Some festive season cheer!

Here is a big merry Christmas and happy new year to you all! Asia and I have returned from New Zealand, where we went to my parents place for Christmas, feeling refreshed (although not yesterday after catching the 6:15am red-eye back to Melb) and ready for the new year in Melbourne. It was great to catch up with family and friends and put on about six kg eating all the great food on offer.

I am quite excited about the festivities tonight, it will be my first new years eve outside of New Zealand and Melbourne looks set to hum tonight. We haven't decided definitively where we will go for new years, although friends of friends of ours are having a BBQ at their place in Williamstown, which looks like the best bet at this stage. It is a 'wig party' so my mission for today is to go and find Asia and me a wig for the evening. Okay, well I won't write too much more, here are some pics from NZ over the last nine days...

Christmas Day...

A day trip to Cheviot...

seven days until christmas and my true love gave to me...

One crazy vege garden! Check out the latest pic of our vege garden.
The courgettes and tomatoes are going ballistic and the cos lettuce is not far behind! The saddest thing is that we are leaving for NZ on Thursday and it is unlikely that they will get any water while we are away :(, meaning that we will probably get back in Melb to a brown shrivelled garden - and just when they were nearly ready to eat. Oh well, it was fun to watch them grow anyway. Melbourne goes on to stage 3 water restrictions on new years day which means that gardens can only be watered twice a week anyway. That probably wouldn't have been enough for our thirsty tomatoes, so they would likely have died anyway.

Okay, well I'm really looking forward to getting back to NZ on Thursday and starting all the Christmas merriment - food, beer, food, beer, wine, food, beer, beer you know how it goes :). This will probably be my last post before Christmas, so here goes a big merry Christmas to all the faithful out there. I hope you all get as stuffed and full of food as I intend to get.

lucky number 13

Today is December 13 and I just realised that today is exactly 13 years since I busted up my arm real bad on a nasty driveway back in my hometown Christchurch, NZ. I was 12 then and spent a couple days in hospital after getting my arm bolted back together by this fantastic surgeon. Also, big ups to my Mum whose famous quote in the car on the way to the doctor's surgery I will never forget:

"Brad, it will be okay it might not even be broken."

This was despite the fact that everyone, me included, could quite clearly see the bone sticking right threw my skin. I'm sure it was just meant to try and reassure me and calm me down and the funny thing was that it kinda worked. Anyway, I ended up spending that summer with a cool black fibre glass cast and living just over a year with a semi-robotic arm half filled with titanium. I still have some very mean scars left over from the whole ordeal, ask me and I'll show you someday.

What's been happening in Melbourne town? Well, it's been crazy business hot - 38 on Saturday followed up by a rather balmy 42 on Sunday. We went down to St Kilda beach on Saturday and had our first swim for the summer (well the southern hemisphere summer anyway). The beach at St Kilda gets a bad rap from Melburnians, but I think it is severly under-rated. I made the comment to one of our friends, that if this was NZ there would be hundreds of people down at the beach and in the water, as it stood there were only a couple dozen and I think that was more just to get away from the relentless heat.

On a more somber note, it would be wrong not to make a mention of the bushfires that are currently gripping this fine state. We woke on Saturday morning to the acrid smell of smoke and discovered that the city was suffocating under a blanket of smoke from the fires that were raging more than 150 km away. The ES were batting away the 000 calls and smoke alarms were blaring away - quite a drama really and just highlighting the fact that what we all really need is a damn good dumping of rain. The winds were more favourable on Sunday through Tuesday but as the wind turned today we were again in the grip of the smoke. Anyone know a good rain dance?

A new theme for a new season

Some of you may have noticed that I have changed my theme. It has moved from the rather dreary black onto something a little more cheerful and summery, and thereby somewhat reflecting my mood about being back in the southern hemisphere summer.

