Here's a little video I put together of an old favourite scouting sport - Ice Blocking.

Basically, the idea is that you go to the top of a grassy hill, sit on a block of ice and slide down luge-style. This video was taken at Montefiori Hill, in North Adelaide, and the actual ice blocking was a part of a Rover event called "Epic Adventure". Enjoy.

Here's a video of William's buddy Zak's first birthday. Zak's dad is serving in Dirkadirkastan at the moment, so Cam, I hope you enjoy this mate.

Our mate the ski man plays with dangerous spring loaded objects....

I have an admission to make, and you have probably all worked this out, but I am absolutely bored shitless with blogging. Well, maybe thats a bit too all encompassing, but for me, it's definitely got to a point where it feels like I am typing a school report about what I did last weekend.

But this is an idea that could prove to be a bit of fun, video blogging! Not sure how this is going to work for dial up users, but I hope you all enjoy William making his first attempt at walking.

Yeah, we went to another wedding. Here's a picture.

In fairness, we had a good time, but we are glad that we aren't invited to another one for a year or so.

This weekend just past was part 5 of our 6 part year of nuptial madness, and what a crazy weekend it was.

It started on Friday night when a crowd of us headed up to Grumpy's for the official celebration of Karen's 30th Birthday. This was once one of my favorite drinking venues, but sadly, skyrocketing prices and mediocre service of late have taken the sheen off of this place. Nonetheless, it was a good night, and Karen managed to get herself all partied out, so to speak.

Saturday morning came, and strangely we found ourselves trapped in some bad romantic comedy about a wedding.

Karen was supposed to duck around to Leanne's mums shop to pick up her dress which had been altered. The shop is at Modbury, which is about 15 minutes from our house. However, since Karen spent half the night sleeping on the bathroom floor, she was clearly in no state to do this. No problem I thought, we'll just get them on the way.

There were other sore heads floating around our house from Friday night as well, most notably myself, Steve and our friends Karen and Torsten, so things were a bit lazy so we weren't making great time getting ready. Things took a turn for the worse when Steve let out and almighty F*CK!, having left the pants to his suit in Clare.

By this time, it was 11:15. We had to be in Tanunda (in the Barossa Valley) by 1:30. Karen still hadn't surfaced from bed.

So Steve and I ducked down to the local K-Mart so he could get pants, and I could get some Berrocca to jump start Karen. Sadly, K-Mart had just finished a big sale, and had no suitable pants for Steve. At this point, Steve would have just decided to wear his jeans to the wedding, had he not been the M.C. ! Another thing to get on the way, as well as Karen's dress and the PA from PBA-FM.

We left our house at 11:55, and thanks to a mix of luck, clever navigation from Steve and a healthy disregard for the speed limit from me, we made it to the Church with 5 minutes to spare, having gone via Target for new pants, Modbury to pick up Karen's dress and Salisbury to get the PA.

At this point I guess I probably should mention that the main participants in the wedding were our good friends Matthew and Laura.

Once inside the church, Steve and myself, being photography geeks, sat in the spare seats up in the balcony by the organist, to get the best vantage point for happy snaps.

Up here, the comedy continued.

At one point, towards the end of one of the hymns, I noticed that the dear old lady playing the organ started to get an inordinate number of the chords wrong. I thought nothing of it, until I the end of the hymn when I noticed that the poor old dear had dropped her glasses. They had fallen between the pedals of the pipe organ, and had slipped underneath one and out of the reach of any human hands.

When the pastor started speaking again, the organist got down on her hands and knees and started foraging for her glasses. While she was trying to get her hand under the pedal to get them, she managed to put a nasty gash on her hand, which made things a bit interesting.

All the while, the service continued relentlessly towards the next hymn. Another helpful lady up there attended to the organists injured hand, while Steve tried to fashion his program into a crude glasses retrieval tool. We managed to retrieve them eventually, and the organist had them cleaned and on her face about 5 seconds before she was required to play again.

More hilarity ensued as another lady on the balcony managed to drop her program over the edge onto the crowd below during the last verse of the hymn.

Finally, just to prove that god does have a sense of humour, the pastor incorrectly announced the new Mr and Mrs Anderson as Mr and Mrs Armstrong.

After all was said and done, rings exchanged and kisses kissed, we had a couple of hours to kill before the reception so a few of us ducked down the main street of Tanunda for caffeine and salt replacement.

