and-then-again-at-3:30am-crying kind of teething trouble.

I'll take teething troubles in the business sense over the teething troubles in the literal sense any day of the week!

Our poor little Dalai Levi has a literal case of teething troubles at the moment. Took us a little while to work it out, but once we saw what the problem was it all became clear. It does come and go a bit, but mainly it comes and stays. We were given a fantastic little feeding thing called a mesh feeder - it's like a little netting bag with a big plastic ring on the end of it. Stuff a couple of chunks of cold watermelon into the bag and give it to Levi and he'll grab the ring, unceremoniously put the netting bag into his mouth, and chomp down on the cold, sweet, juicy fruit. It's working like a treat at the moment, even if watermelon juice does make a bit of a mess....

He's just turned 6 months old, and has simultaneously kicked off with both a bunch of new skills and a bunch of new problems. First, the new skills:
* can sit up very well on his own, and often just sits there laughing to himself
* can do press ups, and can kind of move backwards slowly along the floor by doing multiple push ups in a row (hasn't yet got the hang of one-handed pushups like his daddy, and, um, jean-claude van damme.....)
* can stand up with something to hold on to (and amusingly is gripped with then looking down at the floor from a standing position - the look of wonder on his face is hilarious!)
* can pass stuff from one hand to the other, bang things against other things, throw things around. And he's an expert at raking anything within arm's reach closer, so that he can get it into his mouth :)
* can eat mushed up solid foods - and that's a big new skill. He loves to grab hold of the spoon himself and stuff it into his mouth, but often the little monkey grabs it around the handle with one hand, and then once he has control of the spoon, runs his fingers carefully through the food on the other end. He'll then do something very clever, like rub his eyes, pull on his ears, slap his hands on the traytable - any way to get that food everywhere :) Quick fix suggestion from mum - use two spoons! Let him control one of them, while we use the other to actually feed him - brilliant :)

(I've been amusing myself, and my wife, by making up names for the food - for instance, a mixture of pumpkin and apple becomes: pumple - or apkin. A mixture of avocado and banana becomes: avonana. The hilarity just goes on and on.....)

some new problems:
* sometimes, he just really wants his mummy. Not his daddy, just his mummy. I don't blame him, after all she's very nice, and can sing in a soft high-pitched voice, whereas his daddy is usually unshaven, a bit smelly, and there's no milk in his boobs. But sometimes it's actually daddy's turn.
* sometimes, his teeth are hurting enough that he can't get to sleep. Nothing unusual there, I guess, but he's been *such* a good sleeper up until now.
* along with feeding The Boy solids, which is a pleasure, comes at least two new problems. The lesser of the two is ensuring there are enough clean bibs and flannels around the place - after 6 months of using cloth nappies, we can handle a bit of laundry. The bigger problem is that his poohs have, well, become more like *real* poohs. Oh yes, they no longer smell of roses - they smell like shit :)

I've posted an album of photos of Levi at 6 months old on Facebook - non-facebook users can see it by clicking here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=30380&l=b54c5&id=699605134

Solo travel, and the lost ring

2008-01-15T14:12:00.000+10:00

I had a whole weekend to myself, time to spend however I wished. A rare and valuable thing. I dedicated it to independence, exploring and surfing on the Sunshine Coast, but it started badly. I was quite pleased with myself for packing the car the night before, and actually getting up when my alarm went off at 5am. I was even more pleased when I found my way to the surf breaks at Caloundra without using a map. I had a big grin on my face when, after checking several of the usual breaks along the Caloundra coastline, I found that Ann Street was both looking good *and* virtually empty. And just as I was waxing up my board in the carpark, by pure luck I bumped into a friend who was also about to paddle out. All good.

But.

A couple of waves into the session I got rolled by a steep, sucky one and when I came up for air and got back onto my board, my left hand felt a bit, well, wrong. It took no more than an instant to realise what was wrong. There was something missing, an absent, meaningful, never-ending circle, a lack of something to rap on the rail of my surfboard whilst waiting for a set... I looked down, but couldn't even see my feet through the water. I looked to the shoreline, saw the breakers, the white water and the swirling currents and I just deflated as I knew my wedding ring was not going to magically appear on the dry sand or float up next to me. I paddled out of the impact zone and sat up on my board out the back. Powerless, nothing I could do, wished I had bloody taken the thing off and left it in the car before paddling out, thought about just paddling back in and going home, calling the whole weekend off. It wasn't even 7am yet. I did a bit of looking around, stared at the ocean, swore, slapped my board. But life just goes on, the waves kept rolling in, and I knew that Skye would understand.

I surfed a few more waves, but my heart wasn't really in it and about an hour after I had paddled out I was back in the car park. Amusingly, just as I was rinsing off the salt water the rain came bucketing down leaving me no option but to stand around wet and getting wetter waiting for it to stop. Once the sun came out again, I got on the phone to Skye, told her what had happened and I was right that she immediately understood. "You know you've married the right girl when..."

And the weekend just got better and better from there on in :) I ate breakfast with friends, camped and made friends with the families on either side of my pitch, and I surfed twice in perfect conditions at Tea Tree Bay. I ate fish and chips sitting on the sandy shore of the Noosa River under the moon, I woke up to the sound of Corellas squawking at the dawn, and I caught up with more friends for a beer on the way home. I surfed each session for as long as I wanted, staying in the water for a personal record of 3 hours on Sunday morning, and I saw the most vivid rainbow I've ever seen, sitting up on my board at Tea Tree Bay, 6:30am Sunday morning, the full, unbroken arch touching the surface of the water on both sides of the bay. If only a pod of dolphins had swum through it :)

The thing I most enjoy about time spent on my own is finding out what I'll actually do. For instance, it's all very well *saying* that I'll get up at 5am to go surfing - but to then actually do it when there's no-one else around to witness it tells you a bit about yourself. While I was eating my fish and chips with only a home-brew beer for company on Saturday night, I thought about the weekends I spent camping solo in the Black Mountains in Wales. I used to drive off to Wales with something on my mind, take the weekend at my own pace, and emerge from the forest, mountains and motorways tired but relaxed, with a sense of peacefulness and an increased confidence in my independent abilities. There's something about going on a journey, traveling on your own. I feel exactly that same after my weekend on the Sunshine Coast, except the aches and pains are all in my shoulders and back rather than in my legs :)

...but don't misunderstand me here. I would have loved to have had Skye and Levi there with me to see the rainbow, to enjoy a relaxed breakfast by the beach, and to see the Koala in his usual tree in the national park. But with the pair of them in New South Wales, it would have been criminal to miss my chance for some solo travel.

Back in Brissy, the rain's bucketing down but it's hot and steamy all through the night. I've somehow got more to do each evening than there's time for, and I've happily got computer parts spread all over the lounge floor as I chip away at the old media centre PC I'm rebuilding. Skye sends me photos and videos from her mobile each day, but I can't wait to see them both again soon.

Welcome to 2008

2008-01-04T10:42:00.000+10:00

That was by far the quietest New Year's Eve since I was a child. All 3 of us Byers in Brisbane were either ill, recovering from being ill, or coming down with the same illness the other two had. Honestly, there wasn't a Byer awake in Brisbane after 10pm on NYE. And we didn't even leave the house at all on New Year's day.

...not that we had the weather to tempt us out of the place, either. It's been unseasonably cool this festive period, with plenty of showers and overcast skies, the temperatures have rarely gone above 25 degrees and there's been plenty of rain and strong winds from the south to make it all feel much cooler. Most of this weather has been caused by a large surface low that's been sitting off the east coast of Fraser Island happily generating some epic surf conditions all along the SE Qld coast. Photos on coastalwatch.com have shown double overhead waves barrelling at takeoff points that are normally gentle 2 foot sliders, and waves and currents too big and heavy for anything other than tow-in surfing.

Christmas was also a low-key affair this year, with a pleasantly relaxed christmas eve barbie on our back deck, and casual lunch and afternoon over at Nat and Al's on christmas day. Unfortunately, that was when Levi started to show signs of being sick, and by the end of the day he was sneezing and spluttering away. This is the first time he's been ill, so we kept a very close eye on him, and had a doctor come to visit on boxing day. Turns out he had bronchiolitis, a viral infection. Also turns out that you can never be too careful with young babies, so when he was sounding worse the next day, we were at the hospital to see another doctor by 6am. Thankfully, The Boy's strong enough to tough his way through being ill, (and cute enough to charm all the nurses and doctors) and it didn't develop into anything worse.

All that sitting around the house too ill to go out actually turned into quality family time together. Worried about Levi getting bored of his usual toys, we dug deep into his toybox and pulled out toys he hasn't seen yet - including a soft red and white football, which it turns out he loves. Check out the video below showing Levi's footballing talents.

Speaking of videos, I should also mention that Skye and I had our first night out without Levi when we went to see Daft Punk at the Riverstage here in Brisbane. One of the best gigs I've ever been too, Daft Punk were simply amazing. The music, the lightshow, the outdoor venue, and just the atmosphere all added up to a fantastic night out. To top it off, Levi stayed fast asleep all night, so we didn't get any calls from the babysitters. See below for my video of the gig.

...and, today is officially my last day of contracting. As of monday, I'm a permanent, salaried member of staff. I've never taken a pay cut before, so looking that in the eye is an unnerving feeling (especially now that my income is the total income for my family...). But. The company pays for income protection, and very importantly pays me while I'm sick or on holiday - what a relief! It's also quite strange not to have a date in mind for the end of my contract.... it took me a while to get used to being a contractor, but it's been 2 years now and without realising it, I've got comfortable in that way of thinking and now switching back to permanent may take me a while to get used to!

Levi's latest tricks, the birth of Gabby, home improvements, and news on the job front

2007-12-10T13:09:00.000+10:00

It's just stunning how many new things The Boy comes up with, if not on a daily basis then certainly every week. Since I last posted on the blog about him beginning to coo at us, his vocalisations have *really* progressed. Right now he's able to give a cute, gurgling "aah-googhhh" sound while smiling, make whale/dolphin style wails and screeches, and give full-bore ground-shaking both-lungs-at-full-volume sustained cries. We're mostly loving the "aah-googhhh" ones....

We recently came across a technique of picking him up in a kind of lotus position, and swinging him like a pendulum (thanks Mike and Al).

He really loves it - and (coincidentally....?) since we started doing that, he's begun holding onto his feet. As soon as you put him on his back, up come his feet and he'll be gripping onto his toes and gurgling away in no time - very, very sweet. And also helpful when changing his nappy :) And as if that wasn't a fancy enough new trick, within just a couple of days he's started holding onto his toes while sitting up too.

And his very latest trick is helping daddy turn the pages of books that we read together. He loves grabbing the pages of the soft cloth books (and stuffing them in his gob), and he tries to do the same with normal paper pages, but there's one book we have that has stiff cardboard pages that he can grip and turn well. Seeing him sitting there holding onto a page and turning it back and forth to see what's on each side is pretty amazing.

I've posted some recent very very cute photos of The Boy here on facebook.

A big announcement is that Levi has a new cousin - Gabriella Grace Wade was born on Weds 28th November, mum and bub doing fine.

Summer's getting into full swing now, with daily temperatures at or over the 30 degree mark, and nighttime temperatures staying well above 20 degrees. We've just started to leave the ceiling fans on all night now. Our new house is much, much better in the heat than the old place, but it's still pretty bloody warm indoors through the heat of the day. With mosquitos about in the evenings, we're wary about leaving the windows open, but we just have to. We've got some fancy retractable flyscreens on the way at the start of January that should take care of that worry, and in the meantime we're just slapping and squishing the little buggers.

I've been working on another little home improvement, which I managed to turn around in a reasonable period (which is pretty unusual). We now have a shiny new paved path to the back gate, wide enough to easily roll the pram over on the way to and from the cycleway. It took me a couple of weekend days, but would have been much, much more difficult without the rain. I woke up on saturday morning to find that the overnight storm was still drizzling, and the ground was nice and soft. Thinking it would only be 2 hour's worth of work to finish the job, and seeing as it was overcast, I just got stuck into it. But 4 hours later when it was all finished, and despite Skye slip slop slapping some suncream on me halfway through, I was well and truly sunburnt. As I write this 3 days later, the sunburn on the back of my left shoulder still looks fresh...

We took a family trip to Sydney a couple of weeks ago, and had the interesting experience of travelling with a 3 month old baby. Overall, it was pretty good going - we just scaled back our expectations of how much we could do, and tried to get people to come to us rather than us trying to get around Sydney too much. We spent a lovely couple of days with Mike, Al and Talia in Manly, enoying snorkelling at Shelley Beach, body surfing at the southern end of Manly beach, and hooking up with friends for a beachside barbie. I headed back to Brissy on the Monday morning commuter flight, while Skye stayed a few more days to spend time with family and friends in Sydney and the Southern Highlands. When I picked her up on the Thursday evening back in Brisbane, even though it had only been a few days it felt like much, much longer - and Levi had grown *and* learnt a couple of new tricks!

I did have great pleasure on my return to find that my beer fridge had been restocked with homebrew while I was away. A crispy cold beer on a hot evening (especially after laying all those pavers!!) is such a simple pleasure, but multiplying it by a fridge-full makes it even better :)

I have news from work too (will this blog post never end?!?!) - I'm leaving the contracting game behind, and turning permanent. I'm just waiting on the paperwork, which I am assured will be in my possession very shortly, and then a signature should bring an end to the matter. It's been an interesting but relatively painless negotiation, and although we won't have anywhere near the same amount of monthly income, I will have paid annual leave and sick leave, and I'll be earning TOIL for my out of hours work. It's all swings and roundabouts, but we both know that I come home with a smile on my face most days, which is an unquantifiable benefit that we've been enjoying since I started working here.

