Becstarr - Smuggling watermelons

Officially freakin' huge. Baby theoretically due in about 4 days. Joel has suggested we just go to hospital and wait in the waiting room, which sounds tempting in some ways! Everyone keeps telling me to "enjoy the peace while it lasts". Working on it...

Ben - Still making things

My sister asked for a DVD cabinet in the shape of the TARDIS for Christmas.


It took longer than I expected. The outside was easy, but the inside took a lot of doing.

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