Progress - we might have a roof soon!

More progress

It's been a few months, and the buildings are now really beginning to take shape. Slabs are poured, retaining walls and other blockwork are progressing, frames and trusses are being erected, roof timbers are going up. The windows and doors are on site (stored in a shipping container until the builders are ready for them). The drilling for the bore is complete (water at 42 metres, better than I had hoped). Lockup should be achieved by late February/early March

 North block from the driveway

North block from the main courtyard

Progress

We finally broke ground in July. So far there is not much to see, other than mountains of red earth, the builder's site shed and facilities and some temporary water tanks.

But at least it's a start.

Still waiting

You have undoubtedly heard the old adage the "Rome wasn't built in a day". I bet I know why: by the time they got all the approvals organised, finalised the architectural plans and got the engineering drawings done, years had probably passed.

It is now 15 months since the purchase of the land at Michelago was settled, and do you know what has been built, so far? Absolutely nothing. The field is undisturbed and the kangaroos are still in possession.

I don't even have finalised plans yet, though I am told that those should be available soon, and that we may - finally - break ground in May. I'll believe it when I actually see something happening, and not before.

Part of the problem has been that the building envelope was pegged incorrectly, and the building envelope registered with the local council did not match what was on the plans. I have no idea how this happened, but getting it fixed has involved lawyers, and that always takes time. Then the almost completed plans had to be modified yet again, to make space for a boiler room (which we had not realised that we would need, but which is the heating specialist's recommendation).

In the meantime, we decided that it would be wisest to sell our Sydney house and relocate to the Canberra area temporarily. This was largely driven by my elderly mother's declining health, and the need to get her into a facility that can offer her the level of care that she needs. We managed to find a place for Mum last July, and then I spent a couple of months emptying out her flat and packing up my house. Steve and I bought a small townhouse in the township of Googong, and we moved in at the end of last September.

I think it is only the fact that Googong is so nice that is enabling me to contain my impatience with the building process. The house we are living in now is small, so a lot of our personal effects, furniture and books are in storage, and we won't be able to access them until the new house is completed. At that point, it will probably take me months to unpack everything again, but it will be like rediscovering old friends. For now, we are quite comfortable.

Googong (http://googong.net/introducing-googong/your-town.php) is about 25 minutes from Canberra, and it is a "master planned township", which will ultimately house around 18,000 people. The house we bought is part of the first stage of development, so it is only a couple of years old. It has been built to be low maintenance and to be fairly energy efficient. It also has excellent soundproofing, which is a blessing, because a new section of subdivision is being laid out across the street. Earthmoving machinery starts up around 7AM every weekday morning.

However, the house stays quiet: I do not miss the ceaseless yapping of my Sydney neighbour's dogs. The town has been planned with a lot of green spaces - little parks and gardens everywhere - and when I go for a walk in the evening, I see children playing out of doors. In about two months time a little shopping centre will open about 2 minutes walk from my front door. There is a site reserved for a new public school, and one school (Anglican) is already open. There is a community centre with a gym and a swimming pool.

Because the area is semi-rural, there is lots of wildlife - kangaroos are a common sight, I've seen echidnas a couple of times and many different types of birds. We're only a few minutes drive from Googong Dam, which is surrounded by bush reserves, but I can get to Canberra, Queanbeyan or Karabar quickly and easily if I need something - traffic is negligible, compared with Sydney.

I have a nice sunny garden, and the climate is much nicer than Sydney's - much less humidity. Everything I have planted in the last 7 months has grown enthusiastically - herbs, tomatoes, lettuce, and chilies. And compared to the prices of houses in Sydney, or even in Canberra, Googong is extremely affordable. I feel incredibly lucky to be living here.

I just wish that building my new house would actually start!

Settlement

The lawyer's office called this morning, to tell me that settlement has gone through, so the land is now officially ours.
12.6 acres of paddock, covered in grass and thistles. The building envelope is near the top of the property, with a fabulous view of the Tinderry Ranges.

