On the road again

Yesterday we left Blenheim on a dreary wet day to visit a few wineries before travelling to Kaikoura on the east coast. It was a good day to visit wineries and we went to three: Highfield, Wither Hills and Montana. We bought some wine at Wither Hills which is owned by Lion Nathan breweries. The wine was a bit costly until Mike, one of our group, pulled rank as an ex-executive of Lion Nathan and got us staff discount of about 30%. Good one, Mike! Wither Hills is a magnificent building and the underground cellars are enormous.

This is the second day at Kaikoura, a seaside town. Our motel is rated as the best motel in NZ and I can well believe that. Only thing it lacks is a wireless internet connection.
Kaikoura is between high snow capped mountains and a rugged coast. There are seal colonies along the beach and dolphin and whale watching all year round. Kaikoura was established as a whaling outpost in the 1840s.
We are travelling with a group of five others…Three from Queensland, two from the U.S. and us from Western Australia. We are getting along fine; all drinkers and non-smokers. That makes for a few laughs.

Tomorrow we head off to Christchurch, about 200 kilometres away. We have two days there, on one of which we board a cross-island train for a trip to Greymouth across the Alps. On the Monday the group divides and people fly to Auckland at different times. We will have a couple of days checking out Auckland before flying home to Perth…this time in Business class.

Real Estate weather

We have had two days of lovely weather whilst based in Blenheim 'New Zealand's Sunniest Town'. Blenheim is a nice tidy town almost city-sized. Our motel is the best we have stayed in anywhere. In the two days we have done a touristy drive around the edge of beautiful waterways and lunched in Picton. Joan and I even thought it would be good to live here. Then the long white cloud of NZ came in and the rain has settled in for what seems likely to be a long time. Today is day 3 of 8 of this tour and today I am driving the bus on a vineyard tour. It will be good for me staying completely alcohol free...until we get settled in our next motel. It will be interesting to compare motels. This one we are in has set the standard.

South Island

Yesterday I thought Bob was going to give me a rest day....no way! In the morning we went for a drive into the bush not far from his house to see something interesting. It turned out to be a Buddhist temple. Quite something in the middle of the bush!
In the evening he suggested that I might like to accompany him on a short walk. Didn’t sound too strenuous. We ended up climbing a small mountain. I felt reasonably good and we went for an Indian meal later that evening.
The next day we did nothing except washing and waited around until 2pm and he drove me to the Brisbane International Airport. The airport is quite new and nicely appointed. The Air NZ flight to Wellington was not the best I have experienced. The aircraft was fully booked with families and their crying kids. The meal was the worst I have had on a plane. The flight encountered a bit of turbulence and so tea and coffee was not served. We landed on time in Wellington after a flight of 2.55 hours in a violent thunderstorm. Cheers from the passengers announced the touchdown. I caught a cab to the hotel where Joan was. The cab driver was an African who was lamenting the NZ loss in the Rugby. Joan told me that the flag at the convention centre was flying at half-mast. This is Rugby town.





This morning we walked down to the docks in howling winds and driving rain to visit the National Museum, Te Papa. This Museum is really outstanding with changing exhibits. My only trouble was walking around, as Bob’s mountain climb had caught up with me. Legs and feet of Jelly! We are now on the inter-island ferry and although in high winds there is little rockin and rollin. A three hour trip will see us ashore at Picton where we collect the hire bus. I have been nominated as a driver..one of three. Hope I don’t have to drive near cliffs, snow or ice. Our first overnight is at Blenheim where we will spend two nights visiting vineyards and I suspect have a few samples.

I have a settings problem with the blog and cannot arrange my photos properly. Have to look at that when we have time.

This evening we are in a very nice motel in Blenheim, about 25k from Picton the port for the ferry from the north island. Had a good pub meal and tomorrow we are off to do a wine tour. This country has a lot going for it!

Brisbane

This is the second day in Queensland I am am being treated royally by Bob, a colleague from Forty-six years ago at Malaguna Teachers' College in Rabaul, New Guinea.
Yesterday we drove for about an hour to Currumbin Waters near the Gold Coast to have a most pleasant day with another colleague, Howard and his wife Ann. Their house in on over an acre of land sloping steeply down to a small lake...beautiful spot! We had plenty to talk about recalling the characters we studied with. Some great, humorous and scandalous stories there! Had a lovely lunch and too much wine before returning home.
Today we went in to Brisbane by bus and caught up with Tom another fellow from the college. Again, many stories which we should collect for a book of PNG experiences.

Not sure what Bob has for tomorrow...it might be a rest day.

I had New Zealand in my mind for this trip and neglected to pack a pair of shorts for the Brissie weather.It is 30+c at the moment.

I'm ready

Helen is coming down to our place to cook us a meal rather than taking me to her place. Good idea. She will drive me to the airport at about ten.

Joan has been phoning me daily on a magical $15 phone card that seems to be like the Magic Puddin and never runs out.

The conference/workshop she is at in NZ has daily sessions finishing at 4.30pm and the restaurant they all eat at is above a smart looking car museum which unfortunately closes at 4pm. The convener of the conference has approached the manager of the car museum asking that the museum be kept open for another hour so that the 50 or so women might visit @ $10 a head. He wants $100 to stay open as well as the entry fee. Is that dumb?

Google SketchUp

Google offers a free sketching program for both Windows and Mac. I have just had a little play with it to try and draw the Methane gas producer mentioned in yesterday's post. It doesn't really look much like the pig sty/methane producer I talked about, but it could, with a lot of imagination explain what I tried to describe yesterday. The individual pig pens were arranged around the circumference of the pen and daily the wastes were washed down into the fermenter.

I have started collecting all the gear I need for the trip to Queensland tomorrow night. Medicines, clothing (NZ South Island is cold and wet) and shoes. Helen, our daughter will collect me and make sure I have the tickets and passport etc, take me to her place for a meal and a couple of glasses of wine, then deposit me at the domestic terminal 2 hours ahead of departure. I am hoping to talk the airline staff into giving me a window seat so that I can rest my head on the window when I try and sleep. I have never been successful at sleeping on a plane, so this time I am taking a couple of Temazepam tabs. I'll either sleep or be hyper.

methane

I went to the Cockburn City landfill site today and took some pics of the new methane collection set-up being constructed. I am not sure how they will extract the gas or what it will be used for,but it is a huge area covered with heavy plastic with piping to collect the gas. It's hard to imagine how much gas can be produced by mattresses and such, but it is being done successfully at other landfill sites around Perth.

In the 1970s at a Vocational Centre near Port Moresby in Papua, I saw a methane producer working well and producing methane which was used to fuel the cook-house. The producer was a circular pig pen of about 15 metres diameter with a central circular pit into which the pig wastes were washed daily. The fermentation of the wastes and water gave off methane and that was trapped under a snug-fitting inverted cupola. A hose from on top of the cupola allowed the gas to be taken to the kitchen stoves. The pressure was regulated by weights around the edge of the cupola. I may try and sketch the system and post it at a later date.

