Ben - also making things

Everyone's making maple syrup, balaklavas and babies. Well I made a clock!

Bec: Getting big

From baby 2011

falsedan - making stuff

It's been cold lately so I learnt how to knit. My thanks to Diamond Face McGlinty for agreeing to model for me.

Shoshe - thief!

Someone -- or more likely, something -- stole our butternut pumpkin! This year's pumpkin crop consisted of one small orange-and-green Halloween-ish pumpkin, one large-ish but funny-shaped Halloween pumpkin, and one little butternut. But when we went to harvest yesterday, there was no sign of the butternut! No deer-chewed bits, no stem, no sign of it down the hill :(

Kit: binary day! 101010

Shoshe - Sugarshack!

We made maple syrup from our very own maple tree! We started with about 20 gallons of sap, and ended up with a bit over half a gallon of syrup (about 2 litres) -- we were hoping for "more than a few tablespoons", so we, or rather our tree, did really well. It's generally between a 20:1 and a 80:1 sap:syrup ratio, depending on the sap's sugar content. It's late in the year to be making syrup, but we decided that it's much more pleasant to boil sap in your turkey fryer on the patio in August than it is in March.

Jen - Off we go

Bags are packed (Thanks, Dan!), taxi's booked and will arrive in five hours to take the lot of us to the sunnier climes of Cairns and the Torres Strait. The kids are ridiculously excited. See you in a couple o' weeks!

YL - job application period closed!

The NSW state wide online job application period for jobs starting Jan 2011 has closed. Thank goodness! Each job application has a online set of questions to answer with 1000 character word limit. No two are the same!! =( Argh. I'm glad that pain is over.

Now to wait for the interviews you might might get and then find out which jobs you might might get offered.

(This all assuming the people haven't preselected who they want and are interviewing you for numbers sake.)

Jen - I runned it!

Amazingly I managed to complete the City2Surf today! I jogged the entire way - took about 103 minutes I think. So very tired now.

Ben - Academics of the Carribean

I am writing a history essay about pirates! The main primary sources are Alexandre Exquemelin (who will, I hope, help me get to know Captain Morgan better than I do) and Captain Johnson's legendary General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates.

In further news shiver me timbers, ye scurvy swabs, etc.

Kit is not bakeoff champion

Some friends and I had a bakeoff competition. I made lemon meringue pie (all or nothing - I had never made this before), drove carefully to work, heard some sliding noises from the backseat. Once @ work, I  found that the curd hadn't set, and I had to scrub bits of it off the backseat. 

Then, after taking the competion pie into the arena: remembered that I had had to brake suddely on the freeway en-route, and I realised was missing a pie. I had no idea where it had ended up. 

Sticky date pudding won, dammit. 

Jen - school holidays again

Half the year's gone by - the kids are in the mid year holiday break now. Boy have they needed it. Last term (Term 2) was 11 weeks long and they were absolute wrecks by the end of it. Slowly recovering now. As are their parents.

Shoshe - Berries-R-Us

We finally finished planting our berry patch. We've got six red Heritage Raspberries, six Anne Fall Golden Raspberries (though we think 2 of them died while waiting to be planted) and six Arapaho Blackberries. And last week we discovered that we have feral black raspberries along the creek!

Shoshe - Guardian of the Compost

We have a Compost Snake. He (or she) likes to curl up on the top of the compost, under the brown paper bag that we left at the top of the bin. We also have a Front Step Snake, which seems to live under our front step and may or may not be the same snake.

Epic Kit!

I had arranged to go mountain biking in the afternoon with a friend from out of town. 30 mins before I was supposed to leave (late), the General Manager turns up, then I make my escape (normal knock-off time), then I get a text from a colleague saying: He wants to talk to you, urgent!. Me: Can it be done by phone? Him: He will call you. Then I have this “meeting” whilst driving (I don’t remember anything about the drive – I can see why it is so dangerous), arguing with the GM about why I need to delay a big piece of equipment by year, but how it won’t affect the project at all.

