Katie and Clayton

I haven’t made a cake for quite a while, in fact I’ve only made one since we arrived in Australia in 2005. There are a number of reasons (excuses) for my lack of enthusiasm:

- the places we have stayed in have had pretty ordinary kitchens;

- I wasn’t sure where to buy the ingredients; and

- when we packed, I didn’t think to pack all my tins and things.

So, I haven’t resolved any of my issues (other than the kitchen), but decided none the less to get back into it after getting the opportunity to make an engagement cake.  While I haven’t done a cake for a while, it did remind me how much I enjoy it.  Spurred on, I have decided to create (or ask Clayton to create for me) a section within the site so you can all have a look at my creations to date.  They may not be perfect, but they all tell a story.  So once it is up and running, I hope you enjoy…

So I got an email from a good friend a couple of months back, saying that she was going to be in the land down under for a bit on a trip.  Never been to the Nation’s Capital, so was keen for a visit.  She’s American, but I get along with her because she has a passport, so she realises that there are places OUTSIDE of the US of A which are worth seeing.  Makes her alright in my books.

Easter Monday had us driving down to pick up Caz and her sister from the Jolimont Centre in Canberra, where all the interstate buses end up.  Except Caz’s sister was crook, so wasn’t able to make the Canberra leg.

The bus arrived late afternoon, so we went up to Telstra (Black Mountain) Tower to view Canberra.  Scoring this one off my “Places to take people” list.  It’s a good view of Canberra, but poorly placed - with Canberra being a planned city, the view from Black Mountain doesn’t do it justice.

What does do it justice is Mount Ainslie.  The view looks over the War Memorial, down ANZAC paraid, to Old Parliament House and New Parliament House.  If you stick that view into a photo with a born and bred Canberra boy and a LA based Lass you get this:

We spent the day going through the War Memorial, Blundell’s Cottage, the Carilion, Old Parly House, New Parly House, National Museum and KoKo Black (hot chocolate fix was apparently a neccessity.  Not for me - sweet enough as it stands…).  All good.

What can I say?  To catch up with close friends that you haven’t seen for a long time?  Fantastic.

‘Nuff said.

Subtitle:  My favourite American.  Actually, let’s call you “one of my top five Americans”.

Actually, I might extend that to top ten.  But you’re still tops, don’t get me wrong…

An “American” (who will remain nameless) remided me that I hadn’t updated the site for a while, which I can’t really argue with that.  So this is a very short, and public, post, to quiet your criticisms and hopefully give you more incentive to come and visit now that you have a “warm fuzzy” from having a post dedicated entirely to you.

Yay…

Safe travels, can’t wait to see ya…

Ok. So things have moved on slightly since the last post. Funny how that happens when you don’t do anything to the site for six months…

So the move happened. The advice for anyone considering moving is – don’t underestimate the time that it takes to pack a two bedroom apartment into a van or else you too may find yourself unpacking by the light of the local restaurant (until they close and leave you completely in the dark!).

The new apartment was smaller than we remembered. We’re taking an interesting spin on life, in that while we keep acculuating more and more stuff, we keep moving into smaller and smaller places. Our latest would result to a severe concussion to a cat on the swing. But location is good, a stone’s throw from restaurants and shops.

Once settled in to the apartment, it began to shrink, which spurred us on to give up our weekends, and join the trail of people tramping through houses in the hope that we may land our ideal property, in a nice location at the right price. Once we had given up about 8 weekends (although it felt longer), we began to wonder about the sanity of some people - for example: Why would you spend money renovating your ensuite and not put a shower in it? Or if you only had one bathroom, why would you put it in the centre of the house with no windows? And are the only ones who think you shouldn’t have more bathrooms than you do bedrooms?

Eventually though, we found a fantastic house and decided to participate in our first auction. A stressful experience for Katie, and Clayton (who was the one holding the number and therefore responsible for the bidding) was a nervous wreck by the end. We had read all the advice on the internet, spoken to everyone we know who had bought a house, and watched a couple of auctions. The advice was great – it basically said that as soon as someone bid, immediatly raise it without hesitation. This will scare them into thinking that YOU ARE SERIOUS, and not to be messed with. The only problem was that the our main competition had obviously read the same advice and was raising at an alarming rate. Clayton therefore ditched the advice and took an alternate tack - let them think they’ve got it and at “Going for the third and final time…”, raise his hand and take the wind out of their sails. This course of action began to annoy Katie, although not as much as the opposition who were gradually beaten into submission. So we will very shortly be picking up the keys to our very own digs!