I'm also very pleased to say that I've been for my first surf as a dad, and that somehow leaving the house at 6am on a Sunday not only suited me, but also suited my wife and son! Crack of dawn is the best time for surfing, as the surface of the ocean is usually smooth, and the daily onshore winds haven't kicked up yet. Turns out that it's also a good time to take a baby in a pram for a long walk, as it's neither too hot nor too windy. So we all cruised up to Caloundra, where I caught a couple of waves (left-handers!) and Skye and Levi had a nice walk up and down the esplanade. We then swapped jobs, with me cuddling The Boy while Skye had a swim, then we just hung out in the shade and had a late breakfast before heading back home. Lovely. However, that was weeks ago and we've yet to repeat the feat :)

Chanukah is already here, and Christmas is on the way - love and seasons greetings from the Byers in Oz to you all!

Baby talk

2007-10-31T11:05:00.000+10:00

We read a good tip in the babycentre.co.uk newsletter this week:

"Cooing is your baby's way of showing she's happy. This pre-speech exercise lets her play with sound just as she plays with her fingers and toes. You can show that you've heard her by cooing or talking in response; see if you can have an extended conversation. "

Levi has recently started making gurgles and coos, so we tried having a conversation with him last night and it was a great success. He was happily kicking around under his jungle gym, punching and grabbing at the dangling toys, trying to pull them into his mouth. We were sat down on either side of him, playing with him and recording with the camcorder. When he made a sound, I smiled at him and made a short similar sound back at him. He picked up on it instantly, locked his gaze on my face and replied with another sound. I kept up my side of the conversation, and we had a little chat between ourselves for a little while - lovely. Skye joined in from behind the camcorder, and soon the whole family were telling stories to each other. Levi seemed to enjoy joining in the conversation, and once he'd finished telling us his side of the story, he got straight back into punching and kicking those dangling toys with a renewed vigour.

He's at a really sweet age right now, just under 3 months. He smiles and coos, he can grip on to things and wave them about, he loves having nursery rhymes sung to him, and he's just on the verge of being able to roll himself over. He's a strong little man, and we're helping him work on his physique with regular sit-ups to the tune of "row row row your boat" - soon he'll be looking as toned as his old man :)

grandparents, baby development and a table

2007-10-23T11:41:00.001+10:00

A table? Well, not just any old table. *The* table is finally finished! "What table?" you might be wondering - well, the saga stretches right back to our first week in Oz....

We picked the table up in pieces from my father-in-law when we first arrived in Oz back in Jan '05, and we personally freighted it from Queanbeyan to Brisbane in the back of The Bus all the way up the coast road. It's been patiently awaiting attention in the sheds of no less than 3 separate homes since then, sporadically enjoying a vigorous sanding when time permitted. Other priorities pushed the table further and further down the To Do list (mere insignificancies, like getting married, buying a house and having a baby....) - but once those big jobs were checked off the list, the table rose higher and higher in the priority stakes until finallly, last night, after much sanding, staining and varnishing, it was triumphantly screwed back together and positioned happily next to the kitchen with a nice view out over the garden. Lovely - a family table for our family. (now all we need are some chairs!!)

Speaking of our family, the youngest member has been meeting some of the older members. Grandparents and even a great-grandparent have had a good old coo over the cheeky young man, coming from as far away as Queanbeyan, Sydney and London. And the The Boy (as we call him) has capably taken on his responsibilities to charm 'em all.

After learning how to smile and even chuckle a bit, his very latest trick is gripping stuff and pulling it towards his face so he can maybe get a taste of whatever it is. He's also getting into having a good old sing song with his folks, who are starting to get nursery rhymes seriously stuck in their heads... We've now set a weekly timeslot with Grandma Barbie and Grandpa David to Skype, in a way it's like our own style School of the Air via Skype. Class runs every monday (9am GMT / 6pm AEST), with a strict curriculum of trans-global nursery rhymes and games for babies. We tuned into the first "class" this week, and had great fun singing along with our nephew and nieces in the UK. They can add Kookaburras to Old MacDonald's farm now that we've given them a rendition of the noise they make!

Levi's had his first couple of road trips to the coast, checking out the surf at Noosa (excellent 3 foot and glassy) and Currumbin (utterly blown out and unsurfable that day). I've yet to have my first surf as a dad (4 long months without so much as getting my feet wet!) but I'm hopeful that I'll get into the water this saturday. I scraped the old wax off my board at the weekend, crossing my fingers for a good surf forecast...

It's springtime here in Brissy, and it's just a such a lovely time of year. All the plants and flowers get into bloom, the lorikeets have all come back from wintering further north to chase away the noisy mynah birds, and the temperatures are just right for warm sunny days and mild evenings. Somehow, colours just seem more vivid at this time of year.

Updates

2007-09-19T16:51:00.000+10:00

Since I last wrote a post, I seem to have been preoccupied with sending photos and movies to family and friends, fiddling about with facebook, and dabbling in parenting :)

Some events worthy of note (in no particular order) from the last month:

* on father's day, my son managed to fart a couple of curds of pooh onto my t shirt whilst I was changing his nappy. It's definitely a sign of my adaptation to being a parent that I didn't mind at all :)

* went to the beach for the first time in *ages* - but didn't even get my toes wet, despite having packed all my surfing gear into/on top of the car. Bloody northerly wind had completely blown out what little swell there was. Oooh it hurts to find the beach entirely useless to me on my only chance to get there after 2 months of reading surf reports about the coming and going of one of the best winter swells seen in the last 20 years...

* "The IT Crowd" is hilarious. Got hold of series 2 via the internet and this cunning 3 step guide to getting hold of tv programmes, and we both laughed long and hard whilst watching it. Can't seem to find the first series, but I am working on it...

* Skype is really coming into its own now that we have a something that everyone wants to see - our son :) The latest version for the Mac has improved echo-reduction, so we're now happy Skyping without headsets. Levi has met his cousins, auntie, uncles, grandparents and even his great-grandmother over Skype.

* sleep. There hasn't been as much of it as there used to be. But, there's no real hardship in waking up at the wrong time of day to spend a bit of zombie time cuddling Levi (easy for me to say - I only do middle-of-the-night stuff at the weekends, Skye answers those calls during the week).

* and last but not least, we got tickets to the Daft Punk gig here in Brisbane. I'm still stoked about that ! Got the tickets the moment they went on pre-sale, just need to arrange the babysitter now :) Luckily the gig's not until the end of December, so we've got plenty of time to work that out.

Our son, Levi McRae Byer, born 09/08/07

2007-08-16T21:45:00.000+10:00

The latest news for the Byers in Oz is that we have a new arrival - Levi McRae Byer was born healthy, strong and alert at 00:09, on 9th August 2007. And what a moment that was - stunning.

From the moment that labour started at 02:25 on the 7th August, until the moment that Levi finally arrived 46 hours later, Skye and I worked hard (although she worked harder than I did!) at following all the techniques and methods we had learnt and had been practicing ready for the big occasion. It was a very intense 46 hours, an experience that will stay with us forever. There was virtually no sleeping, and hardly any eating, throughout the labour, and we went to and from the hospital no less than 3 times (twice during morning rush hours too!). There were plenty of decisions to be made, and different midwives and doctors to talk to - we did it all together. I'm also quietly pleased that the tracks on the mix CDs I made, that were cycled many, many times over, are now firm favourites :)

Those early moments of Levi's life in the outside world, were ground-shakingly profound to me. Very shortly after he was born, I talked to him and stroked his temple, and he turned his eyes to mine and calmed at the sound of my voice. And oh does he look like me!! :) It was also fortunate that we both immediately saw that his name would suit him, as we had a very short shortlist of only 1 name...

Skye and Levi were stuck at the hospital for 4 days, which were trying and emotional times. Lots of conflicting advice from midwives, a lack of privacy in the shared ward, the trials of breastfeeding. And although I was very, very tired and somehow just couldn't bring myself to go to bed at night - instead staying up until the early hours making calls, and emailing photos and movies of our son the family and friends who couldn't come and visit us in Brisbane.

Bringing Skye and Levi home from the hospital was a fantastic day. We all just breathed that much easier once we were back amongst the comforts of home. Once thing I've certainly learnt, which I had read in books anyway, is that birth is not something that should have to happen in a hospital. Hospitals are set up to handle diseases, illnesses, and medical procedures, all on a grand scale. Birth should be a unique personal event, and hopefully shouldn't require any medical attention whatsoever - which sounds like the opposite of a hospital case. Although things don't always go smoothly, just being in a hospital environment isn't conducive to having a unique, personal, natural birth, which can only make it harder for a labouring mother to get on with things naturally.

Some of the books that I'd read also said that it's quite common for a father to find it difficult to bond with his newborn, and that this can cause all kinds of anxiety and stresses - not so for me. I immediately felt a strong link with my son, which only strengthened during my 2 weeks of paternity leave.

Skye has been recovering well from the whole experience, and has adapted well to being at home with Levi now that I'm back at work. Although I'm enjoying my job, I would have loved to have stayed at home longer. Luckily for me, Skye's tech-savvy and sends me pictures and videos via MMS through the day anytime Levi does something cute.

Our son is a precious, gorgeous, bundle of amazement and joy - thanks to everyone who sent us messages, cards and gifts.

Plenty more photos of Levi are on facebook here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=10555&l=ee737&id=699605134

ps: we did receive (and are still receiving!!) a lot of advice about pregnancy, birth and parenting. I think the best piece of advice goes something like this:

"Whenever someone gives you advice, no matter how contradictory, smile and say thankyou - you may find it comes in handy when it's 3am and you think you've tried everything else!"

40 weeks!

2007-08-01T12:13:00.000+10:00

according to the doctors, today is the the start of the 40th week since our baby was just a twinkle in our eyes :)

...but what do doctors know, eh? There are a lot of stats regarding accuracy of the due date, but what they all have in common is that very few babies are born "on time" and the vast majority of those babies must not have been listening to the doctor at that first appointment when such minor details as when the young 'un is due to be born was discussed. Perhaps we should have discussed it louder.... :)

I don't think I would describe the last 40 weeks as a rollercoaster particularly, more like a windy road with mild inclines every now and again, and with plenty of roadside attractions that we took the time to stop and admire. It's been pretty good really.

So now we have pretty much everything either in place or at least in the house ready for me to install/stick on the wall/attach to the car/take to the hospital. My mobile phone's permanently set to ring loudly, and my boss is prepared for me to suddenly slam my laptop closed, leap out of my chair and run from the office yelling "this is it!! see you in 2 weeks!"

bring it on :)

New job

2007-07-18T11:30:00.000+10:00

I've started my new job, and after 2.5 weeks I'm much happier with the work I'm now doing. For the last 15months I've been working on enterprise level networking within a state utility company, which was initially interesting and new to me, but turned out to be slow going and became repetitive as time went on. Good bunch of guys there, though, which can make all the difference :)

The new job is back in the service provider industry, which is where my working roots are, and I'm immediately comfortable. I'm using skills that I spent years building up, and I have a more instinctive feel for the environment. I'm also building hands-on skills in areas I previously only had theoretical knowledge of. And there's a good bunch of guys here too :)

The flipside of the new job is that I'm not in a shiny glass-clad skyscraper overlooking the river anymore, I'm now in an ageing concrete block at the city end of Fortitude Valley. "The Valley" is well-known for it's thriving nightlife, the Chinatown area, and generally being grimy and alternative. Where I used to have a wide choice of options at lunchtime, I now have a wide choice of Chinese restaurants :) In London terms, it's something like having Soho, Shoreditch and Camden all rolled into one, but within 10 minutes walking distance of the river.

In other news - fatcat was off the air for a while, but is now back up and should stay up. I've just posted a couple of new albums on there of photos from my birthday, a weekend camping in Noosa last month, and our trip to Canberra in June.

http://fatcat.org/~benb/gallery

I've also registered with facebook, which is proving to be a bit of fun. It's nice to have another way of keeping in contact with friends.

We bought a new digital camcorder at the weekend (ignore the RRP, we paid way less than that!), and put it to good use making a video message for some friends in the UK. Really good fun to do the filming, and editing the film was relatively easy on the Mac too. Mind you, I dread to think how frustrating it would have been if we didn't have the Mac - the sofware is intuitive, and even though it's a laptop it has the grunt to handle the job. We should be able to get on the case with the home videos soon :)

...won't be long now until the new addition to the family arrives - it could happen any day now, or it might still be a few weeks.

Picasa web album has google earth built-in

2007-07-06T21:54:00.000+10:00

fantastic. Not only do all the photos posted on this blog get automatically put into a web album for me, but I just discovered that the web album has google earth functionality built into it.... so I've just been and placed a few of the photos on the map - check it out:

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/ben.byer/TheByersInOz

I do have plenty of other news - including starting a new job - but don't have time right now to write about it all. Will update again soon!

BB turns 31

2007-06-27T13:38:00.000+10:00

and weirdly, I end up on row BB, seat 31 to see Ross Noble at the QPAC concert hall :)

I had a fine birthday, doing some of the things I love most: surfing, laughing, and nothing. We were due in Currumbin saturday lunchtime for a friend's 2 year old's birthday party, so we made a weekend of it and booked a couple of nights accommodation last minute and took the monday off work. The accommodation (The Hill Apartments) turned out to be excellent - we had a top floor apartment with full panoramic views over The Alley and all the way out to the far end of Palm Beach, with Surfer's Paradise in the distance. Very very nice.

I surfed loads, but The Alley was so busy throughout the weekend that despite the excellent conditions I didn't catch as many waves as I would have liked. Sunday afternoon I was sitting up on my board wide of the pack on the point, and counted 35 people inside me. And then there were the same number again strung out down the line ahead of me - crowded. Unfortunately, that's the pay-off for excellent conditions. Whilst sitting there hoping for a wave to magically present itself to only me, a dolphin popped up just a few metres away from me - between me and the next surfer. Fantastic! Then another four popped up, and the pod hung around us just lazily cruising along. It's so beautiful to see them in the water, and to be so close is just breathtaking. Later that afternoon, from our viewpoint on our balcony, we saw whales spouting further up Palm Beach - just lovely.

