Category Archives: General Mumblings

CMA Verlaine, and APL Zircon..

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Two names that we have become very familar with over the last few weeks. We have been using a couple of cool websites (well, cool for this one purpose – dull as dishwater for anyone else, I am sure!): http://www.sailwx.info and http://www.vesseltracker.com

Our stuff was all loaded by Crown into a container, which was then punted by truck down to Southampton. From there, it was loaded onto the first – the CMA CGM Verlaine, an open deck container ship which sailed to Bruge, to finish getting loaded, then cugged it’s way along the english channel, down through the Bay of Biscay, across the Med to the Mouth of Suez.. along the canal, then out into the Red Sea. It docked at Jedda, then headed out into the Indian Ocean, and east towards the Port of Kelang (Kuala Lumpur).

At this point, our container was unloaded onto the dock, and verlaine continued on to China to pick up it’s next load of stuff en route to Europe. In the mean time, the second ship – the APL Zircon. I don’t have a picture of her, so here’s a picture of her sister ship – the appropriately named APL Scotland.

Zircon left Kelang on the 9th July and began her journey south towards the Port of Fremantle (or ‘Freo’ to the locals), where she is due to arrive on the 15th July…

along with all of our stuff! now we just need to wait on Aussie customs poring over everything and deciding what they do and don’t like the look of, and we should get the Wii back, and the Telly.. and our bikes… and the couch…

sigh. I kinda miss our stuff. very Tyler Durden in the whole ‘the things you own, end up owning you’ I know, but dammit, I just want to have a comfy couch to sit on and watch a movie on something other than my PC monitor.

In the meantime, Jen and I have been like a couple of explorers, giving new names to stuff.

First was when we made a spaghetti bolognese from some minced kangaroo.. we could’t quite decide – should it be a boloroo? or a kanganese? in the end, we settled on… Roo-gu! pure genius.

Not as cool as today’s though – we spotted another Skippy-related roadside incident, and Jen came up with a new name for them.. Roo-dkill. heh.

I’ll get me coat…

A perfect day..

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So yesterday was a bit wet and miserable. The weather is a bit of a focus for us at the moment, as it is unbelievably cold at nights. My boss Rudy reckoned that this would be one of the coldest winters we had ever experienced… and coming from Scotland I had a good old laugh.

oh boy was he right.

The problem is that Australian houses are built to get rid of heat in the summer. They have white painted walls, tiled surfaces, overhanging roofs to shade the windows.. and not a stick of insulation.

Houses built in the last few years are starting to get (some) insulation – nobody has double glazing, as it’s only needed for sound proofing.. and folks get around it in the winter months by blasting on the gas fires, electric heaters and wood stoves.

I guess the whole idea of building a passive insulated house with decent thermal management to keep the heat in during winter and keep the cold air in during summer will start to kick in as fuel prices continue to rise.. but for this year, in our rented house…

brrr.

We have a couple of DeLonghi dragon electric heaters to keep the bedroom warm, but it’s like being back at our crappy flat in Motherwell. All of the folks we speak to have a little chortle, and say something along the lines of ‘wait till summer…’

That being said – today has been delicious. we nipped out to the local IGA (independent growers of australia – like Spar) to grab some bacon and rolls.. had a delicious breakfast sitting out on the deck… pottered around the house doing some weeding, put the pool cover back on (we had to leave it off for a couple of days, as the chlorine was a bit high), and settled down a lazy afternoon in the hot tub.

Nothing quite like a soak in the hot tub, couple of bottles of cider and just putting the world’s wrongs to right.. the suns just at that lovely ‘last light of the day’ stage just now – everything’s golden orange and yellow.. in fact, here’s a quick photo of the view from my desk – this is looking towards the edge of Joondalup.

So, settling down to read a book and generally chill before dinner. It’s days like this that just make you hapy to be alive 🙂

One Month and a few days in ….

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We had a good weekend, the weather was fab and we used the hot tub a *lot*. Its too cold to use the pool believe it or not, the water just isnt warm enough, but we are coping with the hardship of just the hot tub.

We went to a local steak house for dinner last night (The Hogs Breath Cafe), great steak, huge portions, we will be going back there again 🙂

So, onto todays agency meetings. I did well with agency number one. Then agency number two landed a pop quiz on me and I totally blanked everything I ever knew about programming and couldnt answer a single question. As I left there rather flustered, I got a call from agency number one with an interview for a business analyst role and a developer role with a company in West Perth. So, I am being interviewed by one company for two separate jobs on Wednesday :). Agency 3 was OK, but he wants to wait till I get a clearer picture from the other two agencies as to where my CV is.

Over all, a knackering day. Its been nearly two months since I was in anything other than jeans and trainers, so after today getting suited and booted, my legs and feet are killing me. Thank goodness for the spa!

Back Online – so here’s a new video!