Sadness

I have had two phone calls from Joan; one from Sydney Airport and one from Wellington Airport, and then an email message from Wellington confirming that the MacBook is accessing local networks to talk with me. I will suggest that she download Skype so that we can talk VOIP (google it).

I had a phone call this evening from Joy the wife of a long- time dear friend. She told me that John wanted to talk to me because he was a little confused. When he was on the phone he was most lucid and told me he was at the college (his previous workplace)and couldn't get out. He wanted my phone number to ring me in an emergency. He was at home and didn't associate his wife with his perceived situation.

John has a wide circle of friends who want to support him, however it is becoming obvious that very soon he must be put into care.

John has a condition called Lewy Body Disease which is akin to Altzheimers and is a major burden to his wife. What can we do to help?

Out of the box

We have had so much trouble with the WiFi setup on Joan's Presario laptop that we went out and bought an Apple MacBook. Everything worked fine straight out of the box. Beautiful! We will sell the PC laptop later.
I will be taking Joan out to the airport at about 10.30pm and she will be in Sydney at about 6am for a three hour wait for her plane to Wellington. Kev will have a similar flight next Wednesday night to Brisbane where I will be met at the airport and travel to catch up with friends from New Guinea days I last saw 46 years ago. Four days in Brissie and then I join Joan in Wellington and start the 8 day bus tour of the South Island. The weather seems bleak and pretty chilly. It is, after all, the land of the long white cloud.

countdown begins

Joan is packing her gear ready for her trip to NZ. She is leaving around midnight on Friday night. She hasn't actually packed my bag for my departure the following Thursday,but she has organised my travel documents etc. Eeek,I will be travelling alone! Who is going to look after me?

Our battle with the WiFi technology is ongoing. Joan has made many calls to Belkin via India without success and also talked with Hewlett Packard, who as it happens, make Compaq computers. None of the advice has helped, so this evening I will take it to a friend who is a PC Guru and if he can't sort it out,then to Willetton SHS Tech. people to configure and test on their network.

An escapee

I mentioned the ‘bring out your dead’ rubbish collection of last week. I got rid of a number of computers, printers and a heap of keyboards. The truck made a sickening crashing noise as it compressed all that technology. After it departed our street I went to see how much was left on the lawn…nothing. Only today as I went out to collect the newspaper did I see a small piece of plastic. It was a key from a keyboard….the escape key!

Our daughter Helen has just left for her school’s parents' night. She has a slide show of her pupils set up to run continuously and I printed off photos of the latest class project which is the construction of space craft as a follow-up on a unit about space and space flights. These kids are pre primary and have done some great work.

Last week I dropped into Willetton SHS to visit a couple of colleagues. It did seem that there was a lot of discontent and that teachers were not happy. I loved the place when I taught there and it is sad that the vibrant staff social life no longer exists. No staff parties, no progressive dinners (very 80s), no quiz nights etc etc. I have taught at a few high schools and they seem to go through a cycle of wonderful camaraderie and after a few years end up just a work site. Pity! When I was at Rockingham Senior High the staff fell in a heap as I have described and a few of us thought of ways to revitalise the social life of the staff. I came up with an idea to farewell a sheep ship from Fremantle harbour. After all, the sheep are Australians going overseas and almost certainly not returning. I could see it all…streamers; champers, formal dress on the wharf. Everyone thought is was a great idea and we thought we could invite Channel Nine along to film it.
When I rang the Port Authority I was told that the police would lock us up if we tried such a stunt. I guess we weren’t as brave as the Chasers….they would have gone ahead and done it.

Technology

We bought a WiFi card for my laptop on Saturday so I can take the machine to NZ and not suffer computer withdrawal. I installed it yesterday. Today I decided to test it.

I had checked the internet for free WiFi access points and discovered that the Dome cafe in Fremantle was one such hotspot. So today I dragged the laptop along when I went in to arrange travel insurance. I ordered a latte, booted up the computer and tried to connect. Local network appeared, I did everything I was supposed to do according to both the hard copy instructions and the onscreen directions, but I couldn't establish a connection. Gave up, drank the latte and came home.

I have tried again this evening. The card picked up a wireless network nearby (the next door neighbours I think. I didn't try to hack in!) Obviously the card is working. The Dome's network is shown as a profile that I could access if I were physically close enough. I don't know why I couldn't connect when I was. Tomorrow I will go back to where we bought the card, laptop in hand, and see if they can show me how to establish a connection that works.

I am not a technophobe, but I hate it when I follow all the directions and it doesn't work. It usually turns out to be a very simple step that was either overlooked by me or an assumption by the writers of the directions that everyone would know a particular point. I don't know which this will be.

Bibra Lake is a lake again

Earlier this year Bibra Lake near our home was totally dry. The doomsayers were all of a quiver. 'Climate change is here!' After the rains the lake is full and even the catchment dams are looking good. The water authority has said that there will be no need to impose further restrictions on our water usage. The lake looked good as we walked along the western edge. The bottle brush trees are in full bloom. For some strange reason the cockatoos cut the flowers off and drop them to the ground. Figure that one out?

We have purchased a WiFi card for Joan's laptop so that when we are in NZ we can tap into public networks to read mail and post to our blog. We haven't tested it yet and will probably go to a McDonalds restaurant tomorrow to see if it is working.

This afternoon we visited Joan's sister Dorothy and Mike, her husband. I have mentioned him before. He has severe dyskinesias as a result of Parkinson's disease. The surgeon will not tell them when the operation for deep brain stimulation is scheduled or even if it is scheduled, so they don't know whether it is to be this year, next year or never. I think I would be going to the radio shock-jocks or Channel 9 to get things moving. On the other hand it might well upset the man and he could be delayed past his use-by date.

TV and Bubbly

Yep, I'm a TV freak...only at night time. I watch 'my show'; Temptation and pit myself against the contestants. I fear that I am falling in love with one of the hosts, Lavinia Nixon. What a doll! Channel Nine is going to drop Temptation for another Eddie McGuire (?) show. He can't replace Lavinia! On the show tonight, one of the contestants won a Wengler watch which is waterproof to 1000 metres. I am quite sure my head would implode at 100 metres.
Another TV show I have flipped over to and really gets up my nose is 'Australia's Funniest Home Videos' presented by some blonde sheila and a lot of the vids are from the U.S.....not Aus. The programme almost always shows people damaging themselves seriously and the audience laughs themselves stupid at the unfortunate star who probably needs follow-up surgery and therapy.

Another show on TV here is New Zealand Highway Patrol. Well, if you ever thought our cops were a bit dumb, you should take a look at this show. Last night a car was pulled over and the driver didn't have a valid licence and his car was out of licence. He was given a hefty fine and told to drive straight home???? We are off to NZ in the next couple of weeks. I shall report back. NZ police have been in the spotlight for their very poor performance on a murder case this week. Methinks they couldn't find warts on a frog.