Time for a change

I've had a busy couple of years, and 2017 promises to be even busier. Steve and I are buying a block of land down in Michelago: we are going to build a new house, relocate, and start drifting towards retirement.

I expect to spend a lot of this year on house planning, negotiating with councils, builders and architects, driving to and from Michelago to see how things are going and on working out how to pack up and move everything we own, including two cats who hate being picked up.

It should be a fun year.

Day 1 and 2

This is actually day 18: we're in Oban: this is our second day here, and tomorrow we go to Glasgow.

But let me back up, and start at the beginning.  On April 18th we flew to Paris, via Hong Kong.  Arriving at Paris CDG we retrieved our luggage and completed the (trivial) entry procedures.  I wish it was this painless every time I have to enter the USA.  Our itinerary included a complimentary limousine transfer, and the driver was waiting in arrivals.  He took charge of some of the luggage (we have a lot), and led us to his car.  By putting one large case in the front seat, everything was loaded, and he drove us to the hotel, telling us a bit about Paris on the way.

We arrived at the Mandarin Oriental in the Rue Saint-Honore early on the morning of the 19th, and of course our room was not ready, and not likely to be ready before 3PM.  The hotel kindly gave us breakfast, and we left our bags with the concierge and went out for a walk.  First we walked to the Place Vendome, which is near the hotel, and then we walked through what seemed to be a small temporary street market, with fruit and fish stalls, just in a side street.  We made our way to the Tuileries Gardens, and walked nearly to the Louvre, and then around to the Seine, where we could see the Musee Orsay on the other bank.  After that, we walked to the Passage du Grand Cerf, one of the old covered arcades of Paris.  From there we walked back towards the hotel, and wandered into the Rue Montorgueil, which is an open air market: the produce looked fantastic, great counters full of cheeses, beautiful fruit, meat, patisseries, chocolate and just about any other food substance you can name.

After this we found a cafe and got some lunch, and then since it was about 2PM we went back to the hotel.  Our room was ready, so we checked in, got cleaned up and had a rest.  We had dinner in the hotel and slept the sleep of the jet lagged.

Feeling much better the next morning (Sunday), we went to the Louvre.  I had ordered Paris Combo passes, which I would recommend to anyone.  The passes allowed us to jump the queue of people waiting to buy tickets, and to walk straight in.  We used these passes all over the place, and while they probably did not save us money they saved us an enormous amount of time: what would you rather do on holiday - stand in a queue or have fun?  The passes included metro tickets and various other benefits, and were delivered to our hotel.

Back to the Louvre: it is enormous, and you cannot see it all.  I'll bet there are people working there who have not seen it all.  It is a beautiful building, steeped in history, quite apart from the amazing collections that it houses.  We saw the "History of the Louvre" exhibits, and then concentrated on the Egyptian and Greek exhibits.

After a couple of hours we felt that we had seen all that we could absorb for one morning, so we walked to Place de L'Opera and got lunch in a convenient cafe.  From there we went to the Grand Palais, which is a beautiful building and walked around in the sun for a while.  Then we went back to the hotel and got ready for dinner, which I had booked at Atelier Joel Robuchon Saint Germain.  I must admit to being a little disappointed in this meal.  Steve and I have been to Le Chateau de Joel Robuchon Tokyo in the past, and we hoped for something similar in Paris.  What we got was a restaurant attached to a hotel, very crowded, with people allowing their children to play games at the table and considerable noise.  The food was good, but the ambiance was rather awful.

Around the World in 43 Days: The Grand Tour

It used be common practice for well-to-do young men to undertake a cultural tour of Europe as part of their education - this was commonly known as a "Grand Tour".  And I know many people who have taken a gap year (or two) and travelled before starting tertiary education.  Steve and I both went straight from high school to university, and from there almost immediately into the work force.  We've both traveled a bit, but not as much as we would like, and far too often the travel we have done has been for work.  This year we plan to do some travel for us: the trip starts on April 18th, and ends (if things go according to plan) on May 30th.