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Well, after a wait that seemed to be measured in weeks, we are in the new house, and have broadband! – we couldn’t really do a blog post for a while, as we were using Jen’s smartphone for web access. sloooooow!

Still, we are now hooked up, and the Hot tub is up and tested (and is as awesome as it sounds!), so here’s a new video:

In the meantime, I have started work so am keeping busy – I need to get a couple of pictures of our new office. I’m travelling into work on the transperth trains, which I am (rather oddly, I guess) actually enjoying. The trains are nice and modern, very regular and the ticketing is quite clever.

I have a ‘smartrider’ card – a little RFID tag which allows me to ‘tag’ on and off of the transport system. You put money on the card, then tag on and off, and it deducts the fare automatically. You get a 15% discount just for using the smartrider rather than buying a ticket, and you get a 25% discount if you link the card to your bank… so, I happily use the tranport system – buses, trains, ferries, and it just pops the fare off each time.

When it reaches a pre-set level, it invoices my bank account for another $50 or so (you set this amount through the website), and that’s that. You can log onto the website and see all of your journeys, and where your tag was used – rather slick.

Another one of those “what the f….” moments.

By | | Australia, General Mumblings, Interesting! (Well, for me)
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We had decided before we came out that we would do the whole aussie experience thing rather than just being the “whinging pom” types who stuck to ex-pats clubs and basically complained that everything wasn’t like “back home”.

We watched an AFL game yesterday. Aussie Rules Football, or just “footy” to the locals. The game can basically be summed up in a couple of small facts – there’s 18 players on each side, and full physical contact is allowed between the shoulder and the knee.

The entire game (quarters of 20 minutes each) looked uncannily like a pitch invasion. there seems to be too many people on the park, they wear slightly different variations on the strip, there are about 8 umpires, and large parts of the game are spent basically fighting.

It’s more ordered than it looks, naturally, with the key element of the play being “Marks” – basically catching the ball after it has been in the air for 15 metres, which entitles you to a free kick (ie, you can pause for a second and nobody is allowed to kick you in the chest, or bite your arm until you kick the ball again).

I might just get into this – it’s kinda like rugby, basketball and ultimate cage fighting rolled into one.

Not weird enough for you? how about this then… it’s late autumn here, and the trees are dying back – like this one:

That tree is perfectly healthy – rather than drop their leaves for the winter, Aussie trees keep their leaves, and drop their bark.

it’s the little things that remind you that you are NOT in Kansas any more!!

Day Ten and counting.

By | | Australia, General Mumblings, grrrr
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We drove up to a place called Lancelin yesterday – our first attempt to see a bit of rural Australia. huge roads – sections of it variously like driving through England, Eaglesham Moor and Spain.. but strangely fused together into one. We had to stop at the side of the road every now and then to grin like maniacs, and take pictures of the car:

One thing we have noticed pretty regularly since getting here – despite the aussie reputation for being laid back, they are even further down the old “Police state” path than the UK – everything is illegal… and has a sign telling you that it’s illegal. The road signs are insane – they have completely arbitrary signs for no right turn, no left turn, no u turn, no parking, no stopping, no looking, no smiling (okay, I made the last two up).

Seriously though, check this thing out:

Worlds Most Cryptic parking sign.

That means no parking to the left of the pole (outside of the bays). no parking to the right of the pole at all (even in the bays). On the left of the pole, in the bays, you can park for 2 Hours (that’s what we think 2P means – you also see 1/4P and so on), during these times. Outside of these times, you can park anywhere you want.. including to the left of the pole. *except* If you have a resident’s permit, when you can park to the left of the pole any time you like, for as long as you like. But not on the right of the pole… can you guess I got a ticket?  😐

In Lancelin, as well as the delightful signs on pretty much every lampost (and this is a town smaller than Plockton’s Pub Car Park) they also have a huge sign that says “no camping – campers will be prosecuted”. There is a sign at the entrance to the town saying “Local Police are targetting…” and  a set of hooks where the topic that most irritates the local plod can be hung up, so that you can consider yourself warned. Yesterday, they has mostly been irritated by Speeding it seems.

We stayed in Lancelin for just long enough to write in the sand:

the beach at Lancelin

We then decided that we had better scarper – in case smiling, laughing or standing on the sand turned out to carry a jail sentence!

Back to Perth, where the locals are thankfully not all cousins and the signs are slightly more welcoming (we think) and picked up some meat for the barbie – we are mostly eating BBQ at the moment, but this is less to do with becoming true aussies, and more to do with the flat not having an indoors cooker… we are so looking forward to moving into our house!

Posted another cool video too – the 207 doing it’s convertible roof thing:

Getting settled – with a trip to woolies :)

By | | Australia, General Mumblings
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Well, a walk past Woolworths, and a visit to Coles – the Aussie equivelant of Asda and Tesco.

