Josie news

We had Josie up at the vet this morning for her last lot of baby injections. After this she will be able to start dog school. We went to sign her up last month but because she hadn't had her last injections we've had to wait. We'll try again this Thursday - the first Thursday of the month is when new people can go.

The vet did a thorough check of Josie. She's gone from 5-6 kg when we first brought her home in early January to 16 1/2 kg this morning! She now towers over Bella. Bella can stand under Josie's tummy and not have to duck her head! I've been trying to get a photo of them together but when they see the camera they stop what they are doing and come to see what I'm up to.

Anyway, during the examination the vet found that Josie has a heart murmur. A heart murmur is usually a congenital condition; the valves that are open in the womb and which should close at birth don't. It hasn't been picked up before. The vet said that he could hear Josie's heartbeat as normal all over her chest and only heard the murmur in a specific spot. It may be nothing. We have to take her back in a month and if it's still there she'll have to have echocardiograms, etc. to determine the severity.

Not going to Victoria

It seems my chance of going to Victoria has been and gone, for the time being at least.

Jono comes down tomorrow and he and Ian are going down to Philip Island, Vic. for the motorbike racing so I've had to make myself unavailable. Anyway, I was stunned to get an email from our brigade Yahoo group to say that our time had been and gone and we were down at the bottom of the list again. Without any of us knowing anyone from our brigade had been sent anywhere. The captain's response to a member's query has been uninformative and unsatisfactory but he has shut down any further discussion on the topic. I sense that no one is happy. Unfortunately for the folks down south, their situation appears likely to continue for some weeks yet so once Ian is back I may be able to put my name down again with some hope of being sent on RRG.

We had yet another busy weekend. At RFS training on Friday night Rob and I got to go on a call out - to help remove a tree from on top of a car. It didn't take long and all I did was control traffic - all two cars but I got the opportunity to give a policeman directions!

Robbie had a cricket match most of Saturday - I don't know what the weather was like at Hazelbrook but it rained a lot here. It's a two day game so I will have to take him next weekend - yuk - I don't do cricket.

Ishbel spent much of the day with her friend Brittany. Brittany was going to choose hermit crabs on Saturday morning and wanted Ishbel to help her choose. Didn't know Ishbel was a world reknowned expert on hermit crabs and much sought after for her advice, did you? Anyway, as I suspected would happen, I got the call in the afternoon asking if Brittany could stay over.

We were supposed to be going to Music by Moonlight at Homebush for Latino Rhythm 'n' Groove with Sharon and Janet and Steven but it was wet and soggy and we decided early in the afternoon to bail out and have dinner here instead. We weren't much chop at thinking of latino food and just had paella, tacos and tortillas and the only latino music (and even this is stretching it) we had was Kid Creole and the Coconuts and Santana. The only dance we could think of we all knew was the conga line! Pathetic.

Unfortunately Sunday was pretty boring, especially for the girls. While Jamie headed off for a day out in Penrith with his friend, Chase and Robbie snored upstairs, we headed down to Penrith to look at flooring. We need to replace the lino here in the kitchen/family room and want to take up the carpets everywhere else in the house except the bedrooms. We were looking at floating wood floors but have been persuaded that wood-looking laminate would be much harder wearing, not to mention much cheaper.

We called in on Karen on our way back from dropping Brittany off and got our Xavier fix for the week.

Diagram Prize shortlist

Time again for one of my favourite prizes, The Diagram Prize, a prize for the oddest title of the year. The award was created by publisher Bruce Robertson in 1978 when the winning title was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. Past titles have included Stray Shopping Carts (see picture) and Bomb-proof Your Horse (a must for homes everywhere I should think).

Nominees for the Diagram Prize are selected from submissions sent in by librarians, publishers, and booksellers. Winning titles were initially chosen by a panel of judges but since 1993 readers of The Bookseller have been allowed to vote. Now votes can be cast online and I urge you to take yourself off to thebookseller.com website to enter your vote and then look out for the winner being announced on 27 March. At the time of writing The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais (with my vote) is out in front.

This year's shortlist includes:
* Baboon Metaphysics
* Curbside Consultation of the Colon
* The Large Sieve and its Applications
* Strip and Knit with Style
* Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring
* The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais

To my surprise and horror I find that NONE of these books are held by my Library! Where's the Purchase Suggestion form?

Now, with your appetite for more silliness whetted, go take a peek at the list of past winners in Wikipedia's Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year page.

RFS training Friday night

see more pwn and owned pictures

Wet weekend

Sorry we didn't get around to Skyping you over the weekend, Fiona, as usual we were running about at breakneck speed all weekend. Will see what we can do this weekend. Did you have a nice birthday anyway?

Ishbel had arranged for her friend, Ellen, to stay over on Friday night. Ellen is one of my favourite little girls, she's incorrigibly happy, always smiling, but a bit hyper and questions, questions, questions. However, our patience was rewarded and Ishbel disappeared with Ellen to spend Saturday night at her house.