As for the reception itself, it was an absolute masterpiece of wedding artistry. Meticulously organised, great food, a very tight jazz party band, and an attention to the little details on the tables that would impress even Tonia Toddman. It was romantic without being gaudy, and seeing as they organised it all from Tasmania, you really have to hand it to Matthew and Laura.

My little brother Andrew was the best man, and considering the stories that Matthew let go at his wedding, let Matthew off pretty lightly on the speech. Following this, Matthew had every woman in the room (including his new wife) in tears when he surprised Laura by belting out a rendition of Van Morrison's classic "Have I told you lately that I love you?". It made my glad I am already married, it is a tough act to follow for any future grooms.

They are now off on there honeymoon, a world trip with a very similar itinerary to our trip in 2004. Bastards... I am so jealous! Read about it on their blog.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. It's an in gag, and I'm not going to explain it, but click here for Gazungas!

Once again this year I was bestowed the honour of attending dawn service and marching with my Grandfather, in the annual Anzac Day parade. Gramps served in New Guinea in World War II as part of the 13th Field Battalion. This photo shows my Gramps, My Dad, My Brother Andrew and myself just after the march.




My dad also participates in the March, having completed army service as a surveyor in New Guinea in the late 60's.

I've already said plenty about this experience in previous years, so I don't really have that much too add this year, with the exception of a little note I received on the day from the RSL. I won't expand on it here, its a topic for another day on Waxing Cynical.

Completely changing the subject, William can now crawl at an alarmingly quick rate, and can also climb and stand up against almost any vertical surface. After weeks of crawling backwards,he got on a bit of a development roll so to speak, learning to crawl forwards and climb up on things the same day. It certainly adds a different dimension to parenting, when your baby doesn't stay where you put them.


The thing is, it sneaks up on you. I know that once, when I dressed William, it was a case of delicately maneuvering his arms into the tiny sleeves of his shirt. Now it is a game of Greco-Roman wrestling, requiring all my adult strength to hold him still to get clothes on the little guy, and I honestly can't remember when the transition was. It seems like one minute I'm in the hospital gently changing his little nappy while he lays there and cries, and the next I am trying to change his nappy quickly before he rolls over and crawls away at 100 miles and hour.

Karen turned 30 last weekend, Easter Saturday in fact. She has an official party coming up next Friday, but last weekend, since a few of us were hanging around in Clare anyway, we decided to have a bit of a non official celebration.

The restaraunt at Neagles Rock, where the Gringo works, seemed like a likely venue for such a dinner. It wasn't actually open, but we don't let little details like that stop us, not when we know a couple of chefs....


So we set a table for 8, sent the chefs to the kitchen, and had a good night. It was just like a dinner party, except the dining room was bigger and the dishwashers were faster.

The food, as usual was bloody superb, and there was enough to feed 16 of us. Karen had a good time trying to decipher the common theme of her many gifts. It was a sneaky puzzle, and I'm not going to go into details in case I want to use it on one of you guys one day.

Other than dinner, Easter in Clare was on the whole pretty relaxing, we did a lot of sitting around and sipping beverages. Lea and Jon were staying in the most amazing B&B, and here is a shot I snapped showing the view from the back verandah of the place they were staying. It shows the Clare Valley in all of its Autumn Glory.

I've been up to the plains of despair this week, and to a part of them that I hadn't yet been to, which was exciting in its own little way. Anyway, rather than a lengthy explanation, here is a map.

The scenery out here is quite a bit different to a lot of the P.O.D, in that there is not a sand dune in sight. The terrain consists of vast gibber plains, indispersed with giant mesas, which are essentially ancient mountains worn down flat by millions of years. I haven't researched that last fact actually, so if a geologist wants to correct me, go ahead, I can't be buggered googling it myself.
Aside from having a two day paid 4 wheel driving holiday, the reason for heading out this way was to have a look at a pipeline I designed. One of the great things about being an engineer is that you get to build big things, and there is nothing quite like the satisfaction of standing and admiring an installation that you were responsible for. You get to leave your mark on the world in a way few other professions do.

So here it is, sure its not the Harbour Bridge, but....


It is actually more of an engineering feat than it looks, because it is actually 8km long and, as most people know, steel expands in the heat. Normally pipelines are buried so its not a problem, but due to all the rock out this way burial isn't an option. So the trick of course is to design it such that it doesn't turn into a big wiggly snake in the heat. How do you do that? Well, I'm glad you asked.

