T Minus 1

Where T = Wisdom Teeth. 3hrs later, and the injections are starting to wear off. Correspondingly, it's starting to hurt. It's still bleeding - more than I would have thought it should.

The good news is that I need to go back in a week or two to have some cavities filled.

The best news is that both my bottom wisdom teeth are badly impacted, and are growing horizontally. Which is something I've suspected for a while, but since they don't hurt me I've been happily ignoring it. No longer, according to the dentist - they have to go. Apparently that's big surgery, more than they can do at their place.

Oh joy.

More needles.

V8 Supercars at the Townsville 400

On the weekend of July 10th - 13th, Townsville played host to the inaugural Townsville 400 V8 Supercars race. And what a weekend it was! We had three day Grandstand tickets, and headed down early on Thursday morning to beat the crowds.

We stayed at Nathan & Di's place, which was wonderful. You couldn't get accommodation in Townsville for love nor money over that weekend, with everywhere booking out before the V8 tickets had even gone on sale. One local girl I sat next to on the bus described how they were staying at a friends house as well, having rented out their house for the weekend. One great thing about staying with Nathan and Di (apart from seeing them and the girls, of course!) was how close their place is to the Stockland shopping centre, and it's frequent bus stops. Big thanks to Nathan and Di, who was odds-on favourite for having the baby just as racing got underway on the Sunday. Thankfully (for Nathan's race-watching, anyway) the bub decided to wait till the next week! They're now the proud parents of another little girl, Sarah.

The race calendar for the 3 day event consisted of the Mini Challenge, the V8 Utes, the Fujitsu cars, and the main act, the V8 Supercars themselves. So there was always something happening to keep us entertained. The utes are always fun to watch, since they're a spec class, and the cars themselves are basically stock-standard. Obviously they run roll cages and such, but they retain the full interior trim and exhausts, and run a standard tyre and wheel package (some of them even running the factory wheels).

Anyway, enough of the rambling - here's the photos!

2009-07-14, V8 Supercars - Townsville 400

Photo Update

Since I'm so lazy, you get the photos from the previous post all stuck in here. Plus, they're not even particularly good photos.

Enjoy then!

Way back when we removed the big tree from the side yard, we put up these lattice panels to grow some privacy-bringing vines on. We planted some Orange Trumpet Vine, with the promise that it would go great guns. As you can see, it hasn't done real well. What HAS done well is the cucumber vines that we planted only 4-odd weeks ago.

Despite getting watered pretty much every day, the trumpet vine isn't going so great. So much for restoring the lost privacy. The cucumber vines, however, are growing really well, and we've even got a couple of baby cucumbers starting to grow:

Where the big tree was, we've put down a lot of crusher dust, and made a nice smooth ramp from the side yard up to the back yard. Realistically, it could still do with some more dust to smooth out the bumps and high spots, but I figure we'll leave it until the grass gets established, then top dress it and fill in the low spots.

The grass is growing well, but it's taking longer than I'd like.

It's a bit patchy in spots, no doubt due to the fact that Badger finds the grass seed quite tasty, and that the crusher dust seems to be a fine place to bury a bone. So we often end up with "freshly tilled" patches, shall we say, and that's not good for the grass that was growing there. But some spots of it are coming up nice and thick and tall (over near the fence, say) - I just wish the rest of it would follow suit. It's certainly not for lack of water, since they whole area has been watered every night for the past month.

The grass on the flat section in the back yard is going well:

But there's a lot of weeds and other miscellaneous garbage growing amongst it. It needs a spray with my good weed-killer solution, but I'm afraid that it would kill the young grass as well. I'll give it a mow this week - hopefully that will take care of the higher/larger weeds, and give the grass a chance.

As you can see, the blue paint on the fence is holding up nicely, and as the grass start to encroach on the reclaimed dirt, the whole lot looks better and better.

