Christopher’s ‘bucket list’

One of the items on Christopher’s ‘bucket list’ is to fly on the new A380 Airbus.

This will have to do for now.

We gave him this Revell model for his birthday last June and, at last, 6 months on, I have managed to finish assembling it. We used little bits and pieces of time over the months to work on it and it hasn’t turned out too badly. He is wrapped.

Now, to begin on the Boeing 747 he got for Christmas! Hopefully we can knock that job over in less than 6 months. Then the plan is for me to build a display cabinet with perspex sides and shelves to mount the models in such a way as to be clearly visible at wheelchair height.

I believe the Boeing 737 and the Bombardier Learjet are also on the model-making list for the future. sigh.

conspiracies and the art of water-tank maintenance

The water in one of our concrete rainwater tanks has been smelling bad for a few weeks now. Its colour wasn’t too bad – a little brown – but it was mainly the smell. We have a cartridge filter at the kitchen sink for drinking and cooking, but bathrooms and laundry just draw water directly from the tanks.

I’m pretty careful with our tanks, so I was pretty sure there were no dead animals in the water (one hears of snakes, frogs, mice, even a possum! rotting in household rainwater tanks), so I guessed it was just an inevitable build-up of sludge on the bottom of the tank and Tamara was right to suggest it was time for a clean.

We had the tank maintenance lady here today, vacuuming out the tank with a submersible pump. I watched the process while listening to the woman’s nonstop conspiracy theories. It seems whenever I couldn’t get her to talk about tank maintenance, she had to share one of her theories about what is wrong with the world – chemtrails (look it up – I’d never heard of this one); government cover-ups of health problems with crop spraying (why the government would want to cover that one up she couldn’t tell me);  secret fluoridisation of water supplies (Dr. Strangelove’s ‘precious bodily fluids’ came to mind); etc.

All very entertaining.

Anyway, you should have seen the thick, black fluid gushing out of the vacuum hose. Obviously, this tank has not been cleaned for a long time. The tank was full when she started and I measured the water level when she was finished. The vacuum cleaner pumped about 4,000 litres out, which is about 20%; but it was well worth it to know that all that grunge is now fertilising the garden.

Tomorrow, when it has settled a bit, I will run a bath from the newly suctioned tank and hopefully enjoy the sweet smelling water as I ponder conspiracy theories…

seashells by the seashore

Catherine has been collecting small seashells for years now and I always thought it was a shame that she had them hidden away in a plastic bag in her treasure box.

So I cobbled together some old bits and pieces of timber into a display frame, gave it a couple of licks of paint and asked her to arrange her favourites, then I super-glued them in place and will hang the finished display on the wall in her bedroom tomorrow.

Nice little holiday project.

bird call of the week (19th Dec 2009)

This week’s bird is the swamp pheasant (or Pheasant Coucal).

Apparently it belongs to the cuckoo family and is widespread wherever there is thick vegetation in eastern and northern Australia as well as PNG and East Timor. I love to hear its hollow, sad call echoing through the undergrowth.

Paul Kelly

I have just read Paul Kelly’s monumental works of Australian political history  The End of Certainty: The Story of the 1980s (1992) and The March of Patriots: The Struggle for Modern Australia (2009). I suppose Mungo McCallum can be forgiven when he describes Kelly’s works as “ponderous” given that they total some 1464 pages, and there is another volume yet to come!

Certainty chronicles the Hawke-Keating years and Patriots covers the Keating and Howard years up to 2001.

If you are at all interested in what has been going on in the corridors of Canberra throughout the 80s, 90s and 2000s, these books are a brilliant resource.

Oh, and having read those 1464 pages, I cannot tell whether Kelly would be likely to vote Labor or Liberal! 

bird call of the week (12th dec 2009)

I am still figuring out how to to upload microsoft powerpoint files to my blog.

I experimented with this a couple of weeks ago, but the sound clip would not play. It is now time to try again.

If this works, I will upload a ppt file weekly with a picture and an mp3 audio file of some of the birds we encounter in the forest around us here on our property on the Sunshine Coast.

Click on this one – Channel billed cuckoo. Open it with powerpoint. Double click the icon in the bottom corner to listen the sound. I love these birds. They sound so exotic and are amongst my all-time favourites.

all the president’s men

After years of ‘meaning to get around to it’, I have finally bought and read a second-hand copy of Carl Bernstein’s and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men, the detailed account, published in 1974, of their investigations into the Watergate scandals that brought down the corrupt administration of President Richard Nixon.

I couldn’t put it down.

There is an advantage to reading such books years (decades!) after they are written, because so much more knowledge has been gathered subsequently that the book is easier to appreciate  in a clearer historical context.

I remember watching the TV news as a 14 year old sometime in 1973 and hearing mum say to dad, “I’m having trouble following all this Watergate business.” So was I. No wonder! Almost 2 years of stories, all in bits and pieces at the time, covering dozens of names and incidents, with nobody really knowing how it all fit together until later.

I have a copy of Nixon’s Memoirs, having read them years ago, and it was helpful to read bits and pieces of the 2 books side by side.

After finishing the book this afternoon, I just had to re-watch Oliver Stone’s 1995 film,  Nixon, starring Anthony Hopkins. I also recently bought the dvd copy of the original Frost-Nixon interviews, broadcast in 1976 to an audience of some 400 million people.

When Tamara has read All the President’s Men, we will watch the movie of the same name together and I will enjoy once again watching Redford and Hoffman portraying the intrepid reporters in action.

a week at the beach

Just back from a week at the beach. All went well and we took the portable hoist with us for the first time so there was minimal lifting and straining – made a big difference.

17th wedding anniversay

Tamara and I ‘hid out’ yesterday after returning in the morning with the children from a week at the beach (not a bad week at all, actually – a few photos to follow)  to celebrate our 17th wedding anniversary – yep. 5th December 1992.

We had timed it so that Tamara’s parents were here for the weekend to look after the kids and the two of us were able to retreat to our Guesthouse for most of the weekend. They delivered us a lovely dinner as if we were fee-paying guests in a high-class B & B, and I hired a couple of old classic romantic movies for us to watch together (don’t laugh: ‘An Affair to Remember’ and ‘Casablanca’ . There was a nearby bushfire and I’m sure that was why I got some smoke got in my eyes!)

November 2009 rainfall

There was rain in our gauge here in the Sunshine Coast hinterland on 10 days in November totalling 50mm – a very dry month, following a very dry Winter/Spring. The median for November here is 104mm. Last November we had 327mm.

Spring total was 162mm (median: 232mm)