Saturday 13th November 2004 Today is the annual Christmas
Pageant in Adelaide. It is famous around Australia, and televised in every
state. The pageant is anticipated all year - mostly by the children, but also
by the people who appear in it - employees of the various Credit Unions.
I can describe it as a mixture of the Notting Hill Carnival, the Rio Carnival,
the London Lord Mayor's Show and a bit of Disney. The floats are all well made,
and some have tenuous links to Christmas, but the highlight is the last float
with Father Christmas - after doing the 3km around the city of Adelaide, he
parades to one of the main shopping centres in Adelaide, and takes up residence
in his grotto until Christmas eve. All the children who have lined the Pageant
route follow Santa to his grotto, and the adults shop.
Ann and I originally thought of going and watching, but instead we had a lie-in
and watched it on TV.
Today the weather has not been too bad. They predicted more rain, but it only spitted for a bit. Ann and I stayed inside, doing very little. We ended up going for a drive to the Parra Wirra Recreation Park, and drove up a into the bush a bit (on an un-made road) to the edge of Humbug Scrub wildlife park. As it was a bit cool out, and they wanted to charge us to walk around, we just drove back.
Seeing the countryside reminded me of our visit to Gumeracha,
and seeing the Big Rocking Horse. I never posted the pictures, so 
here
they are.
Today I cooked something that we have never had before - prawns.
I don't eat fish, because I previously had an allergy to seafood when very young,
and the smell of fish is very distinctive, so ever since then I have never been
able to stomach the smell of fish. I don't know what effect fish would have
on me, because I dislike the smell so much that I can't swallow more than one
mouthful. I can eat small prawns (normally with a mayonnaise or sauce), and
smoked salmon (with plenty of lemon juice), but not tuna or any fillet of fish
- if someone else is eating fish, I try to be elsewhere.
Tonight we had Australian king prawns in a pea risotto. I marinated the prawns
in butter, garlic and chilli flakes, and then cooked up the risotto. I fried
the prawns to give them some colour, and then threw them in to the risotto at
the end of the cooking.
It is the first time that I have cooked with prawns, and it's the most fishy
thing I have ever eaten, but I still enjoyed it. I might try and be a bit more
adventurous next time - providing that I don't get sick.
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Ann was not happy with me yesterday. I spent nearly all day
in front of the computer, putting up the calendar at the top left of each Blog
page, and putting in some extra bits & pieces. But, it gives me a sense
of satisfaction and achievement whilst I am not working. When I am working,
I get satisfaction from getting a project finished, or fixing an issue - so
I enjoy doing this website to get the same satisfaction.
I bet no-one will actually use the calendar at the top to go to other parts
of the blog, but I think that after a few months, it will be the better way
to navigate around the site as the blog index page is getting very full.
This evening Ann went out with Heather to see the latest Bridget Jones movie - and I stayed at home with Thomas. Thomas tried his best to play up and complain when I put him down to bed - I think he needs to see his mummy before he goes to sleep. He was wailing and crying for what felt like hours, so I kept on going in to ensure that he was OK, but I quickly realised that there was nothing wrong, so I left him to fall asleep by himself. It seems a long time since we followed "controlled crying" techniques to encourage Thomas to go to bed at the right time, and to sleep through the night, so I nearly forgot what it was like to sit in front of the TV, not watching it, and hearing Thomas crying in his bed. Time stands still, and even though the TV was on, I was not paying attention to what was on.
Luckily, the TV program that I was not watching was Australian
Idol. Ann was going to miss it, so I had to record it for her. The problem with
recording a program is that the videos that we brought over from the UK have
a tuner that can only pick up the UK TV signals - we can't tune it in to Australian
broadcasts. Luckily, I have been able to wire it up so that it will record from
the Pay-TV digital box, but it can only record whatever channel we are watching.
This was very bad for me, as I had to watch Australian Idol (the last show before
the final at the Sydney Opera House), but with Thomas crying I did not really
'watch' it.
When Ann came home after the movie and a prawn curry with
Heather, she brought back the baby gate that Heather and Kyle had been good
enough to give to us. Heather predicted that I would put it together and install
it in the entrance to the kitchen - and sure enough I had finished it last night.
Now Thomas cannot crawl into the kitchen where there are dangers, and there
is no possibility that he will be under our feet.
It's great to have got a baby gate for the price of a bottle of Chardonnay!
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No responses from any agencies or jobs today. I have been applying for more jobs, but nothing fantastic has come up.
We have got the first tomato growing in our pots on the fence. We only bought the tomatoes because they are rapid growers which climb well to cover the boring fence in our patio area, but it seems that we might actuall get fruit. I have decided not to feed the tomatoes, as we also have basil in the pots and I don't want to ruin the basil for the chance of a single tomato.
My magic sock drawer did it's thing again today. Yesterday when I got dressed, I noticed that I was short on clean socks, and this morning the drawer is full of clean socks - all paired up and carefully rolled. It's a very strange phenomenon, and maybe if I can find out how the sock drawer is doing it, I might be able to patent the magical drawer and sell it to make millions! It's been happening for a while now - it started shortly before Ann and I got married, just when we bought the new drawers.
