Well that was it, another birthday come and gone, another year older, another year wiser.

Supposedly!

For those who don’t know it was my birthday over the weekend, when I completed my 32nd revolution on this cosmic merry go round called earth. When you arrive back on the same point on the circle for the 32nd time, its not really what you would call noteworthy. As a matter of fact, when you have done this many laps, it really is only the ones that end in zero that matter.

By way of celebration, I had 3 meals over the weekend in celebration of the beginning of the 33rd trip around our nearest star. Friday night was a quiet dinner with Karen, her parents Will and Denise, Karen’s brother Steven and his girlfriend Sarah. The venue was the very delightful D’Arenberg winery in McLaren Vale.

I can’t come up with enough good things to say about this restaurant. It was absolutely faultless! A perfect setting overlooking rolling hills covered in blossoming grap vines, impeccable service, inspired and delicious food, and of course D’Arenberg’s famous wines.

Saturday was a lazy day, I played around with my new Panasonic DVD recorder that Karen bought me for my birthday, after I visited no less than 6 shops to buy what I thought was a fairly innocuous SCART cable. We didn’t do much else except surf toy shops for a birthday present for my nephew, and I squeezed in a bit of Grand Theft Auto.

Saturday night was spent at the Ed with a few close friends, eating a bloody big steak and having a few bevvies. We a 1997 Eileen Hardy Shiraz with dinner which indicated it was ready to drink by teaming up with a 1998 Kellermeister Black Sash and jumping out of its carton at 3am landing on our tiled floor. Must have been a bit of a protest at the ad hoc stacking of wine we did when we hastily moved house before going OS earlier in the year.

Sadly, the Kellermeister was destroyed, which is highly ironic. Kellermeister Black Sash is quite possibly one of the best Shiraz’s going, but for some reason I am destined never to enjoy an aged one. So far in my life, I have had two destroyed by a jilted ex fiancée and one that committed involuntary suicide by falling a metre onto a hard surface. I think I need to buy a case and put it in a bank safety deposit box out of harms way.

By some miracle though, the Eileen survived so I had to punish it’s insubordination by drinking it.

Sunday morning I had breakfast with my family, and I had a golf appointment on Sunday afternoon that sadly the rain put paid to. Well in fairness to the weather, it was a combination of the rain and a recognition of the dire need to finish the front garden at Aldinga so we can sell the house that prevented me from teeing off.

So that afternoon, Karen and I rolled up our sleeves and finished the job.



That’s it. The house is finished and will be open to inspection by prospective buyers in two weeks. Here’s hoping someone wants it.

It sure is nice to be sitting back in Adelaide, safe and sound after a long 16 day trip to Moomba. Karen and I are also "back on the air" at home thanks to our broadband internet which finally has been provisioned and is working nicely.

There was a time on Thursday that I seriously thought I wasn't going to make it. It was my last day in Moomba and I was booked on the plane in the afternoon. I had one last job at a satellite facility called Limestone creek which is about 80km south, so I got up early so I could drive down there, knock it over, drive back and still make the flight at 3pm.

When I woke up I noticed it had been raining. It's generally not a good idea to drive around the Cooper Basin in the rain, since the roads are made of sand and clay and they are pretty easy to get stuck on in the wet. So, I just thought "stuff it" and had a bit of a lazy breakfast.

By 9am it had cleared up nicely, and it turned out the rain had been nothing more than a light shower. At this point that damn work ethic got me and I realized I probably had time to get down there and back. So Gabor (the Hungarian intelligent pigging guy) and I set off. We got there and did what we needed to do, and were back on the road at 11:15, feeling pretty happy with ourselves since we were going to make it back to Moomba for lunch.

Then the storm blew in.

We were back on the Strzelecki track when this almighty storm blew in. Driving rain, winds and lightning hitting the ground all around the place. Bear in mind at this point, we were in the desert contained inside the only metal object for miles. Intellectually I knew that we were a moving target on rubber tires, so in reality we probably had a better chance of seeing Brittany Spears running nude down the road than getting hit by lightning, but the loud cracks and blinding flashes were disconcerting to say the least.

More disconcerting as the rain kept coming down, the road got more and more slippery and the vehicle started to slip around a bit, forcing us down from 80km/h to about 10. By this point I will admit that I was shitting myself - not in a flat panic, but certainly a long way from a comfortable zen state. I started seriously thinking about getting out of the car and going and laying down flat somewhere a long way away until the lightning passed.

All of a sudden, despite my best efforts, the vehicle started to slip down the slope of the road off of the high middle and down towards the shoulder. We were only traveling slow at this point so you could hardly say the vehicle was out of control, but let me assure you the steering wheel was strictly ornamental, turning it had no effect.

We eventually stopped and got stuck against the muddy grader spill on the side of the road. Somehow though, only moments after we stopped the storm passed, the lightning disappeared and the rain stopped. It was funny because the night before Gabor and I had been engaged in a lively bar discussion with a right wing, Dubya loving god botherer about the existence or non existence of god. It felt like god said "Scared now aren't ya boys? Never question my existence again! Now I've stopped the rain so I hope you've learned your lesson! " At least that's what it would have been like if I wasn't such a skeptical bastard.

With the rain stopped it was a pretty routine, albeit very muddy, 4wd recovery. Some wooden planks under the wheels and a bit of pushing and we were on our way, back in time to wash the car and have a shower before we boarded the plane.