And then did I mention the bike dramas? The night before, I go to check on the bike, tyres are a bit down, so I try and pump up the rear one, end up fully deflating it, then snap the valve off the tube (means it won’t ever pump up), so I go to change the tube, find that the rubber of the tyre has glued itself to the rim of the wheel so I can’t take it off. Then after I left work, I went past a shop to see if they could replace it, and *he* couldn’t – he was asking if I had used a special glue or compound to fill the tyre, left the wheel with him to try and fix. And that’s when I got the text about the GM wanting to talk to me. Then I race home, pick up my spare wheel with the city slick tyre (mostly flat), and drive out to meet the friend. I'm only one hour later than we had originally planned. Mountain biking on a city slick tyre? It can be done, but looks really silly!

Jen - Portable computing

iPad iPad iPad.
It's good. Money well spent.

Eurotravesty

Dear False Dan,

Lithuania was goddamn ripped off! What the hell, man?! Please use your Euro-connections to fix this Euro-tragedy.

Joe

PS: Hi, how are you? I am fine.

falsedan - eurovision approaches

I am doing the hard yards and watching the semis this year... dangerously low on beverages but I feel that Milan Stanković is the man to watch

Ben - I made a paper windmill

I no longer require orphaned dolls to power my model workhouse.

Shoshe - one free tag

I got some free LaserFest luggage tags at a geophysics conference in December, which I promptly attached to my suitcases. A few weeks later, one of my (Aussie) friends saw the tag and asked me about it. It turns out that she's a presenter on Triple J, and because of the free luggage tag, she did an episode about the 50th anniversary of the laser! She asked to interview me, but a friend of mine works on Mars Science Lab's rock-shooting laser instrument, so I turned her over to him.

http://matsailing.blogspot.com/

I own a boat!
http://matsailing.blogspot.com/

Shoshe - lost

For the past few weeks, I've been looking at tons of images of one of my field sites, Cumberland Ridge, which encompasses three neighboring outcrops in the Columbia Hills (in Gusev Crater on Mars). I'm trying to correlate the locations of the outcrops by identifying the same rocks from several viewpoints. I know these outcrops and the small rocks around them REALLY well*. Now I'm looking at some images from a nearby site, and I don't know any of the rocks. It feels like I'm lost -- Tennessee Valley is just to the side like it should be, but I'm in this sea of rocks and I don't recognize any of them. It's really weird. Kind of...alien.


*By name, actually. Cadge is my favorite, but Buoy has really grown on me. It's easy to identify from just about any angle.

YL - gargh

Feeling overwhelmed here over work/career choices.

falsedan - cripes

Beers bought on a Friday can be claimed on expenses. Today I have a Cooper's Green (amazingly), but it doesn't taste as I remember because it's sodding room temperature aaa

Shoshe - mouses!

Yesterday we caught two little mice in our humane mousetrap! We released them several miles away, far from other houses (by a creek at uni).

falsedan - slow day at work

Current work challenge: write FizzBuzz. Befunge is the obvious choice of language to me...

1:v!`*5*54p2*62*77,*5<
v _@>v   >v>:#<.>1+:2^
>:3%|>:5%|> 1#^_^
v"z"<pvv<"p
:>v>v2,"-z2
"",8**,B5"*
iF,622#"::4
"",,3*^<^<3
>^>^>^>,8#^6#*<

Jen - Bespectacled

Age is catching up with me. That plus too many hours in front of a computer screen and a tiny, tiny iPod screen (where's my iPad?!). Just for reading and computer work, mind you.
Pics to come when Dan wakes up and can take them.

Kit - the pink floyd car

I taut I saw a Pink Floyd car, I did! I did!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/40260071@N05/3704529626/

(Much better than my photo in the dark, just as the traffic started moving)

Tancred - BCMSN w00t!