Now in Jules Verne's classic novel, 'Around the World in 80 Days', Phileas Fogg makes a bet, during a card game at the Reform Club, that he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days.  He then finishes his game of whist and walks home, where he tells his servant to pack a few garments.  Then he gets some money from his safe, and starts his journey at 8:45PM the same night.  So his planning time is, at best, an hour or so.

Steve and I are going to circumnavigate the globe in 43 days, and the planning has taken over a year.  I would like to thank Melissa Louison, Meagan Patmore and Tahn Lee, all of the American Express Travel and Lifestyle service team, for their assistance in the organisation of the whole thing: we couldn't have done it without you.

We are now less than 5 days from the start of the trip, and I have lists of things that must be done, acquired or packed before we leave.  The dining room table is covered in photographic equipment, as we try to decide what to take and what to leave. Steve is practicing his high school Italian and I am trying to recall any of my high school French (not my best subject).  There is a stack of guide books in the lounge, and a mountain of kitty litter in the garage: our cats' nanny will come in to care for The Hoard while we are away, and I have to leave plenty of supplies on hand.

The itinerary, in rough outline, is:

• Fly from Sydney to Paris (via Hong Kong).  5 nights in Paris.
• Travel from Paris to Venice on the Venice-Simplon Orient Express.
• Stay in Venice for three nights and then go to Udine (Oooh-din-ay), probably by train.
• One night in Udine, then back to Venice for one more night.
• Fly from Venice to Newcastle, where we collect a hire car.
• One night in Newcastle, then drive to Brampton in Cumbria.
• One night in Cumbria, and then drive  to Inverness.
• Two nights in Inverness and then drive to Oban.
• Two nights in Oban and then drive to Glasgow.
• Two nights in Glasgow and then fly to Belfast.
• Two nights in Belfast  and then drive to Ballymena.
• Three nights in Ballymena and then drive to Enniskillen.
• One night in Enniskillen and then drive to Dublin.
• Four nights in Dublin and then fly to New York.
• Five nights in New York and then fly to Los Angeles.
• Four nights in Los Angeles and then fly home to Sydney.

We don't intend to travel as Phileas Fogg did, oblivious to the countries through which we pass and focused solely on the completion of the journey.  Our journey will be interspersed with visits to museums, art galleries, monuments, ruins and anything else that looks interesting.  None of it is being done "on the cheap".  Some of it is being done on the "quite astonishingly expensive".  Reservations have been made at some world-renowned restaurants along the way, and none of the hotels have been selected because they are economical.  I like nice hotel rooms, and consider them an integral part of a good holiday.

There will be lots of photos, some of which will be posted to Flickr, and I shall try to update this blog from time to time.  Stay tuned for further updates.

Very Long Silence

I can't believe that it has been over a year since I have posted anything, and yet I can.  It has been a very, very busy 15 months: there have been good times, bad times, stupidly busy times and a great deal of travel.  There has not been enough time to blog.  However, right now there is a lull, so let's catch up.

The latter part of August 2012 was consumed by a large Request for Proposal for a finance institution.  These things are a regular feature of life in my industry, and this one was about as much fun as every other one I have ever done.  It involved a great deal of hard work, and the outcome was disappointing, though not unexpected (well, I wasn't surprised, though I think the sales team were). September through November were busy but unremarkable.

In early December I went to Macau (via Hong Kong) for a company conference.  I got a day in Hong Kong, which I enjoyed: a little shopping and a walk through Hong Kong Park.  Here are some pictures taken in the walk-through aviary:

You would hardly know you were in the middle of a city as busy as Hong Kong.

