AlternateRoute

A training exercise to test the skills of the State Emergency Service was almost called off mid stream when a massive storm hit the area.

A stormwater drain being used for pumping and sandbagging practice, rose over a metre in less than ten minutes during the deluge. Tarping practice, which was being done on a large metal frame in the path of the storm was also suspended. The Westpac Surf Life Saving helicopter, which was helping out in the exercise, was also grounded during the storm, with the crew taking shelter in a mobile command van at Cooper Park.

The storm soon passed and the exercise resumed.

Check out the highlights below or on YouTube.

After much umming and ahhing, our property at Kanimbla is on the market. Although it is a wonderful block of land, the added burden of paying of the land whilst it is producing no income, has made us rethink our priorities. It is currently sitting on a number of “For Sale By Owner” web sites, so if you or someone you know is looking for an idyllic setting, have a look.

These are not two things that you would normally associate with each other, however they came together last weekend. As part of a Team Leader course, we had an exercise where we had to make a truck from Lego that would carry a piece of cement for 5 metres, and convince the judges to purchase our truck using a 2 minute commercial. We decide to go high tech and make a real commercial, and of course the most successful commercials are those with a song. Since it was about the SES, what better tune to use than SOS by ABBA.

The result is now on You-Tube.

If you are wondering about the start, the orange Rhino was our team mascot. His name was Neil.

We managed to recover the missing piece of the puzzle from the dog today and the bookcase is complete!

Ahhhh, the joys of flatpack furniture. We just bought two bookcase/wall units from Oz Design called Wangaratta or West Wyalong or something. Had they come from Ikea (Swedish for poor service) they would have had strange names like kuksugare or fittaö Anyway, these things are designed to explode across the room as soon as you open the box and then it takes about three hours to make sure you have the 20,000 pieces that are 3mm long. Once that is all in place you work your way through the instructions written in clear Chinglish (or Swedeglish) and 3 days later end up with something that looks like a different item in the catalogue.
There are professional flatpack furniture assemblers who will come to your house and do this. Yes, people actually make a living out of it. When you ring for a quote, if you have already started building the furniture they also include the cost of a marriage counsellor.
Anyway, last night we had a crack at the second piece of furniture and it all looked to be going well. The bookcase was assembled and only the small doors needed to go on two of the compartments. It was at this time we discovered the danger of sorting the pieces on the floor.
The doors required small round plastic hinge bushes to be placed in the wood to hold the doors in place. They are about the same size, colour, shape (and possibly taste) of the kibble that we feed the dog. Jules had taken great interest in our work and seems to have internalised some of it. So now we have to follow the dog around for 48 hours to await the delivery of the missing piece. Oh crap!

As I write this, the skies are black, the thunder is shaking the windows and the rain is pouring down. Another summer thunderstorm has hit the city with up to 38mm falling within an hour. No doubt the emergency calls to SES will soon follow.

Sydney has endured a continuous series of storms which began on 4 December when a large hailstorm hit Blacktown in the outer west. Thousands of roofs were destroyed and some streets did not have an undamaged house. With the huge amount of work to be done and the upcoming Xmas holidays, few of the houses were fixed immediately and Blacktown was subsequently hit by another windstorm (which damaged many of the tarps) and further rainstorms. throughout December and January. I have now been to Blacktown more times in the last 2 months than in my whole life.

Last week it was the turn of Bankstown and Liverpool, high winds and hail brought down trees, damaged roofs and soaked the ground to capacity. When record downpours fell the following week, there was widespread flooding, some road closure and a few evacuations. The rain stopped just before the George River overflowed and river levels dropped to safe by the end of the day.

With the rain we are having now, the poor people of Blacktown will be enduring more leaking roofs and soggy yards. Just another summer in Sydney.

If you are reading this on 27 January you should stop immediately and un-plug your modem, for today is World No Internet Day. So instead of staying inside and playing a computer game, go outside and play a real game, have a real face to face chat with a real person in a real room, and let the emails wait for 24 hours.

In an interesting experiment to see how quickly Google Adsense can bring traffic to your site, a Sydney blogger has set up a page to collect Heather Ledger Jokes.

Initially the traffic was high and cheap, but the click thru price of the Google search soon went through the roof, with a price of $6.50 for a click thru on the phrase “Heather Ledger Dead”.

As for the jokes themselves, the quality is not that high.
My favourite?
Q: Which script does Heath Ledger wish he’d read?

A: The one from the chemist.

With an honourable mention to:

Grim Repear stands with Heath Ledger in front of him and yells, “you morons, I said bring me the DEATH LEDGER”.

Damn, I knew I shouldn’t have joined the “al Qaeda Appreciation Group” in Facebook. It seems one of the directors of Facebook is also associated with a technology venture capital firm set up by the CIA.

So it seems that this social networking site is an easy way for the US government to obtain private information about millions of people around the world, without them even knowing.

Have a look at this article from The Guardian.