There is much debate about when summer actually begins (in my mind at least anyway). Some say that it begins at the start of December, while others say that it actually begins at the summer solstice i.e the longest day. From a strictly intuitive point of view I always thought that summer should be distributed equally either side of the summer solstice, therefore beginning sometime in November and ending sometime in February. My theory was - shouldn't it be the hottest when the day is at it's longest and the temperature decline roughly symmetrically around that date? Well, if we lived in a simple world this might have been the case and indeed as it turns out if it wasn't for that tricky old bugger the ocean, it would be like that. You see apparently the ocean has a delaying effect on the seasons so that it takes sometime after the ocean has absorbed the heat from the summer sun until the peak temperatures are reached. This effect is obviously most pronounced in island states like NZ and rather weak in central continental areas such as the middle of Europe or Canada. So the peak summer temperatures are more of a combination or when the sun is giving the most energy to the land and when the ocean has heated up enough so that it starts warming the surrounding air.

So the answer to when summer begins is not such a simple one, and I think depends on where you live. For that reason I am going to stick with summer beginning at the start of December and ending at the end of Feb. Too easy...

Gee, sorry for that rant. You might have gathered that I am sitting alone at home on a Friday night in the gathering gloom halfway through a six pack and having just downed a large pizza, doing what is effectively talking to myself. Asia is having a girls night out - I think it's in retribution for all those crazy insults in my last post, Ha!

Christmas is nearly here! Again! Man, what a crazy hectic year it has been. I'm looking forward to having a decent break at Christmas and catching up with friends and family...bring it on!

Okay well, I'm over talking to myself, on with other more important things, like beer for instance.

To bait or not

Slugs, the scourge of the modern gardener. Asia is annoyed at me because we managed to inherit some perfectly good slug bait - although it is expired the slugs I think still don't know any better, and I decided to lay it out to protect our beautiful lettuces. Guess what? Now we don't have lettuces that are half chewed to bits - the marigolds had their chance, they were tried tested and failed, on with the chemicals I say...

Asia is sitting over my shoulder right now, saying things like what about the dogs and those Marigolds, well well hmmph they never had a chance. Dogs I say, we don't even have a damn dog - it's straight to the pyschiatric unit with you girl. Ha! Seriously it's all good fun and the lettuces were never really chewed that much anyway, those slugs well they just bug me...

Now, the rantings are really getting serious - "We do have a dog, I have a lead!!! I want to write in your blog, these people will think I'm crazy... " Oh dear, well I'll let you make up your own mind about that one...

Melbourne, four seasons in one day it's true. I mean nothing like Wellington, with forty gails, seven hail showers, a removed roof and a sucken ferry in one day, but four seasons nonetheless. Yesterday it was 37 degrees or something and today just scratching to get over 20 with a biting southerly.

Actually I'm not even supposed to be here at the moment. Bit of a botch up at work (by the client) meant that I had nowhere to stay in Karratha and had to come back from Perth three days early, cap in hand and nothing to show for it. I'm not complaining, it's nice to be back in Melb with my crazy girlfriend.

ciao

On a more positive note

Okay well after a bit of a rant in my last post, apologies for that because I do get carried away in my own thoughts sometimes, I decided to add a more friendly post to my blog. Also, it's been far too long since I last posted. The reason for this, pretty much same as always - combination of being far too busy to write semi-creatively and a case of mostly just wanting to sit back and have a couple of beers/wines rather than spend 20 mins in front of a computer screen.

So time for a quick update...

I have been pretty flat tack at work - many long hours in preparation for giving training. Firstly for software that I know well and have been using for years and secondly for software that I've only just learned - this was pretty scary. With a combination of smooth talking and some long hours of crash learning I managed to pull it off and the client was reasonably happy - although there were some nervous moments when I crashed their server with one of our known bugs.

Asia has been busy hunting for a job but it's been pretty hard going and now that it is getting close to Christmas I think it might be harder still. Our stuff from NZ finally arrived during the week, only about six weeks after we were expecting it. Nice to have it back now though, felt a bit like xmas with all our forgotten clothing arriving. Finally now I can start wearing a new pair of undies each day - gets a bit hard streching each pair to last for three days, ha :).

The vege garden is going great guns, nearly everyone who comes to visit, says wow! your veges are going great, you must have green fingers. Well, I can tell you that it is not me, the man who can barely tell a turnip from a potato, rather Asia's very green thumbs and skills that are responsible for the green bonansa in our backyard. Hopefully in a couple of weeks we will be able to sample some of the produce, the lettuce in particular is starting to look very tasty.