The bubbly part of this story is of a local discount deal on, dare I call it..Champagne. Hardy's Crest is on sale for $13.00 a bottle but two for one and if you buy 6 of them there is a further 20% off making it around $5.30 a bottle. Nice too!

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth

Yesterday I went to Castlereagh Special school to collect some of their discards. Two G3 Mac computers which were not working, six printers, a couple of boxes of new floppy disks and a mountain of new ink cartridges. The cartridges are worth at least $400....if one has a use for them! They are mainly for the printers that don't work and other brands I don't have. The floppies are no longer used. I guess that is why I got them?! I should be able to get a couple or three printers working with a bit of patience and the Macs are always able to be fixed with the spares I have available. Printers presenting with poor quality print usually indicate blocked nozzles and can usually be cleaned up with hot distilled water or isopropyl alcohol.

Why am I collecting old equipment? I hate seeing it go to landfill and I may get to send more gear to Bali. So there!

News from Papua New Guinea

In 1973, when returning to Australia on annual leave from PNG, we decided to take one of my students on the big trip to Aus. We had to make a pretense of randomly selecting one of the 65 Vocational School students. It was a bit tricky to make it appear that we drew the name out of a hat, when in fact we had already decided on a lad who spoke good English and we felt sure would fit in in Perth for the six weeks. The whole trip went very well and Michael learned lots of swear words when he spent a couple of days on a farm. We eventually returned to Australia permanently in 1975/6 and never heard from Michael again until I wrote him a letter a few years ago. He wrote back telling of his village life and his family. A short time later I received a very well written letter from one of his daughters. In the letter she gave me her banking details so that I could do a direct transfer of $2000 for her studies at Teachers' College. I must have been busy at the time because I never got round to sending the money.
Today I received another nice letter from one of Michael's sons asking for K5,000 (A$2,500) so that he can commence university studies in 2008.

It is not uncommon for teachers to be asked to finance education or businesses for their PNG ex- students' kids. I guess they see movies of seemingly affluent Australians and figure that we can afford to shell out.

ASOPA

ASOPA was the former Australian School of Pacific Administration and trained Teachers and Patrol Officers to serve in Australia's territories; mainly Papua New Guinea. Today I discovered that their newsletter mentions our family blog in quite glowing terms. The ASOPA site is also a very interesting read.

I had to visit Martin's workplace to get him to sign the vehicle licence transfer form for his new car. He didn't seem too good. Last week I filled some prescriptions for him and one was overdue. The pharmacist gave me an advance on that prescription, so today I attempted to get the GP to write a script for the already dispensed drugs. He wouldn't do it without a consultation. The GP doesn't work past 4pm and doesn't do weekend surgeries. I explained that Martin has just started a job and can't expect to take time off. Still no bending. I returned to the pharmacist and he told me that many GPs write a script and leave it at the desk for collection. He may have to go to another GP after hours and get a new script for the exact medication.

Kev gets lost

A couple of days ago I arranged to meet an ex-student of mine over a coffee. She suggested the Dome coffee place in Ardross. Seemed easy. I arrived early and waited and waited and she didn't show up. It was bucketing down and I thought she may have had an accident. After an hour I went home. On my mail was a note from her asking where I got to. It seems that the coffee shop I thought was the Dome was sold several years ago and she was about 100 metres away at the new Dome. She rang today to say that she would visit me at home in case I got lost again. We had lots to catch up on. What we both have done over the last ten years and news of other students in her cohort. She finished a science degree at RMIT in Melbourne majoring in photography so it was a bit of the student teaching the teacher when photography was mentioned. It is strange that most of what she learned is no longer valid. Wet photography has died and digital is supreme. She, Jayd, starts a new job with the Public Trustee on Monday and is constructing a website from which she hopes to establish a photography business as a sideline. I am a pleased that such a nice gal would wish to visit me.

Home alone

Joan has left me all alone. She has gone on a retreat for one of the sewing/quilting/fabric Arts groups. I confess I don't know which one. I do know that she took a lot of fabric dyes.
So, I am all alone...woo-hoo! Bring on the dancing girls! Just kiddin!

I paid for and collected, Martins car today. It has a few little quirks that need ironing out, but overall it is very good. I drove to Martin's work place to pick him up in the car and he found that he had been underpaid. He went back in to see the boss, but was told it was correct. Not good! He immediately fell into a dark mood and I could see depression written on his face. When I gave him the car keys he barely thanked me. About an hour later I rang his mobile to check on him and his boss had rung and apologised for underpaying him and all was well again. I even got a sincere thank you for the car. Whew! He also had a better day at work. Things will improve over the next week when he gets a handle on the computer programs and machinery at work.

A car at last

The bloke who was selling the Daihatsu Mira yesterday told me that he would have the car available for inspection at 9am this morning. (this was the fifth time we had arranged to view the car) I drove to his business (a car detailing yard with a horrible pit bull as a guard dog) but he didn't live up to his word. I returned an hour later and he was there...without the car. He rang his sister and told me that she would be down with the car and he would ring me. By 3pm we hadn't heard from him so I looked in the Quokka and we went and looked at a pretty nice Daewoo Cielo. Even though it has lots of kilometres on the clock it is in very good condition, so we bought it for $1100. Our Son Martin is well pleased.

Martin is under the hammer at his new job. He needs to be very proficient using Corel Draw and operating sign cutting machinery. He didn't claim that he had experience with such equipment and reckons that he will need a couple of weeks to get up to speed. His boss has him on lower wages for a few weeks, but is still pushing him hard. Hope he doesn't toss it in.

Fame

Update: Car hasn't been found yet. My new Betacord VCR is playing up.

I am going to give up chasing the guy who is selling the car. It is so frustrating to hear that I can see it and then some excuse is made why it will have to be tomorrow.
Fortunately my eBay purchase of a Betacord VCR was made locally and I can take it back for repairs. The fellow I bought it from is a reasonable chap and we have many interests in common...vintage cars, beer brewing etc. He has already agreed to service it thoroughly.

Yesterday our daughter Helen told us of a rather nasty event with a good outcome. It seems that some ex-students of her primary school (now in Year 8) made a home movie of vandalism to schools and cars at a shopping centre and posted it on You Tube. It was a good quality flik and everyone was recognisable by staff at the primary school. They even put their names on a list of credits at the end of the clip. Police have rounded them up. Ah, the price of fame!

Phantom car

I have been on the trail of a small car for our son...a Daihatsu Mira, which is like a shoe box on wheels. Trouble is the bloke who is selling the thing can't seem to get his act together to let me see it. It has been almost a week now since I replied to his advertisement and several dates/times have come and gone without me actually setting eyes on it. Maybe tomorrow.

