ajft

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Lorne is overflowing with bird-life, hopefully the increase in development and cat numbers won't change this too much. Even in the last few years the currawongs seem to hang around all year round, bigger and more boistorous, they don't seem to have had too much effect on the smaller bids — yet. Then down at the river, the ducks are in a perpetual state of feeding frenzy, stuffed to immobility on bread from the tourists. We're just as guilty, putting out seed for the parrots and the odd bit of bacon rind for the Kookaburras...

From breakfast to lunch time I think we counted thirty different species, the first five in under a minute just by looking out the window. King parrots (Alisterus scapularis), a Gang-gang cockatoo (Callocephalon fimbriatum), a currawong (Strepera graculina) chasing a family of blue wrens (Malurus cyaneus), a pair of eastern spinebills (Acanthorhynchus tenuirostris) chasing each other through the wattle branches. Thornbills picking up insects, red wattlebird (Anthochaera carunculata) and new-holland honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae) poking into the grevillea flowers.

Walking down to the beach there's the ubiquitous magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen) and raven (Corvus coronoides), black duck (Anas superciliosa) and wood duck (Chenonetta jubata) in the river, a pied cormorant (Phalacrocorax varius) perched above it and a pair of white-faced herons (Egretta novaehollandiae) asleep on the bank. Sulfer-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) and galahs (Eolophus roseicapillus) over the scrub, pacific gulls (Larus pacificus), little terns (Sternula albifrons), lapwings (Vanellus miles) and another cormorant out at the pier. “Gerroff ya stoopid duck,” yells the fisherman — somewhat ignorantly — as the cormorant steals his bait for the second time. Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), sparrows (Passer domesticus), indian mynahs (Acridotheres tristis) and swallows all hopping or flitting around as we have a coffee.

A black cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo), a Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae), out on a bike ride later in the day there are three pied oyster-catchers (Haematopus longirostris) flying over the rockpools, goldfinches (Carduelis carduelis) near the pub, mudlarks (Grallina cyanoleuca) on the lawns. Enough! I don't think I got to thirty, but I probably missed some.

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Two-twenty a.m. Torrential rain hammering on the roof wakes me up. I can't hear any drips inside, so I guess that's a good thing..

Three-thirty, the rain finally stops and I can stop worrying about whether the roof will collapse!

Three forty-five, the possum leaps from the neighbour's orange tree onto the roof, then skitters across the tin and vanishes.

Four a.m. With daylight saving due to commence next week, its starting to get light and the birds are chirping already.

Four thirty-five. The first train of the day rumbles its way through Oakleigh station, a big diesel freight by the sound of it. For good measure, the driver blasts on the hooter just in case anyone is walking across the rail lines.

Five o'clock, the trucks and traffic are starting up on Warrigal road and I still can't get back to sleep!

Somewhere around five-thirty I finally got back to sleep. I must have done, because I felt like death around eight when I woke up...

Will I or won't I ride to work? Grey skies and light drizzle, not very pleasant to look at. All of a sudden the storms hit again. OK, that's my mind made up then, I'll be taking Jo's car! A quick scurry across the road to the post office to pick up our passports, even that managed to get my shoes soaked. People everywhere were hiding in doorways, or battling recalcitrant umbrellas as they tried to stay dry. Back home, then dive into the car to get to work.

Along the way I did my good deed for the day. Stopping for petrol I spotted a shiny bicycle leaning against the wall of the servo, and the shivering young overseas student standing inside in soaked jeans and polo-shirt, my immense powers of deduction reasoned that maybe he might just be a Monash student... Aha, I was right, and yes, he did very much appreciate the offer of a lift to the uni!

