Quickie
Gang,
Working on the next post. In the meantime, I just read that the new Defence Minister is Brig. Gen. Gordon O'Connor (ret). A Defence Minister who's a soldier!
Looks like he's announcing a new contract for $4.7 billion for new choppers (maybe CH-47 D or F Chinooks), $4.6 billion to replace the Hercs, $1.2 billion for 2300 new trucks, $2.9 billion for three new supply ships, and some more monies for other equipment. Article
here. Finally some new equipment for our boys and girls working hard for us overseas and at home.
A good day for the CAF! I wonder if Gen. O'Connor was ever a Cadet? ...
Size Matters.
So I got into my very first fight this morning. It involved a heavy ceramic telegraph-line insulator and some large and heavy speakers.
But, in my truest fashion, no fists were thrown. Instead, Toby Keith did my dirty work and thanks to a former roommate's stereo system on loan to me, my punch hurt a lot more than the loser's.
There I was sleeping peacefully when my roommate gets up to watch the World Cup soccer at about 0200. No problem, he's not too loud, I'll just roll over and go back to sleep.
Thud, thud, thuddy-thuddy-thud, thud-thud, thud.
Thud, thud, thuddy-thuddy-thud, thud-thud, thud. Oh, for frick's sake, who's the retard playing music that loud at 0200 in the morning?
The noise was coming from the far corner of my bedroom, which is where my head rests when I'm in bed. I think that the sound is being generated in the neighbouring unit, because we share a common wall and I couldn't believe that someone's music from a nearby house could conduct quite that well through my walls. But, I have to be sure before I take any drastic action, so I get dressed, go outside, and walk around to the houses next door to see if I can hear this noise any better.
Nope, everyone's quiet. And the only house besides mine that has any light on and that could possibly be making that kind of noise is the adjoining unit.
Okay, first salvo: slamming fist into the shared wall. First round: me - 0, irritating R&B 'music' - 1.
Second salvo: slamming the heavy ceramic insulator into the shared wall, but protecting the wall from damage by using a book as a hammering plate. Second round: me - 1, irritating R&B 'music' - 1. Score: 1 - 2. I got a response from someone in the other unit that consisted of 4 answering pounds. Good, so they're awake.
But, the music is still loud and annoying. One last check to try and ensure that it is, in fact, the adjoining unit being stupid. Yup, as far as I can tell... time for the heavy guns: Toby Keith and some good ol' honky-tonk country music!
First some info about the stereo system. A former roommate had to leave on short notice, so he's left his stereo with me until he can sell it. It's a Sony concoction that is made to be a loud-speaker system with about 400 watts average power (over two speakers and a separate subwoofer) and 4300 watts peak power. It can be VERY loud for short periods of time.
In goes the Toby Keith CD, 'On' goes the subwoofer, and up goes the volume. I got it to about '30' before I couldn't stand to stay in my room any longer. So I grabbed the remote, stepped into the hallway, closed my door and stood on the stairs until the first song finished. I was really hoping for a knock on the door asking me to turn it down, hoping also that it wouldn't be the police, but alas, I got nothing. However, with the music playing so loud, the bottommost stairs were vibrating and shaking, so perhaps I didn't hear them knock.
Okay, my neighbours have ALL had a little Toby Keith shoved up their eardrums at 0230 in the morning, maybe that was enough.
Still, I had to wait until the song finished beacuse it was too loud to go in and turn it off. Anyway, off goes the loudspeakers and what do I hear from next door?
Nothing.Third salvo: me - 2, irritating R&B 'music - (-1); final score: 3 - 1. I win!
At least for one night. And man am I tired.
Sydney
What better place to meet up with one's parents than in Sydney, Australia?
It seems such a cosmic convergence to think of the distances that were travelled from such disparate places for us to meet up on 2 April. They over the whole expanse of the Pacific and I from Melbourne. So many things had to work for that, or any, meeting to happen: the thousands of moving parts on the 747 had to run flawlessly for 13 hours, likewise for the A320 from Melbourne; vehicles and people all had to work and function in so many places; I liken it to a computer finding a single byte of information in a sea of billions of other bytes knowing just where to look. Kind of an ignoring of all other things around to locate the one important bit. Hmmm, I guess that doesn't really communicate well...
