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9th Birthday: Why So Serious?

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We had Ashton’s 9th birthday party last night with a bunch of her friends coming around. The theme was “make overs” where they did their makeup and hair. There was lots of games and dancing and general shenanigans.

Ashton’s first attempt at doing her own makeup made her look like The Joker

Book week characters

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It’s Book Week at school, and the kids have to dress up as a book character.  Jett has gone for the more traditional Jedi, but we put a little more thought and effort into Ashton’s costume.

Goodbye, Angus

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The fallout of Borders bookstores falling into financial ruin in the States seems to be the downfall of a beloved bookstore from my childhood. Angus and Robertson were operating in Murray Street back before it became a pedestrian mall. In my early adventures travelling into the city to catch movies and explore, I’d more often than not end the day at Angus and Robertson flicking through reference books or the Sci-Fi section. I actually won a door prize for being the 100th person to pick up some particular book on display at the front of the store. Some guy with a microphone jumped out from behind a door and scared the shit out of me, yelling at me. I didn’t understand anything he said besides “The book is yours to keep!”. So I grabbed that book and ran as fast as I could out of there as if he was one of these “strangers” I’d been hearing so much about. After I ran a couple blocks I was able to process what he was saying. I’d won a book! It was called Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space and was the start of a small collection in that series.

Well, I can’t say times have changed much since then. Through my teens and into adulthood I’d often find myself at Angus and Robertson flicking through reference books and Science Fiction novels. The only thing that changed was the location. Angus was now across the street from their original location next to Old Mr Mitchum and his Corner Shop into a new flash multilevel premises.

But a couple weeks ago I saw they’d shut their doors and a little bit of me died inside. Salt was rubbed into the wound upon seeing the notice hung in their door:

Kiss my Yasi

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Meet Cyclone Yasi:

This is the cyclone superimposed on continental USA:

It’s a big mother fucker of a storm. It’s due to hit the mainland between Cairns and Townsville in the next few hours. Wind gusts of 320 km/h are expected.

All this is coming after much of Queensland was under a flood the size of Germany and France last week:

I have friends over there who have packed up what they can and evacuated south to Sydney or Melbourne. I’ve also seen people on TV who think they can ride it out. They have no idea what winds that fast can do. This is Darwin after Cyclone Tracy (Category 4) Christmas Eve 1974:

Yasi is Category 5. Here’s another comparison graphic:

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A trip to The Maze

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We took a drive out to a place called The Maze for Jett’s 6th birthday treat. From where we live it’s quite a hike but it was a good day. It was forecast to be 39 degrees today, and I wasn’t too keen on running around outside in the heat but your sixth birthday comes but once in a lifetime and it was his choice. We needed to attend the school open day first in the morning in full school uniform to meet and greet the teachers and other kiddies, and once we left the school it was already 35 degrees.

After a stopping for lunch and a couple wrong turns (it’s always helpful to have accurate maps in your GPS) we finally got there. It’s a nice little setup, with 5-6 mazes and some bird and animal enclosure including a Koala habitat. Witness our mad navigating skillz in the first maze:

We eventually did get through the first maze. And without cheating!

The second maze was a challenge, made of a grid of pine trees using fence wire as walls. You could see right through the entire maze but it didn’t help because you couldn’t necessarily see the walls and plan your moves. You had to actually go the whole way down a length to see if it really was a dead end. This is where I demonstrated to the kids my mad crazy “left hand” method where you keep your left hand touching a wall at all times. You might go over your tracks, but you should eventually make it out.

The next maze was call the “No Left Turn” maze, where you could only make right hand turns. No lefties, and no U-turns. The kids made it through real quick, but I’m pretty sure they were still coming to terms with what a left hand turn actually means. See here for an example of what I mean, but these guys had one mapped out in a 20m x 20m area of miniature hedges.

It’s right about this time that the heavens opened and it started raining. We waited undercover for the koala enclosure to open where we found that Koalas sleep 18-20 hours a day and wake only to eat. I tell ya, these guys are living the dream.

It was still raining so we thought “Why not?” and topped it off with some wet weather Frisbee Golf which was also on offer at the park. Witness our wicked awesome Frisbee abilities:

They call me “The Tiger Woods of the Frisbee Golf World”. You know, without all the chicks, money, fame and stuff.