Our son Martin started his new job today and he actually likes it. It is up his alley with computer graphics producing plastic badges and signs. If I don't find him a car I will be driving him to and from work every day. If I do find him a car I will be paying for fuel every day. That's easier than driving him!

It is this suburb's 'bring out your dead' collection and I have a nice big heap of what looks like good computer gear etc etc on our front lawn. Actually there is nothing good there. One of our neighbors has added to the heap with a few bits from a drier. This afternoon Joan walked further down the cul-de-sac to check out a nice looking bookshelf, but alas it had been ravaged by termites.

Yippee!

I have been bidding for a Betacord Stereo VCR on eBay and won it. Strangely they end up costing about three times as much as a brand new VHS VCR...there is a Luddite demand for them! I ended up winning it with a bid of $350. and as it is local there are no shipping charges.
Sounds like a lot of money, but I have a nice collection of movies and personal tapes I will convert to DVD. Also I spent more than that last night in tickets and booze for my kids to go to the Steely Dan concert....so there! We all rationalise on such purchases.

Our son Martin starts a new job tomorrow. That doesn't mean that we don't have to keep shelling out cash for some time. He won't be paid for a couple of weeks and there is rent, a car to buy (paid for by us), food and ongoing expenses including the money he has borrowed from a few mates over the last couple of weeks. Not sure we would have kids if we had a re-run.

The Concert

We were lucky that none of the rain that drenched the southern suburbs reached the Swan Valley for the Steely Dan Concert. It was very cold though...especially for me the skipper. On the skipper thing; don't be a skipper. Being sober whilst the others are intoxicated is no fun, in fact it can be very frustrating and unrewarding keeping your friends and family in line in a public place.

We decided to go early to get a good position. Sandalford Vineyard now specialises in concerts and good for them too....all the wines were exclusively Sandalford and the lowest price was $22. Beer was $8 a stubbie. They must have sold truckloads of bottles to the estimated 5 - 6000 concert goers. Entry into the vineyard was easy with lots of marshals guiding cars to a paddock parking area. Once parked we joined a queue of what looked like 2,000 plus people in a long line waiting for the gates to open. After probably 45 minutes the line started to move and eventually we reached the gates where our gear was searched for bring-in alcohol, metal cutlery, glassware and umbrellas. Once in, we positioned ourselves in the 'high chair' area and rugged up to wait for the two support bands to start.

The two bands were Gangajang and World Party. Gangajang did their well known stuff and world party from the UK did theirs. When Steely Dan came on with their ten piece band the mob went wild. It was a great show with many of their older and newer numbers performed. It was amazing to see and hear Walter Becker and Donald Fagan looking and sounding like they have over several decades. And they played their stuff exactly as the audience wanted it. I have been to concerts where the artists tell the audience that they are tired of the same old sound and are going to play it a bit different. Bah!

The concert was great, but getting out of Sandalford was horrific. It took about 45 minutes and it looked like there was a police road block at the entrance back on to West Swan Road. Being sober, I wanted to run the gauntlet, but we had the opportunity to go the opposite direction and join Roe Highway for a straight through trip home. It was a quiet trip home for a number of reasons. I think that will be my last concert.

Weather concerns and the Steely Dan concert

Kevin will probably comment on this tomorrow. I didn't go, but Kevin, Helen, Martin and Graham did. It is being held in the open air at Sandalford Winery in the Swan Valley.

We watched the skies anxiously this morning. The forecast was for showers clearing, and that seemed to be happening. However, our preparations included rain ponchos for everyone, as well as folding chairs, rugs and a picnic basket.

The event was due to start at 4pm. It had been dry and sunny for a couple of hours by then. The main event was to start at 7.30. It poured here just after 7. Sandalford is miles away in a NEasterly direction, and maybe the rain didn't get there. I hoped they had played safe and not left the ponchos in the car.

There have been several heavy showers since. I hope they don't end up like drowned rats.

George Bush

Dear me, George really mucked-up today. He was addressing an Australian Business gathering in Sydney town and in front of the TV cameras made a couple of bloopers most unworthy of the President of the U.S.A. Firstly he thanked PM John Howard for being a gracious host to the OPEC meeting. He did of course realise that he had made a blunder and corrected himself with a little blush saying 'of course that is... APEC'. Next he praised our PM for recently visiting his Austrian troops in 'Eyerack'. I guess by now the clip is on You Tube and every news service around the globe will be running it on their evening news slots. Jeez, if I did something like that I would go away and hide. Let's hope he doesn't launch an attack on Austria...we could get severely damaged.

I predicted that the Corryn Rayney murder case would be solved in about a week. Bad guess! Still no suspects on the radar which seems strange as it was rumored that she had been threatened by someone and had asked friends to tell the police if anything happened to her.

It has been bucketing down today and is supposed to ease off tomorrow morning. We hope so, because we are off to the Steely Dan concert at an open-air vineyard venue. The concert is to go ahead regardless of weather conditions, so we went out today to buy ponchos. Awful things which one doesn't see in use these days. Hope we wont need them tomorrow night.

Near neighbors

In today’s newspaper there is an article reporting a large arms deal between our close neighbor, Indonesia and Russia. The deal is worth $1.2 billion and is to purchase 2 new submarines, 22 helicopters and 20 tanks. Let’s hope that most of it is to keep any internal strife under control…but what are the subs for?

I have always thought of Indonesia as a relatively poor country…and it seems that the Australian government also thought that with a large annual aid package given to them. This year’s aid totalled $328,000,000 and the next financial year it will be boosted to $460,000,000.

Indonesia has the largest muslim population of any country and a military of 396,150 persons. Australia hopes to boost our ADF force to 57,000 over the next ten years. Methinks that we should be nice to the U.S. and remain a staunch ally. It worked in WW2.

Bayzil or Bazzil?

Whatever pronunciation you prefer, fresh basil is a fabulous herb, especially with tomatoes. I used some tonight with a tomato concasse (chef term for a thick vegetable sauce/stew - I did a commercial cooking course some years ago and find that the terms pop occasionally into the brain). It was great, served with veal schnitzels, also made from scratch - hammered, egg and breadcrumbed and fried in a small quantity of olive oil with a little bit of butter for taste. And a green salad on the side - lettuce, cucumber and spring onion. Though it's cold tonight, it has been a beautiful sunny day, so summery fare seemed suitable.

While I like to grow my own herbs, I have not managed to keep a basil plant in production in winter. Even the perennial basil is straggly and I don't like its flavour as much as the traditional one. Thank goodness that some local grower keeps the fruit and vegie market down the hill supplied. The bag I bought this weekend was small, but good quality. Not so, the stuff available in the supermarket. Buyer beware.


While basil doesn't like rain and cold, parsley obviously does. The Italian parsley is huge and even the little pot of curly parsley is flourishing. The mint is doing well too. In summer it tends to die back if it is not watered morning and night. At Bicton we had mint planted in a small header pond and we could always find some to harvest.

