Days Getting Longer

Our little Holden Barina's automatic gearbox has finally given up the ghost. That'll teach us to load up a city-runabout with furniture and blat up and down country roads month in month out. It's not quite a write-off, but the repair will cost well over half the value of the car, and it will take ten days or so to get parts, so we're stuck in Brisbane this weekend and will have to make our own entertainment.
Our ex-flatmate John is in town for a couple of weeks, and we met up with him on Saturday morning in West End market. He'd bought C a bouquet of white roses, and his girlfriend Sanghi called up on his mobile from Seoul to congratulate C about the coming baby- what a lovely gesture!
My boss came through with the promised two weeks unpaid leave, which was agreed when I decided to go permie, and then some synchronicity came into play and pretty much decided our holiday for us: First Tiger airways entered the regional battle, and the other players lowered their fares to compete, then we heard that Marcus and Basia (whose Northern spring wedding in Poland we missed) are on holiday visiting Ian and Eriko in Tokyo at the right time, and finally John and Sanghi will be on holiday at the same time, so we're planning to meet up with them in Kyoto as well. The timing couldn't have been better for our last ever adventure unencumbered by kids - we've been promising Ian and Eri that we'd visit for nearly four years now, and Eri is also pregnant and expecting at the same time as C, so it's the last time we can use their house in Tokyo as a base too.
I'm still surprised by how cold Brisbane winters are. I guess I should have figured it out by looking at a map really - though we're a thousand kilometres north of Auckland, we're on the edge of a huge landmass, and I'm used to London's and Auckland's relatively warmer, wetter island winters. I love this weather though - C has suffered a bit with the cold, but the crisp days with blue skies and a light breeze are exactly what I'd order. The days are getting noticeably longer this week too, and when I walk home from the CBD at half past five, the sunset is just starting to turn the sky orange above the Brisbane river as I get to the bridge to cross to West End.
Work-wise, I've started taking advantage of being in the heart of West End - now that I've located the cafes on Boundary street that serve up reliable wifi and a decent long black, I'm doing some of my mornings from the third place, which is very civilised. I'm intrigued by possible networking possibilities amongst remote-workers that these venues open up - there must be a business opportunity there somewhere, if only I could see it. More mundanely, spending some time in cafes around other telecommuters is a useful education in the techniques and technologies that other remote workers use to juggle jobs and maintain their boundaries in a gadget-filled, 24/7 working world. And the baklava rocks.
I usually try to keep my work out of this blog, but this week I want to plug Flare. Anyone that spends a significant portion of their time writing technical documentation to the web is mad, in my humble opinion, to use any other product. I'm finishing projects at least 30% quicker than I was with AuthorIT.