Roadtrip video taken by Anita (T)

Boris Johnson (T)

This is in no way a political blog, but it would be negligent of me not to record how heartened I was to hear that Boris Johnson is standing for Mayor of London.

Commute (T)

In April and May I was commuting from Perth to Sydney; now I'm doing it from Port Macquarie. I get a plane down on Tuesday morning and fly back on Thursday evening, so two nights in Sydney, and three working days.

It's a good trip, just two hours door to door this week, Eddie and Grandpa came to the airport to see me off.



Here's the plane after it landed in Sydney. It's got two propellers; the runway in PMQ isn't big enough to handle jets, though there is constant talk about upgrading it according to my father.

10:30am Tuesday morning (T)

Marylebone (UK), Armadale (WA) and Port Macquarie (NSW).....in each of these places, at 10:30am on Tuesday morning the local library runs a weekly story reading session for local pre-schoolers. It's a good time of the week to do it, but seems like more than a co-incidence to be exactly the same in each.

Roadtrip (T)

On the weekend we did the roadtrip up to Port Macquarie (PMQ), which will be our base for the immediate future. I got a fantastic deal on the car - I don't think Avis expect someone to drive a car from Sydney to Port and leave it; the price was just $69 all inclusive for a holden commodore, no excess kilometers and no one-way drop-off fee. Including petrol, $128 for the whole trip. The lady at the drop-off point in Port couldn't believe it, she said in the country they have a excess charge beyond 200 kilometres.
It was a good drive up, we visited April & Dave near Manly on the way, most of the Mac tribe was their to see us, and other than getting waylaid in Maitland for 45 minutes, it was smooth sailing the whole way.

Kids say the darndest things (T)

"Eddie can't drive a bus. Eddie only two"

"Daddy, you do so much work"

Solids (T)

Sebi's first solids!

Also a shot with (Great) Aunty Lucy in Ashfield mall.

Ashfield (T)

We are staying in Ashfield, in Sydney's "inner west". The main street is dominated by Chinese restaurants, and according to the local paper, representatives of the Chinese community recently approached the council about installing a China-town style Arch. The goal is to attract 'international tourists', which does seem a little optimistic. Anyway, others have taken umbrage, and if the Arch goes ahead, the Greeks have apparently threatened to respond with a model of the Parthenon, which all sounds pretty interesting, even for the international tourists.

Here's Anita with Sebi out the back. Sebi will be 6 months tomorrow.

Haiku (T)

Eddie has been talking more and more, both poetically - he refered to the fountain outside our window in kyoto as the 'little rain', and prosaically - he chatted to the man next to him on the plane to sydney, referring to him as 'man', as in, "where's the car gone, man?" when he had yet again hidden his little car in the seat.

Shinkansen (T)

You can imagine how much Eddie loved the trains in Japan, particularly our trip on the bullet train, which has a top speed of 285 kph, which means that when two of them pass each other the combined speed is faster than an aeroplane.

Bigger in Japan (T)

Eddie with blonde hair was big in Japan, Anita with her birthday, grew bigger in Japan. We raced around Kyoto and Tokyo, a highlight for the boys the super fast Shinkansen (bullet train).




See the Zeppelin in the top left corner, a background birthday suprise in the Tokyo Botanical Gardens.





I've resisted doing too many of the 'funny translation' photos as the joke wears pretty thin pretty quick, but this one is nice.