Anyway, I got to Sydney a day before my parents arrived because Sydney is lovely city. I met up with an Indian-Canadian fella and we hung out for the day after I found out that he'd not seen the Opera House yet. He'd been in the city for a week already and I simply couldn't let him leave without seeing it. The Opera house is truly one of the world's most beautiful buildings. It just so happened that the weekend of 2-3 April was the Sydney Indian festival, so while I played tour guide to downtown Sydney, he played tour guide to Indian culture. It was an interesting insight into the culture - though it seemed funny to get an Indian culture intro from an Indian-Canadian while in Australia. Anyway, we toured the highlights of Sydney: Darling Harbour, the Opera House, the city... then we stayed up late and went to a pub called Minus 5, which I've mentioned before. The whole concept is sponsored by the Absolut vodka people, so it's a big promotional woo-haa, but it's fun anyway. That's my glass in the picture and it's completely ice. As is the bar it's sitting on, the walls beyond, and pretty well everything else. Kinda made it feel a bit like home, really ;-)
Next up was the climatic meeting with my parents. I couldn't really sleep at all that night, so I was ready to go by about 0300. And, since I was going to an airport, my favourite place in the world, I was not at all averse to getting there very early.
So, I caught the 0700 airport shuttle and started the waiting game. I couldn't remember exactly what flight number there's was, so I stood expectantly for a couple of the wrong flights before I realised that the one they were on was two hours delayed leaving Los Angeles. Then, finally, they rounded the corner from customs/quarantine and what a rush!!
We quickly set about finding coffees and places to sit outside in the sunshine while we caught up, then beelined to the Sydney Aquarium after checking into the hotel. While there, we saw Nemo and all his friends in their indoor-aquarium-reef glory. I thought of no one else but R-man for the entire time.
After that, we then wandered the city and went to bed. The next day was an early rise to wander the shops and see world-famous sites - the Harbour Bridge and the Opera house. The Opera House is made of thousands of tiles and the story goes that the sweeping roof-shapes are made to resemble orange pieces. I originally thought maybe shells or sails, but it's oranges.
Which reminds me of this quote from
A Brief History of Time, paraphrased thus: "At a public physics lecture, an old lady listened to a scientist presenting on current ideas about cosmology and the universe. 'What you have told us is rubbish,' she said. 'The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortise standing on?' - 'You're very clever young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.' "
Don't know where that came from but something about perception and opinion and other stuff have coloured it I think. Anyway, there's a wonderful spot to pose for a picture at the base of the Opera House that frames couples perfectly under the Harbour Bridge. Mom and Bob posed and I took the snap.
After this, we took a nighttime harbour cruise to see the lights, then took off back to the hotel because everyone was getting tired after all that travelling. The next day we picked up the motor home and that brings me to a close for this blog because the next picture features cheap poo for you and you've already seen it!
Cheap poo, radiotelescopy, camels, and 'Bungles
You will find all of these things travelling a single highway route in Aus!
These pictures are a kind of highlight tour to whet your appetites for subsequent posts. So, presented in no particular order:
Couldn't pass this picture up: we hit a town called Campbelltown shortly after leaving Sydney to get food; however, Campbelltown has one unique feature - once you enter, you can't leave! It took the better part of an hour to actually find a route out of the town back onto the freeway. Cheap! And good for the flowers...
Next up is right up (one of) my alleys: it is the radiotelescope in Parkes, NSW. A 64 m dish that is still on the vanguard of radiotelescopy after being constructed in the early 60s. You all need to see the movie '
The Dish' - it was filmed on site here and features, among other things, a game of cricket played inside the dish...
This place was used as the primary feed for live television during Apollo 11 and beamed much of that footage to the millions of T.V. sets tuned in for the Moon landing in 1969.
