I was casting my mind back to Christmas days of the past, when I was a similar age to the sprog. I can remember well the pre-’santa is actually mummy and daddy’ days - finding it hard to sleep, waking up at the crack of dawn, presents in a pillow case at the end of the bed. So it’s been really funny watching Jack this season. He has his suspicions about the origins of his presents, but he’s not stupid enough to jinx it all by calling fake on the jolly fat man in the red and white suit.

The missus and I got to bed at about 2:00am last night and were awoken by a very excited little boy at 6:00am. As excited as Jack was by the stocking in his bedroom, he still dashed off to the bog for his morning piss - if ever there was a boy that liked his routine, it’s Jack. He appeared at the side of our bed holding his stocking saying, “Santa’s been!” And indeed he had.

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One of the things that takes some getting used to when you live in Australia, is the topsy-turvey seasons. This is particularly noticeable during the festive holiday season. In the UK, Christmas is a rare high-point in the otherwise bland miasma that is the British winter. In the UK, Xmas and the new year enable you to forget, temporarily, that you have another five months of low grey clouds and drizzle to go before it warms up for just long enough to remind everyone that there’s a yellow heat-giving orb in the sky. In the UK, Xmas is the interlude between acts one and two of the school year. In the UK the stores start their sales the nano-second the last late Xmas shopper is ushered out into the drizzle.

Down here though, it’s very different. In Oz, Xmas signifies the end of the year in more ways than one. The start of the Xmas break means the end of the school year and the beginning of the long summer holidays. Xmas is merely an (admittedly welcome) interlude to what, for most people, is at least two full weeks of work. It means six weeks of freedom for the kids and six weeks of keeping ‘em happy for the parents. It means driving south or north with a car stuffed to bursting with gear and a tinnie towed behind.

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One of our group of friends is moving back to New Zealand soon and her going away party was on Saturday night. Since I had a very early start the next day, we arranged for Liz and Jack to sleep at my parents house. I left the party at 9pm and took Jack round to my folk’s place, tucked him in and then went home. Liz stayed behind and, I later learned, returned to my parents at 2:30am, stopping only briefly to fall over in a flower bed in the school playing field while taking a shortcut back.

The summer surf lifesaving season means there’s often a chance for the club to earn a bit of extra cash doing water safety at various public events. The event in question on Sunday was the Callala Triathlon, about 20km down the coast from here. I left the house at 6:00am and, pausing only to buy a couple of sausage and egg muffins and a latte in maccers, drove over to Byron’s house for the drive down with the boat.

 

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On my way back from my spin classes, I regularly drive down a stretch of road called the Princes Highway which, whilst it is the main road between Sydney and Melbourne, is often just single lane. This has caused me to learn new coping techniques on account of the fact that you often get learners doing 80kph (50mph) down there - or worse still, some ignorant twat who just loves holding people up for no good reason.

The speed limit on that stretch of road is 100kph (60mph) which is the national average speed limit on main roads outside towns. It often feels painfully slow to travel at that speed on roads that are often straighter than anything the Romans made. So when you get some old twat doing 70kph, you either shrug in a Buddha like way or - if you’re like me, you swear a lot and bide your time until there’s an opportunity to overtake - at which point you lower the window and flip the bird as you drive past Miss Daisy.

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And the living is, ermm, considerably compromised by the credit crunch, thanks for asking. But that's the fringe benefit to living in Oz - you put up with all the same shit you endure in the UK (or indeed any other country) - but at least there's usually a nice warm sunny day round the corner to take the edge of things.

Yes, summer's arrived down under, the temperatures are in the mid '20s, the skies are blue and the Pacific ocean is a lovely 19 degrees. Jack has just three weeks left of his second year at Broughton Public, before the long summer holidays unfold and we have the pleasure of his company for six weeks.

 

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The teachers at Jack’s school were on strike for two hours this morning and we were instructed not to take the kids in before 11:00am. Liz had a doctor’s appointment and she left the house at nine leaving me to get Jack to school. Mornings are always a rush, but she when returned she was surprised to discover that things were much as she left them. She wondered how it was that Jack was able to go to school two hours later than normal today and I still managed to not have his lunch box ready, to not get him into socks or shoes, to not have his teeth cleaned, to not have this his hat on his heed and to not having packed his bag.

Truth is we’d been working on his school project which, for reasons known only to Jack, involved constructing a cuboid from paper, wrapping this cuboid in Xmas paper, tying a ribbon to said wrapped cuboid and sticking a teeny tiny little gift card to it all. I forgot about lunch, hats and teeth in all the excitement. So we left the house, in time honoured fashion, exactly 10 minutes before school was supposed to start, despite having an extra two hours to do it all in.

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Couple of weeks ago I noticed that our pool was smelling a bit, ermm, different. Instead of the usual chloriney smell, it had taken on this rather more pungent odour - musty if you like. But we were swimming in it to no ill effect, so I just assumed it needed a bit more salt for the chlorinator.

However a couple of days ago, Liz, Jack and myself were in having a splash about and we all commented on the fact that it really was not pleasant to open your eyes in that water. I suggested we all got out until I had the water tested. So I took a sample of water down to our friendly neighbourhood pool shop and had the bloke test it.

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So, with the in-laws having safely re-entered their lives in blighty, we have been free to return to ours here in sleepy South Coast, NSW. Jack’s back at school, I’ve got my head buried in misbehaving PCs and Liz has got stuck into her graphic design work. The weather has been consistently improving over the last couple of weeks and the number of tourists passing through our little town of Barefoot Bay has been increasing steadily.

The American election has been in the news here and for once, the time difference on this side of the planet was a useful thing. While the rest of the planet slept, over here in Oz we got realtime updates on all the counts coming in from the voting stations in the states, during our daytime. So, finally the yanks have voted in someone with an IQ greater than your average pot plant. Hurrah.