Helen gave me a kaffir lime for my birthday, and it has now produced some new shoots and leaves after sitting stolidly in the pot for months. And the lemon grass has flowered. I have never had a clump do that before.

Boo Hoo!

I have just lost in an eBay auction. One has to be pretty smart at organising bidding to win. The last three minutes were fast and furious. I believe I was outbid by eBay's auto bidding feature. You put in a maximum amount and eBay bids on your behalf to counter each winning bid. Kev neglected to do that and manual bidding takes important extra seconds to get there. I was trying to win a professional Sony Betacord VCR with little use (5 tapes it was claimed). The winning bid was $225.50. I have heaps of great movies on Beta and my current machine is getting a bit tired. I guess I'll have to get it repaired if I can find an adventurous technician.

In my car hunt for our son, I rang a mechanic we have used before. This guy is a front yard mechanic....a dozen wrecks are a mechanical garden right up to the verge. A variety of parts and tools litter the ground and buckets of dirty oil are standing around. How his neighbors have not had the council come down on him I don't know. I guess he services their cars for free? I thought that he may have a customer who is trying to sell a car, instead he offered one of his cars for sale for $1200. I cruised past his place and saw the car. Rear glass missing; rust, bald tyres and the interior used as a storage place for still more used car parts. No thanks!

Fathers' Day

Our daughter Helen visited and cooked a nice 'Posh Seafood Pie' for this Dad's day. Lovely!

I am still on the used car trail for our son. It is virtually impossible to get to a workplace by public transport if it is not on a bus route or in the city. Australians love single dwellings with our backyards and this causes an urban spread for which it is difficult to provide a workable transport system. I am hoping to pay around $1,000 for a licenced, reasonable car. It can be done; there are little old church-going ladies who want to sell their cars...just got to find one.

We have a 'bring out your dead' collection next week and I have quite a few computer and printer carcasses to get rid of. Each suburb produces different quality treasures for the drive-past collectors. Our suburb is pretty new and I have seen very little in the way of old stuff on the verges. The expert collector knows his suburbs. In New York City the weekly rubbish collection is a treasure trove. The lack of landfill sites means that a walk around Greenwich Village on a nice summer's evening could almost furnish a house with pretty good stuff. We have a wonderful vintage press camera which was put out for collection in the village.

Bugger!

My chilli sauce was going quite nicely last night as we settled down to a bottle of bubbly and TV. The plan was to simmer it for a while to reduce and thicken the sauce. Well, I guess you know what happened then....it 'caught' and burnt on the saucepan. Today I went and bought more chillies and this time pumpkin for thickening and colour. This lot turned out very well indeed...proud of myself! I now have to design some labels for the bottles.

Martin our son, is on the job trail again and I looked in the Quokka (a local free-ad paper), for a cheap car. There was one advertised quite close to us here and I went to look at it. The asking price is $800, but it is two days off running out of registration and the owner says that it has a problem with the auto transmission. I drove it and it functioned well. It has done only 88,000 kilometres and was owned by her grandmother. I am tempted to buy it, but if a gearbox repair is necessary later, the cost would be around $2,000. We have had lots of bad luck (or bad judgement) with our son's cars.

Chilli sauce

Long time friends of ours have just celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. On the eve of their anniversary they received a phone call from their daughter who works and lives in Karratha. She asked them what they were doing on the day to which they replied that they would go out to lunch somewhere in their town, Mandurah. No they weren't: she had booked them on a plane for an overnight in Karratha for dinner with her. There is lots of money to be made working in a north-west mining town!

When we were in Los Angeles we visited the Farmers Market. One of the stalls there was solely devoted to various types of chilli sauce. There must have been hundreds of varieties all made by the stall holders. We bought a small bottle and it is very nice...and hot! So today, Kev has been brewing up his own chilli sauce and it is shaping up very nicely. Large hot chilli, tomato puree, some apples, some potato, vinegar and a little salt and sugar. Ready to bottle tomorrow. The name of my sauce: 'Ring of fire'.

I have been delaying visiting a friend who has mesothelioma. I have not seen much of him in the last 49 years when we both did an apprenticeship at the State Engineering Works. After he finished his trade he went to sea as a ship's engineer and that is the most likely reason that he contracted that disease. Ships in those days used lots of asbestos lagging on pipes and the crew was constantly renewing lagging. I am not good at sitting with people who are about to die. It is not so bad when they are quite old and have had a long and good life. Colin is about 69 years old. What can I say to him?

ex students

I had three contacts with ex-students today...amazing! Two were through the internet. Facebook has certainly taken off and I have had four 'youngies' requesting that I become their facebook friends. At 67 I think I am a little old for all that....however? The first contact was through the SchoolFriends network by a girl (now woman) I taught at Cecil Andrews' Senior High School in 1989. The second one was through FaceBook and I taught her at Willetton SHS in the 90s (?). Then this evening I had a phone call from an early 80s student from Rockingham SHS. He, Sean, did a commerce degree and is about to finish a B.Ed and enter teaching. Sean and his wife Denise have sold their house in western Sydney and are having a caravan built to their specs to travel around Aus for a couple of years getting work where they can. Sean and the family are visiting W.A. and us over Xmas.

Our daughter Helen had me take pics of her Pre-Primary class and print them to a size for making Fathers Day key-rings. She has a lovely bunch of kids and they love their Ms Lock.

Joan entered a piece in the Melville Art Awards and although she didn't win a prize, it was bought for $550. I reckon she should start making more of the same and flog 'em off. I have been told by an artist friend that real artists don't do that.

Good news

Today I drove Joan to Sir Charles Gardiner Hospital for a follow-up investigation after her recall following a mammogram. It was to be an all-day affair to determine if the dense area which showed up on the mammogram was anything serious. By 11.30am she rang me and it was all over. It was good news...nothing abnormal there.

We have just delivered our Hyundai Sonata to the dealer for a warranty repair. The seatbelt warning signal is malfunctioning and the warning buzzer continues to sound even when the driver is belted up. Warranty repairs are always a worry for me....are they going to tell me that 'that wasn't covered under section 43/4 of the warranty agreement'. We'll find out later today.

I googled Sonata seatbelt warning and found a forum where someone in the U.S. was asking how to turn off the seatbelt warning. He got a nasty reply suggesting he was an idiot and a moron and should be wearing his belt. In Western Australia it is illegal to not wear your seat belt fastened and upon reading the message again it seems that the person posting the question was indeed trying to disable the warning so that he could drive without a seatbelt. Having been in a major car crash and being thrown through the windscreen (before seat belts were even fitted to cars) I know we would have done far less damage to ourselves had we been wearing belts.

One of our kitchen cabinets looks darkly at me when I have a few glasses of wine. I can't image what it would look like if I were using mind-altering substances.

