Penultimate BrisVegas

So we were back in BrisVegas en-masse for what should have been the final time, but is now the next-to-last time.
My (over)persuasive boss sweet-talked me into working an extra two weeks - so I've had to recruit C to help out with all the crap I've now committed myself to doing over the next four weeks. Idiot.
Nonetheless this week's will be my penultimate drive up to Brissie - and I'm pretty excited at the thought of getting rid of that weekly 340 kilometre round-trip! I drove the other way this time - imitating C & Fran's detour via the famous Lions Road, but going straight at Dairy Flat for the most direct inland route from Nimbin to Brisbane. It' s a nice drive, if perhaps a bit too scenic at times, and doesn't take any longer than driving via Murwillumbah and the Pacific Highway. I had to work on Friday, so Fran took the Citicat all the way along the Brisbane river from the Port area right up to the UQ campus out West, and hopped off to look at the New Farm park around the Powerhouse. Saturday the four of us had a great chilled day exploring Latrobe terrace (that's me above at cafe pandemonium) - I never tire of the old junk shops and nik-nak places in Paddo; this time, by ridiculous coincidence, I stumbled on a 1983 pen-and-ink drawing of the house 3 doors down from our place at Besant Street in West End (which is way across the other side of Brisbane and over the river from Paddington) and even talked the lass at the shop into giving it to me for $20, which I reckon is a bargain. I'll put a photo of it up next week, it's a nice sketch.
On Sunday we spent the day at the Mount Coot-Tha botanical gardens, then I drove Fran to the airport for 11pm, as she had a 2:30am flight for Brunei. I was sad waving her off, but I knew she was even sadder leaving her granddaughter on the wrong side of the world.
After (many) hours of digging and shifting soil around the perimeter of our house, this week I have finally found termites around a stump. This is actually a major breakthrough as the stump in question is directly below the wall I already knew they were in - so I've pretty much located their entry point. Friends in the area have all advised that I should use chemicals myself rather than call out a pro to use chemicals for me at a massive surcharge, so I'll soon be blogging about my experiences with various arsenic based insecticides. I hope.
I've also used a large chunk of my time this week setting up my profile on The Content Wrangler community site and starting a group for "work from home" tech writers - somehow it seemed more important than work and more fun than digging soil away from the house. To all ye hordes nipping at my heels about my lack of a MyFace, or SpaceBook profile - have patience! As well as the Content Wrangler, I am LinkedIn, I keep my work site pretty up-to-date, and I'm fairly active on most of the relevant forums - so, the only way I'm going to get myself set up on the social networking sites is by making absolutely sure that I'll have no extra maintenance to do on my new profiles - and that takes time!
The shenanigans surrounding the company lease of my car (now that I'm leaving my permie job and going contracting again) have been enough to make me pine for my car-free London days: It seems the change in status from leased to hire-purchase somehow involves me filling in forms in triplicate for the HR department at work, the licensing guys, the road tax people, the finance company, the tax office, the insurers, and Bob. And Bob's Dog. And its fleas.
We have a four-day weekend coming up for Easter, which means more time to battle the termites, and (with any luck) more time to sleep.

Awake

we've done much, but little that's blogworthy.
K is now a month old, hale, hearty, and loud.
We've spent a couple of weeks in Brisbane, and shown Rose the sights to some extent - trundled the pushchair round Lone Pine Koala sanctuary, taken the Citicat down to New Farm and looked round the Powerhouse, shopped for nik-naks along Paddington's Latrobe Terrace, and gone out for wine and pizza in West End - which is not bad considering we've got a month-old bub in tow.
Work has proved pretty tough with my reduced sleep ration, and working from home has, in practice, meant putting an eight hour day in, in smallish chunks between 7am and 11pm.
Though it hasn't got any sunnier, it has got hotter and more humid, and in the last few days it has become harder to work from home - I'm training the fan directly on my face, and trundling over to the fridge for iced water every 5 minutes or so.
C's mum has flown back to the UK, and my mum has arrived from Portugal, in a fairly efficient tag-team operation which will ensure C doesn't have to cope with bub by herself in the first four months. I've become conscious of the looming logistical nightmare that will be taking a toddler on two 25 hour flights to the UK and back to meet the relatives - even though it's a year or so away, I should start solving the problems while I've got thinking time to spare...Now if only I could get enough sleep to think straight.
Next week is Australia day, a Mondayised bank holiday, which I've extended to take as a week off, so I will catch up properly with the blogging, upload some of our Brisbane photos, and maybe get around to replacing the picture of me enjoying the cigar of fatherhood in the sidebar, which is getting a bit tired. Apologies for missing a week last Sunday - I'll not let it happen again any time soon.