 

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The torture is at an end. After nearly 7 consecutive weeks of in-laws, we have waved the last of ‘em off at the airport. It started, as I’ve previously mentioned, with the PILs, but for the last two weeks, we’ve been entertaining the SIL and her sprog. I’m not saying my family’s perfect, or indeed that I am, but dear god they’re hard work.

So. Last time I blogged, the SIL had not long arrived. Well, we have now dropped her and her sprog off at the airport on Saturday evening, putting an end to what has been a very painful two weeks. I thought that the PILs stay had been eventful, but the SIL out-did them in pretty much every way.

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Having the SIL and her daughter over from the UK has proved to be a real eye-opener for us - of that there is no doubt. Josh’s cousin Rachel is about a year older than Josh, but she’s always been a bit, ermmm, slow - so the usual ‘girls maturing faster’ thing doesn’t really count in this instance. They’ve always got on incredibly well together - maybe because they’re both only children and they share the same hobgoblin of a grandmother.

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So. Blimey. Not updated the old blog in nearly a month. Life here has been turned upside down somewhat with the month that the parents-in-law were here and then the arrival of Catherine’s sister and niece two days after the Little Englanders left.

I see from my last post that things were ticking along somewhat predictably. I had hoped we might have a smoother course of events, but it wasn’t to be. It was always inevitable - or to paraphrase Shakespeare - the world’s grown honest and doomsday’s near. So. Where to begin. Let’s start with …

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The inlaws, as I may have mentioned, are over from England at the moment. Thus far everything has gone fairly predictably - we’re well used to their self-centred ways and have mechanisms in place to deal with them. For instance, my father-in-law is incredibly tight-fisted, but the missus laid out the ground rules prior to their arrival and thus far that side of things have been ticking along okay. They have even split the food bills and the cost of accomodation when they go sight-seeing. There is in fact a tally sheet from which sums (to the nearest 5c) are added and subtracted.

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So Josh is in assembly for the last day of term. The teacher says to them - if you made your own bed that morning - then you can go early and play under the COLA. Various kids stand up (who either did make their beds or are getting the hang off this plausible deniability business). Josh stays firmly seated.

Teacher says to Josh, “Didn’t you make your bed this morning then Josh?”

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So the in-laws are over at the moment and consequently we all went out for lunch yesterday. The chosen venue was the Gerroa Fisherman’s Club on account of the amazing views from the bistro and the quality (and quantity) of the food.

We found a table next to the windows upstairs and settled down to peruse the menu. As we were deciding what to eat I heard this robotic voice, like Robbie the Robot and looked up. There was a bloke several tables down from us with one of those throat microphone things. Horrible freaky things at the best of times, but as I’m sat there, the bloke ‘coughs’ and all this yellow pleghm and goop comes out of the hole in his throat!!! He just nonchalantly gets his hanky and wipes off his neck - his dinner guests didn’t seem to bat an eye-lid. Now am I the only that finds that fucking repulsive? I’m just about to sit down to a meal and some bloke’s expectorating goop from a hole in his neck? Put me right off my creme caramel I tell you.

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Well didn’t that come round quickly. Our household has entered the period of the celestial calendar in which various members of Catherine’s family descend on us, bringing discord, strife, bitterness and packets of bread sauce with them. In a weird conjunction of the planets, my kid brother is also be down this way because his girlfriend’s mum is leaving Denver, Colorado for the first time in her life to visit her daughter. Everyone’s arriving at Sydney airport, but a day apart.

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When we were buying this house, one of things that we were advised to get checked out (too late as it happened) was the pool pump. It is, apparently, a fairly notorious problem whereby vendors fail to mention the fact that their pump hasn’t been serviced in five years and has been running near-constantly for twenty. And it’s that exact trap that we fell headlong into.

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And now a small tour of my village courtesy of Google Street view …
Somewhat improbably, Australia is one of the first places outside the ewe-knighted staytes of uhmerrykah to get the Google Street View treatment. Basically Google drove up and down most of the streets in Australia and took photos as they went - these have been married to their excellent Google maps with the result that you can actually see what a place looks like whilst navigating your way around a street map.

Blog entry continues at http://www.thatstheplan.com/.

So the other day I walked into the kitchen holding a knackered motherboard from a dead PC that I was about to put in the bin. Josh asks me if he can have a look at it and I tell him I can do one better than that - he can have it. He’s absolutely stoked by this and has me explain to him all the different bits and pieces on the board. I show him the CPU, the northbridge and southbridge chips, the RAM slots, the IDE sockets. I explain that PCBs are a bit like cities with a road network, but instead of people moving around, little bits of information do. He seems rather taken with this explaination.

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Update: Link working again. Perfect example of why I took my blog off-site.

It was as I watched young Billy launch himself across the garden, fist extended towards Charlie B’s face, that I realised that Josh’s mates had perhaps grown up a bit since last year’s party. And as the fist connected with Charlie’s face and he fell over, I also realised that inviting 15 of his mates over for his party was, perhaps, a bit overambitious. Yes, Josh’s birthday party has been and gone and I can categorically state that we’re not letting him throw another one in our house until he’s, ooooh, 35, at the very least.

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As you may recall - I recently started going to the gym again. It’s going well too - I have managed to stick to my three sessions of spin cycling a week, without copping out. However I have a question for any blokes that might be reading this, that regularly ride a bike. How the fuck do you stop your bollocks getting banged around like a couple of plums in a blender? Is there some equipment, like a cricketer’s box, that I can stick down my shorts to protect my family jewels? Because at the moment, when it’s time to do a downhill sprint, my balls are getting flipped from left to right like the numbers in a bingo-callers drum.

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