Animeme response

Sorry it's taken so long Steve - pregnancy brain.

An interesting animal I had
We "had" silkworms for a while when I was at primary school. The worst thing was getting the mulberry leaves for them because we didn't have a tree. Sometimes we'd take cicadas to school show-and-tell especially if they were something other than the usual greengrocer variety.


An interesting animal I ate
I had crocodile at a pub in Willoughby once. I avoided the fried insects at the night markets in Bangkok but roast bogong moths are supposed to be tasty - just avoid the ones in cities which tend to hide out in sewers.


An interesting animal in the museum
I'd like to see the thylacine again - a must for all Australians.


An interesting thing I did with or to an animal
I'd rather not remember all the rodents I've killed in the name of science


An interesting animal in its natural habitat
I liked meeting the local wildlife in Europe especially the geckoes http://rowena_h.blogspot.com/2004/07/wildlife.html on our apartment walls.
Back at home, the echidna that we met on the slopes of Cradle Mountain was memorable. It was smaller than it's mainland cousins, to cope with the cold I guess, and was unconcerned snuffling up ants as we walked past.


I'm tagging ?

Bennelong did it

John Howard has finally been ousted from his federal seat. Yeh!

What I can't understand is why we didn't get Kerry Nettle back into the Senate for the Greens. They won three more seats in WA, SA and Tas. Maybe someone will explain.

I think I went to primary school with the number two Greens senate candidate, David Shoebridge.

House headaches

We have three ongoing insurance claims all relating to the big tree that fell down in June. What a saga - they still haven't started repairing the initial damage to the corner of the house and deck. The other claims arose when the storm water pipe broken by the tree roots ripping out of the ground (we think) backed up in heavy rain and came in right along the back of the lower concrete slab and on one occasion right in through the front door on the upper slab. We can't have the carpet relaid until they come and fix the skirting boards which have exploded because they're not solid wood. So much for having it done by Christmas. Aargh.

Clothes

I finally need an expanding wardrobe to go with my new waistline. Bought a bunch of stuff on eBay but it's all target stuff so I bought a PP dress with my birthday money. It'll probably be too hot to wear anything much now!

I'm supposed to be doing this meme but I'm having trouble remembering anything. Who do I tag anyway?

Go to go and play tennis now, maybe beach afterwards - it's hot already.

Ryan ski-suited up

Ryan ski-suited up
Originally uploaded by Robubble

We've just been for a short trip to Perisher for snow play. Front valley had enough snow and the weather produced 10cm more the day after (it was gone again in a day).

Chloe's 5th birthday cake

HPIM1644 Chloe's 5th birthday cake
Originally uploaded by Robubble

Three littlies enjoying mermaid cake

Not a good week

I got a cold from my mother-in-law via my son, which has now turned into a secondary infection as per usual, and conjunctivitis also from my son and husband plus other ailments I can't mention. Oh joy!

My laptop was pronounced dead by the local PC repair place. They offered me a newish IBM Lenovo for $1300 but I may as well hang out for one bought pre-tax from Dell. Probably be better than the old for half the price.

On the bright side, Ryan continues to entertain although he's been a bit picky about food lately (maybe contagious too). Keeps hanging out for jelly.

Ryan hard at work at Zoe's house

HPIM1628
Originally uploaded by Robubble

We all went to the Powerhouse Museum on Saturday. Ryan was entertained for some hours and fell asleep on the tram back to the car. He was very excited by the space display.

Computer trouble

My laptop has died of heat stroke. I bought it prior to the French sojourn (1e its 4 years old). Luckily I was able to extract the data off the HDD to our PC with a handy adapter from Jaycar. Don't know if I can be bothered paying heaps to fix it.

In other non-news, no action from our strata insurance company or the builder on fixing our roof or deck. It's been five weeks. Dad and I disassembled the deck timber so we can actually walk across but now Ryan can just run out into the reserve or the road ;(
Thinking of having the other trees removed at extrordinary expense. It's a shame as they were one of the reasons we bought the house. Ironic that our duplex neighbours hate trees.

Ryan had a little bit of conjunctivitis so at the doctor's we got something for the scratched spots too. Hoepfully this will work or he'll end up with big scars on his face 10 years before puberty.

Fallen tree

HPIM1596 Fallen tree
Originally uploaded by Robubble

This Southern blue-gum came down at 1.30am on Saturday morning.

HPIM1596

Stump cross-section

HPIM1603 Stump
Originally uploaded by Robubble

HPIM1603

Tree death

I'm sitting here typing to the oh-so-restful sounds of chainsaws. It has been going on for the past three hours. At 1 am yesterday morning I was in bed trying to sleep despite the noise of the storm and the full force of a cold. The groaning and cracking noises coming from the large eucalyptus tree at the side of the house were alarming enough for me to go outside and shine a torch at it. It was then leaning hard against the very corner of the roof and cracking the eaves. I rang my parents (Mum had arrived from the UK in the evening so she was still awake with jetlag). A couple of minutes after I started talking, rather ineloquently as I was a bit scared, the tree came down. Mum could hear the bang over the phone and me saying "f***". It wasn't so scary once it had fallen. It took out half of our deck roof (the part that Dad had worked so hard to repair and cover!). The bulk of it landed in the council reserve. The insurance company sent a tree lopper to have a look and later yesterday he rang the neighbours to say he would come today (Sunday).

