On the Bottom Half

Eventful Birthday

Thanks for all the cards everyone! They were wonderful and most welcome :-)

In an effort to make up for last year's birthday, which consisted of a Mars bar and can of Solo Lemonade on a dive boat somewhere in the Coral Sea, I planned a full day to get everyone out and about. The schedule was thus:

0900-1200: Skating
1200-1300: Travel to city for lunch
1300-1400: Lunch at a Japanese place called Funa
1400-1630: Educational fun at ScienceWorks
1630-late: Dinner/movie or Dinner/St. Patrick's Day 'festivities'.

Skating was ebulliently successful and well attended. I was very pleased that so many came out and had fun on the ice. No injuries! There're 3 Canadians in the PhD 'team' here and they hadn't been on ice in a couple of years. Also, it's something out of the ordinary in a country like Australia, and therefore I thought it would be interesting. Picture below (see if you can pick out the Canadians):


I'm wearing the away jersey of the Aussie national hockey team, called the Hockeyroos (heh), which is so far proving a great talking point with almost everybody. (There are 3 or 4 people missing from the picture).

Eight people stuck around after the skate, and we went into the city for lunch. It took ages to get to the restaurant, but everyone was raving about how good the food was, so success again! Funa sells cooked Japanese dishes, which is something a little out of the ordinary nowadays with 'sushi' being so popular. I use quotations because most people like maki sushi, which is the roll variety, variously containing vegatables, cooked fish, roe, or other stuff wrapped in seaweed. Sashimi is simply sliced raw fish, which, because of my sushi snobishness after staying in Japan for a month, is what I consider 'real' sushi. Then there is aptly named sushi, which is slices of raw fish on little beds of vinegar-flavoured rice. Also acceptable as 'real' sushi. Heh :)

After that, a couple of people took off to start drinking, but four of us continued on to ScienceWorks and got to do all sorts of cool fun educational things that involved the pushing of buttons, landing of space shuttles, capturing of space telescopes, confusing of brains, and using of senses. After that, we made our way into the city for St Patrick's Day and everyone had a couple or several pints of brown to black fermented barley and hop drinks.

After hockey practice till 0230 and 5 hours of sleep the previous night, I was toast by 2300 and went home. My legs were sore and my head was having sympathy pains for my legs and the band was too loud and I'm whingeing so I'll move onto the next paragraph.

Sunday afternoon I went out to the airport and continued !flying! I've formally been granted my license now so I can take the airplane solo! I went for a rip around the training area doing careful steep turns (trying and find the slipstream), procedural stuff that I know and love, then a couple of no-flap touch and goes. The flaps are electric and apparently have a dicky microswitch that may cause them to quit working, so I didn't use them. It was great! The weather was really good too, except for the lift that had me climbing on short final with the throttle at idle and airspeed at 60 mph. In this airplane, that should mean 600-700 fpm down, but instead meant 200 fpm up!

I then visited Bruce and Helen for the balance of the day and got home late. Helen made me a birthday cake and we had yummy spaghetti bolognaise. Now I can't focus and I'm trying to find my happy place today...

posted by Kyle @ 18:57