The good and not so good

Today we drove to Sawyers Valley in the hills above Perth. A fellow up there had emailed me offering a late model iMac for $50???? I have been donated stuff from him in the past. When we arrived at his place in a bush setting, I asked why did he not advertise the computer and get at least seven times what he was asking. His simple answer was that he hates selling things and didn't want people coming up from the city making a noise in his area and haggling over price.

He is a retired psychologist who migrated to W.A. from the U.S. in 1967. I will write him a nice letter of thanks with some money to buy himself a bottle of decent wine. Still can't believe that he 'gave' it to me for $50!

Joan had a mammogram on Tuesday and everything looked OK. Yesterday she received a phone call informing her that there was a dense area which needed further investigation. Not good! She is to go to Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital on Tuesday for what looks like being a a day's investigation. She has been informed that they will make a definite diagnosis before she leaves the hospital. I will drop her off in the morning and collect her when all is done. We both hope it is not a serious problem and the nurse who rang stressed that it was not a 'lump'.

a week in Bali

Friends are off to Bali tomorrow for a week. They go about three times a year and love the place. There are other places to visit for around the same money and I wonder why they don't do at least one trip to, say, Singapore. I guess they have been going for so long and so often that the familiarity of the place and the people are important. I just talked to Haddon and he is quite sick with a heavy cold. Great start to their hols.

I collected 12 donated computers from a store room and have reconfigured seven of them with educational software and some games. As soon as I hear that the Fawcett Foundation will help with space in their shipping container, I will change the Australian power plugs to Indonesian plugs and start collecting boxes and shredded paper for packing.

The murder of Mrs Corryn Rayney and discovery of her body buried in a deep grave in Perth's Kings Park is still unsolved. Police discovered her grave by the most fortuitous set of circumstances. Her car was driven to Kings Park and up a track where the body was offloaded and buried. Fortunately, for the police, the murderer ran over a bollard in the track and damaged the gearbox causing an oil leak. When the car was found in a nearby suburb they noticed the oil trail and tracked it back to the grave. Unlucky killer! There are the usual armchair detectives pointing to her husband, her sister and probably the archbishop of Perth.
I reckon the whole thing will be solved within a week.

New project

A couple of days ago I was starting to feel lost in retirement and then all of a suddy, there is a posting on the Mac Users' Group for free computers. I decided to take them...about 12 plus a couple of laser printers. I will pick them up this evening and start cleaning them up and configuring them for Bali. It is long enough now to get over the bad time that Indonesian Customs gave us both entering and exiting Bali.

The difficulty with such an undertaking is getting the stuff to Bali for free. Garuda Airways will help with one or two computers at a time, but then we have the same problems with Customs when going through Denpasar airport. In reality the only way to do it is to talk the John Fawcett Foundation into giving me some space in one of their sea containers which regularly go to Bali. The Foundation has also had lots of problems with Customs and now ships directly to Surabaya where the Customs Department is more 'transparent'. It seems that they have a sort of computer system there whilst in Bali they do everything on paper. Once unloaded in Surabaya the container is trucked to Denpasar, Bali.

The John Fawcett Foundation has the use of a shipping container owned and paid for by Ross's Salvage, a company which buys Balinese manufactured furniture and ships it back to Western Australia. Good for the Foundation as they get to fill it with medical supplies on the upward journey.

Aches and Pains

We both have them today.

Kevin's are because he spread half a trailer load of compost (kindly donated by Dave next door) and also did some other work for a friend in South Fremantle which involved a lot of squatting and bending.

Mine are due to two things as well. Firstly a water aerobics class that was full on - and I have only been to one other since we got back from the US, so I am out of practice. Second was a mammogram. I got the letter yesterday that I was due for the checkup that happens every two years, rang to make an appointment and got in today. This is something that is better to get over and done with, rather than think about it.

The procedure was as horrible as usual. Though the radiographer did the best she could, there is no way to make it easy. I have a bruise just below my right shoulder where the edge of the frame dug in. However, if it leads to early detection of cancer or better still, provides reassurance that there is no problem, it is worth it. And we Australian women of a certain age are so lucky that the checkup is free.

Retirement

Lots of people have asked me about retirement...'what do you do?' I have never understood their concern as I have always been busy with various projects. In the last couple of days, however I find myself walking around the house trying to decide whether to watch TV, a DVD or go and buy something. Retirement has hit me and I must find a new project.

Today a lady I have worked with emailed me to let me know that a business contact has a large number of PCs to donate to a good cause. That company has a policy of removing the Hard Drive from the computer so that any data cannot be retrieved. A good friend teaches IT at a Senior College and I have passed the offer on to him.

I guess many people who use a computer do not know that even deleted data can be retrieved using simple software. That's why you see the cops collecting computers from suspects' houses. On Mac computers (and probably PCs) there is an option to empty the trash securely, so that the next lot of data overwrites the secure trashing. I would think that there is still a chance that bits and pieces of data are still left around the traps. Smart villains would almost certainly have a spare hard drive for any naughty stuff.

The 21st party on Saturday night at our neighbors' place went off without noise or beer cans on the lawn. We were rewarded (for what I do not know) with some birthday cake and a bottle of bubbly. I guess it is because we allowed guests to park in our driveway. I did mention that Ross, the 21 year old did visit all the neighbors in the street to advise them there was to be a party and there was only one couple who objected. They are the Cul-de-sac's Neighborhood Watch because they know something about every resident and are always looking out for undesirables. We don't mind them being watchdogs.

A 21st party

Our neighbors, Judy and Dave, have three kids. I have mentioned them before. They are excruciatingly nice! We are fortunate to have neighbors like them. One of them, the middle one, is having a 21st party tonight. He has warned the cul-de-sac that there is to be a gathering and we have suggested that the kids use our driveway for parking, leaving their own lawn for others.

Today our automatic garage door broke one of the cables. We have manually forced the door up and hope that our open garage doesn't attract villains. I will get new cables on Monday and fit them. Cul-de-sacs are fairly nice places to have a house. No passing hoons making black tyre-marks on the roadway . . . they are however, a problem for party parking.

I think tonight might be one where we drink a fair bit and sleep through the party noise. I reckon I can do that.

House hunt still on

Our daughter Helen's offer to buy was not accepted and she has decided to wait and see if the owners come back to her. I don't think they will as it is a very nice house in a newish suburb with what look like nice neighbors. I think they will stick with their initial sale price for a few weeks at least

She is agonising over shifting from Victoria Park which is a very trendy suburb with lots of pubs, restaurants and a 'village' feel to it to St Pauls estate which has the 'settle down' feel to it. There may be a bit of the 'settled' fear showing. She is going to look at more houses over the weekend. The current stock market and house finance scare may also have influenced her.

A couple of days ago I was offered a contract to write a course for the School of Isolated Education..Distance Ed. It sounds interesting, but I have been retired for 9 years and don't think I want to re-learn stuff that I have long forgotten. I will look at it when I get the details.