Then I went on to Macau.  I had never been to Macau before, and I managed to get a day to actually walk around and look at it as a place.  The casino part is what you might expect: garish, vulgar and slightly tacky.  Look at this:

Yes, it looks superficially like Venice, but it's actually Macau. This is the facade of the Venetian Hotel.  They were determined to have Christmas with all the trimming, so there was fake snow everywhere:

That white stuff in the foreground is some sort of spray on "snow effect", and it had been sprayed everywhere.  I hate to think what it's made from.

The conference was good, though the hotel (the Sheraton), and the hotel's food were appalling - apparently the place was in some sort of "soft opening" state, and everything was amateur in the extreme.  Fortunately I only had to stay a few nights.

I got back to Sydney, had a couple of days to repack, and then we went to New Zealand.  Steve and I flew over together, and met up with Steve's Mum, who had flown over from Western Australia.  We had 3 marvellous weeks together, during which we saw things like Hobbiton, 

Rotorua's boiling mud pools, 

the art deco city of Napier, quite a few wineries and the glow worm caves at Waitomo.  We had Christmas in Wellington, and we spent a night in the Hobbit Hole room at Woodland Park.  We finished up by flying to Melbourne to catch the penultimate performance of "A funny thing happened on the way to the forum" with Geoffrey Rush as Lurcio.

Then, alas, we had to go back to work, and there was lots of it.  And then, in mid April, Steve's Mum died very suddenly.  She was 76 and, so far as we knew, in excellent health.  There was the sad business of sorting out personal effects, packing things to be kept and disposing of things that none of the family wanted.  Arranging a funeral, contacting people who might not have heard.  I am so glad that we had that last holiday together, so our last memories are happy ones.

Then there was more work, a massive Request for Proposal from a key customer.  It consumed my life for weeks, and we won it.  Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to discuss it.

I had to make three trips to the USA during the year, visiting Dallas, New York, Raleigh (North Carolina), Waltham (near Boston), Los Angeles and Sunnyvale/San Jose, so I have certainly racked up the air miles.

And now, as the year winds down, we are planning next year's trip, which we are calling "The Grand Tour".  I shall save the details for my next post.

Upgrade weirdness

I've recently been upgrading my Macs to Mountain Lion, and I hit one particular problem that may be relevant to someone else.  When I upgraded my Mac Book Pro, everything appeared to be fine - and then I noticed that when the screen saver cut in, the password lock was not activating.

Inspecting the System Preferences - > Security & Privacy dialogue revealed that the check box of "Require password after sleep or screen saver begins" was greyed out.  Everything else in the dialogue worked as expected, but not that.  I tried the usual things - log off and on, reboot, etc. - to no effect.  One thing that I did notice was that if I tried to set account password to blank from this dialogue, I got a message that said "Your password did not meet the requirements specified by your server administrator..".  This struck me as odd, and pwpolicy revealed no specific policy settings.

Eventually I called Apple support, and spent about 90 minutes with them, with much deleting of preference files, resetting of ACLs and many reboots.   The check box remained stubbornly greyed out.  Apple support stated that the problem was likely to be a third party application, and delicately suggested a reinstall.

I thought about this, and decided that it made little sense.  I run essentially the same applications on all my machines, and only the Mac Book was experiencing a problem.  The password requirements error message struck me as significant, and it occurred to me that, in the past, the laptop had been joined to an AD domain.  I believe I have stated before that, every time I am compelled to interact with Microsoft products, I have bad experiences;  how one company can have unleashed so much truly nasty software on the world and still made a profit defies understanding.

Other accounts did not present the same problem, so, working on the theory that AD had in some way corrupted the user account, I decided to try something.

Login as root, and start Terminal.

mv /Users/myaccount /Users/myaccount.backup

Go into System Preferences and delete the affected user account.

Recreate the user account.

Go back to Terminal.

mv /Users/myaccount.backup /Users/myaccount

chown -R myaccount /Users/myaccount

Log out as root.

Login as myaccount

Problem solved.  If you are going to do this, be VERY CERTAIN that you have a good backup before you start.