Flickr has a really distinctive and appealling way of visualising “tags” (keywords) on their photos. Something to keep in mind as a way of presenting the information I guess... [http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/]

I've found a way to convert the [[/journal/2004/10/15][mysterious Microsoft-only]] TIFF files into JPEGs. Squirrelled away on the PC that does the scanning in our student labs is some HP scanning software that allows you to convert from one format to another, pity that the universally usable one isn't the default! The first four are from September last year, I know that two were picked up on September 8, I guess the other two were earlier when I was in Switzerland! So here's the start of another project — the scanning of the big box 'o postcards...

Postcards

Since moving house something seems to have gone wrong with our ability to feed ourselves! We either run out of food in the cupboards, or we can't work out what to cook for dinner. This morning I got up to try and make bacon and eggs for breakfast, only to remember that we'd run out of eggs. No problem, plan B is bacon and avocado on toast. Ah, a problem. No bread to make toast! Time for plan C, explore what Oakleigh has to offer in the way of a bought breakfast!

The Cosmic Bear café, kiwi accents and tasty bacon and eggs. Three good coffees and one dodgy one. Good corn fritters and a great tomato chutney — it was all from a stand-in chef, so I guess we have to go again to find out what the regular one is like.

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A wonderful warm spring day today, so what did I do in my lunch hour? Spent the hour walking around the University and find that I am still discovering little gardens and courtyards that I don't know about!

It's a very long way, and a very long day. Being woken by the alarm at 04:45, having to get out of a nice warm bed and eat breakfast in the dark — surely these aren't things that people chose to do on the weekend, on their days off?

No way was I going to ride all the way in to Docklands for the 5:30 start, I checked on the map and it was the same distance from Docklands to the end of North road in Brighton as it is from our house to the end of North road, so I felt justified in leaving home and heading straight along North road. Its a strange time of day to be out riding, on the sun's just starting to come up, on the plus side there's hardly any traffic, on the down side, what traffic there is tends to be tired taxi drivers or drunk night-club goers heading home.

Once on Beach road I joined the maelstrom of south-heading cyclists, organised bunches travelling at all sorts of paces, disorganized bunches and individuals meandering around in their own ways. Despite looking I couldn't see any Monash jerseys, so kept on heading south with a group of people from Geelong and an Italian gent from somewhere up in the mountains near where we'd been travelling last year.

Ten past eight in the morning and I arrived in Sorrento, a stupid time of day to be so far from bed! Stranger still to be queueing for lunch at a time when few will have had their breakfast — then it was time to join the mob for the nine o'clock ferry. One good thing about heading to Sorrento first instead of Queenscliff is that its a slightly shorter leg, so the chances of getting an earlier ferry are greater — people arriving at five to nine find themselves booked on the ten o'clock ferry, quarter past nine can end up having to wait for eleven o'clock or worse!

Queenscliff to Geelong seemed to meander all over the Bellarine peninsula, right-angle turns all over the place and as a result we had alternating headwinds, sidewinds and tailwinds! From Geelong onwards it all straightened out though, sadly it was then a blustery headwind the whole way to Altona. The road is dead boring, the freeway traffic noisy, the chatting subsided, fewer jokes were being made, the day just subsided into a 65km slog to get back to Melbourne.

Up and over the Westgate bridge, the view of the river and the city a highlight. About a dozen riders almost crashed into one individual who decided to stop and adjust his shoelaces — dead in the middle of the lane! Then what should have been a wonderful down-hill run back to Docklands, except for the wind slowing us all down!

Two p.m. on the dot we sailed in under the banners, stepping off the bikes to a number of creaks and groans, a mix of smiles and exaustion on the faces around us.

Four o'clock and I was back home, ready for a long hot shower and a cold beer! Eight hours riding, 237km, I think that's the longest day I've ever spent on the bike — certainly its the longest distance!