In a couple of weeks we; Helen, Martin, brother Graham and I are going to the Steely Dan concert at the Sandalford Vineyard. As usual, the main attraction comes on late in the evening.
I am getting a bit old for this stuff, but being a serious fan of the band I cannot miss the show. It is to be an outdoor concert and it is one that will go ahead regardless of the weather. Hope it doesn't rain.

Haddon and Margaret

Today I returned a borrowed exercise bike (unused) to Haddon and Margaret. We had a cup of tea and lots of discussion about worldly matters and when I was about to leave I was given some seeds and seedlings of various plants. There were some seeds from a very nice red flowering Canna, a Cape Gooseberry plant and some seedlings from some sort of 'spider' plant. As you can see I am not an exotic plant gardener. They have a great back yard...very Baliesque with a Bali style retreat. They are into plants, but I am into edible plants...silver beet (Swiss chard) is my fav. and of course, tomatoes.

I also love Cape Gooseberries (Phisallis peruvian) and have had much success growing them in the past. They are a weed and thrive on neglect. It would seem that cultivation is the last thing that they need. The other common name for them is Chinese Lantern Fruit because the fruit is encased in a lantern-type shell. They are almost bitter to the taste and make wonderful tarts covered with ice cream and cream. That taste makes them safe from nasty insects. There is a trade-off there! I have always thought that they were named Cape Gooseberries because they came from South Africa like lots of our plants, but no. Google (Aus) tells me that the lantern shell around the fruit is a 'cape'. Is Google ever wrong?

When we lived and worked in Papua New Guinea I took Cape Gooseberry seeds back and planted them. They grew, but the fruit never ripened. One thing I did take back that was a success was silver beet seeds and the students were able to grow enough silver beet to offset their school fees. It seems that people did not know that Australian vegetables like silver beet would grow in the tropics. My boarding school students made good money selling their produce to Australians starved for familiar vegetables.

short one today

This evening I shared a few beers with brother Graham. His house is about ten kilometers from our place and Joan had said that she would drive up and collect me in the intoxicated state before meal time. And that she did! We watched a few TV programmes...almost all of them of American origins....why do they clap their own achievements? That is something that is not Australian. Traditionally, in Australia, winners wait for others to applaud; not clap their own achievements.

As I said; a short and intoxicated post!

Tuesday and a confession

Our daughter Helen has overnight thought long and hard about buying a house and this evening she has made the decision...buy!! One of the worrying things for her is her employment tenure. If she doesn't get tenure at her current school she may not be able to meet her mortgage repayments of $350.00 a week. She is confident that she will be teaching next year and even if things went badly she has two qualifications to fall back on . . . Education and Business. Even without tenure there are plenty of relief jobs in teaching and those jobs don't require lesson preparation. The teacher being relieved is obliged to provide adequate lesson planning.

We are about to have Aussie tucker for dinner tonight...steak, carrots, silver beet and spuds. As preparations commenced it was found that we had no potatoes. Kev volunteered to nip over to IGA in Coolbellup to buy some. Here comes the confession part; I went to the store in Ugg Boots! I don't normally venture outdoors in Uggies. It is, however, OK to shop in Ugg Boots in Coolbellup... popular footware over there! Sorry Had and Marg.

A few more US trip pics

Helen's house hunt

Our daughter Helen teaches at Banksia Park PS in Leeming. She loves it there and is hoping to retain her position there next year. The Western Australian Education Department has suddenly become Mr Nice Guy about postings because of a teacher shortage. If she works two full years at a school, then she will be granted permanent status and remain at that school. The Principal has told her that they want her there next year and it looks like she will get tenure.

On Sunday we looked at a house for sale quite close to our place. Helen is ready to move from her two bedroom unit in East Victoria Park into a house and today she went to look at the house we had seen over the weekend. She is sold on it. Just 7 years old in a nice area with nothing to do, she will probably make an offer tomorrow. She owns her unit and should be able to sell it for around $290,000. This house is on the market for $469,000, but the agent tells us that $465,000 will probably get it. Then of course the state government wants its slice of the action with stamp taxes probably in the $19,000 range. We will most likely help with that part of the purchase, if it goes through. Houses in this state are sold at a premium with timber/weatherboard places selling for more than this double brick 3X2. Hope she makes the leap.

A prediction

I have a friend (his blog has a link on this page) named Paul, who is an avid...possibly one-eyed, Fremantle Dockers supporter. Today the Dockers had a big win in the AFL and surprisingly there was no nasty play.

My prediction is that Paul will write of the Dockers' win in glowing terms: and so he should, they had a great win. I am happy about their win also. I am also happy about the Eagles winning as well this weekend. You see, I am a parochial Western Australian and I want both teams to win. When they play each other (in a 'Derby') I don't barrack for either side...I'm a winner whatever happens.

Check out Paul's blog tomorrow from this page.

US trip photo sampler

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PC problem

Yesterday I collected a Windows PC from my son. He had borrowed it from a friend and on returning it it would not get up and go. 'Fix it', he was told, so Dad decided to have a look inside.

I know the inside of Macs well and PCs are basically the same, so I opened the case and had a fiddle with connections etc to no avail. The computer would start and the hard drive would run, but no screen. I decided to cart it over to a PC/Mac Guru's house to see what he thought. As soon as he set it up it ran fine. Damn! On restart it didn't want to show a screen. Eventually he went to Goggle and found the codes for the start-up beeps that were sounding....there it was; three beeps indicated that the RAM was either faulty or needed re-seating in its slots. Fixed!

Also yesterday, brother Graham and I did a little bit of house hunting for our daughter. She wants to upgrade from her two-bedroom unit to a house. The bank has set a limit on the amount she can borrow and we were looking at places around the $420,000+ price. Not much at that price in a reasonable suburb. We did see a house in the suburb of Parkwood, but the opening time was later in the day so didn't get to look inside. Parkwood is not considered to be a great suburb and this house is opposite a park and the last dwelling in the street adjacent to bushland.....ideal for villains to jump the fence at night. Parkland can also gather drinkers and youths on weekends. The older I get, the less democracy I wish to afford youth.

We might go back today and take another look.

Elephants

I am a bit elephant's trunk at the moment...it is, after all, Friday.

The email I sent to the manufacturers of the carving machine replied advising me that they do not ship to, or support their machine in Australia. There is a woodworkers' expo at the Showgrounds over the weekend and I will go and see if someone has imported one of the CompuCarver machines and has it on show. The entry fee is a bit steep at $17 for oldies...guess it is worth it?

Today I drove to Banksia Park Primary School to swap cars with my daughter to try and solve a problem with her car. Her car was 'missing' under load and I guessed it might be spark plug leads. I don't have a good multimeter and so I drove her car out to cousin Ted's place in Willetton where we tested the spark plug leads and found that one lead was dead. I bought a new set of leads and all is well. She (our daughter) is off to Wedge Island for the weekend with a newly acquired boyfriend. She rang just before she was due to be picked up for her weekend and left details of the new beau. There was a little apprehension about spending a weekend with someone she didn't really know too well. Smart gal!