After three months of rather solid study I’m very happy to say I passed the Building Converged Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks exam this morning. Two more exams to go to the CCNP :) Then one more for the CCDP :)

Jen - Long weekend

There used to be a time when long weekends were cherished, especially ones that coincided with the end of daylight savings! Sleep-in heaven! Not any more. Now it's four whole days at home with munchkins. Four very long days.

Thanks for a wonderful diversion and an excellent evening at your wedding, Red Bec. It was such a happy occasion and I'm glad it all went well. It was fabulously organised and ran super smoothly (from my view, anyway)!

Jen - Nine years

On this day around this time, nine years ago, the Hive was meeting Dante for the very first time. How time flies.

Friday afternoon special kit

I find out today that the paper I'm going to give at an Industry conference isn't in May, it's on next week. oops!

Dan: can has fever

Felt crappy and lethargic all day, and was assuming it was just general under-caffeination. Got home to discover I had a light fever (as does Jen).

I don't think you can get fevers from not enough caffeine, but I don't plan on risking it.

Jen - students are back

Today I was horrified to find that the new student cards double up as VISA debit cards.

Shoshe - I'd tap that

On Monday we started collecting sap from the first of our maple trees. We've got about 4 liters already, and that's just from a few days and that one tree! Three trees and 4-6 weeks to go. We'll probably make the first batch of syrup in a few weeks.

Jen - Year of the Tiger

Happy Chinese New Year everyone. The weekend was spent, first cleaning then eating (big family dinner on Saturday night), then relaxing, with a spot of sorting and shopping on Sunday.

Also, I can't believe that I didn't write about Atticus. The last week of January was a big one for us. He had a hair cut! And turned 5! And started Kindergarten! All in one week (or thereabouts).

And he's doing great, by the way. Settling in, starting to actually join in and listen to his teacher. He's off the Epilim now too. We think that's probably helped a lot with his behaviour. Yay!

Also... Dante is finally in his permanent class for the year (Week 4 already and they're still stuffing around... but at least he's not in a class of 42 anymore. Back to a reasonable 31). Now he's been moved to a 4/5 class. Not with last year's teacher anymore but hopefully one that's just as good, and back with his good friend Will (who's in Yr 5 this year). He's already got his first homework sheet and excited about learning.

Scrumping Kit

The neighbours' grapes are ready for scrumping.

Shoshe -- toasty warm

We have decided that the most appropriate temperature scale to use is absolute. It is currently a toasty 255K outside. That's warm even by Martian standards*!

*But not in summer, when it can get up to 50 degrees warmer. Goddamn it's cold out.

wading through the end of 2009

I havent liked quite a stack of news that I've had in the last few weeks. The craziness of the driving back and forth all over the place is a bit nuts too.
And so, being Russian Orthodox and having access to a secondary calendar, my 2010 starts today - the Old New Year - 14th Jan.
Happy New Year everyone! Go the old new 2010!

Also, you shoudl all come to my festival - www.corinbank.com
(maybe a saner blog post soon)

Shoshe - nice neighbours

We accidentally left the car's boot wide open for about 20 hours the other day. Luckily, that was about the only 20 hours in the past week and a half that it didn't snow. The battery died (NRMA-equivalent took care of that), but everything in the car was still there! That includes the muesli bars -- we figure the local critters couldn't smell them because it was too cold for scents to waft.

Kit Boo Web

Big brother is monitoring my net access, so no more onesentencehive @ work for me. Boo. 

Jen - First week of 2010

A full week has passed. The year is moving forward. Back to work - it's like we've never left. Child care has started up again, next week Vacation Care begins for the boys.

falsedan 1, global credit crisis 0

New job starting tomorrow, doing support and development for a perl-based résumé indexing application. The company is in Musselburgh, so I shall be sharing a bus with Tancred.

Becstarr - Back from the South Coast

Been down the South Coast to Ulladulla to visit friends and futher onward to Bermagui to visit Joel's childhood rockpools and beaches. Camping, beach swimming, and kid-wrangling have meant that I have spent only about 2 minutes in the last 9 days thinking about work. Good stuff.