Winter has set in

Nothing much is happening at the moment.

Winter has arrived with a vengeance.  Yesterday it reached about 6 degrees duing the day.  Today is a bit better, and at least the sun is shining.  Despite the sunshine, the garden is looking a bit bleak.  We've just had some of our trees cut back because they were reaching the powelines so things look even worse.  Because we've had it done before we know they'll recover OK.  The two photos below show how much we had the trees lopped and how boring the back yard looks.  Even the pool looks a bit murky.

I took these photos with my new phone that I got last week.  My phone plan finished months ago, but I've been holding off to see what the new iPhone was like.  Instead, I decided on an HTC Legend phone running Android.

The phone is really great, but it takes a while to set it up in the way that you want it.  I've been using a Palm Pilot for many years and I hope to be able to set the phone up as a replacement. However, from what I can see at the moment, no phone will be able to fully replace the great features of the Palm Pilot.  But then the Palm Pilot wasn't a phone either.   So I hope to get close, at least.  One of the good things is that we are now all on Vodafone, so all calls between us are totally free.  I got a message from Vodafone during the week that they've now merged with 3, so all calls to and from Mum are also free.

Matt is on holidays from University.  I don't know if I mentioned it before, but he got a Distinction and a High Distinction for his two subjects.  We are very pleased and hope that he keeps it up.  He even remarked that maybe his high school (Radford College) wasn't so bad after all.

In order to earn some money, and to stop himself from being bored, he's taken a job as a casual labourer.  His current job involves relocating furniture at one of the universities.  He seems to be enjoying it because it is such a change from his usual part time job of waiter.  He says it good not having to be polite to customers.  Because it's Saturday he's getting $30/hour, so we reckon that he's late home today to get extra money.

Oh, yes.  The tickets for our holiday to Fiji arrived during the week.  I'm really looking forward to it.  I can really use a holiday after the past 12 months...

Hmm .... despite what I thought when I started this blog post, there have been things happing after all.

A poor day at the races

Another day, another loss.

Today we went to the races in Bega to see how our latest racehorse, Hot Eyed Glare, would perform.  Our other horse, Diamond Jay, is having a break at the moment.

Unfortunately the horse didn't run well as the jockey worked the horse too hard at the start of the race rather that letting him settle has he was directed by the trainer.  So he came well back in the field.  I didn't get a picture of him crossing the line because I can only take a finite number of frames at high speed and I ran out of them before he crossed.

So I spent the rest of the day trying to capture a good picture of the horses as they came down the straight.  It was a lot harder than I expected, especially when the cloud came in and reduced the light.  I had to set the speed to about 1/1250 sec or 1/1600 sec to avoid any motion blur.

It's still a bit hit-and-miss because you don't get time to frame the shot as they cross at high speed and it seems that most of the time you just capture a mass of heads, legs and bits of jockey.  I also noticed that I had a tendency to overly-concentrate to the horses' heads and jockeys so clipped off their feet.

ANZAC Day - Dawn Service

This year I again went to the Anzac Day dawn service.

It was easier than I thought to get up at 4:20am.  I went with Di and Donna (our neighbours) leaving Karyn and Matt in still in bed.  No way can you get Karyn up early.

As we approached the War Memorial we took seemingly random turns looking for parking, only to end up exactly where we parked last year.  We walked up to the cenotaph with a thousand other people only to find many thousands already there.  I'm not certain of my ability to estimate crowds of people, but I reckon there must have been over 6,000 people there.

When the official party arrived, they made no fuss about the presence of the Prime Minister, which was good. It's not a time for politicians.  After all, aren't they the ones who get us into wars in the first place?

It was a very simple ceremony, but we reflected afterwoods that there we didn't like the hymns they selected this year.  Maybe hymns are less relevant these days.

The ceremony lasted about 30 minutes and then ended.  We walked up to the volunteer tea/coffee stalls, but they'd run out of coffee and only had soy milk left.  So we had to wander around until we found one with coffee and real milk.

We then had an early breakfast at Pizazz at Kingston before coming home.

Away for Easter - but not on holiday

Today we drove up to Port Stephens to stay at the mother-in-law's.

The traffic was pretty good until we reached Sydney and got onto Pennant Hills Road where it became bumper-to-bumper. We picked-up Jessica at Hornsby and headed up to Newcastle.  The expressway was busy, but flowed well.  As usual there were the usual hoons who felt the need to tailgate and zoom in and out of lanes.

When we arrived it appeared that there's a big list of things for me to do.  It seems like my days up here are fully planned out for me.

Here's where we had lunch on Sunday.

Credit Card fraud

I got hit by credit card fraud this week .

The Credit Union rang me to ask about a few transactions that had just been made on my credit card.  I said that I knew nothing about them, and they said that they were probably fraudulent.  It looks like they have a system for identifying suspicious transactions.  They immediately cancelled the card and issued me with a new one, but over the next few days about $2000 in transactions had been racked up from all over the world.

I don't know how they got my card number, perhaps they have a software program for working them out, or maybe there are people in shops or restaurants who copy the card details and sell them.  I just hope they can track the bastards down.  I never use this particular card over the internet, in case you were wondering.

Now I have the hassle of filling in paperwork to get the transactions reversed.

Back on the treadmill

This weekend I was able to get back on my treadmill and go for a walk.  

Although my broken toe is sore if I kick something or wear tight shoes, it doesn't hurt to walk any more.  Today was a bit of an experiment because I feel guilty for not exercising each day; but afterwoods there was no residual pain at all.  But then there are always pain-killers and anti-inflammatories !

It's been a miserable weekend so far, with drizzle most of the day, so walking inside is the only option available.  Karyn's been painting doors, architraves and skirting boards.  I've been doing .... not much.  Supervising, really.

Penny's Birthday

On Sunday we celebrated Penny's birthday at our place.  She's got a few things in the pipeline at the moment so we thought that we'd hold her party here and give her a bit of a rest.

We had a BBQ and had a great time.  What could be better than good friends, good wine, and good cake?

Here's Penny and her daughter Catherine.

Once the thunderstorm passed, the day improved remarkably.  Here we are outside after lunch.

From the left:  Gabby (hiding from the camera), Catherine, Karyn, Penny, Peter, and Jill.