Outnumbered.....

After Mungo died, it rapidly became obvious that our surviving cat, Percy, was not going to cope with being on his own.  He became increasing clingy and demanding, and for a cat who already thought he was the centre of the universe, that's saying something.  When he began getting weird about going outside unless one of us went with him, we knew we had to do something.  So I called our vet, and asked for his recommendations about what sort of cat would stand the best chance of integrating with Percy.  Our vet knows Percy well, having cared for him for 14 years, and he recommended getting a younger cat, about 4 months old: out of really silly kittenhood, but too young to look threatening.  And so I began the search for a 4 month old female kitten to join the family.  Of course, there were none.  I called every pound and cattery, all the reasonably local vets: no joy.  Older cats, younger cats, but no cats around 4 months old, of either sex.

Meanwhile Percy was driving us both nuts, and putting on weight because he was comfort-eating.

I dropped into the vet's office late one afternoon to pick up some supplies, and mentioned to the girl on the desk that I was looking for a 4 month old kitten, and she informed me that they had two out the back, who had been handed in as strays.  She went to fetch one, and came back with a little calico persian cross, who turned out to have a purr like a motor.  Then her sister was brought out, also calico, but short haired.  Short hair seemed calmer, so I said I would take her, took a photo with my iPhone, and arranged with the vet's assistant that they would call me when candidate kitten was ready for collection.

Went home.  Showed the photo to my husband.  Talked about it.  Called the vet.  Said we would take both.  Not quite sure how we talked ourselves into it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  I picked the girls up from the vet on July the 14th, and we are still trying to convince them that we are not threatening.  They are getting better, but we've missed the crucial 3-7 weeks old window, when kittens are pretty easy to socialise.  They are both litter tray trained and very clean, so we are guessing that someone's pet cat had kittens, and these two didn't find homes easily: they've had some handling, but not enough to be comfortable with people.

Percy has not yet met them, though he has grumbled at them under the closed dining room door, and seen them through a window.  He's not exactly happy, but he seems calmer just because there is something else living in the house - he's not alone all day.

So here they are:

Matilda of Flanders, or Tillie for short.

And Florence Von Sass Baker, Flossie to the family:

Right now they are under my desk, behind the printer.  They've spent the day playing wildly all over the north end of the house, and they're probably exhausted.  If we can just get them comfortable with us, we can try introducing them to Percy.  Wish me luck!

A Death in the Family

On June the 6th my beloved ginger cat, Mungo died at the Sydney Veterinary Teaching Hospital at Camperdown.  Mungo was, we think, a few weeks short of his 15th birthday, and while we had noticed that he was slowing down, the end, when it came, was very sudden.  He seemed slower than usual on Monday evening, but ate his breakfast on Tuesday morning.  However, when I came home - fortunately a bit early - on Tuesday afternoon, he was obviously unwell, and I took him to our vet.  They admitted him, and called at 8PM to say that he had a build up of fluid on his lungs, and that he should be transferred to the teaching hospital if we wanted him to have overnight care.

Steve and I collected Mungo, now with an intravenous drip bag attached, from our vet, and drove to the university.  The folks at the university did everything that they could, but when the pathology work came back on Wednesday afternoon, the diagnosis was carcinoma.  They called me just as my last webex of the day was ending, to tell me that there was nothing that they could do.  I called Steve, and we each made our way to the hospital to day good bye.  I took some cream, and Mungo was still well enough to lick a bit from my fingers: he always loved dairy products.

We were able to stroke him and talk to him, and then the attending vet injected the lethal dose into his intravenous line, and he was gone in a few seconds.  The autopsy report confirmed carcinoma, involving both lungs, which apparently explains some of problems that were treated earlier in the year.

We are both a bit shattered, and Percy, the surviving cat (aged about 14) is beginning to accept that Mungo is not coming back.  Percy has never been alone, and we are hoping that he will adapt: because he is so territorial (and violent), we are not keen to try to introduce another cat into the house - it would just traumatise everyone, including the new cat.

