Permanent blog now ready

My permanent blog has finally been set up!
Find it at www.sachqua.com/blog

Viking, um, ship?

Sounds like fun?

A viking ship made out of 15 million ice cream sticks, stuck together with 6 tons of glue, is seeking crew members to sail across the Atlantic from Holland to Canada (via Greenland).

Touted on the web page as the world's only "Full Size Recycled Ship".

Snow report

More snow last night!
Covering the hills on the way to work, and very icy roads. No accidents, though, everyone driving at 60-80kph. Took lots of photos.
No snow in town, but long icicles on everything and our sloped driveway was slick with ice. Just about went arse up getting into the car.

Edit: There were accidents. The local paper reported 10 crashes in an hour. And everyone I talked to had a few fun fishtails while getting to work.

G. I. John

Though he is actually "Private Chow"























John is back after surviving four weeks of basic training for the army reserves.

I went down to Kapooka (in Wagga Wagga) this weekend to see his matching out parade.

And then went out drinking with about 40 people who hadn't seen a beer, and been going non-stop, for four weeks. Good fun was had by all.

He's survived, and I think somewhat enjoyed, his time a Kapooka, despite being yelled at, never having 5 min to himself, and gaining a cold/flu and twisted ankle.

At the marching out parade, the Chief of the Defence Force was attending. Apparently this is quite a treat, because he hardly visits Kapooka, let alone for "lowly" reserves.


















There were some surprised reactions from people at the mine about John being in the army reserves. Some reactions:

"He's doing WHAT?"
"The thought of John with a gun is scary"
"He's mad"
























I'm glad he's back, even though he is having to learning again how to sit still.

Bad drivers

No more snow yet, but did have frozen dew on the lawn this morning.......

I couldn't open the car door because the rubber seal was frozen to the car frame. And no wiper water, cos it was also frozen in the tubes.

This blog is somewhat in response to Jad's comment about road conditions.

NSW roads are almost always in bad condition. For everyone in Western Australia, don't complain about the extra few cents you pay on fuel for road tax, it is very much worth it. The only good roads are the toll highways in Sydney, so you have to pay extra to use them anyway.

The speed limit on the road out to work is a 100km/h, but in WA it would probably be 80km/h. It's narrow, winding and potholed.

I have occasionally heard Perth drivers been accused of being bad, and having driven in Sydney I can understand why. In Sydney, there are so many cars, close together, going fast that you have to be continually alert, and take even the smallest opportunity to turn or change lanes. There is no margin of error.

In Perth, you have the luxury to hesitate, wait for a better opportunity and become rather lazy about driving.

But this also means that NSW drivers, especially Sydney drivers, are extremely bad country drivers. Driving too fast, or very close to cars in front, and overtaking dangerously.

And then you add ice.........

There are always a few bad accidents every winter. But there are also lots of accidents even on dry summer roads just from people being dickheads.

They don't salt the roads as they don't usually get too icy. I haven't experenced any icy roads yet *cross fingers*.

Snow

We had a snow fall last night!
Only a couple of centimetres, enough to thinly cover flat ground with tuffs of grass poking through.
It wasn't at home or work, unfortunately, but on the side of the road on the way to work.
The road gets to approx 1000m altitude before descending into the valley where the mine is situated.

Prediction is for more tomorrow morning. I will try to remember my camera!

My house

Thought I would show you some photos of where I've been living for the past 7 months.
It's a 4 bedroom place. Have one housemate at the moment, a vet grad, and she always has great work stories. Until recently also had a grad mining engineer, on exchange from my employer's western australian mine site.





























Lounge room at the front, front door to my left, hallway down to the bedrooms on right:















Kitchen (to the right of the dining room in above photo):















Living room / computer room:















Back patio:















But the best thing about the place (well, at the moment) is it has central gas heating!

Beauties and Beasts

Ok, I'll move on to something other than winging about the cold. It's actually not as bad as you would think. It's a novelty at the moment and all the buildings have very good heating. And I have discovered pure Merino wool thermal undergarments for when I do go outside, heavenly!
I will probably change my mind when it actually starts raining......

Went to a charity ball on Sat night. There was a great cover band, even though they didn't play anything from the 90's, let alone this decade. That's one of the things I miss in Orange - live music.
Mostly because there is relatively few people in their 20's in Orange. Teenagers finish high school, move to the big smoke for work or uni, and then come back when they are ready to have families.

You may or may not know, and you may or may not believe, that I now play a regular team sport - soccer! I am actually enjoying it, mostly due to it being C grade and most of the team members are from the mine.

These two subjects are related and in the same post due to these two photos:
On Saturday night - The Beauties




















On Sunday morning - The Beasts

Icy

Iciest morning yet. Stopped to take photos on the way to work:



















The fields are normally green, just not this morning. It's all white, well actually pink due to the sunrise.

See it IS cold!

Screen capture of the before mentioned weather webpage.
This is from last thurday (31st May), before it was offically winter.

Here is a photo of the work landcruser:















It is already a morning ritual to fill up a bottle with warm water to pour over the windscreen.

I'm cold

Orange is finally getting cold. Predicted to be 8 degrees max tomorrow.
And I got told today that it's not even *cold* yet. I have to wait until there is inch thick ice on the windscreen and icicles hanging off the guttering.

I found an Australian weather webpage that not only tells you the current official temp, but what temp it "feels" like. I could have told them it "feels" like 5 degrees.
Weatherzone site for Orange

I'm a lot more in tune with the seasons here. Probably because I'm not jumping between climate zones every second week. When I arrived in Orange last October, John's street was lined with the one variety of tree with pink and white blossoms. Wish I had taken a photo. Since 90% of the trees in Orange are deciduous, last month all the trees started turning yellow, orange and red. Our lawn and street is crunchy with leaves. And I can definitely tell you that winter is on its way.

Though it never did get really hot.....

Welcome to my new blog!

Hello everyone,

I've decided to create a blog since I never end up telling everybody everything that I want to. So here I can do it just once. It will probably be more of "this is the interesting stuff I did this week" including photos, rather than anything rambling and philosophical.

This is my temporary blog, since now that I've got some inspiration I want to start straight away. I am eventually going to host a blog on my own domain, but it involves time spent with ftp clients, MySQL, and other things I've never heard of. For those in the know, does anyone have a recommendation on a good blog template? I did a quick search and have so far settled on b2evolution, but I am definitely open to suggestions.

For blog beginners, the best thing about this format is you leave me comments. Try it now. Click on comments below.
Since the blog is in the public domain, I recommend not mentioning full names, addresses and phone numbers.

Enjoy