After the bulk of the outback NSW tour, we ended up in Port Macquarie where we spent two glorious days on the beach. The first day, the waves were so big that that even the surfers weren't out. Wow - big waves. So, we went for a camel ride instead. How often does one get to ride a camel on a beach in the Coral Sea?
I'll show the camels later, but at least that explains the helmet.
Before the camel ride on the beach, we were in one of the coolest small towns in Australia: Coonabarabran - that's Coon-a-bear-a-bran. Its a place were everyone is obsessed with stargazing and nearly everyone knows someone who is in a observatory. A whole town of up-lookers! Anyway, just outside of town is
Warrumbungles National Park, where one of Australia's largest optical telescopes is located.
Beautiful drive through this. Pretty well everything in this picture is related to volcanism - volcanoes, volcanic necks, dikes.
Long weekend this past weekend for Queen's Birthday. Went to
Werribee Mansion & Shadowfax Winery with Bruce and Helen, then spent all of today exploring the east side of Melbourne around the Melbourne Cricket Ground and some beautiful gardens and conservatories. A most interesting day! This evening, I made a
pumpkin soup with Zac's organic pumpkin that he can't eat (long story), then made another soup for supper - red lentils are great as a thickener. Success with my guinea pigs in the other unit says that I'll try it again, but next time with a little bit of onion powder. Humpf.
Love you guys.
Pictures... Finally!
First of all, to put this post in context, you must go back and reread the post about the washing machine in Coonabarabran (Titled: 'Not Dead').
Alright, back?
First, history: way back in the olden days of Australian automated washing machines, there were double barrelled creations that had separate washing and spinning tubs. I have to admit, though, that the separate spinning tub was a good idea beause it spun as fast as a turbine and essentially dried your clothes before they left the machine. Anyway, they looked a little something like this:
Neat huh? The whole spin-until-every-last-drop-of-water-is-out
is quite Australian - it is definitely a much rarer thing to have a dryer in Aus than it is at home.
Anyway, turn the red knob (which I have lots of experience with as a glider pilot) to the right to engage the washing tub; turn it back and presto, off. Once washed, take the clothes out of the wash tub, drain the wash tub and carry on...
Now, when you drain the wash tub, the water goes into the stomach of the machine. However, when water is pouring from the vent for the electric motor, you know there's something wrong. What better time to solve the perpetual myth of the missing sock... I fished around in the water-filled stomach of the machine and what do I find.... (Drum roll)
A Pink Thong!
Hahahah - Just kidding. A little bit of Aussie humour there for ya.
But seriously folks, I found these:
The pink ones the stragler there in the middle. You can't see it, but I'm standing in the water, next to an electric machine. Don't worry though, I held off on stepping into the puddle until just before the machine turned off.
All together now... Ewwwwwwwwwwwwww.
I hope that's the most foul underwear I will ever have to experience.
You can now probably guess that I have my fancy shamancy new fandangled Mac and I have to admit that it's a pretty cool machine. There's this cool software on it called iPhoto that makes you look like a professional photographer by employing this thing called the Ken Burns effect. It pans and zooms simultaneously as it goes over your photos in a slide show - very dramatic and quite professional if I do say so myself. It's a damn shame I had to go back to school to get it.
Other than that, I've finally got a halfway decent wireless network going that's so stable it only drops out about once a day. Thankfully, the router is robust enough that it can recover on its own. But, that requires patience, which is something that my American roommate has little of.
Oh, Google Earth-ians: they've got high-res imagery of the Clayton area up. Type in: 'Clayton North, Victoria, Australia. That whole set of buildings that surround the placemarker are the Clayton Campus of Monash university. If you put your pointer at South 37deg 54min 33sec East 145deg 07min 50sec, you will have your hand on my office. Feel free to crush it if you like. If you move down and to the right and put your pointer on South 37deg 55min 3.48sec East 145deg 8min 24.79sec, you will have your hand on top of my room. Feel free to pick me up and carry me home. That makes me exactly, according to Google Earth's geoid, 8641.36 miles or 13,906.92 km away, as the crow flys. Huuph...
Anyway, to end with this evening, a picture of traveller's bliss, as told by my Mom!
