Possum Galore
A life ‘Down Under’!
There and back again.
So....for the third time in four weeks we have once again been to Brisbane. To cut a long story short, the 'Chi Udaka' show Ros booked last weekend was, she thought, on Friday and so Andrew booked tickets to a play on Saturday night called 'Straight White Men' at La Boite Theatre. It turned out that 'Chi Udaka' was actually on Saturday and so we were double booked. Luckily 'La Boite' Theatre let Andrew exchange the tickets from last weekend for this weekend and so back to Bris we went.It was well worth it. The play was funny, thought provoking and brilliantly acted and we loved it and we were glad that we didn't miss out on seeing it.We returned home today to discover that 'someone' has eaten Will's poppy in our absence.
Before it's demise.
Someone is dicing with death!
'Perseids'....or 'Of Shooting stars and shooting possums'.
So...last night was the best time to view the Perseid meteor shower apparently as the Earth passes through the debris left behind by the comet Swift-Tuttle. We set the alarm for 1.00 am but I had to attend to a call of Nature at 11.00 pm and saw a fantastic bright light streak across the sky. We still got up at 1.00am and Will startled something amongst his vegetables as he went out the back door. It turned out to be...
Looking guilty.
"If she eats my poppy I'll kill her!" He said.We stood in the cold by the 'chook' shed with Yudhishthira crowing, annoyingly, as he does throughout the night. We stood there for about 20 minutes and saw nothing before Will had had enough and went back to bed. I stayed out a bit longer trying to catch a shooting star with my new camera. I saw about 6 more but they were nothing like the one I had seen at 11.00. They were just ordinary 'bath night' shooting stars and the camera didn't pick them up.
Then and Now.
In Memoriam.
Census.
So...last week something rare happened at Frogknot...a car came down the drive unexpectedly.It was the Census Man dropping off our Census Form. We told him that we would be completing ours online. He headed off again back down the drive. (We suspect it was he who broke the gate thinking that it lifted up like a car park barrier rather than it swinging open.)Last night was Census Night. Every 5 years, on August 9th, the Government requires everyone to complete a Census Form. Interestingly the last time, in 2011, we were also here and visiting Deranie and Phoebe in Sydney and we had to be recorded on their form as visitors.Two thirds of people were expected to complete it online and people were asking whether the website could cope with all the traffic on the night. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) was confident it would be fine...of course it wasn't and the site crashed.We tried a few times to get onto the site to complete our form but couldn't so in the end we completed the paper copy dropped off by 'The Gate Wrecker!'Today the ABS is saying that the site was hacked but the Government is contradicting them and saying it wasn't. If it was hacked the rumours are that it was China getting their own back after Australian Swimmer Mack Horton called his Chinese rival, Sun Yang, a drug cheat.On Sunday while in Brisbane we had Sunday lunch at Wendy and Geoff's with Danny and Xiaoling. Xiaoling was telling me that Chinese people in Australia were 'p*%$ed' with the Olympic coverage here. Firstly Channel 7 went to a commercial break just as the Chinese athletes entered the arena at the opening ceremony and secondly a few days later showed the medal table but some bright spark had put the Chilean Flag up next to China.It seems the Census website was still offline at lunchtime today. People are worried because it has been widely mentioned that fines of up to $180 a day can be incurred by those people who fail to fill in the Census but we have until the 23rd September (Will's Birthday) to fill it in and fines will be incurred after that. Hopefully they can get it all sorted before then.Typical.