garden stuff and bikes

had a long week at work this week. very long hours. also didn't get as much riding in as i would have liked as i broke a spoke which makes the wheel waaaay out of true. its hard work when the brakes are jammed on for half of every revolution.

Anyway today i replaced the spoke and another bent one at the bike maintenance workshop. took the bbq too which was a nice addition to the workshop.

the rose bush near the shed is blooming now. This is the one that Raechelle took to with such gusto in July. Seems to have responded well to the attention.


The mint is also starting to look like its going to do all right in the old container


the spuds are going great guns, all but 4 are now well and truly established. mmmm pink eyes!


the last shot is a general backyard shot with the fig tree to the left of picture. Thanks to Trish (Ben's wife) for indentifying said tree.


sorry the pics wouldn't load. will bang them up soon - ALL FIXED NOW. Don't forget CAPS LOCK is the cruise control for the awesome :-)

anyway i have finished 'truing' my rear wheel and getting it all back together tonight. Its 'true' in the sense that its mostly true. I don't know if anyone has ever tried doing this, but its no where near as simple as you imagine it to be.

Quick Montage

Wow time can really get away from you. I didn't think it had been so long since I'd added a post.

The beans are pressing up against the top of the seedling try cover now. I'm going to take out the big ones (not all of them have sprouted yet), let them harden and then plant them out next weekend.

The potatoes are going great guns. about 15 out of 25 have sprouted lovely green foliage and are growing well. Pink Eyes in the new year for me!

Just got back from the movies - saw Death at a Funeral which was very funny.

For those of you that know Rhys, he is turning 18 this Wednesday so that will be a big day for him

This week I am going to try to ride to work every day. Need to get myself organised though. SOmehow I always seem to forget something. belt, cuff links, etc.

I also ordered a shiny new laptop for myself. I'll probably be doing a fair bit of travelling in the soming months and my desktop (this one I'm using right now) is getting quite long in the tooth. was time to update and a laptop can be salary packaged which makes it a bit cheaper. Anyway I hope that will arrive later in the week. I certainly have bucket loads of work I need to get done.

Today I went to the Kingston Markets with Ben and Trish. Sampled heaps of yummy stuff and had a very enjoyable day.

Best get back to the ironing, have to get 5 days clothes ready to cycle in tomorrow morning.

Newstopia!

Brilliant! I thought it was a sad indictment of Australian broadcasting when the Shaun Micallef show was pulled from the air a few years back. There is something about his comedy that makes me laugh until i cry. There is an intellectual (and i think philosophical) slant to his comedy that takes it beyond simple parody. Anyway I just finished watching his return to glory on SBS ( a far better place for his kind) and it was brilliant. Admittedly, for every 1 person who thought the micallef show was brilliant, there were 20 who thought it was rubbish, so it may be just me (and the 2 other people i managed to find who loved it). But he is back with bells on. Don't miss Newstopia, 10pm wed nights on SBS.

Today was ride to work day and it all went off very nicely. Had a great gathering for DVA here in Canberra. About 35-40 at our breakfast and everyone having a great time. Ok bed time!

Beans are getting bigger too!

quick beans

just a quick one cause its getting late and i have to get up early and ride to work. have to brief the Secretary at 8.30 tomorrow morning.

so here is a picture of the beans growing.


here is one of the walnut looking particularly happy.

Magic Beans!

Well what a week. Been flat out with the AICD course, but its been brilliant. It could well be the best course I've ever been on. But its truly terrifying how exposed you are as a director. I'm not talking about the dodgy ones like HIH etc. I mean you can get yourself in trouble by doing nothing when you should have been doing something, even if you didn't realise you should be doing something, because you should have known, and so on.

