VISITORS ON THE WAY!!

Such beautiful weather. The birds are singing outside (actually the birds are corellas and considered pests but they sound much prettier than traffic noise would in the city), the sky is a deep blue, the sun is shining, the house is (phew) reasonably tidy.

Oh, and the beer fridge is overflowing.

It's going to be a fun weekend. We're going out to see Mt Hope and maybe show the visitors the full Murray. It really is mighty when it's like this. And I'm cranking up the outside wood pizza oven too. Very good news.

Hooray!!

Proven by science!

Today we proved conclusively that South Australia has the most delicious gingernuts, as voted by 6/9 of our testers. I didn't even know they varied by state until one of the many Queenslanders in the office told me. We designed a mostly-double-blind* testing protocol and ranked them from best to worst.

* It's hard to truly double blind this one when one of our testers is addicted to specially imported Queensland gingernuts..

Here are my tasting notes:

Qld - too soft, but a good level of gingeryness. Not a satisfying crunch. 3/10
NSW - hard. Really hard. Kinda too sweet. 5/10
Vic - Spicy. Not too sweet. Not as crunchy as NSW but still good. 7/10
SA - a good balance of hardness and spicyness. Not overly sweet. 8/10

ky is pronounced 'q' and means yellow belt :-)

Summer

Ella did a proper handstand tonight that went for a full 3 or 4 seconds!!! And she learnt how to do a full 360 flip on the monkey bars.

Man - I'm just astounded at how much of a difference all this sunlight has made - that there's suddenly so much light left after dinner that you just HAVE to go down the back and kick balls around and roll in the grass for a while. I feel like I've been indoors huddled around the fireplace for a million years and suddenly SUMMER!

(ok, spring time. But it's really nice here. You'd love it. You should come and visit.)

trying something just cos someone you like likes to do it

So dancing is a lot of fun, and it seems to be an important part of my life, the way basketball, tennis, climbing, skiing, doing a PhD and being in bands have all been. But when I dance, I dance with people I know from dancing. Only rarely can I dance with a friend, someone I already know. Elisabeth and Linda are two marvellous examples of this. So I was chatting with one of my favourite people in the world the other day, when, completely unprompted, I received the following shiny message:

I'll come dancing with you in melbourne, but you have to understand I do it under sufferance
[me: if you do it, you get massive brownie points!]
you can make me do it but you can't make me enjoy it. ok you can make me enjoy but you can't make me want to enjoy it. ok, you can make me want to enjoy it but i'd find it weird.

Man, I feel so loved! This totally made my day! The only sad part is that I want my other favourite person to say the same thing...

I'M GOING TO THE SNOW TOMORROW!!!!!!

http://www.mtbuller.com.au/Winter/Snow-Report/Snowcams


Spending two nights on Mt Buller with my parents and the kids to do some sight-seeing, snow-creature construction, tobogganing and obviously snowball flinging. I haven't been skiing for about 12 years so I'm hoping to fit in at least a half-day somewhere. I'm so excited.

And then - next week - Anna and Sacha* and Steph and Gustav are coming to visit to do some 4WDing and canoeing and drinking in the spa.

And then - week after - we're taking the kids on their first plane ride up to the Gold Coast to do some theme parking.

And then - week after - we're going to stay at Chris and Lauren's place up in Ipswich to do some sight-seeing and gossiping and drinking.

* excused for reasons of having housewarmings.

Oh my god I'm going to the snow tomorrow I have to pack!

5k to 10k

Hard to believe it was only 4 months ago that I shared my joy at making it to 5k. Today I went out and ran 10k non-stop... well.. probably more like 11, I wasn't measuring it exactly. Got some great tunes from the freeway to 10k and the motion traxx podcasts, and they got me to 10k without too much trouble!

Now that I work in the city, I've joined the army of people who run around the domain/opera house area at lunch. I think most tourists who are out there assume that there's some event on, but it's just like that every day.

Now I feel like I should have registered for the city to surf this weekend - it's only 14km. Oh well.

look ma no hands

wow, this one totally snuck up on me. When I started riding a bike here in Reykjavík, I started trying to ride no-hands, like we always used to do when we were kids. So that's about 2 years ago I started trying, and it was really hard. But, riding home from the swimming pool the other night at about 3am (night-swimming, yay!), I realised I was talking to my friend and I was just riding along no handed, without even realising it! Woo-hoo! How great when a long-term project like that finally bears fruit! :D

Woot!

This week I've shot a shot gun, driven a 4wd over some insane obstacles, gone out into the forest in Rob's Land-rover to use my chain-saw to get a couple of trailer loads of wood (there was SO much mud), played poker and did some plumbing on the sprinkler system.

The country can be fun! Expecially when the slabs of Becks cost $49.

(BTW, that's the new, hipper, country way to spell. There's a guy here who says 'arkse' every time he means 'ask'. Isn't it endearing?)

It's the return of Sink Cat

Pepper-sink-cat circa February 2010:

Pepper-sink-cat cat circa May 2010:

Found things!!

Ooh! Ooh!

I found my pocket knife! Once again I can smugly walk about with a pair of blades, some little but remarkably effective pliers/wire cutters, an assortment of screwdrivers, a can opener and, importantly, a bottle opener on my person, ready to whip out and solve people's problem that they didn't know they had and lecture them that a pocket knife is "usually the WORST tool for the job, but you can normally get something done well enough while everyone else is still looking for the right tool. Ah! There you go! Finished. You can put those scissors away, we didn't need them after all!"

Hooray!