It was really good to get my board back in the water, but it took me a while to get used to it again. With virtually no green water on the waves left un-surfed, I started catching the white water just inside the surfer to at least get some time riding and getting my feet used to the right position on my board again. Once I'd worked that out, I got much more quality time upright :)

I've never quite understood people who live in Brisbane spending a week's holiday on the Gold Coast, just an hour's drive away - but being able to check the surf from my balcony, and then be in the water 10 minutes later, and just being away from the clutter and distractions of home to unwind is good value. And after all, it's only an hour's drive home at the end of the holiday :) That Sunday we did so, so little. Apart from surfing, we just relaxed in the apartment, had a mid-morning nap, watched the view, and picked through some music to make a CD to take to the hospital with us.

Monday was actually my birthday, and it started well with less than 20 people in total out at The Alley. I was in the water at about 6:45, and caught a few waves - but I kept finding the wrong current, the one that pushes me back into the impact zone while I try and paddle out behind the waves. Nat joined me in the water about an hour later, and we hung out at the edge of the current away from the pack. Nice and relaxed, despite the overcast and drizzly weather. I helped Skye pack up back at the apartment, then we went for a nice slow breakfast and I opened some of my presents (M&S socks from my Mum!). The rain was pretty constant, so we cruised back up the highway into Brisbane, and had an afternoon nap at home (more presents - Black Books series 1, 2 & 3 from my mother-in-law).

And then we went to see Ross Noble in the evening. He is possibly the best stand-up comic working today, and this was the second time we've seen him in Brisbane. Luckily for us he has an Australian wife, so he includes Australia in his tours. It was only by chance that I picked up tickets for the show, and pure luck that he happened to be playing on my birthday. To top it off, our seats were just 5 rows from the front in the massive QPAC concert hall, and at $40 a ticket it was just too good to be true.

So - another year wiser, as they say. A lot of change in this last year, and plenty more to come in the next!

Yoda visits Brisbane

2007-06-14T13:26:00.000+10:00

..and we went to see him. Well, he might as well be the real-life Yoda - old, wise, friendly, amusing, powerful. I'm talking about the Dalai Lama, who stopped in Brisbane to give a talk at the convention centre (which is where we saw Eric Clapton).

He's really quite something, the Dalai Lama. Any person who has spent their entire life studying and meditating is worth listening to, and on top of that he's had a good deal of both good and bad personal experience, travel, meeting important and interesting people and writing a couple of books. It all adds up to a worthwhile hour having a listen to what he's got to say while he's in town. It was entirely unreligious, and extremely informal. His topic was kindness and compassion, which he said where vitally important human values to be encouraged. Some of the points he made that made me think a bit were:

* I've met George Bush, and actually he's a nice man
* when I hear sad things it goes in one ear, then soon it goes out the other ear
* when you hear sad things. it should be like the waves on the surface of the sea - below the surface, all is calm
* it's possible to oppose an act, but forgive the person who carried out the act through compassion for that person's well-being.
* before external disarmament, there must be internal disarmament
* this century has started very well, and it's up to the next generation to really see it through (he mentioned that nuclear threats of the last century are largely defused, which is a huge step forward)

Those points might sound a little unusual as paraphrased by me and taken out of context of the talk, but you'll have to take my word for it when I say that his perspective was refreshing and inspiring.

Mobile phone photos

2007-05-31T09:29:00.000+10:00

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

2007-05-28T15:20:00.001+10:00

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....

2007-05-14T14:55:00.000+10:00

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:

Belated update on too much activity!

2007-04-27T16:42:00.000+10:00

It's been a busy month since I last put a post here, so here's a very brief update:

* moved into the new house, with hugely welcome help from mates. Still a few boxes left to unpack, but we're starting to feel settled.
* no sooner were we in the new house, than we were off to the airport for 10 days in NSW. Whoah is it cold in the southern highlands compared to Brissy!
* went to a NASA deep space tracking station in Tidbinbilla, then sat and watched 4 Platypi cruising around happily in a pond at one of the most peaceful places I've been too. Fantastic.
* went to Jervis Bay National Park, and found more incredibly peaceful places to relax and wildlife. Lovely.
* showed off Skye's increasingly large bump to as many family and friends as we could manage :)
* We were picked up at the airport back in Brissy by Dan and Delia, then back to our new house. Beautiful day at Noosa the next day, managed to find a Goanna, a Koala and a turtle, and a few tanned nudists on Alexandra Beach...
* Soon after Dan and Delia had left, David and Lyndsey came to visit - we found another couple of peaceful spots on Tamborine Mountain, and got started on DIY around the house.

I've posted the photos we took during the Easter trip to NSW here on fatcat.

too much news!

2007-03-17T10:57:00.000+10:00

This'll be a chunky post - loads of big news.

First up (and this is by far the most important news) - Skye's pregnant! I'm going to be a Dad! everything's going to change! We're both incredibly happy about it, and we were amazingly fortunate to fall pregnant so easily - the only reason it's not a honeymoon baby is that we didn't have a honeymoon! We just realised this morning that one our first wedding anniversary we'll have a 3 month old baby - how nuts is that! The baby's due on the 1st August, which is a good thing as it'll mean that Skye's late pregnancy will be through the winter months here. Apparently that would make the baby a Leo, whatever that may mean :) After a fairly anxious first 8 weeks, we've had it relatively smooth. Skye had all-day morning sickness from the moment we realised she was pregnant up until about 3 months (she described it as feeling hungover, all day, every day - so ironic....) Since then she's had new energy and is now starting to show. We're just now starting to feel the first kicks. I've had to leave this news out of the blog for months as we've tried to tell as many people personally as possible, but it's about time the baby made an appearance in this journal! Although there's an incredible amount of positive in this news, it seems that in life there's always a flip side to the coin, a ying to the yang. In this case, the flip side is that we won't be able to get to the UK this July for Roy and Carol's wedding, at which I was due to be best man. We had both been looking forward to making the trip and catching up with everyone, as we've missed all our friends and family in the UK terribly - but we'll just have to postpone that trip and fork out for a third ticket :)

The images from the 8 week scan, and the 12 week scan are on fatcat here.

Next big news - we're buying a house! Its been a mad rollercoaster of house hunting, making offers, analysing our income and outgoings, negotiating the price, dealing with solicitors and mortgage brokers. As I write this we still haven't closed the deal, but we've encountered and overcome a few hurdles already so I'm quietly confident. The house is very nice, fully and tastefully renovated, lovely big deck on the back, garden front and back, quiet street, big shed for the car and and workshop, 3 bedrooms - all good. The location is also excellent - Wavell Heights is a suburb not far from Wooloowin, about 7kms out of the CBD and spread across a couple of hills to catch good breezes. There's a nice spread of parkland in the area, which includes a cycleway - the end of the cycleway goes right behind the garden of the house, and the back fence of the garden has a gate onto the cycleway. While that raises a couple of questions about security, that'll also be really handy for going for a walk through the park. The only real downside to the house is that it's lowset, so we don't have masses of space under the house for storage. Oh, and our beautiful big fridge won't fit in the kitchen :)

We're going to have to get used to having less disposable income - although I've negotiated an increased daily rate at work, we'll be down to one income and will be carrying the added weight of a mortgage. I'm going to do my part by making sure I've got plenty of homebrew in the fridge instead of paying full price for beer!

Finally, a quick update on living in Queensland. It's been pretty hot this summer, though I'm told it's been much less hot than previous years. Summer has officially ended now, but this last week has been the hottest yet with daytime temperatures on Sunday rising to 37 degrees. Even though I'm enjoying the heat, at that level with the humidity as well, there's nothing for it but to get in the car, turn on the AC, and head to the coast!

I'm still really enjoying my Australian lifestyle of surfing at the weekends, barbecuing whenever we fancy, regularly seeing exotic wildlife like koalas, turtles and dolphins at the weekends, and geckos and parrots around the house any day of the week. In spite of that, we both really miss our friends and family in the UK, and think of them often. (there's that ying/yang thing again....)

Oh man I loooove de cake

2007-02-20T10:24:00.000+10:00

Saw Little Britain live last night at the Brisbane Convention Centre, and it was excellent. Very clever and imaginative production, incredibly fast costume changes, hilarious sketches and even more hilarious ad lib work when the scripts got left behind. We had expensive tickets, but it was worth every cent (despite the annoying screeching laugh of the idiotic woman behind us who must have pissed herself she screamed and laughed and repeated the lines so much!!)

Thinking about it today, they are a really complimentary comic duo. I couldn't say which of them is my favourite, and there doesn't seem to be any in-fighting between them over who's the dominant one. I think that's a rare and valuable thing in entertainment, I just wonder what they'll do next.

Some of my highlights from the show:

Marjorie Dawes picking a fattie from the audience to humiliate on stage, then telling us that cake is low in fat if you have a slice of it on a Ryvita (and sprinkle a bit of dust on top)
Seeing the Dennis Waterman sketch live - it's even funnier when they have to make the props work without clever camera cuts
Matt Lucas and David Walliams falling out of character in a shop sketch and just ad lib'ing about Matt being gay.
David Walliams apologising to the kids in the audience for the rude content "to all you kids out there, I'm fucking sorry, ok?"
During the interval, and for 15 minutes before the show started, the cameramen picked out people in the audience and showed them on the big screens - hilarious!

It was a pretty big venue, and with the big screens on either side of the stage it was realistically easier to watch those rather than the stage itself - which felt a bit more like watching TV than being at a live show, or perhaps more like watching a DVD of a live show. I guess the same was true at the Eric Clapton gig too.

I think we did go and see a fair few gigs when we were in London, but one of the differences here is that there are only top quality gigs every now and again, rather than every day of the week, so when they come along everyone gets tickets for them. I reckon that's quite a nice balance - there were almost too many things to see and do in London, it was hard to filter through all the static and find the things you wanted. With less choice here, but with top class acts typically including Brisbane on their tours, the stand-out gigs are clear to see.

...and we've got some more tickets to wicked live comedy coming up - Dylan Moran in May, and then we've got tickets for seats about 6 rows from the front for Ross Noble actually on my birthday in June :) Both of those gigs will be in more intimate venues, which will be nice.

Great surf this weekend

2007-02-13T14:22:00.000+10:00

Really enjoyed having a surf this weekend :) Skye and I headed down to Currumbin fairly early on sunday, getting there for 7:30-ish to find that the carparks were jam-packed, the swell was 5ft+ and there was an offshore wind leaving the water glassy and smooth. Lovely.

Now, 5ft swell is pretty big, and tends to come with strong currents and crowds of surfers - it's been a bit beyond me up until this weekend. But I paddled out despite the trepidation, and had a great time. The direction of the swell meant that the waves came marching around the point like a row of ominously unstoppable walls - and more to the point, the waves broke in a long line right across the width of the bay, meaning that there was plenty of room to paddle out wide to get away from the crowds.

The first wave cleaned me right up - I eskimo-rolled to get through and under it, but my board was just ripped out of my hands and I (and the board!) got sucked up inside the wave and rolled over the falls. My longest hold-down yet, and despite sucking in a lungful before rolling over, I was swimming up to the surface to catch a breath before the wave had let me go. It had probably only been a few seconds, but it felt like longer and thinking about it now, I guess I was quite puffed from paddling out before I took the lungful, and tense from the trepidation. The wave took my hairband with it, so for the rest of the surf I must have looked like a mop-headed fool instead of just a pony-tailed fool :)

In all seriousness, those rare moments when you feel the strength of one of the forces of nature put things in perspective. I guess this is one of the reasons people surf - certainly it's one of the reasons I'm enjoying it. I felt very, very small struggling to the surface of the ocean, and I was stunned by how solidly and impersonally the wave had ripped control away from me and had held me underwater. I've had that feeling whilst surfing before, and a top 10 tips in one of the surf magazines was to never underestimate the power of the ocean - because guaranteed that the moment you think you've got it licked, there's a monster wave building up somewhere just out of sight with your name written all over it...

Anyway - I did get nailed by a few other girthy waves, but I also caught a couple of big, clean, powerful faces and managed the takeoff and bottom turn. And a real first for me - I took off down a face, looked up and saw that I'd have to steer around some other guy paddling up the face, and I managed to do it! Luckily for him, I had to steer right (which I can do). If I'd had to have steered left, he would have ended up with 9 foot of surfboard and 5 foot 7 of mop-headed fool in his face :)

To top it off, for my last wave I caught a beaut right into the beach, literally jumping off the board into knee-deep water and taking two steps to get out of the surf and onto the sand. Turns out I had been surfing for a good 2 hours, which is a long session for me, and I hadn't even noticed. After a late breakfast with friends, we went back to the beach and just relaxed, had a snooze, messed about in the calm cool water of the inlet, then went to Rainbow Bay surf club for lunch.

Rainbow Bay was really buzzing - the Quikky Pro starts there in a few weeks time, which is the first event of the world pro surfing tour. We had a great spot on the verandah at the surfclub looking right out over Snapper Rocks, which is exactly where the competition will be held.

Nice food, a couple of very cold beers, and I bumped in Mark Occhilupo (ex-world surfing champ, and general Aussie legend) at the bar - I didn't bother him, just did a quick double-take and let him get on with his lunch.

When we got home, I turned on the TV to watch the end of the second final in the Commonwealth bank one day cricket series, and would you believe it - we won! So, as a fantastic day drew to a close I happily sent a text message to all the Aussies who've been ribbing me about the cricket, simply one word: "sweet"

Is Clapton God?