I've disposed of Mungo's favourite cardboard box (the latest of many), donated the special diet food that he will never eat to the vet, and notified everyone who knew him.  He had quite a fan club, for a cat.  Several people have sent me sympathy cards (I didn't know that there were sympathy cards for the loss of a pet), and I am getting into a routine that does not have Mungo in it.  Pets get so intertwined in your life, the hole that they leave seems enormous.

So now my gorgeous ginger fluffer is reduced to ashes, contained in a rather twee little urn adorned with a paw print motif.  We'll pick a sunny day one weekend, and scatter the ashes in the garden.  But I don't want to remember the tired old cat with an oxygen tube up his nose and an intravenous line in his foreleg.  I want to remember the happy kitten who would leap into the bathroom sink, to play with the water coming from the tap.  The regal ginger puss who liked to sit in the fork of the tree on the east side of the garden,

or go out onto the gallery above our family room, and stick his head through the railings. The cat who would wedge himself into a box, no matter how small.

The cat with no dignity

and a tendency to try to hide under furniture...

...if he could find anything big enough.

I adopted Mungo from the Animal Welfare League refuge in August of 1997.  He was named after Mungo Park, the 19th century Scottish explorer who was the first European to see the Niger River.

I shall miss him terribly.

Ancestors

What a sink hole of time is genealogy.  You tell yourself that you will just have a quick look, figure out who your great-great grand parents were, get a bit of a sense of the family history.  Then the next thing you know you are spending your spare time transcribing 19th century church records into spreadsheets, so that some reasonable level of correlation and analysis is possible, and chatting to other researchers about interpreting really difficult handwriting.

And I mean bad: I've worked for doctors and lawyers, and they are not even in the running for illegibility compared to some of what I've dealt with recently.  Between the erratic spelling of place names - some of which are pretty strange to begin with (Hurtletoot, I'm looking at you), the splotches and smears caused by old fashioned ink pens, and the extremely indifferent handwriting of people who had little or no formal schooling, and you begin to look forward to the entries where the officiating minister wrote all the names, and everybody else just wrote an "X" next to the words "his mark" (or "her mark").

However, the marriage records make interesting reading.  You can follow the changes in occupations - almost none of the brides had occupations before about 1955; after that, few of them didn't have an occupation, unless they were very young.  And the change in given names is interesting - in the early records they are all James, John, Mary, Margaret, Archibald, Alexander, William, Elizabeth, Annie, Jeannie; but 1965 there are people called Stanley, Gerald, Nancy, Pauline, Dora, Josephine.  The big change comes at the beginning of World War II, when there must have been soldiers and airmen stationed near the town I am working on, people from other parts of the country.  They started marrying local girls, and in quite a few cases it appears that a brother or sister who attended the first wedding met someone they liked while they were there, and a few months later there would be another wedding.

And the men's occupations change - originally the men were all farmers or worked in the flax mills, or as weavers.  Slowly engineers begin to crop up, school teachers, chemists, business managers, lorry drivers, even a detective.  People began to live longer, and marry later.

The end is in sight: two volumes of marriage records to go.

.....And we're back!

The last few months have been ridiculously busy for me, and I haven't updated this blog since late May. However, things have settled down a little, and I'm going to try get back into the habit of blogging (also of exercising, and few other things that I've been a bit slack about lately).

The key events, and things that took up the time:

Editing a book: The First Donegore Story, by Donald Alexander, is out and available from Lulu. I'm really pleased with the result, and the finished book looks good - if you have never used Lulu, I'd recommend them. The final bit of work was the cover.

This was constructed using images from the book, the cover of an ancient dictionary that I have in my study, some old paper from a handwritten recipe book that belonged to my grandmother, a scanner and extensive Photoshopping. I'm sure a professional graphic artist could have done better, but I was satisfied with it as my first foray into the field. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a few things doing it, particularly about handling very large documents in Microsoft Word, and about Photoshop.
The official launch of the book is next Tuesday: if you happen to be in Donegore, the details are here.

