Conventional wisdom

The hardest thing about blogging consistently is not the sitting down each week to tap it out, but the going back to it a fortnight later when when you miss one. Apologies.
Two of our house mates - Ili and Conrad, have got their own place round the corner and have moved out of our Besant Street house in Brisbane, so we are only sharing the place with Marina & Co. - which has immediately made it feel less like a student shared house and more like the poor man's pied à terre that it is.
C's extended contract finished on the 26th with doughnuts but sadly, no beer, given she's 7 months pregnant.
My long-anticipated weekend in Nimbin was not to be, as an unexpected offer of a bursary to attend the ASTC's Novacon in Sydney was impossible to turn down. With only a few days to arrange everything, I booked the cheapest flights and room I could find. I ended up not only flying from the Gold Coast rather than Brisbane airport, but also at inhuman times - I had to set my alarm for 2.45am to catch the return flight. The conference was smaller scale than I expected but with several high-calibre speakers from industry and academia, and excellent opportunities to chat with communications professionals from other parts of Australia. The conference also helped me develop a clearer idea of the tertiary courses in communications studies on offer in Oz - I'm considering enrolling in a communications course over the next year or two.
The art of conference attendance, of course, is skipping the right sessions to maximise your free time. I didn't get it quite right, but still managed to check out a good chunk of Sydney's China Town, Liverpool, Surry Hills and King's Cross districts. I also made my way back to Circular Quay, where C and I spent New Year's Eve 2006/2007 with Dom and Michi, and this time I made it into the Museum of Contemporary Art! Ah Xian's remarkable busts which had delighted me in Brisbane were on display here, alongside some new ones. MCA's highlight for me though, had to be Julie Rrap's Body Double - a great, memorable, un-hectoring, political exhibition!
Gold Coast airport is next to the motorway as you drive South from Brisbane. C picked me up on Sunday morning en-route from Brisbane to Nimbin, and I had my first full week in Nimbin - which seems to have passed in blur of work, except for the two wonderful thunderstorms which we enjoyed from the deck, and the friendly young wallaby joey who joined us for lunch most days.
Somehow this week ended up being a "tie up loose ends" week, so on top of my two day-jobs, I caught up with the stuff I'd promised to do for my Kiwi mate's website, got my mum's B&B website back online and finally got around to installing the IDE and source control software on my PC that I've been meaning to install since August.
The bathroom project continues apace - a snail's pace that is - and as I write, we've got to the point where we can begin sanding the floor tomorrow. I'm still getting a lot of satisfaction out of getting the details right, and the fact of doing work that's less abstract than my day job. Nonetheless, it's starting to feel like the project that will not die.
Its been a great week in Nimbin, and best of all I've got another ten days straight here.

Busy Busy Busy

So, it's been a mad couple of weeks. Mostly, it has been mundane stuff - climbing up onto the roof, and cleaning the guttering. Assembling and plumbing in the new sink and vanity unit in the bathroom. Selling our old car and buying a new car. Probably the biggest single piece of time this week has been given over to fighting off the evil paperwork caused by needing to register a car in Queensland, whilst residing in New South Wales, and at the same time needing to renew my driver's license in the UK. Kicking off a new project at Gensolve Ltd, and wrapping up a long, ongoing project at Mincom have also featured high on the list.
Some of it has been only half mundane - I have taken the first few steps towards organizing a reunion of the UCL alumni who live and work in Brisbane. It looks like there will only be a handful of people at first, but it should be interesting meeting up with folks of various ages who have UCL backgrounds and have emigrated to Queensland. Also, we have had the component parts of C's new desk sitting around in the office for months. this weekend, we finally got around to assembling it - it came from Ikea, but it's pretty cool - the height and angle can be independently adjusted, and the entire top is a massive sheet of glass, divided into two separate lightboxing areas. Not that C will be able to reach the desk to do any lightboxing, or indeed, any work at all, if her belly gets much bigger - she already has trouble reaching the keyboard. Being able to rest her elbows on her bump hasn't stopped her from extending her contract though - she has reduced her hours to 17 per week, but will now continue working at Queensland's Department of the Cabinet and Premier until October 26.
Our first spring in New South Wales continues, and the entire driveway was covered in white blossoms when we arrived home this week. The next morning I walked out into the garden and looked up. I don't know the names of any of the trees that are in bloom yet - but there are at least three different species of white blossom in the garden. With our continued weekly absences, it seems the wallabies are getting bolder as well - though perhaps I see them more because I have tuned my eyes in a little bit better to the life in the bush around our house, which definitely starts to teem in September!
We had to drive back to Nimbin last Wednesday, because I didn't have too much confidence in my plumbing - but all the connections seen to be watertight, and there are no leaks in sight. Unfortunately, our ante Natal class has been postponed by one week, and will now run on Wednesdays starting 19th.
The fact of being only three months away from fatherhood has not sunk in yet - and it probably won't until I meet my daughter! On the other hand, the lists of things that we want to get respectively started, and finished between now and December are decidedly real. It looks like the garden, which by necessity will be a lower priority than the house, is unlikely to be tamed unless we can find someone to help us. Hopefully, we can find a couple of backpackers willing to pitch in and tidy it up in exchange for food and board for a couple of weeks - we have put up adverts around Nimbin, and will do the same in Brisbane this week.

Insanity

Last week was insane. After four busy days, I shoehorned in the Nimbin Good Times crossword in a single evening, with C helping me frantically complete the last few clues and email it off before the deadline. I'm almost certain there'll be at least one embarrassing typo.
With our car at the garage having its gearbox rebuilt, the plumbers we've been chasing to plumb in our shower for four months finally rang back to say they needed to start on Monday.
To keep costs down, we are redecorating and retiling the bathroom ourselves (or "doing renos" as they call DIY in Oz - it rhymes with the French car, not the city in Nevada). We're only paying the plumbers to make the fixtures and fittings watertight at the seams. The problem was, as we needed to keep using the shower, we couldn't start tiling until the plumber called and gave us the go-ahead. So we were in Brisbane on Friday, needing to have the bathroom stripped and retiled by Monday. I rang 4 car-hire places before I found one that could rent us a small car on short notice, then threw some weekend gear into a bag and hiked across town to meet C just before the Europcar office closed at 5:30, so we could pick up a car and sit in rush-hour traffic for two hours. Once we made it to the Southbound transit lane we did better, as it seems everyone in Brisbane is alone in their car - but it was still nine O'clock by the time we got home, and after eleven O'clock by the time we'd mixed up and poured a load of self-levelling compound and turned in. The next 48 hours passed in a daze of hammering, sawing, and dismantling of all the old fixtures, and dealing with all the tricky things like sawing through and sealing up copper pipe that we disconnected, so that we still had water in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. By Sunday night we had the floor retiled and ready for the plumber, and we checked the time before turning in - half past two in the morning.
There have been ground frosts round Nimbin this week, but we've kept ourselves warm all weekend, and not had to light the fire once. We also got our broadband reconnected, and I've finally hooked Skype up properly - email me if you're on Skype but don't have my Skype!
This week some of my team (and my boss) are over from Denver, so I've been catching up with them, and we went together as the dreaded all-IT couple to another drinks night organised by our contractor management company in Brisbane's West End. It's shocking to see how many poms are in the IT game in Brisbane!