2007-02-08T15:00:00.000+10:00

well, the famous graffiti was probably over-stating how good a guitarist he is, but he is a pretty damn good guitarist nonetheless!

We saw EC at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on Weds night, and it was quite an experience. I've never been to a gig at an arena or stadium before, as I much prefer a more intimate, smaller venue. But, you'll never get to see someone like EC at a small venue, so I guess you just have to roll with the punches.

We got to the BEC on the train, which was nice and easy. It's then 600 metres walk from the station to the venue through some lovely bushland - very nice, and no snakes / spiders / great white sharks attacked and ate us :) The weird thing was the age group of everyone else that got off the train there.... a *lot* of grandparents!

The warm-up act was Mia Dyson, and she was good. Nice bluesy voice, she sings and plays guitar in a 3 piece band, and her guitar playing was smooth and chunky. I was nicely warmed up for the main event. We had silver class tickets (I think) which meant that although they cost quite a bit of money, they weren't stupidly expensive and we had fairly good seats. From where we sat, we had a pretty good view down onto the stage, and the sound quality was clear. Danm loud though! :)

But. Even though EC was very, very good for some reason his band had *3* lead guitarists. Now, some bands have got away with having 2 lead guitarists (Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden) but never 3. And we didn't pay all that money to hear these other, unknown, guys play - we only wanted to hear Eric play. This meant that we all were niggled throughout the gig by these guys, who, although they were fairly good, showed absolutely no emotion and feel in either their playing or their body language. Their body language of standing stationary, with virtually no change to their facial expressions just said "oh, here I am again swapping solos with Eric Clapton in front of 10,000 people, what a drag". Boring to watch, and boring to hear. And being a blues band there were plenty of solos over a 12 bar blues - but this band had to give all bloody 3 guitarists their solos.... I really could continue ranting about this, but I'll stop there :)

That aside, when Eric sat down with just an acoustic and played "Rambling on my mind" off the John Mayall's Blues Breakers album, it was just magic. And he did play Layla (of course!), Cocaine, Crossroads and even a stunningly beautiful rendition of "Wonderful Tonight". The drummer, bass player and keys guys were all amazing, and EC himself was simply stunning. If I were giving marks out of 10, I'd only be able to deduct points for the 2 extra guitarists.

I don't know if I'd be up for another "guitar legend" gig like that - EC tipped the balance on the positive side against the negative weight of the arena venue, the stupid quantity of lead guitarists in the band and the cost of the ticket. But if he'd been anything less than stunningly amazing, I don't think it would have been worth it.

Anyway - the next gig is Little Britain Live a week on Monday, looking forward to that!

Austalia day weekend

2007-01-29T15:38:00.000+10:00

Australia day fell on a friday this year, so after only a couple of weeks back in the office we had a long weekend - lovely. Australia day commemorates the landing of the first fleet at Botany Bay in 1788, but the celebrations are all about Aussie culture - so there's plenty of beach, barbie, pub and pie-oriented tongue-in-cheek events, but the main emphasis is on having a fun day (ideally with your mates!)

We found ourselves spending the first half of the day relaxing around the house calling up friends and family until the heat and humidity got too much, then we escaped into the airconditioned pleasure of the Subaru, and headed to the airconditioned hell (well, my idea of hell anyway!) of Chermside shopping mall. If you have any idea how much I dislike shopping malls, you'll have some idea of how hot and humid it must have been in the house for me actually to suggest that we go to Chermside! Luckily we only had a couple of hours of shops being open, then we watched Happy Feet at the cinema. By the time the film was over, the sun was nearly down and we dared to venture back home and away from the airconditioning.*

Over the next couple of days we covered nearly 500 kms cruising around catching up with friends. We spent an hour or so in a gorgeously cool and shady water hole at Cedar Creek, complete with mini waterfall, hanging out with Kim, David and their kids. A lovely spot, and a beautiful drive out of Brisbane and through the countryside. We then pushed on up the highway to Wurtulla, just north of Caloundra. The trusty Subaru kept us cool as it reported the external temperature along the highway was 37 degrees. When we pulled off the highway and got closer to the coast, that dropped to a more reasonable 32 degrees.

We spent saturday afternoon and evening relazing with Drew, Lan, Davo, Fran, Der, Rachel, Jed, Kel and Grant. A very chilled out and fun gang, they were nursing hangovers from Australia Day at the Ettamogah pub boozing and enjoying the Dunny races and Coooee competition (!) We all wandered to the beach, and cooled off chucking a rugby ball around in waist-deep in the water. In the evening, we went to Kawana bowls club, and played a few ends of barefoot bowls. I hadn't had the pleasure before, but with a schooner of beer at each end thoroughly enjoyed myself :)

I've posted photos from the bowls club on fatcat.

After getting home late on saturday night, we didn't manage to get up early but headed south and over the border into New South Wales to meet up with Denise and Ben, and Melinda, Dave and Jacob. With the hour time difference, we got there in time for lunch and headed straight to the pub. While waiting to order the food, I bought some raffle tickets on a whim - and won! The prize was a seafood tray, lots of prawns, mussels, moreton bay bugs and a whole steamed trout. Well, we just decided that we'd have to hang out for the afternoon until we felt hungry enough to tuck into the tray :) Ben's just moved into a new development just back from the Casuarina Beach - so new, that hardly anyone else lives there yet. We had the brand new communal pool and barbie area all to ourselves - very very comfortable. I did take my board with me, and I did take it through the dunes to the beach, but Casuarina Beach seems to be one of those classic Aussie stretches of white sand and barrelling shore breaks. Oh, and very very strong currents. After feeling the strength of the water pulling sideways and out to sea from only knee-depth, we opted for the swimming pool rather than the open ocean.

* I ought to remark here that we've had more than a week of solid 32degrees during the daytime, and nighttime lows of 27degrees. The queensland summer has finally kicked in here, and I've been told that last year's stinking hot and long summer had kicked in with this kind of weather way back in November, so we're fairly lucky this year.
* I also ought to point out that I'm not exactly *complaining* about the hot weather, but the way it works over here these summer days are counter-intuitively the worst times of the year. It's actually uncomfortable and impractical weather, much like a cold and wet winter is in the UK. Over here, it's the clear and fresh winter days that are the highpoint of the year's weather. Still feels funny when I think to myself "Roll on winter!" :)

happiness is....

2007-01-11T15:06:00.000+10:00

....a new laptop, bought online for an excellent price (over wireless LAN, whilst sitting on the deck at 10pm listening to the cicadas) and delivered within 2 days :) I haven't *ever* bought a ready-made new computer, let alone a top-of-the-line model like this one - so although the Buddha would be very disappointed in me for falling under the spell of transient satiation of desire for material possessions, I do have a very large grin on my face. This laptop even has a "superdrive" - presumably that can leap tall buildings in a single bound (note to self: keep kryptonite far, far away from my new favourite toy!)

So, the new toy is a 17" MacBook Pro, with a 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB RAM (might double that shortly), 120 GB SATA harddrive, an ATI mobility X1600 256MB GPU (gaming - remember that.....?), built-in 802.11g/n wifi and bluetooth, the 8x dual layer SuperDrive and a built-in webcam. It's quite a beast, and best of all it's a tax-deductible business expense :)

Well, that was big year...

2007-01-08T11:41:00.000+10:00

...could 2007 possibly be any bigger? We'll see!

It's been a massive year - we left the UK, travelled for 4 months through amazing places, settled into Brisbane, found jobs and a home, I learnt to surf, Skye learnt to scuba dive, we both turned 30, and we got married. It's been amazing, are really jam-packed year.

I've posted photos from the 10 days over christmas here on fatcat - lots of surfing at Noosa, a flight to Kingaroy and back via the Glasshouse Mountains, and cruise along the Noosa River. Very, very nice.

I didn't manage to complete a blog entry about having our friends Jez and Kez stay with us for a month after the wedding, but they keep a travel blog here, and they're now 6000kms further into their trip around the continent - very interesting reading, as we hope to do the same journey one day.

Schrodinger's cat....?

2006-12-18T14:40:00.000+10:00

Has anyone seen this cat?

Much to our dismay we haven't seen the adorable friendly tabby fluffball for a fortnight now. He/she adopted us for a few days, to the point where we thought we'd better feed the little cutie. And not just any old leftovers, we gave him a saucerful of freshly barbecued snapper. But. Since then, we haven't seen him, and we miss him.

I can only hope that Schrodinger's cat thought experiment hasn't happened in reality :)

How not to climb at Kangaroo Point cliffs

2006-12-12T11:24:00.000+10:00

We did get all our kit together, and we did go down to Kangaroo Point after work one evening, and I had spent my lunch hour that day picking out climbs from the guide book that'd be good starters. But. Once at the cliff I learnt something about Australian climbing that wasn't mentioned in the guide book. They have different bolts here. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but when these different bolts require you to slip a plate over them as you're climbing to be able then clip a quickdraw into them, it does make rather a lot of difference. After re-appraising my list of climbable routes with the new criteria of which of the bolted ones have normal bloody bolts, we were left with only a single route So, we stepped up to it to find that the first bolt was bloody miles in the air. Perfect. Undaunted (well, outwardly so!) I got started up it. About halfway to the first bolt Elvis got the better of my left leg, and discretion proved to be the better part of valour I downclimbed as much as I dared before leaping backwards off the wall. I had another crack at it, but again the commitment to reach that first bolt was beyond my out-of-practice ass. We did at least have a barbie afterwards, so the evening wasn't a complete loss :)

So - I'll be off to the shops soon to get some bolt plates (whatever the hell they are) and then we'll be back to show that bloody cliff what us Englishmen are really made of :)

Anyway - I did take rather a nice panoramic photo of the location which I thought you might like to see.

Day at the cricket

2006-12-07T11:20:00.000+10:00

(I'm a little late posting this entry, but despite the recent cricket results, here goes!)
Many, many months ago I spent over an hour frantically hitting refresh on a webpage whilst hitting redial on a phone. When I did eventually get through on the phone, the conversation went something like this....

"G'day cobber, welcome to bloody Ticketek, what do yous wan'?"
"Good day to you too, my good man. I'd like to purchase 8 of your finest tickets for the first day of the first Ashes test at The Gabba, in Brisbane please"
"Strewth! Another bloody Pom! Ya know yous got two chances this year - Buckley's and none"
"Ho ho, we'll soon see about that. I think you'll find that although Our Boys are recovering from injury, your Dad's Army team won't last the series!"

...and so the conversation continued, until finally the ol' credit card was brandished and 8 tickets were promised in return :)

Fast forward a few months to Thurs 23rd November, and here's the view we had:

Not bad :) Wish I could say the same for the result, though :( Through the morning, it looked hopeful for England, and I had a couple of chances to punch the air and gloatingly fire make-believe guns with my fingers at my Aussie companions. But on the field, the Aussies took control and settled in for a long, long afternoon of sustained excellent batting. The boundaries were coming quick and fast. By the end of the day, I was pretty much stuck with my head in my hands, despondantly watching my national team get whipped, whilst Nat and Rod turned to me on every boundary and just grinned. Bastards :)

International huband and wife team

Well, the rest is history. Australia convincingly won the first test, and I'm writing this in the aftermath of the horrific result from the second test - England managed to both declare for 551 in the first innings, and lose the match. A new entry in the record books...

It's a funny old time to be a Pom in Oz - one friend (who shall remain nameless!!!) suggested now would be a good time to adopt an Aussie accent to avoid the jibes and gloating. Not a chance :)

Wedding photos are up!

2006-11-28T20:05:00.000+10:00

there are really quite a lot of photos, and they're all here:

http://fatcat.org/~benb/gallery/our_wedding

Next job - wrestle my aging home computers to produce a DVD :)

oh - and I should probably point out that we really are the Byers (plural) in Oz now!

Married!

2006-10-31T18:36:00.000+10:00

.....it's been rather a busy month - apologies for slacking on the blog :)

If I were to start at the end of the story, I'd say - we're married! But it's probably better if I start at the beginning and lead up to it....

...Mum and Dad arrived at Brisbane way way back on 6th October, and they were feeling fresher than we had dared to hope for. They had a fantastic flight, all the timings worked out, the overnight stopover in KL really broke up the journey for them. I can't really explain how excited we were to pick them up from the airport - it was very, very difficult to maintain my usual laidback cool while watching all the people coming through the doors, being tearfully greeted by loved ones.

We got stuck into the daytrips the following morning, taking them up to Mt Tamborine to have a wander through the rainforest a little. We also took them shopping, on a trip through the city, and to the botanic gardens at Mt Coot-Tha. Just as they were seeing out the last of the jetlag, we packed them off to Sydney for a couple of days. We worked a couple more days, then headed down to Sydney to join them. The aquarium at Darling Harbour is still excellent, I don't know whether the shark tank, the platypus tank or the coral tank with the guitar fish is the highlight - all very photogenic. We also hooked up with James and Jo for a night on the harbour. Again, can't really explain just how exciting it was to have old friends with us.

Then the heatwave in Sydney really hit, pushing 35 degrees - not great for wandering around a city. We took Mum and Dad over to Manly for lunch and to cool our heels in the ocean. The beach was jam-packed, but the water really cooled us off. We flew back up to Brisbane, then headed off first thing the next morning down to Byron Bay to pick up Naomi and Dave, who had just finished a week on a surfing safari travelling up the coast from Sydney. Nat and I joined them for a surf session at Tallow Beach, but by the time Naomi and I had managed to paddle out through the surf, we were half a mile down the beach from anybody else..... strong sweeping currents and a couple of head-height hollow waves later, and we were doing the walk of shame back up the sand :)

Spent the rest of the day relaxing in Bangalow, and walking around Cape Byron lighthouse looking (unsuccessfully....) for whales or dolphins. The next morning back in Brisbane, kicked back, relaxed, and picked up an 8 seater hirecar and Sam from the airport. Under overcast skies, we took the family north from Brisbane into the Glasshouse Mountains to picnic at Mary Caincross park in Maleny, and to visit the Australia Zoo. We just managed to get there in time to watch the crocodile feeding, which was as amazing to see as the last time Skye and I were there way back in 2001.