Bhutan national dress

HPIM0114
Originally uploaded by Robubble

Here I am modelling a half kira, wonju (blouse) and toego (open jacket-like garment) for only the second time. I bought them in the Bhutanese capital Thimphu near the end of our trekking trip to the country in April 2003. The other photo of me in it at our hotel in Paro has been viewed a number of times on Geocities so I thought I would revive it. The fabric is very comfortable being silk and cotton but I haven't tried to move extensively in it. A majority of Bhutanese women wear it daily since it was introduced as the national dress in the 17th century to give the Bhutanese a distinctive identity. It and the male equivalent, the gho, is required wear for Bhutanese at all formal occasions and visits to government and religious buildings. Smaller versions form the school uniforms.

HPIM0114

Booderee National Park

Check out the Flickr photos of us at Booderee NP in the ACT bit of the south coast. It was lovely warm weather so we even managed a short swim (good for May). Ryan had a ball at our campsite at Bristol Point (5 mins walk from Greenpatch). We felt relatively childless with the group of 6 dads from Sydney with their tribe of 15? kids nextdoor plus two other groups with children nearby. Their plan was to run them ragged, put them to bed early and then party. Unfortunately for me their partying on the second night and Ryan's very early wakeup added up to no sleep for me. The first morning we had an infant wake us up at 5.30am. On the second morning the kookaburras let rip at 6am whereupon Ryan stood up from his bed and said "Funny bird". Also rather unfortunate was the birds and animals habituated to feeding from kids. We lost a sausage that I was saving for Ryan and a kookaburra took a cheese sandwich right out of Bob's hand as he was eating it.

Toppy

I've been enjoying my Topfield TF5000PVRt (SD digital set top with twin tuners and 250GB hard drive) for 6 months now. It's great except for some glitches where it misses a recording (we lost several episodes of the West Wing). It means that Ryan can have his fix of Bananas in Pyjamas and Thomas the Tank Engine at any time. Usually he sleeps through the afternoon when they're on.
The best thing is watching while its still recording and cutting out the interference on analogue reception from the neighbours' plasma TV, which seems to be on 24/7.
I just updated the software applications you can add functionality to Toppy with:
ProgressBarKeys (a must according to topfield.com.au forum users)
mcgCYRResumeV1.0 (for resuming play after the machine dumps you out when the recording finishes)
Archive1.0
Automove1.8
We're still working through what they've changed.

Almost 2 years

Ryan turns 2 on Easter Sunday. He has a remarkable number of clear words now - it must be close to 200. He now tells us what to do! "Mummy sit", "Daddy drive", "open fridge", "over the bridge"

It seems from some web trawling that my old boss has severed his ties with ANU. I wonder how the newer personnel are working out. Seems most of the women have left! I don't really miss that place apart from them.

I've been uploading some photos from France. It's been good to look at some of the trips and walks we did again. Pat may go to Sophia and Brest in June but I don't think I fancy flying 24 hours with Ryan.

End of NZ holiday

Yes, we're back after 5 weeks (not 4, due to a flight booking stuff up).
All went well. Did lots of camping, some tramping and some tram riding, all in the South Island between Christchurch and Nelson. Ryan enjoyed most things except going in the carrypack after the freedom of walking on his own. He is now in a bit of sleep debt and has happily gone back to long daytime naps (time for me to catch up on some Toppy recorded TV).

I think Sydney had more rain while we were away than NZ did - we had only about 6 days with some rain and only 2 days rain while tramping. My plants survived the hot days. We have to replace the jacaranda and eucalypt that the neighbours removed while we were gone. They think the jacaranda had got into the drains. Now we have a lot more hot sun in in the morning.

Tonight we're getting our monthly DSL dwonload before the end of the month ten minutes ago!

My feed looks crazy

When I look at my feed only some of the posts appear. This might be the problem with feedmap. The xml parser may be refusing some of my posts. I don't know how to test it.

In Google Reader the posts are in jumbled order (some from 2 years ago mixed in with the last few months) but they all have the current date and time so there is something screwy going on with the date/time stamps.

Further to this other people have had this problem see newsgroup
but Blogger hasn't fixed it. So my original problem is not with the code. Don't think feedmap is worth all this effort.

Off to NZ in two weeks

We are going to take our toddler overseas! At least it's only a three hour plane ride but we have elected to fly to Nelson on the same day to get to Pat's aunt and uncle's place. His Canberra-based parents have a New Zealand car garaged there which we can borrow. Jessica and Basil have grandchildren so they have camping and baby gear we can borrow.
We are going to try camping in our new 3 person Eureka tent. We tried it out in the garden and Ryan lay down between us - very cute. Now we just have to work out how to manage his naps whilst sightseeing. Probably the whale watching that I missed out on last time due to bad weather will not be toddler-friendly.

Any kid-friendly New Zealand attraction suggestions welcome.

I fixed the meta tag in xml problem tonight - forgot the end tag. Feedmap still doesn't work that well.

Canberra Christmas

HPIM1302
Originally uploaded by Robubble.

Weather in Canberra over Christmas was variable. It did get warm enough for Ryan to run around unclothed for a bit. We also used the bike seat in the background to explore Weston park - the children's water park had water running in it - and feeding the ducks at the bridge near the GG's. We did quite a lot of eating good food and playing Carcassonne, mostly while Ryan was asleep.

Another activity was a walk around the suburb. You can see the dry. For a short time it didn't feel like a capital city.

Pat and I took a tour round this building.