Had a bit of a play in the garden again. The beans I planted a week or so ago are leaping up! Theres at least 10 of them up now and one is quite large. The $500 cabbage is still the only one from the first tray that has emerged. The second tray had nothing, so i took all the punnets out of the mini greenhouse thingy and replaced them with 4 punnets of peas and 4 punnets of sweet corn. I am hoping that these will come up quickly like the beans did with daily watering as the beans have enjoyed. Today was also 'seasol day'. watering with seaweed water mix rather than just water. I'll try to remember to take a photo of the beans tomorrow. I planted about 70 bean plants i think (5 different varieties-all 'bush' beans -- kidney beans, flageolet beans, cherokee beans, yin & yang beans, basmatti beans. If all of them grow i plan to dry the extra in the trusty dehydrator and have them in winter soups etc.

I unwound all my dripper tube today and lay it in the sun under some pavers to try to get it straightened out a bit. I also constructed a grid of dripper pipes for 'bed number 2' (which is assigned to legumes at this point in the crop rotation). Unfortunately i didn't quite have enough connectors/elbow etc to get it all together. Will have to grab some from bunnings tomorrow.

For those following the EQ2 front, I dinged lvl 49 this morning before it warmed up enough to be wandering around outside. Was a bit chilly overnight in Canberra. As the tomato growers here say, you don't plant your tomoatoes out until you know the winner of the Melbourne Cup. Late frosts don't you know! Have finished the quest line in the Steamfont Mountains and now moved to the Sinking Sands and finished a dozen or so quests there.

Did a heap of laundry, etc, and have been listening to a lecture series on archeology and the discovery of various civilisations.

Also made some little loops of 5mm dripper line to go around the lemon and the walnut in their pots. The walnut is going great guns by the look of things.

Hide the Sausage

First day of the company directors course today. Was absolutely fascinating though very tiring. If I learned one thing today it was that you are absolutely mad if you are on a board. Even if its just the local cricket club or something. The courts have made it absolutely clear that if you are a director on a board of anything, you need to be away of your duties as a director (even if you are not called 'directors') otherwise you could end up sued for millions and wind up in jail. If you haven't read the Corporations Act and understand how to determine an entity's financial position, resign now!

But now for the headline story. Last night I cooked some curried sausages. Enjoyed them and went to bed. I have been getting up very early to ride to work (5.30 this morning) and so have been going to bed early. I was in bed and suddenly remembered that I hadn't put the leftover curried snags in the fridge. So i got up, went out to the kitchen, got a pyrex container (with lid) out of the cupboard, put the leftovers in and put it in the fridge. Tomight I got home and thought that some leftover curried snags would be just the ticket. nice and easy.....only i couldn't find them. Eventually I discovered them in the cupboard from which I had taken the container. In my sleepy haze I had taken out the container, filled it up and put it back....be honest, you thought the "hide the sausage" story was going to be rude, didn't you?

Not riding tomorrow as thunderstorms are expected. A perfect excuse to take the car tomorrow.

New Digs

So today was the first day in the new office. Didn't get a working computer until midday but that was the only hitch. Got nearly all of my boxes unpacked.

I rode to work today as well. Got up a little before six and had a nice ride in now that the weather is warming up now. Its magpie season though so it can be a bit dicey in some spots. As you are riding along the magpies swoop in and attack you. The first thing you know is a thump to the back of the head or neck. The best thing you can do is just hunker down and ride out the follow up attacks. People have al sorts of bizarre ways of dissauding the maggies. Some people stick fake eyes on the top of their helmuts and swear by these. The funniest looking solution though is the people with a whole heap of plastic cable ties attached to their helmuts poking up like some bizarre echidna. I saw a lady this morning who must have been terrified of the maggies because she had at least 30 or 40 of these things poking up all over the shop.

I'm just about to log on to Dawn of War and play a few games with John, Russ and Greg for an hour or so.

Grease!

Today seemed to flit by in an instant. I got up quite early (around 5.30). For those interested in this sort of thing, I played a couple of hours of EQ2, nearly finished the quests in the Steamfont Mountains and dinged level 47. Then around 9am I headed off on the bike to work where there was a bike maintenance workshop happening in preparation for ride to work day. 6 people showed up in the end which made for a pleasant 3 hours. I got my hands a bit dirty and helped someone clean and repack their hub bearings and crank bearings. good fun all round.

