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Saturday 2nd July 2005

After another day of rain in Adelaide, and so we spent the morning inside. I spent some time working on the website - adding advertising space to many pages, and fixing the logotest. If you have not yet tried the logo quiz / logo test, give it a go - I spent lots of time and effort on making it fun and challenging, so give it a go and spread it around to your friends. It's a spreadsheet of 200 logos from companies and products from around the world, and the aim is to type in the name related to the log, and then a little smiling face appears to say if you are correct, and you get a total score at the end. It's been getting popular, so I've put a capability that people can donate money to me if they want - which is very common on the Internet now. I've also put some advertising banners on that page to make a few pennies.

This evening we took Thomas down to his grandparents for the night. Ann and I went to a quiz night in aid of the Harlequins Netball club - Victoria's team. It was a great night, Ashley, Linda, Eugenia, Ann and I were the main question answerers, with Victoria and her friend Lisa and Lisa's mother lending their moral support. We were leading the quiz for most of the night, with only a few questions sparking frantic debate on the table. When it came time to mark the answer sheets from other tables, we were so confident in our own answers that Linda was able to mark the answers from other tables before the answers were given!
There was a musical round, where we were all meant to listen to the song and then write down the next line when the music stopped - the problem was that most of the songs were such well known ballads that the whole room of around 150 people were singing along, and when the music stopped, everyone in the room sang out the next lines of the song - it created a great atmosphere.
Towards the end of the evening, it started to drag on a bit, and the microphone started to cut out, and when it came close to 11pm, Ashley had to take Victoria off to a party, so he missed the last two rounds.
There was one round where we had to identify logos from South Australia - so I was in my element!
Just before the last round, we were told that our table was only in the lead by one point, and when the final results came in, we just got pipped at the post! It was a fun evening, but we left at nearly midnight with no prizes.

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Sunday 3rd July 2005

A nice long lie-in for us both this morning, as Thomas was with his grandparents. I cooked Ann a lovely fried breakfast, and then we went to Liam and Shirley's to wish her happy birthday (21 again!) and pick up Thomas. Thomas had had a wonderful night, and played with everyone when they dropped in on Shirley this morning.

It's been wet for such a long time that the washing has been building up, as there is no point washing clothes if we can't dry them. Nevertheless, Ann had to put on some washing today, and so in the house this evening we have got underwear everwhere trying to dry it off.

I have been painting this afternoon - white gloss paint on the skirting and woodwork in the laundry, and painting the newly installed kitchen cabinet that is now all finished. The kitchen now looks finished, but the only problem is that we don't know what to put in to the new cabinet now that we have re-arranged the kitchen before the cabinet was built. Gloss paint is really smelly, so I had to give up when I started to feel dizzy. Instead of cleaning the brush, I just threw it away - it's cheaper, easier and better on the environment than washing in turps.

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Monday 4th July 2005

Ann went in to work this morning, and found that they still had tapes from Friday piled up to be typed. It was a busy day for Ann, and she barely had time to call me at home and check if I was feeling better.

I took the day off work, as I have had an upset stomach again and a bit of nausea. It's frustrating, and I am worried that people at work think that I am pulling sickies - but what is worse is the way that I have been feeling. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fumes from the paint - I seem to be very sensitive to smells at the moment. I looked it up on the Internet, and my symptoms (nausea, sensitive to smells, aching back, bad taste in my mouth, sore breasts) means that I am pregnant. I won't trust Internet diagnosis again.

Thomas was with his grandparents for today, which was helpful for me feeling so under the weather. Thomas had a great time, and tired out his grandfather in doing laps around the house on his trike.

I've put up some more pictures of Thomas and me, and some pictures of Thomas with Anna when we went out to the Tea Tree Gully Hotel with Kyle and Heather.

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Tuesday 5th July 2005

I was off work sick again, and Ann has been feeling pretty bad today as well. Thomas was at daycare, and the weather has been so nice today (18°C and sunny) that the daycare centre took all the little children for a walk around the oval that is next to the centre. Ann and I wondered how they managed to keep control of 8 or more little children...

Because of the good weather, we must have done about 6 loads of washing - I even managed to strip the bed, wash it, dry it on the line, iron it and put it back on the bed. Ann of course did much more of the washing and ironing and considered it routine, but as far as I was concerned I did well. Both Ann and I felt really tired today and nearly dozed off whilst reading books in the lounge.