We tackled this back corner a few weeks ago now, and turned what was jungle into a clean, if unimpressive and wasted corner space. But at least we can get in there now and keep it cleaned out. And not having 2 feet deep of rotting palm fronds on the ground makes it much more pleasant for everyone, Badger included.

Since this is eventually where my shed is going, I don't really care that it's currently wasted space - it doesn't really lend itself to anything, so we'll just keep it as clean and tidy as possible for now, and worry about what to do with it later.

All in all the backyard's looking a fair bit different than it did 6 months ago! Once the grass comes on and we manage to level out all the bumps and ditches in the yard, it'll be a much nicer place to spend time and easier to keep tidy. By having the car access into the back yard now, we can bring in ute-loads of mulch for the gardens, which will help to keep the weeds down.

The other big job from this weekend just gone was to sort out the fountain in the front yard. The base was full of rotten water, and the mozzie people were concerned that it was breeding dengue mozzies. Whether that was right or not, it still had to go, just because it was disgusting.

We pulled it all apart (after discovering it wasn't made out of styrofoam or hebel block, but actually cast concrete) with the help of a couple of litres of bleach to kill all the strange and gross "things" living in the permernantly-wet spots, and drained the tub by belting a hole in it with the fencing bar (best tool I've ever bought). A couple of hundred litres of black, stinking water drained out, and let us then remove the submersible pump and the besser-blocks that was supporting the structure.

After getting it all apart, we decided to re-assemble the top part of the fountain back in the garden, and just keep it as some garden art.

It doesn't look bad, and adds some interest to the garden. All that's left to do is shape the dirt around the base so that it won't collect water there, and to use some expanding foam to seal up the ex-fountain-outlets on the top of the concrete balls, so they don't fill up with rain in the wet season. The big tub base has been thoroughly washed (it still stinks), and is living around the side of the house until I can arrange to get it to the dump.

We salvaged the besser blocks (no, we didn't just leave them in the front garden like that!), and after being thoroughly washed down and left in the sun to dry, they'll come in handy some other day.

Now, all we need to do is get a spare weekend to clean out the remainder of the front garden, and make it all presentable, and we'll be laughing. Maybe in late September, at this rate...

July Update - What's been going on?

Well, here we are in the start of July, so I figured it we were well past due for an update. Nothing too fancy to report, really, just going about our daily business. Some of the things we've been up to:

• Garden Attack! - We've been continuing our work on the back garden, but I've not yet managed to get any photos of what we've been doing. We stole the old ute a few weeks back and took two or three loads of rubbish out of the back, which cleaned up the far jungle corner, and down the far side. So we're now at a point with the back garden where things are relatively clean and tidy - the challenge is now to keep it that way. I forsee a lot of palm trees getting the chop over the next few months. We've also painted the remainder of the asbestos fence, since we cleared out the rest of the garden that was covering it. All in all, looks a lot better. Photos to come, once I get off my lazy butt.
  
• Crusher dust. Oh, how I love crusher dust. We bought in somewhere around 1.5 cubic metres of the stuff, and have dumped it down the side of the house, where the big tree used to be. So now we have a nice graded ramp from the side of the house up into the backyard. Coupled with the removable hills hoist, we can easily drive a ute up into the back yard now, which made cleaning out the gardens as described above a real breeze. Previously, the closest we could get the ute was just inside the front gates, requiring everything to be carted by hand or wheelbarrow all the was down the side of the house. We still need some more crusher dust though, as the sink hole in the front yard is settling some more as more of the tree roots rot away. I suspect we'll be topping it up for years to come.
• Grass. In an effort to make the yard look less like a construction site, we sowed half a bag of grass seed over the new crusher dust ramp, and around the edges of the back yard that we reclaimed (and are currently just dirt). We hope to get it nice and green and covered by the time my party rolls around. It's coming along nicely, and we've been watering it every night now for about a month. Some patches are greener than others, though, and it seems crusher dust is a good medium to dig in and bury bones with. Also, it appears that grass seed is very tasty, as is potting mix soil.
• Push-ups. I've started on the 100 Pushups plan, as found here. I'm now at the end of Week 1, and this morning just managed to eek out 19 pushups. But that's better than the 4 I could do at the start of the program, so I'm making progress. This is actually my second time through Week 1 - I ran through first using "girly pushups" (Knee pushups, as shown on this page) to build up some initial strength before tackling it properly. It's jolly hard work, and proof that you don't need to spend money on home gym equipment when you're just getting started. So far, it seems to be paying off, with me only having one bad headache (yesterday, in fact) after three weeks worth of training.
  