And then it was time to pack up, and move en masse down to Currumbin. With only a few days to go, we loaded up and shipped out hoping that we hadn't forgotten anything... The Sandcastles resort at Currumbin was a great place for us all to hole up, comfortable, affordable and literally right next door to the parkland that we used for the wedding ceremony. I surfed every morning with Nat and Dave - Naomi was dismayed that The Alley is a right-hander, but came out for a surf on the last morning there anyway. The first couple of days were slushy, but we got wet anyway. Notable highlights - Nat caught a huge wave, well over headheight, and rode it clean to Palm Beach, we watched whales breaching close in to the point, and I caught my best wave ever on the morning of my wedding :)

Our penthouse was a great spot, with lovely views over the ocean and everyone else's units :) More and more people arrived as the day got nearer, and on the evening before the big day we did a dry run rehearsal. We ironed out the niggles, then Skye and I went our seperate ways...

The girls had been very organised and had a table booked at an excellent Italian restaurant nearby, while us blokes went to the Tugun surf club, and made our way through quite a few jugs of beer... I had decided not to have more than a couple of beers, but foolishly had those couple of beers before we even went out. Still, no head shaving or being tied to lamp posts. Instead, we had exactly what was hoped for - a quiet evening to get to know each other. Despite the hangover, we were in the water the next morning at 6:30am - perfect for clearing out the cobwebs. It was around the time I was eating breakfast at The Deck (again...) that I realised it was high time I started to write my speech (!) It was very chilled hanging out at James and Jo's unit, and I managed to get a few ideas scribbled down before it was time to set up the gazebo and chairs in the park.

Throughout the final preparations, I felt very calm and relaxed. James did a fantastic job, even loading up his hip flask with Lagavulin (not that I needed it). Walking out into the park, feeling smooth in my tailored suit, to greet all the guests was a slightly surreal, but very pleasant, experience. The weather had been a hot topic for the preceding week, with thunderstorms forecast for the afternoon of the 21st - but we pulled it off nonetheless. The overcast skies meant we had a very pleasant temperature, and the photographer was happy with the even lighting.

And then, late of course, the signal came through to start the music ("Nearly Giant Ants" by Acoustic Groove) and Skye started her entrance. She came across a bridge with her mum and dad behind her, bridesmaids ahead of her, looking absolutely beautiful. The ceremony went off very smoothly, though we both were a little choked up through our lines. We had written the whole thing ourselves, so each part was directly meaningful to us. Before we knew it, the deed was done and James had "I feel good" by James Brown playing through the soundsystem :)

There followed what must have been hours, but felt like much less, of photos at various locations - we missed all of the canapes - and then a delicious meal at the Elephant Rock Cafe, followed by speeches and dancing to the band. I managed somehow to stumble through my speech completely disguising my poorly organised notes - I did forget to include the part where I tell Skye how much I love her, and was about to wrap it all up when I spotted the bridesmaids energetically waving their arms and pointing at Skye from behind her back :) without missing a beat I found my notes and did as all grooms must - made my bride blub :) James' speech had me cringing and laughing without mentioning anything too bad, and we loved hearing all the emails (I think there were 30 in total!) from absent friends that were read out by James and Nathan at intervals during the evening. Before we knew it, the day was all over....

[Note: there's not enough space to mention here all the details of the day, the week, the last 4 weeks - so apologies for missing things out]
[Note: there really are a lot of photos to sort through, so I haven't yet posted them on fatcat. I will publish a link here, and email the link around, once the albums are ready to be viewed. If you've got photos from the big day, we'd love to see them - please email or send us a CD :) ]

Visitors from home, working in the tropics, and prepping for the big day!

2006-10-01T16:33:00.000+10:00

Such a lot has happened since I last wrote an entry - good to be busy!

First up - we had our first visitors from home, which was fantastic. Manch and Rachel spent 5 nights at our place as part of a spontaneous trip over here. It was a huge buzz for us to have them, and we made the most of the time we had with them. We barbied, went to Noosa (saw a koala!), took them for a breakfast in Currumbin, showed them where we'll be married, went sea kayakking in Byron Bay (saw plenty of dolphins), watched whales from the lighthouse and drank a whole bunch of my homebrew :) Manch even seemed to enjoy watching a podiatrist cut my ingrown toenail out! It was great to hang out with Manch's parents, and his brother Steve and his girlfriend Tina too. Skye and I were both very sad on our last day with them - we said goodbye as we left them in the house and we went off to work together. The place felt empty when we got home after work. So happy to have them here, so sad to not have them here once they'd gone. I'm sure it'll be the same through the wedding as people arrive, spend time with us, and then afterwards it'll be just us again. Still, I'd glad to have solid friends and the good times they bring, even if missing them when they're gone is part of the deal. A few photos are here.

...and then, with the wedding getting ever closer, work became hectic and I had to spend 4 days away from home in Mackay trying to complete the install of a wireless point to multipoint network at an Ergon Energy depot. These trips away for work are always long days, the motels are generally drab, and I tend to be on my own with a paperback as company over dinner. This time, the motel was pretty good (food was pants though), I had decent company with a guy from the Ops team accompanying me, and I managed to successfully complete the install of the network. To top it off, I got to be taken up in a cherry picker to around 20 metres above the ground - while I was up there, I watched a flock of Lorikeets screeching as they tried to escape from some kind of hawk that was chasing them! Way cool... The downside to the trip was that new regulations have been brought in that mean I have to wear a hi-vis shirt, full length cotton trousers and steel-capped safety boots whilst working at a depot. I have jackets thinner than those shirts, and the temperatures are tropical....

Preparations for the wedding are going well. We do have a lot to do, but we're getting through it. While we both want a non-traditional, non-religious wedding, that means that we have to author pretty much the whole ceremony. It means that it'll be as we want it to be, but it takes time to think it through and word it right. Well, we spent a few hours on the weekend pulling our ideas together and drafting what we'll say - and we're both happy with the results.

Mum and Dad arrive in less than a week! We're incredibly excited, and can't wait to pick them up from the airport. As I type this, they're either in the air or in the midst of a stopover in KL. Dad showed us over a Skype video call what he plans to wear on the big day :) Naomi and Dave have already left the UK, and should be somewhere in Malaysia by now.

Australianisms

2006-09-15T16:44:00.000+10:00

"Bluey" - pretty much anything with the word blue in it :) Bluebottle jellyfish? Bluey. Blue Bonds vest? Bluey (no self-respected brickie, plumber, builder, sparkie or just anyone driving a ute would wear anything else). Australian Cattle Dog (also known as a Blue Heeler)? Bluey. And a bloke with ginger hair? Bluey :)

"Fairy bread" - came across this one at a recent 1st birthday party, seems that all Aussies have fond memories of being at kiddy birthday parties and eating fairy bread. It's sliced white bread, spread with butter, then covered in crunchy hundreds and thousands. Everyone I spoke to at the party was amazed that everyone else in the world didn't have fairy bread at their kiddy parties :) In the same true traveller spirit that saw me eating snake in Cambodia and ant's egg soup in Laos, I ate fairy bread in suburban Brisbane last weekend - and although I smiled while eating it, I thought it was a bit yucky. The kids at the party seemed to enjoy it though :)

Bitter sweet

2006-09-11T14:44:00.000+10:00

Sweet - on friday night bought a brand new longboard, 9'0 x 3' x 23', deep concave under the nose, psychedelic graphics, super duper 10mm Creatures slimfit boardbag (Nat's very jealous) and a couple of blocks of sexwax. By 7am on saturday morning, I was in the water at Currumbin with Nat, the new board paddles so much better than the old thing, and I was catching waves. Two dolphins even surfaced right next to us - and I mean right next to us. Stunning. We took my new GoPro Hero waterproof camera (a snip from eBay at $45) and took a whole roll of shots, almost all of which turned out really well. We even managed a couple of classy action shots, and I took one of Nat while we were both riding the same wave. All good.

Bitter - after the lengthy surf session, I was knackered. So knackered, in fact, that carrying the board across the carpark I dropped it. On the bitumen. It bounced on it's rail, then on it's deck. I had such a sick feeling in my stomach - horrible. I've caused a shatter in the fibreglass at the nose, and another at the tail, and scratches along the rail. Nothing horrific, but the board was only 12 hours old! On the way back to Brissy we stopped into Noosa Longboards to get them to look at patching it up. Keith, the same guy I had bought the board from, was working - so after telling him that the board was great, I told him what had happened afterwards. I didn't know the other guy in the shop, but we all had a bit of a chuckle about me being an idiot - only then did I find out that the other guy was Josh Constable, the bloody world longboarding champion.... Oh - and there were loads of blue jellyfish in the water while we surfed. Nothing worse than a stinging nettle kind of sting, but made me feel pretty uneasy and squeamish.

So my brand new board's at the shaper's being fixed to the tune of $90 (ouch) and Skye's making jokes about me having used up my birthday presents for the next 10 years - I don't think I'll ever drop another board! :)

Couple of other bits of news - the birthday balloon ride over Brisbane planned for for Skye and Lyn was cancelled the night before due to bad weather. That's a real shame, but the weather's so poor at the moment that it's almost better that we'll have to reschedule and have a chance of a clear day. We did go and see Mojo Webb last night, though, and he was fantastic. He's got a weekly solo gig at Satchmo's on a sunday - I can see us taking visiting Poms along there too :)

Last but not least, Nat and Al have a new puppy :) Luca is a Kelpie cross, very cute, evidently very intelligent and it's easy to see that he's going to grow up to be a great dog.

Photos from the weekend

2006-09-04T21:01:00.000+10:00

Had a great day on saturday - friends over for a barbie, then Riverfire fireworks, then Gomez live at the Tivoli. Rather a lot of photos from Skye's birthday are here. Great to have people over to our place, put our deck to good use and have some reason to tidy up the house :) Going to the fireworks was a spur of the moment thing, but fantastic. The riverbank was thronged with families picnicking and grilling, and when the F-111 flew low over the river with afterburners blazing at the start and then again at the end, it was absolutely awesome. Gomez were good too, even the newer poppier stuff they played was bearable, but the top moments for me were all when they played songs from their first album. They're such a talented group of musicians, the performance was damn good.

Back at work after a big weekend is never great, but there was shocking news this afternoon that Steve Irwin died today. I think a lot people assume that he was just a joker, but after we went to his zoo a few years ago and saw him doing the crocodile feeding routine, I had a flick through his biography in a book shop and found that he was a committed conservationist and a serious naturalist.

Skye's birthday

2006-08-30T15:06:00.000+10:00

Yesterday, she joined me in our thirties :) I'm not sure if I still feel hungover from saturday night in Bowral (today's wednesday!!) or whether we relaxed so much yesterday on North Stradbroke Island that I'm still feeling slowed down today.

This has been a big birthday for Skye, because it's the first for 7 years or so that she's been able to spend it with family. So, last weekend we went to the Southern Highlands and enjoyed lunch with the family at the pub in Burrawang. In the evening, we met up with friends and drank The Grand in Bowral dry (well, nearly...) and have been chuckling at the flashes of recollection ever since :)

For her actual birthday yesterday, I had a surprise trip to North Stradbroke Island lined up. We put the car on the ferry and spent the day enjoying the peace and quiet of the place. Day trips on weekdays are highly recommended! We swam in a lake, paddled in the sea, watched whales, dolphins and turtles while we ate our sandwiches on a rocky headland, spotted a wallaby and 3 koalas (first time either of us had seen them in the wild) and even had a possum run under my chair while we ate dinner. Lovely. To top it all off, I surprised her with having arranged for Nat and Al to meet us for dinner in the evening.

The only downside to taking a day trip on a tuesday is getting back into the office on the wednesday :/ Not only were we lucky with the wildlife we spotted, we were also very lucky with the weather. There's a very welcome interlude to the drought here at the moment, but luckily it held off for the entire day and left us with very comfortable temperatures and clouds to shelter us from the sun - perfect for bushwalking and swimming, and lovely conditions for late afternoon photos.
(these photos are just taken on my mobile phone - there are plenty of much better ones that I'll be posting on fatcat soon!)

Photos posted from surfing at Currumbin alley

2006-08-22T09:51:00.000+10:00

The photos are here - the new polarising filter really made a difference, the pictures now show the colour of the water so much closer to how it actually looks. Unfortunately, I screwed the polariser onto the existing UV filter, so on the wide-angle shots there's very noticeable vignetting at the corners. Live and learn...

Ekka

2006-08-17T15:58:00.000+10:00

Working in a state-wide company, I'd been a little peeved when people in Rockhampton, or Mackay, or Cairns had told me that they had a day off for their town's agricultural show. I was rather less peeved when I discovered what all the advertising around Brisbane for the "Ekka" was - Brisbane's agricultural show, complete with it's own regional public holiday :) So this week, everyone (in Brissy) had Wednesday off work - hooray!

We didn't go to the Ekka, we instead spent the day on the Gold Coast, having a surf and cruising around getting familiar with some of the towns either side of Currumbin. The surf was great, which was a relief after the poor conditions last time we were there, but my board officially sucks. Paddling the damn thing anywhere is quite literally a drag, which makes catching anything even more difficult. Nat was catching everything he paddled for on his longboard, so after a while we swapped - and we both caught the next waves that came through. The time has come to start shopping around for a longboard for me :)

We bought a polarising filter for the camera, and Skye put it to good use at Currumbin taking photos of us surfing, and then some great sunset shots from Kirra hill. Once they're sorted through, I'll post them on fatcat. In the meantime, there are a few shots from a couple of weekends ago surfing at Moffat's Beach, Caloundra.