2004-Mar-19 2004 RTA NSW Big Ride: Gloucester — Berowra
2004-Apr-09 Easter Deadly Treadly Tour: Moe — Melbourne
2004-Oct-17 Around the Bay in a Day

• Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Abattoir Blues
• Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Lyre of Orpheus

Its all harder than it should be! I can't get my camera to talk to my linux PC, only to the Windows XP laptop. When I switch on the camera, the Windows software very helpfully pops up a dialog box behind everything else, unless I hit return very quickly, the main window pops up and hides the dialog, then nothing works until I kill off the program with CTL-ALT-DEL and try again!

Inspired by the logo of the net-snmp people, I decided to scan some of my old postcards, starting with the three that have been stuck in the front of my notebook since last September! Bloody Microsoft bloody imaging software has saved them in some mysterious version of TIF that only it seems to know about — I can't seem to get the JPEG image out of the TIF wrapper with any other utility, or view them on any other PC! I guess I have to go back to the machine with the scanner and see if I can get it to save the images in a readable format!

Ha ha. Back to the original scanner PC. The only option that the Microsoft software has is to save it as it did. Do a search on Microsoft's website and it says something like "if you encounter a TIFF file encoded in a way that it cannot be read in Microsoft's image viewer, go back to the original scanner software and save it in a portable format!" Real bloody helpful.

Give up, shoot the lot of them. Go home, drink beer.

I added a few photos to Fotothing, then had a look around. Two things struck me; firstly, how beautiful a lot of peoples' photos are, secondly, how much fun I could have with a digital SLR and a macro lens! Additionally, limecat is a magnificent character.

One more step along the way to making the house ours. This evening I attacked the bathroom and scraped off all the paint where the previous owners had managed to paint over light fittings and the toilet cistern because they were either too lazy, or in too much of a hurry to slap a coat of paint on the place! Personalised the mirror with the letters that move from house to house — now we've got a reminder in the mornings of who we are.

Surely it wouldn't have been too hard to unclip the plastic light cover, to remove the top of the toilet cistern, to put masking tape around the switches and power-points... I guess it matches the quality of the fireplace though!

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Roamed around the house this morning, camera in hand, photographing the remaining kookaburras on or in the windows. First up are the painted ones on the door in the hallway.

I need a better quality shot of the leadlight one above the front door, but this early in the day I'm not about to stand on a chair to try and get the right angle — The photo from Sunday will have to do for now.

Last up is the “etched glass” Kookaburra in the backdoor. In reality it is painted on, and the paint has seeped under the stencil. For the last few days Jo and I have been busy scraping it back with our thumbnails, trying to restore a little definition to the edges!

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What's the first thing you do when you wake up in a strange house? In my case, it seems to be “get out of bed and walk into a piece of furniture”. The rooms are a different size, the rooms are a different shape. Nothing is where it was and its going to take a little while to get the subconscious into the habit of twisting around the hard wooden end of the bed!

What a day! More exhausting than our wedding, nowhere near as much fun! Friends and family made it bearable. Naomi and Steph helped all day long, cleaning and unpacking. Marko and Lesley turned up in the afternoon and attacked the kitchen and outside, respectively. Jo's family arrive later, lending moral support and last minute assistance.

There were a few humerous moments, there's a panel between the top of the fireplace and the bottom of the mantelpiece that looks as though it is crying out to be covered up with tiles, or indeed anything... it also has a visible curved line across it where the panel has been cut to shape to fill the gap between the old semi-circular open fire, and the new square slow-combustion stove. The panel just looked flimsy and badly made — no idea how neither of us noticed it during the inspections. One by one people examined it, poked it, prodded it, and tapped their knuckles on it. I walked into the room as John stood back shaking his head and I gave it a light tap too... CRASH! The panel of plaster-board was only held in by a few handfuls of filler! How it has managed to stay attached this long is a mystery, the owners must have been sweating each time the house was open for inspection that the whole thing didn't fall off!

One month. A thirty day settlement. At times it passed in a blur. At other times it seemed to stretch interminably. Finally it is over. At 14:45 came the phone-call to say that everything had gone smoothly, and 8 Mill road was now ours.