We can’t wait for the move – to be able to unpack all of our belongings will be fantastic, and finally we will have room for guests. So, now you have no excuse not to visit us in sunny Canberra!

So tonight we say goodbye to Woollahra. Well, actually that’s not quite true, but it is the night we say goodbye to having a functioning internet connection in Sydney, given that the PC is about to be packed away.

So… how long would you think it would take to connect a phone line and broadband into a brand new building?

It’s not a riddle. It’s just what we spent half the day doing. Apparently the answer is 10-15 working days. My best man Gordon (I hate having to call him that) has a phrase that he uses in software development to describe behind-the-scenes processing. It’s “jiggery-pokery”. Used in context: “So a form comes up asking for the users first name, last name, and year of birth, they click on Ok, then after a bit of jiggery-pokery it informs them that their whether or not there spouse is sleeping with the milkman and if they need to get new fire insurance.”

Not being in telecommunications, I’m not sure exactly what jiggery-pokery is required to connect a phone and broadband, but I would have thought it couldn’t take more than a few hours of jiggering and/or pokering to get things up and running. 10-15 working days seems excessive, although one lot we contacted said up to four weeks, at which point they may discover that no, the infrastructure isn’t actually there for them to connect me.

Puts an interesting spin on the term “service provider”. I have an “internet service provider”. They should change the term to “dude”. I have an internet “dude”. Then you’d know where you stand. After all, “service provider” insinuates that your service will be provided, whereas “dude” insinuates nothing more than “Your call is important to me, dude. I like, love you and all, but, y’know, chillax dude. What’s the rush? It’s not like you, like, need to talk to people or email things like CVs… I’ll get to your connection, just got to punch a few cones first… where are the tim tams?”

Rant ended. Normal programming will be resuming once we are reconnected.

As I’m currently a man of leisure (1 more week to go!), I thought I’d do something fun. Or, at least, fun for me (being a bit of a tech geek).

I had a number of recipes on my old site which was given to me as a gift by some mates on my 26th birthday (the site, not the recipes…). I had written them up in static HTML - SO last millenium.

Well, yesterday, I created a new WP blog and migrated them all over. Found a nice theme to use as a base, then customised it. I’m particularly pleased with the index of recipes on the sidebar - a PHP guru could probably knock together an alphabetised list of post in a few seconds, but I’m not one, so I was pretty chuffed to have got it to work.

The new recipes section can be viewed through the link at the top right of the blog, or here…

…hasn’t happened yet, but I figured that I’m in much better condition to write something before the event than I will be in after. We’re heading out to bowl a few frames at Strike Bowling in Darling Harbour, before heading to the Rocks for some food and bev. From there… who knows?

Going through the guide books for Tasmania, we discovered that there were caves to the South West of Hobart - and theses ones were advertised as having a Thermal Spa.   You can obviously imaging that I was keen to go.  So we headed off in the car to Hastings Caves and Thermal Spa.  The guide taking us arounf the caves was probably one of the more interesting and informative that I have seen (although he did come with a large whiff of garlic - which was slightly offputting!), and caves did not disappoint…

The thermal spa
Continue Reading »

I’m sure there is some health standard dictating the maximum amount of hoof that is allowed to be included in a sausage, but apparently it hasn’t reached Tasmania yet. Or at the very least, hasn’t reached Lemonthyme Lodge. Breakfast was NASTY!

So we settled for loads of toast, and then headed out for a walk. Lemonthyme Lodge is the largest log cabin in the Southern Hemisphere, which, on first viewing, is a pretty impressive claim to fame. However, I don’t know if I could name another log cabin in the Southern Hemisphere, so don’t really know how impressive it actually is. What I was impressed by though, was the fact that it generates its own power. There’s a waterway that flows through the property, and the Lodge has its own hydro-electric generator (which is only the size of a garden shed) which generates enough power to run the entire setup, with pretty much zero environmental impact. Nice.

This leg of the trip was all about getting up to Cradle Mountain. The information book in our room told us that Cradle Mountain was up above the cloud line, and normally only gets decent viewing conditions on an average of 32 days a year. We were incredibly lucky then, as the sky was crystal clear, and rewarded us with the following:


Continue Reading »

We woke fairly early today as there the day was going to cover a number of kilometres. The first point of call (given our location) was obviously “The Nut”. Having read in the travel books that there was a chairlift to get you to the top of this volcanic plug, I was fairly confident that it was going to be a nice easy walk.
Continue Reading »