I have decided that I am going to get my South Australian driving license sorted out. According to the website, I only need to surrender my UK license within 3 months of my visa becoming permanent - which is June next year, but it's so much easier to have an SA license to prove my identity when asked. I need to do a written test, so I will have to study up on it.

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Wednesday 6th July 2005

I have been doing the online sample test for the driving license, and I do well in the multiple choice, but keep on making mistakes with the 'give way' section of the test, when it comes to four-way stops and uncontrolled intersections (four way stops with no signs, lights or lines on the road). I will just have to study up a bit more before I do the test!

Ann had a busy day at work, typing up lots of tapes and catching up with the backlog. When I got to work, there was a backlog, but it did not take me long to catch up, as much had been done by others in the team. Thomas had a good day at daycare, and spent most of the day on the bikes at the back of the centre. They have tried Thomas in the room with the over 2's to ease him in to being with the older kids.

Story time. When I brought Thomas home, I had a little panic when I went outside to see to him and the door closed behind me - luckily it was not locked out, but I was reminded of a time when my father was trying to get in through a locked door.
The family was on holiday in Devon, staying in a bed and breakfast in a working farm. My brother and I must have been around 5 and 6, and we loved going to the farm in the summer to see the sights of Devon and be in the farm. One year, my father took time off work and came to visit us in the B&B one night, but went out by himself to the pub down the road once we had gone to bed.
When he came back after closing time late at night, he was concerned about trying to get in to the farmhouse without waking the farmer and being at the wrong end of a shotgun, or worse - annoying the farmer's wife. He then started to pick up gravel from the flowerbeds at the front of the 18th century english farmhouse, and started to throw the stones up at the window where my brother and I were sleeping. Being small boys in a creaking old house with low dark ceilings and dark corners, we did not react to the little tapping on the window, and certainly did not get out of bed to find out what was going on.
So, after a few minutes of getting no response, my father decided that he would try and find another way in to the house. As he picked his way past the farm machinery and avoided the chickens and moist deposits in the yard, he found a small window on the first floor that was slightly ajar. Fortified by locally produced ale, he scaled a drainpipe and some ivy to get to the small window - about 60cm by 15cm. As he opened the window, he managed to get his head and shoulders in. Unfortunately he had not had the forethought to put his arms through first, and so he was wedged in the window, and had to wiggle and struggle to get further in.
It was at that stage of the struggle that it became important to know which room he was sliding into. Having just gone past his centre of gravity, he was tipping head first - with his arms pinned by his side - over the toilet. As he started to drop towards the victorian style extra deep toilet with the lid up, the thoughts went through his mind about being found drowned in the toilet with his feet sticking out of the window, and how confusing it would be for whoever found him.
Then, as he was trying to work his arms free to slow his descent towards the pan, the metal stay in the window opening got caught on his belt. The metal pin that is used to hold the bar that holds open the window had done more than just get caught, it had actually pierced the corduroy (it was the 70's - so it's forgivable) and had become lodged. As he wiggled and jiggled, he stopped to consider two options - 1 was to sleep there and risk being found by a half-asleep farmer dropping his pyjamas, and 2 was to struggle free and risk catapulting himself directly into the open toilet.
After a few seconds of consideration, he decided to try to get his arms free and get in. In the final stages of entry, the small window snapped down on his foot, knocking off one of his shoes into the buckets of feed below.
Somehow, this entire escapade had managed to go un-noticed by everyone, until the farmer quietly and simply brought the errant shoe in - and placed it next it to my father whilst he was having his bacon and eggs. Not a word was said by either of them.

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Thursday 7th July 2005

Sorry, can't blog today. We are too busy watching the news about the explosions in London. We can see places where we worked, visited and travelled through, and so we are stunned and watching. There are few people that we know who are working or living in London at the moment, but obviously we are still concerned.
I know how well organised the London emergency services are, having worked for the LAS Emergency Service myself, but if I was still working there, I would feel completely helpless as there would be little that I could do except make sure that all the systems were kept working.
The terrorists obviously knew that the way to affect London would be to impact the transport system, which is very vulnerable and always under strain. With London having it's highest annual population at this time of year and this time of day, crippling the transport would trap around 9 million people in the city. I just hope that no other attack will try to take advantage of that today.

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Friday 8th July 2005

This week's revenue from Advertising: $2.41
This week's revenue from Donations : $0.00

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