I changed jobs: I now work for NetApp. Starting this job has been a bit like coming home: the office is right across the road from the building that I worked in while I was with Sun Microsystems, and many people who I worked with at Sun now work for NetApp.

Steve and I also had a three week holiday, two weeks of which we spent in Japan and Singapore. We had organised the trip to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, and we had a fantastic time. The weather was good (mostly, better than we had expected), the hotels were lovely, the people were nice, and we saw (and took photos) of all sorts of things, from Himeji Castle to the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore (Steve wants to stay there next time). A small selection of our photos is on Flickr: Japan here and Singapore here.

American Express made all the travel arrangements, and they appear to have told all the hotels that the trip was for our wedding anniversary: all three hotels (Park Hyatt in Tokyo, Hyatt Regency in Kyoto and Mandarin Oriental in Singapore) made a special effort to help us celebrate. Flowers, special deserts, personal greetings (and wine!) from hotel managers: it was great, and made the whole holiday extra special. We went to Chateau Restaurant Joël Robuchon for our anniversary dinner (which was fantastic); the Park Hyatt sent a photographer to our room to take our photo before we went: then they presented us with the mounted photo as a memento the next day. On the morning that we left Singapore to fly home, the restaurant staff served us champagne with our breakfast. All nice touches and lovely memories.

However, we are now back at work, and on the run up to Christmas. I'm establishing a routine in my new job, and preparing to get started on my next personal project: the creation of a map of Sydney "underground", using the floor plans of all the interconnected shopping centres and arcades. If you spend a lot of time in the city, you work this out from personal experience, but for people who only visit occasionally all the convenient short cuts are a mystery. I've drawn enough maps for imaginary cities in FRP campaigns, I should be able to draw one for Sydney.

Count down.....

Finally, after years of rumours and delays, June Hemmons Hiatt's "Principles of Knitting" will be reissued in November. It's available for preorder at Amazon, and at The Book Depository (and probably other places). TBD says there are 163 days to go, so I must mark my calendar.

Second hand copies of this revered work have traded at frankly absurd prices for years, if they are available at all - I've never even seen one. The existence of the book is like a cherished myth, passed from knitter to knitter in yarn shops and at craft fairs. Apparently the new edition is a complete rewrite, to cater for modern fibres. I hope it's worth the wait.

So much to do, so little time....

I've had a busy few months, but this evening my wonderful husband is cooking dinner, and I have time enough to blog.

I have once again over committed myself. I have not yet completed the project to scan all my back numbers of Omni magazine (though the end is in sight), and despite that I took on another large project. I am editing (and designing) a book about the history of a Presbyterian church in Northern Ireland. I am also knitting, with yarn backed up waiting for the needles to be free so I can start the next project, trying to read several books at once, and trying to change jobs. I need more hours in the day, or days in the week.

The history book was an unexpected opportunity. I've been researching the history of my late father's family (family history - there's another sink hole for time), which is extraordinarily badly documented. In the course of dredging through the online resources, I stumbled across the First Donegore Presbyterian Church website. One of the church members kindly sent me their baptismal records: hundreds of pages of photographs of hand written records stretching back to 1806. As soon as I saw the first pages, I knew that I would have to do something to make the records more accessible: finding anything in them in their raw state would be extremely challenging. So I said "I'll get the whole lot converted to a spreadsheet", and they kindly sent me a draft of their church history as well. I had a look at the document, and it brought back fond memories of cataloging family history for the National Library of Australia: erratically formatted documents with amateur-hour illustrations and no indexes. We used to get scores of these things, under Legal Deposit requirements, and their sole virtue in my eyes was that I could catalogue half a dozen in an afternoon (the subject headings and Dewey numbers would be almost identical for every one, leaving only physical cataloguing, which isn't that time consuming) and keep my daily averages up. We aimed to complete 8 books a day: cataloguing takes a lot of time, and we were still doing hand written coding onto data entry sheets when I was at the NLA.

