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Last day of the year, last chance of a bike ride for the year. I think the same thing happened last year, a ride off along the Great Ocean Road. It started out with the idea of gently stretching the muscles from yesterday's hike with a ride out to Wye River. Along the way I chatted to another cyclist heading to Wye and he decided that it wasn't far enough and would continue to Kennett River. That seemed like a good idea to me so I did the same, then when I got to Kennett River the weather and road and traffic and state of mind all seemed conducive to just keep on going, so onwards to Cape Patton Lookout. Stopped at the lookout talking to a few tourists in their cars, all heading on to Apollo Bay or the Twelve Apostles, then I decided it really wasn't that much further to Apollo Bay, a good spot for lunch before heading back....

Surprisingly, the traffic was fairly light and I didn't have too many idiots to contend with, only a small number of arrogant 4WD owners too lazy or stupid to pull out as they passed, and three motorcyclists on unregistered dirt bikes overtaking head-on at me. The usual number of tour buses big and small, and plenty of traffic around Shrapnel Gully where a dozen cars had parked while people were photographing the Koalas in the trees beside the road.

Similar mayhem in Apollo Bay to Lorne, hundreds of people milling around and bumper to bumper traffic, I grabbed a spot at a table and ordered my lunch. I'm not sure if they are normally this disorganised, or if its a special summer feature caused by too many new casual staff, but actually getting your orders seems to be a major undertaking. You have to order inside, quoting your table number, although nowhere on the menu, tables, or window, does it tell you this! The problem is, when the waitresses come out with the food and drink, none of them know which table it is for, so they just walk around and around asking each person "Cappuccino and a milkshake?", "Cappuccino and a milkshake?".... Sitting at the table nearest the door I was asked first each time and could have acquired half a dozen orders in five minutes!

Back on the road to ride home, I discovered that the gentle easterly that had made the ride out so pleasant had increased a little and was making the trip back more of a chore. The traffic had also increased, and between Apollo Bay and Cape Patton lookout I had to put up with far more than my share of idiots and boy-racers.

I decided to get away from people for a while and go for a walk up along the Erskine river, the town and the beach are packed cheek-to-cheek with New Year's revellers or people here for the Falls Festival. Ten minutes along the banks in the cool and I couldn't remember whether the sign had said 3 hours return o r 3 hours one way... I guessed I could walk up to the falls and then catch the shuttle bus back (I'd seen the bus in town advertising free shuttle between the Erskine Falls car-park and the Tourist Information centre).

I reached the falls at five o'clock to discover that not only did the signs say it was three hours one way, but that the shuttle bus only ran from 8 to 5 and that they had to be booked from the Tourist Information centre, in person, back in town! Debated for a while about trying to hitch a lift with the festival traffic, but with the idiot P-plate drivers and amount of drinking decided to take the easier option and hike back the way I'd come. Another hour and a half and two tired legs and I was back where I'd started. Seems I'd taken three hours twenty minutes for two three hour walks!

Plenty of birdlife to be seen and heard, in a strange coincidence, a brilliant yellow male, and drab grey female, Golden Whistler (Pachycephala pectoralis) shot out of the scrub and perched for a few seconds only a metre from me — odd since I don't think I've ever seen them previously, and on Boxing day at Kathy and Cec's house we saw a Rufous Whistler (Pachycephala rufiventris) for the first time. White, Black and Gang Gang cockatoos screeched about in the forest overhead, while numerous small hard-to-identify brown birds flitted around.

Sadly, also met two feral cats in the forest; the first was a tiny scrawny thing, the second much larger and darker, not quite up to the purported size of the Otway Panther, but equally devastating to the local wildlife.

...The Owner

There's not much more I can add to who I am.

...The Site

I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there's always the cross-references between them.

• I use Mozilla, IE6 and Lynx to check the appearance of my pages, if you are using an older browser, or one that has poor implementation of style-sheets, then you may find that things are very ugly indeed.
• As far as I know, I've written everything using valid HTML and CSS. Page should validate when submitted to the W3's validator.w3.org, and the style sheets when submitted to http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
• Most pages are static HTML, there's a bit of server-side includes, and a bit of PHP. It all seems to depend on what I'm doing at the time.

...The ISP

• Hosted by my friends at bund.com.au.

...The Grue

Home seems very quiet after four days of niece-and-nephew filled activity! Time to catchup on a few of the outstanding chores, put away some of the Christmas loot and buy some much-needed provisions, then time to get off the couch and get out on the bike — far too little bike riding has been done this year.

I decided to go east in search of Lysterfield park, site of the Commonwealth Games mountain biking circuit, and ride around some of the trails out there. Not at all familiar with the area, our street directory in the kitchen shows the whole park as one big empty space since it predates most of the development out there.