Friday night I left Ian to it with the girls and headed out to book group at Cathy's. We usually meet on the first Friday of the month but Cathy was working that night so we'd changed the day for her. We'd read (some of us anyway - Trish has the distinction of having attended nearly every meeting but never having read ANY of the books - she's doing a PhD and doesn't have time for reading) The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Cathy always goes all out to create atmosphere when we meet at her house. She was dressed in lacy blouse and lacy, tiered skirt (the book is set in Spain) and had a 'Cemetary of Lost Books' on her sideboard.

We always have a lot of fun and Friday night was no exception. Apart from hearing how Heather had turned the tables on an obscene phone caller, Sharon told us she had an annoying song in her head. The cure for that is to sing Jesus Loves Me - it puts the annoying song out of your head but doesn't stay itself. How does that go? asked someone. So I started to sing it and the others joined in. Sudden silence from Cathy's boys in the next room! We really lost it when Cathy reached in behind the Cemetary of Lost Books and pulled out a picture of Mary and Jesus (or Mary and Joseph) which, at the flick of a switch, had flashing lights going! Cathy's mum had got it from the local convent when it closed down and thought Cathy would like it!

I was up and out early with Jamie on Saturday morning. Jamie was doing a two day Senior First Aid Course up at Firecom in Katoomba. Luckily our friend, Marie, and her son, Rob's mate Leigh, were also doing the course so we were able to arrange for Jamie to go up with them. Rob and I did the same course about this time last year.

During Saturday afternoon (Valentine's Day) I rang Sharon and Janet and Steven to see if they wanted to come round for tea. It's been raining and cold for AGES now and I thought we could do cold weather comfort food like thick soup and steamed pudding. Nobody was free, which was a bit of a fizzer but not long after that I took a call from Cathy Humphries. Cathy (separated, single woman now) offered for the children to come to her for the evening, letting us do something for Valentines. I looked up the showing times for the Ricky Gervais film, Ghost Town, and tried to book us into my favourite restaurant in Katoomba but it was fully booked and I thought it would be a similar story all over so thought we'd just take pot luck after the movie. I didn;t give Robbie any choice, just told him we'd be dropping him off to spend the evening with Cameron and Brendan and Jamie would be able to walk over there from Marie's place when they got back from Katoomba.

The film was great fun. If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend it. I laughed out loud all the way through and there's a shock at the end where I shouted out loud too. After the movie we crawled through the main street in Katoomba looking for a not overcrowded restaurant or cafe. But it was chucking it down and there was no parking so we then trawled the Mall in Leura. Again no parking. We thought we'd have to just wait until we were back in Faulconbridge or Springwood. We tried Wentworth Falls on our way past. There just happened to be a parking space outside the Chinese restaurant so we thought we'd give it a go - and had one of the nicest Chinese meals I've ever had. And it was a very reasonable price.

Meanwhile the boys had been playing board games with Cameron and Brendan and had also had a good night. We had a cuppa and a serving of sticky date pudding (my favourite) with Cathy before taking them home.

And up early on Sunday again to take Jamie to Marie's. Not me this time - Ian. I stayed in bed trying to finish the book for my other book group. I didn't finish the book but that wasn't too much of a problem, I'd read it a couple of years ago and I got pretty close anyway.

I went to see Xavier. He was awake and playing happily on the floor plaything. When he started to grizzle I picked him up for a play, tired him out and made him grizzle so he was sent to bed. By then it was time to head up through driving rain to Katoomba for book group and back again through cats and dogs stuff afterwards.

Last night

Here is a little video of what happened in my bedroom last night (don't worry; it's clean).

Usually the cat is locked in the garage overnight and the dogs in the laundry. Somehow last night Abigail must have eluded capture and the Camp Commandant hadn't done a proper headcount. I ended up at 2am, with Abi on my chest reading Dear Fatty (Dawn French's book) with me. She must be enjoying it coz she was purring.

Still waiting . . .

. . . to hear if Blue Mountains brigades are going to be sent down to Victoria and if I'll be on the crew. I'll be cross if I don't; there's only one person on the availability list who goes to training more often than I do!

Like a blog?

From the November 08 edition of Reader's Digest found on the lunch room table . . .

When he received a bound diary as a gift, my eight-year-old son was mystified. "Mum, what am I supposed to do with this? The pages are blank."

"You write down interesting stuff that happens to you," I said.

"So it's like a blog . . . on paper?"

Hot stuff

So we survived the big hot weekend and I'm sitting wearing a cardi this morning!

As you can see from the table below, Karen was right and following the rules of the temperature guage on the Springwood Weather site we couldn't go over 40C and we didn't - by much.

Still, that was hot enough. We weathered the heat by judicious use of our air-conditioning. Thank goodness we weren't still at Macquarie Road, it used to get very warm in that house and a long run of weather like this would have been really uncomfortable. I felt sorry for the new owners as I drove past on Sunday.

Robbie had a cricket game on Saturday. Luckily it was at Blackheath which is higher up the mountains and therefore a bit cooler. Ian took Jamie and Ishbel up with him to the outdoor pool up there so they splashed about keeping cool. (I was at the hairdressers - for hours!)