We stocked up with some essentials, as well as a trip to Bunnings – the local B&Q. some hack job surgery later, and we have a couple of Aussie power leads for the laptop.

starting to find our way around and took some photos from our living room – here’s jen having breakfast:

Living Room

Those doors lead out to the patio, there’s then a nice park before the river. Given that the river probably contains crocodiles, sharks and jellyfish (for all we know), we are not going down there just yet… still, the patio has what looks like a good croc-proof steel fence:


Our patio..

Anyhoo, next we head off to Westpac to prove that we are who we say we are, and open our Aussie bank accounts (which we have to do before we can rent a place).

busy, busy!

Our house, empty!

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after many aborted attempts (grrrr – youtube!), I finally got the vid walk through of our house uploaded.

anyone who has ever been to the house will be downright shocked at how clean and tidy the place looks, minus it’s messiest contents (that would be us!).

for your enjoyment:

also a little bit of good news – we have a couple of viewers set up already for the house 🙂

Unemployed again!! :D

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Well, that’s us now, officially, unemployed slackers again – we both finished this afternoon, and are now running about mad getting stuff ready for the off.

The house is packed on Monday/Tuesday, we should be decorating the finishing touches on Wednesday, letting agent is out on Thursday, Friday for “contingency”, then we fly out on Saturday. phew.

Nearly two years later, and right on schedule!

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We started KyCon ’08 back in 2006 (as evidenced by the dates on Jen’s posts). That’s when we started thinking about roaming the world.

Wintermute Consultancy had just went under, we had sorted out work, the house was safe again, and we decided that we had just had enough of being cold, wet and miserable… it was time to see the world.

Last year, part one of the plan came to fruition, and we visited the pyramids – one of the best experiences I have had so far, and one of “the big 50 things to do before you die”.

Now, here we are – ready to leave Scotland for Sunny Australia. The house is being packed up as we speak, and we fly to Perth in a little over two weeks.

It was my really sincere hope that ’08 would be the year we actually did it – I honestly didn’t think we would make it.

Hot, Hot, Hot!

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Its been really warm for days now, so much so we took wednesday off and bummed about, visited a garden centre and generally lazed. It was great.

We have been out and running quite a few times now and I have progressed to 5 x jog for 1 1/2 mins, 5 x walk for 1 1/2 mins. I am rather chuffed it has to be said! 🙂

Our batch cooking went well, and we have really rather enjoyed amazing lasagne tonight, with fresh salad picked from the garden. Fab.

Summer Rain

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Came home from work on Friday after only being in for 30 minutes after my breathing got crap, and just got worse, and I didnt have my inhaler with me. It was playing up all weekend, and was real bad on Sunday morning. Then the rains came. and came. and came.

Thunder has been going on and off pretty much all of the day! Oppressive heat, humidity and wheezing all go hand in hand.

I have got together a list of all the tasks I can think of and put it in Outlook, hopefully this will help get me a bit more focused to get things done.

Today we are starting a 100 day challenge-y thing. Today till the 9th Oct, getting in as much exercise, eating as much good food and as little bad food and just doing things right for 100 days. *Fingers crossed*

So, what will we do tonight Brain.

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Same thing we do every night.
Try to take over the world.

Had a *great* weekend. We decided on a whim to take Friday off work on the Thursday morning, and was that the right idea….

On Thursday night we went for a run, and then got chinese and watched The Day After Tomorrow.

On Friday, we traipsed round B&Q and got a ton of wood, and then Ian made a big box for me so I could spread out my veggies into more space. We had settled down to do very little when Sean MSNed me asking if we were going out tonight ….. blank looks …. we had gotten mixed up as to when Peters night out for his birthday was. We would have turned up on Saturday when every else had been out on Friday. just as well Sean asked. So, we took Sean in, met Pete, Greig. Liz, Rachael, Paul and some other of Peters friends. Got gassed, had a sar beni and a late night.

Saturday involved a trip to North Berwick via Dobbies garden centre in Dalkeith (its huge) in North Berwick we walked on the beach, Kayleigh dived in the sea, we got greasy fried suppers, and then came home to watch loads of SG1.

Sunday was a day in the back garden mostly. Ian finished building a base for the box, and then I thinned out the spinach, lettuce, parsnips, leeks and beetroots. Potted out the strawberries I had in the house, and planted some peppers, carrots and red onions. The thined out plants look dead. Heres hoping they recover quickly. Was enjoyable though 🙂

I am now a little sunburned, knackered, and my back is acheing. Its a sign of work, and I am not used to that!

So, the aim of the next few days is study, Study, STUDY!
I have an exam on Thursday. Which I am so gonna fail, but I need to at least try and get close to the pass mark. Monday brings roleplaying, on Tuesday I should be going for a walk with Anna, Wednesday is the Brights meet up I think, Thursday is my VB/Windows exam, and Saturday we should be going out for dinner for my dads birthday. Need to get him something.