An expansion loop is the answer. You put these little kinks in the pipe every know and then to take up the expansion. This pipeline has 4, which the naysayers were saying wasn't going to be enough. As you can see from the photo above, the pipeline is still pretty straight. Not to be smug, but sometimes its great to be right.

Hooray! After weeks of frustration for the poor little guy, William finally crawled today! Time for some child proofing of the house this weekend

However, for every parenting ying, there is an equal and opposite yang, and that is that he has also developed another new skill, which is waking up in the middle of the night. We have had about 7 nights in a row where he has woken up for one reason or another, which is an alarming trend. Last night was midnight and 5 am - lets see what time we get to trudge around the house tonight.

Turns out William is and Aussie kid. Sure, he treated avocado with some disdain, but this photo shows his reaction to vegemite on toast.

He loves it, like any aussie kid should!

I went along to Adelaide's big car race today, the Clipsal 500. They say a picture is worth 1000 words, and as such the whole event can be summarised in 2000 words.

We were woken at 3 am this morning by the commotion caused by the house across the road from us catching fire! No prizes for guessing my exclamation as I opened our front door to be confronted with this scene.... [hint]

Those of you who are not parents, who don't want to be put off of having children, might be best to skip most of this post and just look at the pictures.

Last week, William was infected by a delightful little virus by the name of Gastroentertitis Rotavirus. Good old Gastro, a bug that will strike fear into the hearts of even the healthiest person, made its way into our house through William, and made it self known by Karen getting up to William to discover that he had been sleeping in his own vomit. (That's my boy!).

Of course since this little bastard is highly contagious, Karen was struck down by Wednesday night, and by 4am Thursday morning, I was down too. It was, if you'll pardon the pun, some nasty shit.

This all happened against the backdrop of Tara and Nicks impending wedding, for which Karen was the Matron of Honour. Whilst Karen and I recovered reasonably quickly, when William let loose a projectile vomit at 2am Saturday morning, there was a level of stress in this household to rival the elastic in Rita McNeil's undies.

So William went of to stay with Karen's Mum and Dad on Saturday, despite being quite infections, because we couldn't exactly pull out of the wedding. They were harvesting the grapes on the property that weekend, and almost everyone who helped ended up with the lurgy.

As did Nick, and other guests from the wedding. Fortunately, the wedding had been over for a good three hours before it hit Nick.

Despite all this, the wedding was bloody excellent fun. We had a ball, and I got to try my hand at some "Serious" wedding photography. You can see some of the results in my Deviantart gallery, along with a lot of my other "best work". For those that can't be bothered, here is a quick pic....



It doesn't end there though. Due to the rapid spread of this virus amongst the circle of people we saw last week, and Williams yet to be fully developed immune system, the poor little bugger came down with it AGAIN!, and a couple more vomits saw Karen reach the end of her tether and whip him round to the Women's and Children's hospital. He is now on a rehydrating fluid, which is like baby Powerade, and hopefully recovering.

Have I mentioned yet that this year we are going to a whole metric shitload of weddings?

We have one wedding per month for the first 5 months of this year, and that combined with all the bucks shows/hens shows/kitchen teas/catching up with friens from interstate makes for a busy social calendar.

So first of all in January was my little brother Andrew's wedding, which I already mentioned. February's wedding was union between Karen's little brother Steven and his now wife Sarah.

It was an absolutely spectacular day, and all of the hard work getting the farm at Aldinga ready really paid off, as can be seen in this photo. That lawn is a work of art, you have to admit.

I once again assumed the role of M.C. for the event, and had a blast hamming it up with the microphone as usual.

And you know its a good party when I went to bed at three-ish, and was far from being the last one. So anyway, for the record, here is one of my happysnaps of the couple in question.


The wedding for March is Tara and Nick, look out for photos here soon!

William can crawl! Only one small problem though, he can only go backwards. He gets up onto his hands and knees, but then his legs slip out from under him, and he goes backwards a little. So he gets up and tries again, and goes back a bit further.

The parenting books say that you should put a toy in front of your child to encourage them to crawl towards it. William gets quite frustrated as he finds himself getting further and further from the toy he's trying to reach. Poor little bugger, I feel like that at work sometimes.

As well as crawling, Wil is now learning to swim. He had his first swimming lesson last week, which he absolutely loved. This week he was loving it as well, at least until I completely submerged him under water. It turns out he wasn't a real fan of this, but then I hear no baby is the first time. Its a bit like beer I guess, more of an aquired taste.