So I outsourced the baptismal records to Freelancer, and got stuck into the book itself. I've thoroughly enjoyed it - it is actually much more interesting than it sounds. Social history, about people rather than war or politics, has always interested me, and I hope that the lecturers who taught me history at university would approve of my efforts. I actually read Irish History in my third year, and I still have some of my text books, which has proved useful. We hope to publish in August.

Then there is knitting. I'm part way through an interesting cowl, and then I saw the Mr Fox stole in an issue of Yarn Forward. Even my husband, who is normally immune to knitting patterns, concedes that this one looks like fun. And I still have a bag of Noro yarn (and a pattern for same) from my Christmas trip. I need to knit faster.

And I need to change jobs. This is by mutual consent with my bosses. Things didn't go as we expected: while there is plenty of work, it is not work that I am particularly good at, so it is everyone's best interests that I move on. And now is the time: the amount of work out there is staggering! I've got a couple of interviews lined up next week, but as word of my availability spreads, I'm getting calls from people who I have worked with in the past who would like to work with me again. This is really nice: it is not that easy to explain what I do on a standard resume, but the people who are calling me have seen me at my best - what one former colleague was pleased to describe as "charging $2,000 a day to fix things you know nothing about". And that is essentially what I have done for many years. I have a career based on saying "OK, I'll have a look at it, come back in a couple of hours and I'll have something for you". I am "the third engineer": if two people have already tried to get something working and failed, I'll come out and fix whatever it is. This not because I know a huge amount about anything - it's because I know a bit about everything, and I'm prepared to take calculated risks.

So I have opportunities with a couple of systems integrators and couple of top tier vendors, and more coming in. Every time I get a call I have to re-evaluate what I want to do next : interesting work versus commute problems versus financial stability versus employer stability etc. Interesting times.....

Audrey Blooms

Audrey bloomed last night.

Here she is at about 6:45PM



And about 9PM:




The flower has gone a bit limp now, though may open again tonight. The flowers are usually not as good on the second evening.

Audrey's Progress

It's been seven days since I took a picture of Audrey. Here she is this evening:


Quite a change for seven days. Here's a shot with a ruler, so you can get some idea of the size of the bud:

Getting a well-focused picture is proving to be tricky, because the garden is fairly breezy - we are near the top of a hill - and I have to wait for a calm moment in order to get a shot where Audrey isn't jigging about. An additional challenge, revealed by the telephoto lens, is the ambient cat hair in the environment. My first shots this evening were compromised by the presence of white cat fluff, courtesy of Percy (AKA Fernslayer).

Meet Audrey

So this is Audrey



Audrey lives in my back garden



That's her, in the pot. And she is just gearing up to flower. Over the next few weeks, that small bud will get much larger - and if we are lucky there will be more than one. Last year, Audrey produced three flowers, each lasting only one single night. I'm planning to take pictures several times each week, and hopefully get multiple pictures on the critical "flowering night".

Audrey is the product of my mother's dreadful habit of souveniring cuttings out of other people's gardens (I just cringe, and pretend that she is nothing to do with me). When she first handed me the rather unprepossessing bit of stalk and leaf, I had my doubts. It didn't look like anything that I wanted to cultivate, and my gardener said "stick it in a pot: then if you don't like it, it's easy to get rid of it". The plant still doesn't look like much: it's primitive and rather straggly. But the flowers are worth the effort.

What is this?

I took this picture through the window of a plane, flying from Japan to London in March 2004.

I'm guessing that we were somewhere over east Russia.

Update: I asked Reddit, and the answer is: a river with Oxbow lakes. What we call a billabong in Australia. Thanks to utexaspunk for providing the answer.