Early this week we finally got round to visiting our neighbours two doors up the street, Lynne and Richard. They have a few acres of land, running down to the creek at the foot of the hill, and have dug in a dam to catch some of the runoff, have started to terrace the steepest part of their garden, and made real progress reverting to native plants and removing invasive alien plants and weeds - the pay-off was clear to see: A happy family of wallabies bouncing around their bottom paddock. Also, they've only been in Nimbin for about as long as we have. Richard's industry in the garden definitely gives me a complex, but the bright side is, he has a wealth of knowledge and is happy to give me cuttings!
We have also heard from the our ante-natal classmates Jonas and Tanya - they're doing fine (despite Dunoon -only a few kilometres away- suffering a mini tornado last week) But Tanya's baby is yet to arrive, though she's five weeks ahead of C. I'm dreading the imminent period of some 2 to 5 weeks when the baby might arrive, quite literally, at any minute.
After an almost unbearably sweltering week, the temperature dropped suddenly to the mid twenties and we had a week of intermittent but persistent rain. This has made for a really nice late Spring, with the Nimbin and Tweed valleys even greener than usual, and the blossom staying on the trees later than it did last year. It has also made us see reason however - given that C could go into labour as late as mid-December, we have decided to invest in a "backup plan" window-mounted air conditioning unit, just in case we are really unlucky with a heatwave.
The upside for me was that I had a reason to get some work done indoors, given the rain. I had completely run out of excuses and I had all the tools necessary to press on with the bathroom, so after prevaricating for another day and a half, I got in there with the dust mask, a belt sander and lots of attitude. The results so far have been better than expected - the floor is never going to come up beautifully flat and shiny, but the planks are a very rich red-brown colour, and in fairly good nick for an almost 20 year old tongue and groove floor, so I'm optimistic that the end result will be worth the effort.
We had a tough decision at the end of the week, as we'd planned to stay in Nimbin until Tuesday, but due to leaving it very late to book a Christmas party venue, my work in Brisbane ended up organising their Christmas do for Friday November ninth.
In the end, I decided to drive back up to Brisbane on the grounds that, working from home, if I don't go to some functions I'll never get to know the people I'm working with. the works do turned out to be a good laugh. It was at the Merthyr bowls club by the Brisbane River In New Farm - it was your basic Australian works do: Dress up as sheilas, then spend the afternoon doing something competitive under powerful antipodean sun, while consuming weak lager and competing to be last to the kharzi. All great fun if you keep a certain detachment! Once a state of sufficient dehydration was achieved, we retired to the boss's pad in West End, where it turned out he'd set up not only a DJ and cocktail bar, but a full-on play-money casino setup, complete with blackjack table, roulette and two croupiers. All great fun if you keep a certain detachment.
Somehow, our Brisbane house mates colluded to have an impromptu barbecue in the back garden on the Saturday, and that, along with our mad dog decision to walk all the way from west end to Paddington in the noonday sun, put paid to any lingering hangover, and should ease us into next week.

Missing Nimbin

Week two in Brisbane, and we're both missing Nimbin already. We checked out Paddington, the only central Brisbane district we hadn't explored yet. It's reminiscent of Parnell in Auckland: Climbing up a hill, and with pleasant converted queenslanders all in a row selling retro nik-naks and overpriced (but delicious) spiced hot chocolate, flat whites , lamingtons, and Queensland cakes. After buying some retro nik-naks (really, there's bugger all else to do) we had flat whites and a preposterously large slice of Queensland cake.
Sunday morning, we took advantage again of being on the West side of town, and drove round the corner (less than 5 minutes, in fact) past the botanical gardens and up to the Mount Coot-Tha lookout. There's a popular cafe and picnic spot at the top, as it's the highest point in Brisbane, and you get a great view of the skyline and beyond to the ocean. From there we walked into the park and followed an aboriginal art trail for a couple of kilometres - at a leisurely pace, of course.
On Sunday afternoon we scored a real win. Knowing we'd need a room in Brisbane for about 9 weeks after our current house-sitting stint ends, so that C can see out her contract, we'd (fairly optimistically) put up posters around West End, in the hope there'd be a friendly house-share with a spare room. A lass phoned us on Sunday (the only phone call we got, after putting up 10 posters around West End) and we're going to move into a very cheap room in the heart of West End - there's a beautiful, quiet back garden, broadband access in the room, and fun, progressive housemates... We'll soon see if there's a catch!
My contract with Gensolve starts next week, and not only are the sterling chaps there allowing me to do all my work from the comfort of home, they are also supplying me with a snazzy new laptop, and latest versions of the software I need (this should keep my inner nerd well fed and happy for a few weeks). Switching from software development to technical writing, despite the inevitable paycut, is working out more or less as I'd hoped thus far - there is lots of demand, few good people in the game, no chance of my role being outsourced to a non-english-native-speaking country, and a good 20 years' worth of Moore's law before any significant chunk of the work can be automated away. The only catch is that paycut...