On Sunday morning I got up early and went off to RFS training. I got grunts of No when I asked the boys if they were coming. The turn out yesterday was HUGE. That and the heat meant we stayed inside the shed, divided into 3 more manageable groups and did training that way.

One of the topics was vehicle familiarisation. We went walkies round the truck and the Personnel Carrier, pointing out potential hazards, etc. We have a new PC, a Landrover Defender. I got to have a little drive of it. We haven't been too impressed with it really. It's carrying capacity is rubbish - our taller members can't sit upright in the back seats, some of our more curvaceous members have trouble finding space anywhere and with a full crew of 7 there is nowhere to stow bags and equipment except on the roof. We barely have room for the First Aid kit and the fire blankets for use in an over-run. Driving it was odd too - the hand brake is in a whacky spot and the indicators and wiper sticks are all back to front - I managed to remember they were the opposite way round while I was driving the PC then promptly put my windscreen wipers on in our car instead of the indicator! Visibility out the back was rubbish - even without a crew on board.

As a Total Fire Ban had been declared again both days of the weekend crews were sought to sit on stand-by. But we couldn't volunteer. We had tickets to see the Top Gear Live show at the Acer Arena at Homebush. It was a lot of fun, the kids loved it. They had some of the stuff from the TV shows - we voted for cars on the Cool Wall by holding up green or red cards and using the same cards to indicate Left and Right, did a lap of the circuit used on the show by celebrities. There was an Australia v England car soccer match - Australia won 5-4!

Karen and Dan went to Top Gear the evening before. We were supposed to babysit Xavier but Rana is over from the US so she did it instead. Ishbel was a bit put out and said, "Well, we get first dibs next time!"

We've woken up this morning to much cooler temperatures - hence the cardi - but the sad news that over 100 lives have been lost in the Victorian fires (see ABC News pages). Yesterday morning 20+ lives had been lost but the news reports were saying 40+ could be expected. When the alarm went off at 6am the news report said some 90 people had been killed. Not half an hour later 108 were being declared dead. This is the most people killed in bushfires ever. We still haven't heard anything about teams being sent down to help from the Blue Mountains but I have said I am available.

Just like at our house . . .

when we show them our walk-in wardrobe . . .

Two points of view video

Weather forecast

Here is a screendump of the weather just now (2:30pm) in Springwood. Note that the max on the temperature bulb is 40C - we're in trouble 'coz the forecast is for 44C on Sunday!

I'm going to download this to a CD and play it long and loud every weekday morning

. . . perhaps then I'll get out of the door without a sore throat and a hoarse voice!

Looking back on another week

From the middle of the week this time.

Last Wednesday was Joanne's funeral. It was held at the crematorium at Leura. There's a lovely little chapel building at the edge of a hill looking over bushland. It's quite beautiful. Ian and I went up with Robbie and Ishbel. Joanne's eldest sister, Margaret, gave a lovely speech followed by Joanne's friend from college, Linda. It was very hot in the chapel and a few people had to leave to get some air and three people passed out - including our own Ishbel. She was complaining of feeling a bit sick, I was trying to find a seat and then her eyes just rolled back in her head and she just flopped. A short rest on the lawn at the front of the chapel with all the other floppers and a glass of water and she was right again. After all the ceremonial stuff was finished we let go 47 purple balloons. The reception/wake was held at the golf club in Springwood.

On Friday the washing machine was finally fixed with a new pump being installed. However, after putting on the first load I found water all over the floor in the laundry - the man hadn't connected things up properly. Luckily Ian had been paying close attention to what he'd done otherwise and was able to correct the problem.

On Saturday Ishbel and I went down to Bowral with Cathy for the afternoon. Her boys had left their Nintendo DSs at friends during the holidays and we were meeting Chris to get them. After meeting Chris over lunch we pootled about the bookshops and antique shops then finished with 3 enormous ice creams before heading home.

Meanwhile Robbie and Ian went cricketing leaving Jamie to hold the fort at home. Robbie's team lost - the umpire came from the opposing team and the decisions were not without controversy apparently.

Robbie has signed up for both soccer and rugby this winter. I'm not at all sure how we're going to manage to get him to games and Jamie to his AFL games. Jamie doesn't start his comp until April but we have the draw already. He has games ALL over Sydney. Some with early starts. I've said to Ian they should just stay overnight near the venue for those ones.

Ian went for a long bike ride to Oberon on Sunday morning. On the first Sunday of the month he usually does that with a crowd of fellas while I go to RFS training leaving Ishbel at Ruby's house. We'd not got into our stride after the holidays though and hadn't arranged for Ishbel to go to Ruby's. It wasn't until mid-morning that Carolyn rang wondering where Ishbel was! Ruby came round to play in the afternoon and we'll get back into it next month.

The boys have started back at Venturers tonight. Tomorrow Robbie starts work at McDonalds in Blaxland. He's to be there at 4:30pm for orientation. Jamie starts his AFL training at 6pm and at 7:30 I plan to take Josie to dog school. Phew!

Oh and the forecast is for hot, hot, hot weather this weekend. Yeuch.

From a document at work

I just like it.

“If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity” Bill Vaughan