I will talk with our son tomorrow and see if he is ready to start looking for a job. Yesterday I went and looked at a car for sale in Willetton. It is a 1987 Corona with a lot of kilometers on the clock but not in bad condition. They want $900 dollars ONO which means $750 I reckon. Our son has an appalling track record of car maintenance. Almost all of the cars we have bought him have cost us double the purchase price in repairs and maintenance because he neglects his vehicles.

CompuCarve

Each time we visit the U.S. we usually see something that Kev thinks would be a 'goer' here. It sounds like we visit every year; in fact we have been there only three times. This trip I didn't see any new-fangled machines or schemes that would go well here. However just today I received a newsletter from Sears (I don't know how I subscribed to the Sears newsletter?) featuring a wonderful computer-controlled wood carving machine at a price of US$1800. See it here.

This machine could be just the thing for our son to start a home business producing detailed carved plaques and nameplates for houses and farms etc. From the promotional video and the many postings of internet forums for the machine, it seems to be a great little machine.

I have emailed the firm asking if they market their machine in Aus or even ship to Australia. Two thousand bucks is not a lot to spend to get our son into something that he, with my assistance, could run. There again, I have had lots of schemes that I have not followed through on.

Photography

We have now downloaded all the photos we took, though I think there may be some on the CDs that Kevin made at Jennifer's which haven't been loaded on to our computer. The question now is what to do with them all.

Kevin spent some time today with Photoshop and the photos that he took at the Barn Bash the night before the wedding. The lighting was really bad, but he has managed to adjust most of them so that the people are not only recognisable but also look good. He is planning to make some CDs of this and also the wedding to send to the bridal couple and their parents.

But what to do with all the others? We might put them on Flikr. Or, since I wrote a pen and paper diary every night, I may set up another blog and chronicle the whole US adventure with heaps of photos.

By the end of the trip my three year old digital camera was starting to play up. It no longer turned itself off, and I was getting rather too many pics of pavements and blank walls. I had been frustrated often as well with the length of time it took to process each photo. We timed it at 10 seconds this morning - no wonder I lost lots of photo opportunities.

We got a Hardly Normal (Harvey Norman) catalogue in the junk mail over the weekend which advertised some cheap digital cameras, so we went today to look at them. Ten minutes later we had bought a little Nikon CoolPix half the weight of the Canon with a much bigger viewing screen, 6 megapixels, digital and optical zoom and a host of features that will take me months to get really familiar with, all for less than $200. And the processing time is less than 2 seconds!

It went with us today to a gathering to celebrate the 71st birthday of a friend. We haven't yet downloaded the pictures to be able to comment on quality, but watch this space.

Home sweet home

It doesn't matter how good the trip was ... there is no place like home.

We were met at the Perth International Airport by my brother Graham and driven home. Had a few drinks with him and slept in our own bed with an electric blanket smoothing out the cool weather. The last two days have been like summer, but whilst we were away there has been heavy rainfall and more is promised this week. That should do some good for the water supply dams.

Yesterday I had a phone call from an African chap I had helped out by giving him an iMac and a multi-purpose printer/scanner/copier. I at first thought that something had gone wrong with either the computer or the printer, but he merely rang to thank me again for setting him up with a computer. Nice! He along with his wife and child have been in W.A. for about a year. The child, a girl, attends school and the parents are both employed as carers for disabled children at Rocky Bay Village.

Joan says: I have finished the washing - the ironing is still waiting - and have adjusted to being home again. I do like our own bed and bathroom, and especially the plumbing. Every motel we stayed in while we were away seemed to have a different system for toilet flushing and showers. It's just as well Kevin is mechanically minded. I always made him take the first shower!

Singapore Airport 5.20am

We have just had a 16 hour flight to Singapore from LAX. There was hardly a bump and Joan read and slept for most of it. I didn't manage any sleep as I had a bad pain in my right leg. Even though we are here for another four hours and the flight to Perth is five hours, we feel that we are just about home.

Yesterday we left the motel at Pasadena and made a less stressful trip into LA proper. That last motel was by far the best we had used and was only $15 a day more than the cheapest one. Most of the motels were poorly maintained with plumbing or electrical problems. The Indians (of the sub continent variety) seem to have captured the cheap motel business.

The day before, we had a passing look at a couple of LA attractions as we drove past them on the bus tour and decided to spend a few hours before heading to the airport taking a close look at them. The first was the Petersen Motor Museum and this is a wonderfully presented museum. Best we have seen! Next was on to the Tar Pit. This museum and actual dig was amazing! Right in the centre of LA is this ongoing excavation of thousands of fossils of animals, birds and insects trapped in the tar floating on the water, some over 40,000 years ago. There are complete skeletons of Mammoths, wild horses, Sabre Tooth Cats (they are cats not tigers) dogs, wolves, birds and insects. There was a continuing dig which the public could watch. A paleontologist's dream: to work in the city!

We returned the hire car and caught a free shuttle to the airport. LAX is chaotic. Nuff said. At the Singapore counter we were told that we were separated, Joan did a bit of grumbling and they found us two seats in the 'emergency' seating area. They are the ones near the emergency exits and we got a lesson on how to open the door in any emergency. As it happened I didn't get the opportunity.

Downtown/Intown LA

Yesterday we ventured into LA to do the 'Grand Tour'. The tour took all day and started off with a very nerve wracking high speed drive in 3 - 4 lane traffic at 60-70 MPH since we had to be at the pickup point at Grauman's Chinese Theatre at 9am. Our Sat Nav device is pretty good but under these curcumstances travelling in a mass of metal it only warns us what to do at .8 of a mile. So a suggesting of 'keep right' when in a left lane causes panic and sweaty hands. Fortunately LA drivers are used to cars changing lanes at high speed...I'm not! The voice on the satnav caused the only amusement on that trip by pronouncing left as 'bleft'.

Once parked in a huge multi-level parking area we joined the tour. Apply later for details.

The tour took us to the highlights of LA. We didn't intend to take the second tour of the Celebs' houses, but somehow we paid for it so went along for the ride. That tour finished at 6pm and that put us back in peak hour traffic again. The navsat chucked a hissy fit and wouldn't talk to us.....probably because it heard me laughing at the mis-pronunciation of left. So we headed off in the direction that Joan thought was right and after about 20 minutes it started to talk to us again. And we were on the right road.

Today we book out of the motel and head back into LA to look at a couple of things we thought needed extra time at. One is the 'Tar Pit', a large pit of tar in the middle of LA. Since the 1940s archeologists have found many prehistoric animals including mammoths. Then we drop off the car and get on the plane to Singapore at 9.15pm. We should be landing in Perth about 3pm Friday, having lost one day.