Oh! And I found the camera! Which means that I can take a video of Ella on the climbing wall - she's actually really very good at it when she doesn't know that she can't do it. Because she's so little just about every hold is a clear 1 or inches out of her reach and she has to stretch from full tip-toes to the very tips of her fingers then quickly transfer her weight. It just reinforces for me that kids are natural climbers: they do little tricks and moves that grown adults take months to learn.

Oh! And yes! The camera was with my work phone - for which I have been in deep shit for not being able to find this week. I'm very happy to have found that.

new music!

It's always a bit of a wild punt buying cds at a gig where there's just some bloke bashing away on a guitar, and his cd is 'with a full band'... This gig I was at last night started out with 3 people in the audience - me, my friend who was also support, and his housemate, and finished with just over a dozen people in the room (which we filled out pretty nicely - it's about the smallest venue I've ever seen!). Anyhow, I think this is my new favourite cd! I thought it'd be more Darren Hanlon-y, but it's kind of more Man Bites God-y - TOTALLY right up my alley! But in Icelandic, of course :D Yeah, and I haven't yet worked out a) what the guy's name is, b) what the band's name is, nor c) what the cd is called. Nor does the intermanet/iTunes know - I'm so edgy, vikings keep falling off me!

Couch to 5k

So I've been doing the "couch to 5k" programme. It's supposed to be a 9 week thing, but I've taken about 6 months on it what with sickness and injury and laziness.

Anyway.. I ran exactly 5km without stopping for the first time yesterday! I was pretty stuffed by the end, but my legs were still moving. Totally stoked that I got that far - this is the most fit I've been in my life.

Being the gadgeteer that I am, I recorded the track (incl. warmup/cooldown walks)

Next target: 10km.

(edit: make the link link..)

New job!

I got a concrete offer today on a new job. I'm really keen on it. I'll be working in the city for a change, and it'll be with some people I know are awesome. Oh, and for more money. Start there May 10th. Can't wait!

I have an awesome

climbing wall in my garage.

And this is just the start.

I just went for a walk in bare feet through the grass around my house. It needs mowing and it's thick and lush. It was like walking on air, cool massaging air.

Soooooooo niiiiiiiiice.

hiiiiiiiiiiiYA!!

I SPARRED tonight at karate!! It was so much fun!

Ok ok I spent the first half having the other guy (a white belt) (ie, the lowest) (actually, I'm the lowest because I don't even have a white belt yet) (next week) make mincemeat out of me and the second having a 15 yr old girl (in a purple belt ok) make mincemeat out of me. But it was very exciting.

I'm taking lessons with Tali out at Koondrook. 6pm Wednesdays. 5 bucks. Doug, a 65 yr old ex cop who showed me the bullet wound in his knee and where the bullet went in and came out. The men there have been really good for Tali.

(Oh, and I won at tennis last night - 4-6 6-5 6-2. I thought they had us at 1-3 in the 2nd, but we brought it back and won the tie-breaker, then shot out to 5-1 in the last set. It's so beautiful up here in the evenings playing tennis - the courts are set in a huge natural ampitheatre with tall trees on all sides of the footy ground and you can see an always-orange sunset light up the whole sky. Corallas (sp?) abound. They're pests, but you sure know you're in the country when a huge shrieking mob of the bastards come shooting past in the evening sunsetlight.)

Wish you were here.

Mountain Conquering On A Lazy Sunday Afternoon.

Tali and Ella and myself climbed to the top of this (note, entire photo appears in google reader. Website displays partial image.) today. Ok, we went around the back up the gully, but it was pretty cool. We saw a rotted wallaby carcass and some wicked looking gold and red spiders. Tali really liked climbing up and Tali-sized boulders he found, and both he and Ella could be heard to shout "On to the next challenge!!" as they clambered upwards through the boulder-strewn and overgrown bush.



We checked out this 22m grade 13 (it is visible as the left leading crack on the towards the right on the top image) and it looks really quite doable. Apparently there are rappel chains at the top which is good because I had a go at clambering up what I thought might have been the descent from these climbs but ended up being a scarily suddenly exposed handholdless ledge out in the middle of nowhere and I was staring down at my kids thinking "Uh oh, I'd really better not die out here because they'd never make it back and no-one knows we're up here time to go down now."

I think this may be top-ropable, or at least, we could climb this to start with then set up some top ropes then rap off att he end of the day.





Climbing anyone?

more iceland

Luce finally got his manager's manager's manager to okay his spending the rest of the year in Iceland, so that's a huge relief. Apparently his manager had to go and argue his case for him a bit - yay for managers who are on the side of good!!

And, while neither of our embryos took, and we've got the whole process to look forward to when we get back next year, on the bright side we don't need to worry about obstetrics and the like in Icleand, or whether I can fly while preggers. Aaaand we don't need to worry about whether being pregnant will affect my snowboarding in January on the way home... So, more living life now, which I am very focussed on enjoying.

Oh, and I learnt heaps in the 6 day stats course I just did, where the learning was finding out the maths and reasoning behind the stats tests I already know how to do, which means I feel very confident now in my statistical analyses, and am unlikely to forget it very soon. Yay again!

playing mario kart with the kids on my lunch break gives me a happy.

Yep, she's still cute

omg omg omg kittens are so cute!

And Pepper's the cutest:

Long weekends and red red wine...

Coming down to Melbie tonight to drop the kids off than see Dan and go to a rock festival at Philip Island then staying at Cowes overnight. And it's looking like I'm getting JJJ Day Monday off - so it's REALLY looking like I'm getting a beach holiday this year which very much excites me. Here's hoping I can get in at the PROM!!! Huzzah!! Huzzah!!

...also - Kate Miller Heidke (who's playing at Philip Island along with Bob Evans and TLE) is reeeeeally good. Was either bursting out laughing or bursting into tears on my first listen through. Subsequent listenings did not disappoint either.