(I've also started uploading and organising all the photos from our backpacking trip on fatcat - should all be done in a few more days)

The other big news of the week is that after an intense couple of weeks studying for the CCNP switching exam, I passed it. In fact, I got a really good score, which I found surprising as I thought it went really badly and was resigned to failing. Altogether a fairly unpleasant experience, but one that I'm going to have to repeat another 3 times to get the CCNP.

Scooby Doo

2006-07-27T14:08:00.000+10:00

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

2006-07-12T14:56:00.000+10:00

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 :)

2006-07-11T16:29:00.000+10:00

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.

Birthday presents

2006-06-26T11:30:00.000+10:00

are cool :)

Too many cool presents to list here, but the picture shows the coffee machine and wraparound surfing sunglasses that my folks bought me.

The weekend was amazing, and we took nearly a gig of photos and movies. Will be posting them on fatcat soon!

2 days 'til the big one

2006-06-23T14:47:00.000+10:00

yep - I turn 30 on Sunday. I haven't really thought about it much (unusual for me!), and in fact typing that just now makes it feel more like it's really about to happen. We can't really muster enough of a crowd for a party, and it's a great excuse to get away for the weekend (take the Forester for a cruise!) so we're heading south to the Gold Coast Hinterland. We're staying 2 nights in a mighty fine chalet with good bush walking nearby, and we're booked in for an afternoon's whale watching from Byron Bay. We loaded up on tasty naughty foods yesterday, and I'm anticipating some relaxed eating and drinking.

Other news - World Cup! England are through, and so are the Socceroos. I've been absolutely gripped by the competition (as ever), and over here that means tinkering with my sleep pattern to make sure I don't miss games that kick off at 11pm, 2am or 5am. Hooray for the media centre - I've had a fair share (maybe more than a fair share....) of hassle with it, but it's doing it's job of reliably recording stuff, and allowing TV to be paused and rewound even while it's recording. People over here are really behind their team, and it's been a historic performace too. It's quite nice not to have to endure the negative media pressure that's always piled on the England team during a World Cup.

It's mid winter here. Daytime top temps are still 20 degrees and above, and lows over night only just dip below 10 degrees. Not too bad at all, really. Still, I'm wearing Ugg boots round the house, and bought a fantastically warm merino wool jacket that I seem to be wearing anytime that I'm not lying in bed.

it's alive!

2006-06-07T11:42:00.000+10:00

after quite few evenings, well, too many really, spent kicking, cajoling, courting and cursing the PC, I finally got the damn thing to become a media center (sic) - hooray!

Phase 1 is now complete - I have a noisy but functional PC sitting next to the TV, ready to record to the hardrive, in time for the start of the world cup. The problem of those awkward kickoff times is now solved!

Phase 1.5 involves adding a remote control, and a wifi card

Phase 2, I guess, will involve a bit more of a rebuild. Probably add a second HDD and card reader, then shoehorn the lot into a smaller, slicker box.

god, my life's exciting! :)

Another big day

2006-06-05T21:45:00.000+10:00

It's still one thing after another for us - today brought 2 huge developments:

Skye got a new job
we bought a new car!

Going into detail about work isn't always appropriate here, so I won't mention much about the new job thang, but I will mention much about the new vehicle :)

It's a silver Subaru Forester, 2.5 litre, all wheel drive, pop-out cup-holders, cruise control, air con (at last!), CD player, smooth as silk - it's the kind of nice car that we've seen other people driving around in but never seemed to own ourselves. The car salesman was unexpectedly straight up and decent, the finance company were easy to deal with, even the insurance people were friendly and accomodating. To top it off, it even fits into the garage under the house :) All we need to do now is buy one of each of the official Subaru accessories (oh, and there's a whole brochure of those!) and then she'll be right (as they say).

....but is it appropriate to name a car....?

New developments

2006-06-02T15:25:00.000+10:00

Undoubtedly the most important and best news in ages is that a pair of new Byer babies were born just after midnight on june 1st, everyone happy and healthy. Welcome to the world, little Solomon Maurice and Joelle Ilse!

Anything else seems very insignificant following that kind of news, but there is other news so I'll state it here anyway :) I have begun the hard work of turning a tired old PC into a shiny new media centre PC. Hooray for umart, who allow you to shop online and then scoot straight over to pick up the goods! A new DVD writer, 120GB hard drive and fancypants dual digital TV tuner card will be the bones of the system, and should be enough to get it up and running in time for the world cup. Fripperies like remote control, shiny hi-fi style case and super quiet fans will have to come along later.

...and, after an hour on the phone and frantic webpage refreshing, I have 8 tickets to the first day of the first Ashes test here in Brisbane! 23rd November should be a day to remember, and I've plenty of time to practice my sledging

14 days to go!

2006-05-26T16:10:00.000+10:00

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

bye bye hangovers!

2006-05-23T15:04:00.000+10:00

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

2006-05-18T16:15:00.000+10:00

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......

2006-05-04T16:36:00.000+10:00

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.

some good, some bad

2006-04-26T10:21:00.000+10:00

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....

2006-04-24T14:46:00.000+10:00

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 :)

Climate Shock?

2006-03-31T14:28:00.000+10:00

People talk about culture shock, and they talk about acclimatising to different environments - I've had a couple of experiences that are a mix of the two.

The sun sets here between 6pm and 7pm during most times of year, so on my way home from the office the sun is pretty low. Add to that the clear blue skies, and the cold aircon on the train, and I find the sensory cues add up to the feeling of 4pm on a clear winter's day in London. The "climate shock" happens when I get off the train, and find that the temperature is in the high 20s.

The other regular shock I get is when there's an overcast day here. My office, the lifts in the
building and the atrium on the ground floor are all heavily airconditioned to what feels like the temperature of a cold day. Looking out the office window on a grey day, subconsiously I'm expecting that I'll walk out of the building and shiver - but in fact I have the exact opposite experience. I'm colder under the aircon than outside under the grey clouds.

spend, spend, spend

2006-03-27T09:50:00.000+10:00

I'm very pleased to report that we were successful with our rental application, and moved into our new home on Saturday. It's a lovely place, it feels very us, spacious and homely. It's going to be a joy to come home to in the evening, and that back deck will be great for entertaining (when we make some friends!)

I've started posting photos from our new home on fatcat.

It'll still be a few weeks until my first pay packet comes in, but undeterred by that we've been spending money like it's going out of fashion :) The house is entirely unfurnished, right down to white goods, so we've been shopping whenever we can for however long we can manage. Late night shopping last thursday, we bought a factory second huge Fisher and Paykel fridge freezer (cool feature - the freezer section is at the bottom!) and a 32 inch LCD TV :) As if that wasn't enough cash burnt, on the morning that we moved in we bought a queen size bed and mattress, glass-topped cane table with cane chairs and an electric space heater second hand off a client of Nat's. Still not content with our outgoings, we upped the ante by ordering a new L-shaped leather sofa on Sunday (roll on the 6-8 week delivery period!), followed by a grocery shop to stock up on cupboard items.

Phew! And there are plenty more requirements - bedside tables, computer desk, bookshelves, TV stand, barbecue, microwave, washing machine, wardrobes... the list goes on.

I'm having a little fun researching the ISP situation here, but there's pressure to get a connection in quickly, rather than the pleasure of looking into it in detail for a couple of weeks. There is some ADSL2+ being rolled out in Brisbane, but unfortunately not to our local exchange (yet....). Internode look like a good bet for DSL, or we might end up with Telstra or Optus for cable. I don't want to go with the incumbent if I can at all help it :)

Came across this very useful website full off forums, news and advice about choosing as ISP in Oz. Very much like the old adslguide.org back in the UK.

Video chat rocks, and rip currents suck

2006-03-19T21:48:00.000+10:00

It's been a busy few days - here's some highlights:

caught in a rip current alongside a rocky point along a beach break south of Currumbin Alley, helped some guys out by lending them my surfboard to get back to shore, then ended up in pretty dire straights along with one of them. Bit of a wakeup call, but no harm done.
had a great time chatting to Naomi and Dave using webcams over Skype, showing them around the house here and getting a tour of their flat. Great to be able to say "nice to see you" instead of just "nice to talk to you" - it makes a real difference. Same goes for seeing Adam, Amanda and Annabel over their newly-setup webcam. Sunday evening's are turning out to be a good chance to catch up with folks back in the UK
Currumbin wildlife sanctuary is a great place, with lovely animals and beautiful setting, but I don't think we can really have our wedding ceremony there. It was worth checking out (and we got a free tour around the place!) but it didn't feel quite right to us for what we have in mind
Elephant rock cafe, though, will suit us perfectly for the reception - had a tasty dinner there on saturday night.
And we've found a place to rent that we really like - fingers crossed that our application will be chosen from the pile that will surely be sent in!

Plenty of photos from Brisbane and Currumbin up on fatcat, here.

More excellent news

2006-03-11T08:39:00.000+10:00

I start work on Thursday :)

I've landed a contract as a Network Engineer for the IT&T company that services the energy companies here in Queensland. The work looks promising, with lots of hands-on Cisco work and exposure to VoIP implementations, and nice small team of 3 engineers reporting to a single project manager. I absolutely aced the first interview, which was over the phone, even managing to drag out an explanation of BECN and FECN in frame relay from the dim depths of my memory in response to a technical question that just came shooting out of left field. I later heard that another candidate, who had a CCIE I might add, simply couldn't answer the BECN/FECN question :)

It's my first time as a contractor, so that should be a learning curve too. As far as I can tell, I'm on a decent hourly rate. I've taken up the services of an umbrella company to manage all my tax and payrolling so that I don't have any headaches with the financial side of things, and can also get my head round all this talk of tax deductible expenses and see what the hell that actually means for us practically :) I can imagine that lunchtime chats with colleagues are going to be about how best to work the tax system, rather than about where the best surf is ;)

Probably the best thing about this job, though, is that it's based right in the centre of town, on the 20th floor of a huge golden monolith of a building on the bank of the river - should be a nice place to go each day. Probably the worst thing about the job is that it's formal dresscode mon-thurs, which will be something for me to adjust to - luckily fridays are jeans and t-shirt, otherwise I'd probably be suffering after a few weeks.

Getting this job means a number of things for us - firstly, we can get on with searching for a house to rent, and secondly it takes the pressure of Skye for finding a job too. With just my income rolling in we can get started on moving in to our own place, and we afford to be a little patient until the right business analyst role arrives.

My first eBay win!

2006-03-08T09:54:00.000+10:00

Very exciting - I won an eBay auction, and bought a surfboard! We'd been watching it for the last few days, and the price was way low with 24 hours still to go, so I created a login (pancakesclimbingfreak) and got started with bidding. Great fun, and in the end I've got a good price for a second hand board. Think I'll get this board wet at the weekend, too :)

Hunting

2006-02-24T09:57:00.000+10:00

for jobs, cars, houses, wedding venues, wedding celebrants - we've got our fingers in a lot of different pies at the moment! On top of that, I'm getting the surf ski wet at the weekends, and I'm trying to piece together a set of holiday video/slideshows to send home. Busy? I guess you could say so :)

Plenty of highlights though:

top of the list - catching big waves with Nat at Currumbin last weekend. I caught a few 4-5 footers, and managed to hold on to them as well. Good thing too, as if I'd fallen off them I would have been well and truly mashed. We're off up the sunshine coast this weekend, hopefully lots more of the same!
Morticia Addams showing us round Bungunyah Manor House Resort on Mt. Tamborine - a bizarrely Basil Fawlty kind of place, with a strong christmas theme even though the 12 days have long since passed... it would satisfy plenty of our requirements (outdoor ceremony, delicious food, accomodation for the wedding party), but it was just a little weird. I think it's a weird part of Queensland, to be honest. Mind you, the gum trees up there were the tallest I've ever seen, absolutely magnificent. Even if we don't have the wedding there, we'd be taking friends and family up there to tour the wineries.
Our new phones - these Sony Ericsson K750is are brilliant. The 2MP camera is fantastic for starters, and we just realised last night that we can play mp3s as ringtones. So, in the space of barely 10 minutes, I had downloaded some free wav file editing software (wavepad) and had cut and editted the best funky guitar chops from Groove Armada's Chicago for Skye's ringtone. I had forgotten how much fun, and how easy it can be, to get in there and remix sounds...
and finally - a troop of rainbow lorikeets keeps coming to eat the berries off the tree just behind the kitchen. They are simply so colourful that they are amazing to see.

Brisvegas

2006-02-14T11:28:00.000+10:00

We finally made it across the "banana curtain" and we're here in Brisbane. The last 2 weeks have been very hectic, and we've been living out of our bags (still), but now we're here we've unpacked and we're living out of a wardrobe instead!

We've got a long list of high priority pastimes: wedding venue, jobs, somewhere to live, new car, bank accounts. We mustn't forget that we also need to prioritise getting away to interesting places at the weekends, too - after all, that's one of the major advantages of living here.

We're currently enjoying/surviving using "The Bus" as our transport - the huge space for luggage and gas-filled shock absorber seats only just make up for the lack of AirCon ;) It's definitely hot up here, and definitely humid with it. I'm sitting absolutely still right now, and even with a fan switched on behind me, I'll break a sweat if I type too fast :)

Arrived in Oz

2006-02-01T14:23:00.000+10:00

I have to say, I expected a little more ceremony when I went through passport control - perhaps a grilling about our relationship, or a quiz on Aussie sporting records, or at the very least a "welcome to Australia". But no, just a quick stamp on the passport and that was it. Mind you, we had slept very little on the flight and weren't really in a decent state for anything more complicated. As it was, deciding what to do about our customs and quarantine declaration was enough mental excercise. Gotta love the Steve Irwin promo video shown on the plane before landing - "Declare or beware". We declared our boots, and customs happily (and for free!) gave the soles a good hosing and returned them to us. Some poor bloke has the job of scrubbing all those minging holiday shoes...