• Swine Flu. Jess has been crook this week. Started out like a flu, but by Tuesday morning she was at the doc, with a diagnosis of throat infection. Actually, the first Dr diagnosed Sinutitus, but she didn't believe him, and went to see a different GP. The second fellow diagnosed a throat infection, so she's spent most of the first half of the week in bed, taking antibiotics. She went back to work yesterday, and is feeling a lot better again this morning, so hopefully she gets it licked quick smart.
• Pathfinder. Nearly bought a Patrol last weekend. But pulled the pin, and decided to stick with the mighty Pathy a bit longer. Have decided to start doing some work on the car that I've been putting off for a while now, depending on available finances, and first job is to design and build a carrier/mount for a second battery (this one - Warning - PDF Link) in the back of the car. I'm being a bit different with this, and actually want to mount the battery underneath the car, behind the rear passenger wheel. There's a bunch of free space under there, and by my calculations it's just big enough for that 100Ah battery. I've built a mock-up battery out of cardboard, and have done up a couple of designs in Sketchup. I've been talking working on this project with Justin, a mate in Melbourne from the Pathfinder club, and we're slowly refining the idea into something that we think will be simple, strong and useful. Hopefully we'll have something to show for our troubles soon! Big shout-out to Justin for all the help he's been giving me, and for even offering to knock up a prototype, since my welding skills leave a bit to be desired! Next project after that will probably revolve around fitting a water tank into the back for the car, so we can carry heaps of fresh water when we go away.

And that's about it, really. We've had a couple of weekends at home, which was much appreciated after the hectic couple of weeks early last month. Unfortunately we haven't been able to spend much time relaxing, as there's been heaps of jobs for us to do around the house. It's all good though - the backyard is starting to get to a stage where I'm happy with it, and the house is starting to work really well. All the little things are starting to come together, like the new toilet that flushes, and the new vent fan in the bathroom that's not about to fall out of the roof, and new clothes line that can be pulled out of the ground when you need to drive into the backyard, etc. It all cost money, but we saved by doing all of the work ourselves, and have been able to set things up just the way we like them.

As always though, there's plenty more work to do, with the front gardens starting to look very overgrown and neglected now! And with the deteriorating state of the front fence (even since the tree loppers backed their truck into it), it won't be long before we need to seriously look at replacing it, and most of the side fence as well. I already have a plan in my mind for what I want to do there, but again, it's a bit involved and will take some time to do and some time to save for the materials. Plus I need to learn about things like retaining walls, welding, concreting and rendering - all things which come naturally to an IT nerd. So I can see I'll be spending a lot of time asking questions on the Renovate Forum. But when it's done it should be fabulous.

We're coming up to a busy few months, however, with it all kicking off next weekend with the V8 racing down in Townsville. We've got full 3 day grandstand tickets, and a few days off work. Should be a great event. Hopefully we'll be able to score some pit passes, and get down amongst the teams.

The weekend after that is a long weekend for us here in Cairns, with the local show holiday. We had plans with friends, but they're beginning to unravel after one party is unable to attend, and another has been injured and can't get out of bed at the moment. So we may end up doing something else entirely.

Then, we've got a quiet few weeks until August kicks off with a vengeance, and my YoYo Adventure starts, with 3 return trips between Cairns and Bris inside of 6 weeks. Fun fun!