I did some more on the website today. I noticed yesterday that when I changed the "next" and "previous" at the bottom of the page to include pictures, that it took a lot of work to change every page. So, I decided to write a bit of JavaScript that would allow me to have the "footer" in one file that I can change once, and then each page asks for the footer to be put at the bottom of the page. It's pretty simple, but the fun bit is passing across the values for the "previous" and "next" pages, which are different for every page. If you want to see the source, feel free.
Ann watched the video of Idol this afternoon. It was quite lucky that I had recorded it, as it was the last shown, and Ann would have been very upset to have missed it. I avoided watching it a second time.
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It was a very delightful 27°C spring day today. The sky was blue, there was a gentle breeze and it was truly wonderful.
After all the rain that we have had recently, it has become quite good to see everything green again. What happened was that the switch was turned to start spring a month ago (suddenly everything sprouted in the same week), and there was lots of new growth. Then, as the weather got warmer, the grass started to turn brown as the very efficient council maintenance mowed all the verges and parks. In the space of around 4 weeks it went to brown, then light green, then brown and now - after the rains - it's green again. As it's getting warmer, I bet that it will go brown again very quickly.
We got our second comment on the
discussion
forum today. I hope that other people will start posting comments about
what I say here.
I have put up some more pictures today. In July, we went to
the
Botanic Gardens just on
the outskirts of central Adelaide, and had a great time walking around the grounds.
Have a look at my pictures and let me know what you think.
I noticed that a lot of people who come to my website from
search engines (like Google and Yahoo) have been searching for terms relating
to home brewing. So, I have
written how I brew
my beer, with steps that I take and changes that I make to the normal brewing
instructions with a kit. I hope that someone finds it interesting or useful.
I would start writing about things that other people have been looking for,
but the "recipie for potato salad" and "jacob wickham" terms
are unlikely to be searched for again... I will put the search terms on my
stats
page for people to see what brings people to this site.
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Today Ann took Thomas in for another swimming lesson. There
was a photographer there, and Ann was unsure as to whether to smile or ignore
him.
Once Thomas was dried, we left the swimming pool to hit 37°C of heat. The
sun was shining and the temperature was rising. 100°F is not an unusual
temperature here, and it is great to see that Australia is much better organised
when it comes to heat - the shopping centre was a lovely cool temperature and
there was no sudden change in temperature when we went from one shop to the
other - only when we went outside.
Thomas had his first McDonalds lunch today. He had chicken nuggets and fries - but he was a little unsure about them. He didn't spit the food out, but he ate it slowly. He was very impressed with the happy meal toy - oh dear, we have opened a can of worms. I had a new Deli sandwich, which I found to be really quite good.
For dinner tonight, Ann wanted to follow a recipie that she
had found in the Australian Woman's Monthly Weekly Magazine, which was
a pasta dish with spinach, tomato and ricotta. I followed the recipie exactly,
but unfortunately it tasted so bad that we ended up throwing it away. It was
bland and uninteresting, and it was a bit of a disappointment.
This evening, Ann and I are going to a Meetup group. I will post more about that when we return.
Liam and Shirley came up to the house so that they could babysit
Thomas. I gave Shirley ample warning and instructions on what to do if Thomas
starts to play up and cry all night, with what steps to take to ensure that
he actually goes to sleep.
Thomas showed me wrong though, and was apparently a real angel. It bodes well
for when my mother comes over - once Thomas gets to the stage that he trusts
her, then Ann and I will try to get out of the house more - maybe try to spend
some time with other friends in Adelaide.
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Last night's Meetup group was a big no-show. Either no-one turned up, or we could not find them. Ann and I sat in the pub, surrounded by University students, for half an hour - trying not to look dodgy. Instead, we had a little walk around Adelaide at night, then ended up getting an Indian meal.
Yesterday a woman was shot
in the middle of Adelaide's main shopping street, Rundle Mall. She was an employee
of Myer,
a large department store, and was 61. The man who shot her 3 times was her ex-husband,
and before shooting her, he burnt down their house, and asked a neighbour to
look after his dogs for a while.
What sort of city are we coming to? They also said that Adelaide is the largest
source of home-produced narcotics, and that Golden Grove has the highest crime
rate in the Northern Suburbs. Oh dear.
No progress on jobs today. New adverts are slowing down, and it's proving to be extremely difficult for me to keep my spirits up today. I have still not heard back from about 4 positions that I have been interviewed for, and so I called all the agencies today, and so now there are less jobs that I'm waiting to hear about. I think that I am down to two possibles, and so it's not been a good day.
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Nothing yet. I wonder when something will appear. It's getting
tedious to look for jobs now. There are very few around, and those that are
possibilities often have comments like "must have detailled experience
of the manufacturing industry" or "Australian Citizens only"
or "Must have an MCSE, a CCNA and Prince2 certification".
I keep trying. I keep studying. I keep hoping.
19th November has been an auspicious day for Ann and me in the past. I won't list all the events that have happened on the 19th November, but fair is to say that it has always been big events. We were both secretly hoping that today would be a good day - we should have bought some Lotto tickets!
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