So, the travelling is very nearly over, and certainly we're no longer wrestling with challenges of language barriers and menus (unless you count Aussie slang and a general lack of veggie options). We're both feeling a little displaced, and I'm certainly feeling anxious to establish myself. I guess it'll take a little while for us to settle into being here, and experience says that with hindsight these periods of discomfort usually look like insignificant blips. The trusty Aussie sun is well and truly shining on us, though :)

R&R in Luang Prabang

2006-01-23T15:42:00.000+10:00

A very pleasant place to spend pretty much our final days of this trip, Luang Prabang is very relaxed and scenic, and has excellent food to boot :) We're loving the Beer Lao, and after joining a 3 day trek, we've got some friends to knock around town with. The sun shines every day, and in the evening it's cool enough to wear trousers and still sit outside with a tasty dinner. The temples here are fantastic, and the local monks are talkative - yesterday, we had a monk explain to us the different horrific things that will happen to us in Buddhist hell if we drink alcolhol, harm other animals or commit adultery. Amongst the gorgeous gilded bas-reliefs of the ancient temples were graphic depictions of the hellish consequences of gathering bad karma in this life.

Also, a friendly chap with the same camera as us has helped us out of the automatic modes and into the full manual mode - we've had some satisfying results too. The local waterfalls here were a perfect subject for longer shutterspeeds, and the sunset last night was a great chance to practice metering the exposure with sharply varying lighting. All good :)
The same chap has started his own website - www.guesthousereview.com - which has great potential as a source of up-to-date info for travellers. We've begun posting reviews for all the places we've been staying on this trip :)

did you know....

2006-01-17T23:14:00.000+10:00

....that in Pokhara, Nepal, the streetlights have switches on them so that you can turn them on or off as you walk by?

Leaving Krabi

2006-01-10T19:22:00.000+10:00

Got a long wait before a sleeper train from Surat Thani to Bangkok, but there's usually an ADSL connection nearby here in Thailand :)

We had a couple of closing experiences on Ko Tao before we left, one good and the other bad. Bad one first - we thought outr bungalow was pleasantly bereft of vermin, but on our last night there I surprised a rat that was hiding amongst our bags. Horrible. It esacaped down a hole in the floor. That night, I was woken by the sounds of the damned thing scrabbling around and squeaking right next to our bed... time to check out! The good experience was our last day's diving - excellent visibility at the first dive site, around 15 metres, and at the second dive site we saw a Titan Triggerfish right at the bottom of the anchor line. Beautiful. Felt like we were swimming in a huge aquarium :)

Since then we've been in Krabi. Krabi town itself is nothing fancy, but is actually a real Thai town rather than a tourist hole, so we liked it. Stayed at a fantastic little guest house where we paid 200baht a night (just under 3 quid) for a double room with shared bathroom. We managed to go climbing for a couple of hours, and made the most of the only really clear and sunny day to relax on Phra Nang beach and explore the West and East Railay beaches. Overnight to Bangkok today, then on to Camobodia!

Thailand

2005-12-31T16:49:00.000+10:00

ah, Thailand. Damn it's nice to be here. I have such great memories of my first trip here in '98, and it still lives up to my expectations. Right now, I'm sitting in an Internet cafe (obviously!) on Ko Tao - we're both now qualified open water divers, and we've been out on a couple of fun dives together. Althought the visibility is pretty poor, never really reaching double figures, we've really enjoyed what we've seen and just the feeling of being weightless while breathing underwater is excellent. I've still not seen a trigger fish, but I saw a couple of blue-spotted stingrays, puffer fish, crown of thorns starfish and even a small moray eel. We've dipped into the gear shops too - just like climbing, there's a lot of cool gear to be bought! We've got new masks and snorkels each, which we tested yesterday for a couple of hours snorkelling. Prices here are apparently much lower than the retail prices at home (either Oz or UK). but with the backpacks there's a limit to what we'll carry around with us.

We're now into the last month of our trip, and we're both feeling like it would be nice to cook for ourselves, drink water from a tap and sleep on our bed. With plenty of travelling behind us now, the idea of just holidaying for the rest of our trip is pretty attractive - except that a month is just a little too long to spend reading books on the beach and eating out. Weather's a little poor too - it's not cold (it's never cold here....) but it has been changeable, often cloudy, and there's been a fair amount of rain too. Checking on bbc.co.uk just now it seems that most of the south of thailand has this weather for the next 5 days too. The north looks clear, but that would be some real travelling again :)

I shouldn't forget that we were in Sri Lanka for a fortnight since I last posted an entry here. It's beautiful in Sri Lanka, such friendly and honest people, and such abundance of easy to spot wildlife. Amongst all the colourful birds, snakes, mongoose and monkey we even saw a wild elephant at dusk. And amazing ancient ruins there, which neither of us really had any idea about. We did find that after a couple of days we were "ruin'd", but we took solace in tasty cakes and pastries, and then the beach :)

I uploaded a bunch more photos onto fatcat here.

Bhote Kosi!

2005-12-05T20:14:00.001+10:00

Just got back from 2 days white water rafting on the Bhote Kosi - incredible rapids, I know very little about the sport but from what I can gather we rafted over rapids up to class 4, which is serious stuff. Incredibly good fun, great guiding from the company we went with (Ultimate Rivers) and a real exciting ride. We only had one person fall out of the raft, but it was right in the middle of a rapid (as you would expect - you'd hardly fall out on calm water!) and she looked in some trouble, just held in place next to a rock by the strength of the current. The guide instructed her to swim to one side, and after some effort she escaped, but she ran the rest of the rapid "solo" until one of the safety kayakkers could pick her up and help her to the shore. Up until that had happened, I was just feeling like the raft was an invincible floating dodgem, and that there was no real danger.

So - I've posted a few more pictures on fatcat here - plenty of shots from the Annapurna trek too. I'm already planning on coming back here for the Everest Base Camp trek... :)

Back from the hills

2005-11-30T18:07:00.000+10:00

Our 10 day trek from Pokhara to the Annapurna Base Camp and back was incredible - trying to write my diary each night, it was a joke trying to come up with new adjectives to describe the views :) We spent 7 days walking up to the base camp, and then only 3 days to race back down. On the way, we saw terraced hillsides stretching into the valleys, snow-capped peaks towering at the valley heads, glaciers fringed with thick icicles, clouds rolling up from below us, prayer flags billowing in the wind. A real feast for the senses. And perhaps most surprisingly, walking all day every day for 10 days doesn't really make your legs hurt that much - each morning, you just set off again.

I've posted a bunch of photos on fatcat showing a taster of the gazillions that I'll eventually post once I don't have to pay by the minute :)

Just enjoying the sun here in Pokhara at the moment, and going out everynight with people we met while we were trekking. Lots of "trip admin" to take care of, including the teething problems with getting Fabian Towers rented - we do now actually have tennants in the place, but apparently there's a few niggly maintenance issues to get sorted (despite the extensive DIY labouring we put in). Ho well - the main thing is that the necessity of owning a flat in London while we move to Australia has become a workable reality.

Kathmandu

2005-11-16T22:50:00.000+10:00

It's such a difference being here versus being anywhere in Northern India - it's quiet, low-hassle, clearer air, and the people are quite simply much nicer. It's wonderful to be here. On top of that, we're in the Himalaya, which I don't think anyone could possibly complain about. From a rooftop cafe here you can see the surrounding mountains of the Kathmandu valley, and beyond them you can see snow-capped peaks! Lovely - they're not even sprinkle-of-snow-on-top type peaks, they're glacier-snowfield-technically-difficult-ice-climbing-at-altitude type peaks :)

Just finished reading Chris Bonnington's account of the first ascent of the south face of Annapurna in 1970 - and tomorrow we're flying to Pokhara, and from there will be walking right in his footsteps on our way up to the base camp his expedition established. I am *very* excited.

To top it off, we spent the last couple of days at Chitwan National Park, where we were lucky enough to see a Rhino in the wild, very close, from our seat on the back of an elephant. Wow.

Varanasi

2005-11-08T21:24:00.000+10:00

We're finding that Varanasi is much more chilled out than the other places we've been in India on this trip - I think that's mainly because we're spending most of our time inside the old city, where the alleyways are too narrow for rickshaws, and so we're not having constant hassle from the rickshaw wallahs on top of the usual cries from stallholders as us walking dollar signs pass them by. It's also helping to be doing a 2 hour yoga session each morning. We've stumbled across an excellent teacher, the real deal, and he's a lovely warm-hearted person too. He also has a laugh that sounds like a cross between Basil Brush and Sid James, and oh he loves to laugh. In fact, in our first lesson, he had us lying on our backs pretending to ride a bicycle and laughing out loud.

The city is stretched along the western bank of the River Ganges, and the riverbank itself is built up into concrete steps, called Ghats, all along the city side. It would be an interesting excercise to spend a day just watching what goes on along the ghats - but you'd have to be invisible (or Indian!) to avoid the constant hassles.

Anyway - we'll be heading off to Nepal in the next couple of days. Hopefully we'll spend a few days in Chitwan national park, and some more days trekking in the Annapurnas.

India

2005-10-30T16:17:00.000+10:00

Got a few more minutes than usual on the Internet right now, so I've actually got a chance to add another entry! There's been a lot happened since we had a go at Kilimanjaro - we had an amazing time on the safari through Serengeti and Ngorogoro, saw so many incredible things. I'm not sure whether the highlight was watching a lioness break off from a pride of 7 lions and hunt some antelope, or spending 5 minutes or so right in the middle of a herd (?) of elephants munching their way through the trees and tussling amongst themselves. Or maybe it was watching a cheetah finishing off it's breakfast - a leg of some antelope or zebra :)

After the dusty tracks of the safari national parks, it was a real pleasure to get to the clear blue seas and white sands of Zanzibar. We had a day in Stone Town, but found that the streets seemed just to be lined with tourist tat shops. It was much more relaxed on the northern beaches, where we just chilled out for a few days. A national election was due for the 30th October, and Zanzibar has a history of political unrest, so we decided to move our departure date forward by a few days to be on the safe side.

Right now, we're in Pushkar in Rajasthan. It's a holy place to Hindus, but that hasn't stopped them scamming and peddling overpriced crap. We've had our guard well and truly up since arriving in India, but let it down when we arrived here - and were promptly burned for a "donation" by some "priests". Shameless, these people. Delhi was madness, absolute chaos on the roads, and incredibly smoggy and polluted. Jaipur was similarly mad, but magical. A highlight there was staying the night at the Nahargar Fort - built a few hundred years ago across the top of a ridge looking over the city, there's a single room available to stay. The bedroom is octagonal, with the 4 sides around the head of the low bed being windows with uninterrupted views over the city - amazing.

We had come to Pushkar for the camel fair, but it turns out that it's not on for another couple of weeks. So, we'll just hang out here and relax (hence the free time to be online!).

Absolutely randomly, we bumped into Cassi last night - in fact, he spotted the back of my head through the door of the internet cafe and called my name. We knew he was in India somewhere, but didn' tknow where, so that was a perfect turn of luck to bump into each other.

Heard the news last night that there have been bombs in Delhi - checking on the BBC just now, one of the bombs was in the Paharganj street bazaar, which was where we stayed for 3 nights last week. It's a real backpacker place, as well as always being incredibly jammed with Indians, and leading to the main New Delhi train station. We're safe where we are, and won't be going back into Delhi city at all on the rest of our travels - still, it's a shock to see in the news.

gotta be quick!

2005-10-10T23:17:00.000+10:00

well, here we are in Africa. dialup internet plus high prices means quick blog entry!

tried to climb Kilimanjaro last week - gave it a good crack, but failed to reach the summit. We're both very pleased with how we did, and both amazed at the place itself. would love to post amazxing photos, but upload speed on dialup isn't going to meet the challenge!

Off to serengeti and ngorogoro tomorrow - should be exciting. Can't wait to see for myuslef those places I've seen so many times on Wildlife on One!

Not long to go!

2005-09-30T07:16:00.000+10:00

...and to be frank, I think that we're very stressed and exhausted. All the goodbyes, home refurb obstacles, logistics and just sheer outflow of money are really taking their toll. The worst news is that the conclusion on our plumbing is that despite all the work and money thrown at it, there is still an undiscovered leak, and we have no option but re-lay central heating pipes across the entire flat. While we're away. And after our first tennant moves in. Ouch.

On the positive side, in about 3 days' time we'll be in Tanzania.

Hungover again

2005-09-23T18:32:00.000+10:00

we're at the tail end of 3 weeks of virtually continuous evenings out - it's been tough, but we've managed to wake up in time for the arrival of the decorators at 8:30am despite our daily hangovers. The flat is nearly finished, and in fact we had our first prospective tennant come to view the place yesterday - very exciting. The place is looking really good.

...and we had our latest barbie ever - 20th September, and it was a lovely balmy night. Discovered just how tasty an onion with oil and balsamic mustard can be after it's been double-wrapped in foil and left amongst the coals right from the start of the barbie - delicious.

The shipping company are booked up to come and pack and take away all of our gear next week, which will leave us with only our backpacks for our last few days in the UK. We keep reaching milestones that make us realise anew that we're actually going. Having all our gear shipped away will be a big one!

Friends and family have asked us all kinds of questions about Oz and Brisbane, so I put together a short webpage with some info - it's here.

Come down for the world's busiest retiree...?

2005-09-06T18:46:00.000+10:00

Not only is the intensely fun boys weekend over, but so is the summer - a double whammy come down. And this retiree, and his retired fiancee, are both working harder than they were when they had office jobs :)

The weekend away with the boys was excellent - it turned out to be a couple of days drinking and hill walking based in a converted barn in the middle of nowhere. Perfect. Plenty of photos here - I'm particularly pleased with some of the panoramics.