Watered the seedlings, lemon and walnut but apart from that nothing in the garden today.

Tonight was Rush Hour 3 at the movies. I actually quite enjoyed it, except for the teenagers who talked through the whole thing. I confess I had some non-Christian thoughts about them from time to time.

Got a big week coming up. New office and the AICD Course wed-fri. Also I am planning on riding to work all week if I can. Got to toughen up the 'contact point' before Dad shows up in November.

Water Works

So the $500 cabbage's scond set of leaves (or leaf) is coming on nicely. Nothing else in the first two trays has sprouted yet but there is some movement on the beans i put in the thrid tray last weekend. I forgot to change the camera to macro mode so this photo is a bit blurry.


I also fixed the dripping tap. It was broken somehow. When turning it off, you could almost get it to stop dripping then it would 'slip' and suddenly be on full bore again. So I could never turn it off entirely. Anyway the tap seems to be braised on so i couldn't just change that. Anyway, I bought a new tap and used the new innards to fix the old one. So its half shiny. Here's a photo.



I also bought some more bits of 20mm bits that i use to make the manifold for my automatic wtering system. One of the T joints split in the frosts over winter. Anyway I expanded that out to 6 solenoid capacity (mind you I only have 4 solenoids at the moment). It only took about 800 yards of teflon tape but that all seems to be sealed up nicely with no drips now.

I also tied up the lemon tree at last (i ended up using garden twine as I couldn't find the errant stockings). Anyway I am a little worried about the damage caused by the winds knocking it over. I hope its roots are ok. I put some water on it through the course of the day to give it a bit of a boost.

Speaking of 'the day' it was quite warm here today. Tomorrow I am riding into work to keep Ben (not regular Ben another Ben) company while he runs his bike maintenance workshop for new ride-to-workers (seeing how I am ride-to-work king) Actually 'regular' Ben will be there too.

Rode to Work

Well it was moving day at work. packed up the office and hopefully it will all be in my new office on monday. its a lot bigger (and i have my own electronic whiteboard in there hehe) but alas no windows. Oh well you can't have everything i guess.

rode to work today a touch over 20 km round trip. felt pretty good about it too. Was supposed to meet Ben on the way but a miscommunication had me waiting for him by the path while he was merrily riding to work. Still we rode home together which was nice. We had an info session for new ride to workers this afternoon and had a good turnout.

Got a couple hundred pages of reading to get done this weekend in preparation for the Australian Institute of COmpany Directors course next week. should keep me busy over the weekend.

This morning I noticed that the $500 cabbage had another set of leaves coming out too. But still no other seedlings up as of this morning.

Played EQ2 for a few hours tonight after a break of about 9 months. Wasvery good fun.

Office Bike

The time has come, tomorrow I am riding to work for the first time this spring. The weather is warming up nicely. I just have to make sure I have everything I need. Its quite a logistical issue getting everything ready to ride to work!

Tomorrow is also the day of office moving. I go from the 16th floor down to the 2nd. Bigger office but no windows. my own electronic white board too which is cool. I will be back in with my resources/finance branch colleagues once again instead of squatting in a spare office.

Also tomorrow we have the first of our pre-ride to work day info sessions. Sunday we are running a bike maintenance workshop for a few hours. Don't worry, there will be someone who knows what they are doing!

On the garden front, still only one seedling up (the $500 cabbage as I call it). The lemon tree has a severe list from the high winds. I secured a could of stakes in the windward side of the planter box, but cannot find the remains of the stockings I bought that i intend to use to tie it to the stakes. Before you get any wild thoughts i use the stockings to buff my work shoes to a high sheen when i clean them.

As a final note, great to hear from Andy B again. I was very pleased to see that he hadn't lost faith in me even after such a long break between posts.

Dinner Out

Well its 10pm and I've just gotten home from a lovely dinner and evening with Ben and Trish over at their place. So just a short one tonight.

Jacko correctly pointed out, that the layout that looked fine on my widescreen monitor actually looks terrible on a regular monitor (like the one I checked it on at work). So no more pictures beside the text. Strictly linear from here on in.