Since then, it's been non-stop. Having fixed the leak under the bathroom floor, the central heating has sprung a further two leaks (!). I must take some credit for the second one, but in my defense it was an accident waiting to happen. So, the plumbers laugh each time they hear from me.

The conversion of our flat into a showhome is really gathering pace, though. I've been busy finishing off lots of odd jobs that have been hanging over me for the last 18 months. For instance, not only can you now lock yourself into the bathroom, but you've got a handle on the inside of the door to get you back out again. And, almost unbelievably, the kitchen is now finised. Never thought I'd see the day...

We have decorators in (slowly) working their way through the lounge, hall and spare room. The house is a complete bombsite and dust bowl while they're here, but it should only be a couple more days and then the place will really start to look like the showhome that we always knew was hiding underneath that old wallpaper and avocado tiling.

Our trip home is now all booked up - we're out of here on 2nd October. Very soon. But once we land, we immediately start on the climb up Kilimanjaro. That should blow out the cobwebs....

Right - far too busy to actually be writing blog entries, so best get going!

Surprises for the weekend

2005-09-01T23:27:00.000+10:00

Both of us are in for surprises this weekend - our friends are taking each of us out seperately for some kind of leaving / pre-wedding fun. I have some idea of what the girls have in store (and it sounds nice) but I have no idea what the boys have in store for me. I have been given very little information, only that I'm to wait on a street corner in hammersmith wearing a balaclava and holding a bunch of chrysanthemums - the mind boggles....

In other news - the leak in our central heating has finally been found! It's only taken 6 months.... *so* pleased to have finally seen the problem with my own eyes, and watch the tradesmen starting to fix it. That's one more refurb task ticked off the very long list of things to do.

I'm spending my retirement hacking through admin at home - somehow, it seems to take all day!

Lots of dSLR photos from the weekend in Eastbridge are here

I've retired!

2005-08-31T21:11:00.000+10:00

Well, retired at 29 - there's not many that can claim that! The shame of it is that I can't claim my pension until I'm 60, so this retirement lark might be a little short-lived. Ho well, easy come easy go :)

I had a great last week at work - spent a couple of days in Dublin running some informal training and drinking lots of Guiness, then the last couple of days in London, including a hilarious night out in West London. You don't get a gold watch for 1 year's service at AOL, but I was pleasantly surprised by a card and cash leaving present (will probably spend that on a memory card for the camera).

We spent our weekend at my parents' place in Suffolk, celebrating birthdays and enjoying the last throes of the English summer. There's a knife block on the way to join our incredible knife, and Dad's got some quality 60s sci-fi short stories for his next holiday. We ate a delicious meal at The Lighthouse in Aldeburgh - they put a pepper grinder and cylinder of French sea salt on the table instead of the usual salt and pepper cellars (I think that's a new indicator of how good a restaurant is....)

Plenty on our plates for the coming month, though - we've got lists a mile long of things that need doing (updating this blog isn't on any of those lists - I should probably be busy doing something else!). We're getting closer to finalising details of our trip - we've got some flights booked, just need to fiddle about with the dates. Itinerary will be something like:

London - Nairobi
overland Nairobi - Dar es Salaam
Dar es Salaam - Delhi
overland Delhi - Kathmandu
Kathmandu - Colombo
Colombo - Bangkok
Bangkok - Sydney

It's going to be an amazing trip!

Planning to travel....

2005-08-11T22:59:00.000+10:00

We're starting to plan out trip more seriously - I borrowed some guide books from work covering South East Asia and East Africa. Here's a great recipe for a saturday afternoon - take guide books to the pub, add a couple of beers or coffees and the pull-out sections from the paper, mix with enough rain to stop you walking back home after the first drink then let it all sit for a few hours. Delicious.

Was searching for some information about Tajikistan the other day (as you do), and came across this site which has photos from a trek through the mountains there, and from Samarkand and Bukhara. Looks like an incredible place to visit. The site also has great photos from other excellent trekking regions, including the Himalaya and the Andes.

Only a fortnight to go until I jack in my job....

Modern mountaineering

2005-08-11T00:44:00.000+10:00

I'm reading Heinrich Harrer's "The White Spider", which is a seminal climbing text documenting the history of attempts on the North Face of the Eiger. Harrer was himself one of the party that first successfully made the ascent, but in fact is probably better known for his involvement with Tibet and the Dalai Lama in the years before the Chinese "liberation". Certainly, the book's a must-read for anyone interested in climbing, and moreover, for anyone planning a trip to the Alps of the Bernese-Oberland in Switzerland.

In Harrer's book he makes much of the press coverage of attempts on the Eiger. There was plenty of coverage in the climbing press, but there was also plenty in the popular press. If Harrer is to be believed, most of those popular press stories were uninformed, sensationalist, and in many cases plain morbid. Chris Bonnington also talks about similar levels of popular press interest in climbers during the early days of his career. He did in fact participate in a live TV programme covering an attempt to put up a new route on the Cheddar Gorge (I think) - this was supposed to make for informing, true-to-life and entertaining television. I would have enjoyed watching it, but I'm not sure how successful it was at the time.

In this morning's news, there's coverage of the rescue by helicopter of Slovenian climber Tomaz Humar from the upper slopes of Nanga Parbat. The press seem to have been fairly even-handed and non-sensationalist in comparison to the kind of reports that Harrer reviews in his book. Also, Humar has his own extensive website displaying hundreds of photos from his many expeditions (some of which are amazing) and even has a blog being updated by his support team at base camp. Things have changed since the days of queueing up at the telescopes on Kleine Sheidegg to watch the climbers struggling up the Eigerwand.

So I've had a slightly bizarre mix of 50-year-old and 12-hours-old mountaineering literature today. Flicking from one to the other really shows how far the sport has come - from claw-nailed boots and hemp ropes, to individuals solo-ing new routes up 8000 metre peaks. Mind you, I'd much rather immerse myself in these stories and images of mountaineering than watch the seconds tick by in my dull office as I wait for these last few weeks to be over. I'd love to be a mountaineer - but my fear of heights and trad-climbing kind of tells me that I should stick to just reading about it! :)

Is it only wednesday!??!?!

2005-08-03T20:34:00.000+10:00

With only 3 and a half weeks left of work, days are dragging. Difficult to be motivated now that I'm leaving and won't be around to see anything through - difficult even to drag myself into the office on time. This is leaving me feeling mostly idle, or certainly rev'ing at a lower rpm than everyone else at work, which causes some tension. The tension seems to be entirely within me, and pulls between wanting to be professional and get on with work (and not to let my team-mates down), and wanting to just sit back and fiddle my time away doing very little. The end result is a string of unsatisfying days, which is definitely dragging me down. Tough times.

Had a wonderful time last weekend, borrowing a friend's Smart Roadster for the drive to and from Devon - what a great car! Very small, but feels so quick and sporty. Having a turbo, with a turbo pressure guage mounted on the dash, is great fun. After a few hundred miles in it, I could easily be persuaded to get one of my own :) Unfortunately, the weather in Devon was typically English - grey, drizzly, and sub-20 degrees. Looking at photos of our trip to the same part of Devon in July 2003, I can see that we had some very similar weather.

Yesterday, though, the sun returned to London after a fortnight's absence (presumably shining somewhere else in the world) and we had a barbie to mark the last night in the UK for our Brisbanite visitors. Nothing like tending a chock-full barbie with plenty of beer and wine on hand, good company, and a balmy evening. Looking forward to hopefully keeping that up once we get to Oz! I've always been a charcoal barbie man, but I can see myself getting into gas-fired Aussie barbie style once we're over there. I'm still tempted to maintain a cheap charcoal barbie on the side for old-time's sake, and to preserve my Englishness!

I'm still fighting my way through The Algebraist - it's a good book, but it's not great, and not one
of his best. I've tried to avoid reading reviews of books and music before I've made up my own mind, but after writing that last blog entry I thought I'd see what the Guardian had to say. They were pretty bang on with their review.

...and for a pretty comprehensive review website, check out metacritic for games, music, film and books.

Iain M Banks

2005-07-28T23:57:00.000+10:00

Just got hold of his new book, "The Algebraist". Great cover art (the first bite is with the eye, and all that....) and I'm enjoying the imagination and story so far. But. I am pedantic enough to have found 2 aspects of his writing style that are niggling me:

1) He has repeatedly used "and/or" in free-flowing text. Now, I'm no traditionalist, but that's an abbreviation born out of email, surely. I'm surprised and a little irritated to see it in a book written by such a highly reputed author.
2) He also keeps on using "-" to denote subclauses in sentences. I'm pretty sure that he should be using "," for that. I find that I use a lot of hyphens for similar purpose, but only in email.

In past books he has played around with language very inventively to succesfully put the reader in an altered state of mind while they're submerged in his imagined worlds, but these 2 grammatical changes don't seem to be aimed at doing anything like that. I'm quite sensitive to this kind of thing (although I do know people who are a *lot* more sensitive!) and it's annoying me. He's also using some *very* long sentences, some of which with subclauses denoted with "-" as well, none of which is lightening the load of reading the book.

Ho hum - plenty of the book left to go, and it's giving me that feeling of almost looking forward to the tube ride home just so that I can get my nose back into it :)

Engagement party

2005-07-27T20:24:00.000+10:00

After I started off a whirlwind of events by asking that famous 4 word question, there's been ups and downs a-plenty for the engagement party - but it all went off a treat on Saturday, with everyone having a memorably enjoyable time. There'll be photos a-plenty too, once I get through sorting the good ones out (there was quite a lot of paparazzi-style snapping with the new dSLR.... gotta love that 3fps motor drive mode!)

Although the day was packed with remarkable moments, a couple of particularly notable events were:

having extended family members from Scotland, Brisbane and Surrey (and Leicester!) all together in London
baby Annabel was incredibly well-behaved, to everyone's enjoyment
we accidentally bought 2 chocolate and cream cakes after I mixed up whether or not dessert was included in the lunch
2 work colleagues arrived at the party wearing bodices, causing all sorts of drunken dancing rumpus by the end of the night

If it weren't a once in a lifetime event, I'd do it all over again tomorrow!

Time to start planning for the even bigger day, now. I like the look of the Brisbane Powerhouse for a wedding venue - it's kind of like a cross between the Tate Modern and Sadlers Wells. It's in New Farm, which is very central, and we might even end up living in that area when we get to Brissy.

How it is in London at the moment

2005-07-22T20:11:00.000+10:00

Quite frightening, actually. After the first bombs on 7th July, it seemed that the security would be heightened, and the tube would be safer than ever. But after yesterday's mirrored events, it seems that the tube is in fact still a viable target.

It's very true that Londoners, as a group, should stand up to these tactics, vote with their feet and get on with their daily business. It's also true that as an individual travelling on the tube daily, it's not worth the risk just to get to work.

Who was it who said "May you live in interesting times"....?

Test shots from the new dSLR

2005-07-21T20:30:00.000+10:00

Took a few test shots with the new camera over the last couple of evenings - the 8MP sensor picks up *so* much detail, it's incredible. We're going to have a lot of fun with this kit!

Finally....

2005-07-20T23:50:00.000+10:00

....we've bought one of these! And what a lovely piece of kit it is - not too weighty or bulky, very rich feature set, and best of all Jessops matched the best Internet price. As if we didn't take thousands of photos already, with this beast there'll be a sharp upturn in volume (and hopefully quality too).

I've been watching this market segment carefully for over a year now, waiting for the affordable dSLRs to come into reach. We'll keep a hold of the Ixus for movies and pocketability - it still takes lovely photos. It also seems that it's not worth selling the film SLR, as they're going on eBay for around the £40 mark. So we are now a 3 camera family :)

In other news, my visa application has been both sent off and acknowledged - that puts us on the home straight. Just have to pass a medical examination, then wait to see if they send us a request for any additional info. We're still cutting it fine for our intended departure date, but if everything goes to plan we're on course.

Had a great holiday in France last week, enjoying lots of sunshine, wine and cheese. Also found myself doing more excercise than I normally would on a holiday (or while at work for that matter!) - played lots of badminton, and some frisbee and beach volleyball, and spent an afternoon cycling. I actually felt in better shape at the end of the holiday, despite all the alcohol and big meals.

It's all go for the engagement parties this weekend - restaurant is booked up for our family lunch, and the bar for our party in the evening is all set. Should be a great weekend!

plans, plans, plans.....

2005-07-06T19:51:00.000+10:00

My future's taking over my present! And that doesn't mean that I'm wearing a tin-foil suit and my robot butler has driven me to work in a gyrocopter, more's the pity.

No, what I mean is that with all the plans for exciting developments, it seems as though todays are being filled with tasks for tomorrows. Now let me be clear here - this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is remarkable in itself. So what are we plannning? Oh, nothing much - just migrating to Australia, having guests for a month, an engagement celebration, a wedding, and refurbishing our flat. All good stuff, most of it happening in parallel, and we're both working full-time jobs. Still.

Update on the job front - I've resigned! My days of squeezing onto the tube for 2 hours a day are numbered. Obviously, I'm going to miss the comforting familiarity of being pressed full-body into a group of complete strangers, and of standing mere inches from the edge of a platform as a train roars in, the crowd of commuters behind edging me forwards. But somehow, I think I'll cope with the loss.

But the biggest question currently on my mind (and let's be honest - it's a biggy) is whether to buy a digital SLR. I want one, but should I get one? Decisions, decision....

First post

2005-07-01T01:10:00.000+10:00

Now that I'm leaving AOL, I'd better move my blogging from their service to something independent. So here it is! Right - that's some text entered, now for a picture and then a link

I intend to use this blog to post messages about our preparations for moving to Oz, and once we get there, what we get up to. No doubt, there'll be a huge number of incredible things to post here :)