Moving into the new office on the 2nd floor this weekend so have to get things packed up at work over the next couple of days.

Starting to ramp up activities for 'ride to work day' with a session on friday and a maintenance session on sunday.

ok, thats your lot for today.

Courses, courses everywhere and not a drop to drink

Not a bad day for a day after a long weekend. Started off with a course on the Financial Management & Accountability Regulations (and specifically Reg 10). Run by Dept of Finance and Admin but held in the new Dept of Prime Minister and Cabinet digs over in Barton. It was actually a lot more interesting than it sounded. I learned a heap of things, got a few questions answered and aired a few gripes about the whole thing. The Regulation itself is about 3 lines long and if we were to explain it to a ten year old we would say "don't promise to give anyone money if you haven't got enough pocket money left to cover it". However, the machinery of government being on the slightly more complicated side the total explanation runs to many hundred pages, much of it incomprehensible to mortal man.

Remembered to give the seedlings a squirt of water this morning before I went to work. Still only the one cabbage happening. Ben is keen to put in another garden bed over at his place so that might be another weekend project. I'm having dinner with his family tomorrow night which will be very nice.

Last night was a bit of fun. Greg popped around on Sunday after the movies and managed to fix the problems I had trying to log into the online servers for a game called Dawn of War. Not a great game by any means but fun by virtue of the fact that I was playing a cooperative game with 3 friends (Johnno, Russ & Greg). Jacko is frustrated by his troubles getting onto the servers. Frankly I never would have managed it without Greg's help, so that was very handy.

I am continuing my Franz Schubert odyssey. I have a whole pile of audio files that I am laboriously splitting into tracks (so that there isn't 3 symphonies in one long track for instance). I am listening to one right now and it is incredibly uplifting.

Apart from being very breezy at the moment, the weather is getting to such a stage that I should get back on the bike and start riding to work every day. National Ride to Work day is on the 17th of October and as these things tend to happen I am DVA's national coordinator. go figure.

Finished the lecture series on 'Famous Greeks'.

Next week I start the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) 'Company Directors Course'. There's a 4 kg box of reading material to digest for it this weekend. If I pass the exam and the assignment I can use the post-nominals AICD which is quite cool I thought. It should be absolutely fascinating (and tiring). Will fit in nicely with other governance work I am doing.

Ok thats enough for today.

My Man Franz

This first couple of shots concern the backyard blitz team of Rae and Ash who visited on my birthday weekend in July. Rae got medieval with a huge rose bush next to the shed and left it looking like this when she went home.




Now, after some spring growth it looks like this



As you can see it seems to be quite vigorous.

I also got the potatoes in this weekend. 24 pink eye seed potatoes in the ground. Here is a sort of a mid process shot. After this I covered the rest of the seed potatoes with compost and then put in the irrigation and covered the lot with straw.



Other backyard activity included anchoring the chook house down more firmly. Its been quite breezy lately and it was getting dislodged from its perch in every wind. So a trip to the camping store and 10 huge tent pegs later i was ready for action.


I put 6 along the front where the trouble seems to mostly be. One i each back corner and 1 on the right hand side for luck. This is what they look like in situ.


I experienced a most remarkable thing this weekend. A truly uplifting experience. For reasons that would take too long to explain here I find myself in possession of 40 CDs worth of audio files containing what I assume to be everything Franz Schubert ever composed. I have to say I am absolutely blown away by Schubert's symphonies. I catch myself wandering around the house waving my arms energetically in time with the music. It is absolutely remarkable stuff. Its an instant mood changer in a way that other music isn't entirely. I presage a long odyssey of discovery of classical music for me in the months to come. But first Franz Schubert. I am only about 15% of the way through the stuff I already have.

Still got a bit of an irritating cough happening, but definitely better than I was last week. Time for bed, I have a training course on FMA Regulation 10 tomorrow over at Prime Minister & Cabinet.

Check out my man Franz if you get the chance.