North road then Wellington road, far too much traffic and noise, not a single one paying any attention to the lowered speed limits for the construction works... construction works that had narrowed the lanes in places and led to some interesting moments when two obnoxious semi-trailer drivers passed within inches, too lazy to pull out into the adjoining, traffic-free lane.

Somehow I managed to skirt almost the whole park, following the main road south and then winding my way around through endless suburban streets, eventually finding myself at North Hallam road and heading back north towards the parkland again! Finally found an entrance to Churchill park and rode in, then tried my best to memorise the very complicated network of fire-trails, walking, and riding paths! I think its the first off-road riding I've done for years, straight off along Bellbird track and gradually up hill.... Then gradually uphill became steeply uphill and it really hit home how long it is since I've been off road! Tyres slipping and sliding in the gravel as I tried to keep traction, trying to keep my eyes on where I wanted to go, and an unfit heart hammering away telling me how unfit I've become! I have no idea what my maximum heart rate really is, going by the simplistic old 220 minus your age then it shouldn't have been allowed to get up over 180 — the Edge GPS/HRM happily telling me that it hit 183 at some point!

Finally back down hill, a slow cruise in the gravel with the road tyres, taking my time to admire the views and listen to all the bird-life — and to get my breath back. The track finally ended at a 2m fence and an enormous locked gate, so back half-way up the hill to try a different way, and finally out into the back streets of Rowville. I then tried for a while to get back to the park by following the roads, but the whole suburb seems a maze of dead-ends and circuits, with very few through roads, so I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. The endless blocks of enormous hideous McMansions in all their brick ugliness were an ugly shock too — such massive houses packed almost fence to fence, no eaves, brick cubes, and the gaping maw of double or triple garages filling the front.

Time to leave this place and return to known ground... a bit of guesswork and a few turns hopefully in the right direction, then follow what seemed to be a main road through the suburb and I found myself back almost where I'd started, at the corner of Stud road and Wellington road. I took a meandering way home, where Wellington road crosses Dandenong creek I detoured off onto the cycle path, then followed it up to Jells park and attempted to get home along the Scotchmans Creek trail, but abandoning it somewhere in Mount Waverley — infuriating that after ten years of riding around these bike paths I can still lose them as they cross roads and zig-zag on and off road through the suburbs! The Dandenong creek path had dried out from its Christmas flooding — as with many paths, it was built as an after thought at creek level under road crossings — all I had to contend with were a myriad of helmet-less families wobbling their way along the paths on the left, on the right, or straight down the middle towards me.

I really only rode through one very small section of the park, discovering afterwards that I was nowhere near the main trails and Lysterfield lake which were even further east! Maybe next time I'll take a copy of the map with me!

Presents, food, family. Grandchildren being completely spoilt as usual, but that's what grandparents do to grandchildren!

Waiting...

Waiting...

A bunch of Christmas cards to post and a parcel to collect, I know that its a 15kg case of wine so I hopped in the car and drove over to the post office in North Road to collect it before work.... There was a careful selection of route so that I didn't have to try and turn right across morning grumpy-traffic, but even so I was stuck for five minutes at less than a walking pace inching along North road towards Warrigal road.

I don't know where we got the square Christmas cards from, but they're not an Australia Post approved size. In the nasal whiny words of the unhappy woman serving: “They're too big, I'll have to charge you double.” Wow, $0.90 to post a card, that's some markup for something 1mm too wide to fit through the slot in the guide!

“...and the parcel?” No, I can't have it. It doesn't matter that I've just posted ten cards with both my and Jo's names on the back of them, that I've got the card for the parcel, that I know what the parcel is and who its from, I'm not Jo and I CAN'T HAVE IT. No, I can't ring Jo up and get approval verbally either.

Thank you for your helpful smiling customer service, I guess I'll try to come back tomorrow with my name and Jo's name written into the official “sign it to my agent” box, the box that they have no chance of verifying!

Too much grumpiness, too much stupidity. I made my way home, got changed and went out for an enjoyable circuituous bike ride on the way too work.

Melbourne's little paper outdoes itself today, with a headline and article reading:

Military goat toll mounts

THE total number of goats killed after experiments by British military scientists since 2001 stands at 69, the Ministry of Defence said today.

:

Ministry of Defence scientists use goats in the tests because, it is claimed, their reactions are similar to those of humans.

Hmm.... maybe some of the website application developers should use goats for testing their user-interfaces before releasing the applications on us at work.

Bushfires are raging across Victoria and the forecast for the weekend is two days of high thirty temperatures and strong winds. Woke this morning to stiffling heat, thick smoke filling the air and a dull orange sun shining down. Visibility is down to a couple of kilometres and there's no incentive to go outside and do anything at all. This is in the city, 150km from the fires, it must be terrible out there fighting them.

The one thing I did was try to fix a few too many punctures in too many inner tubes. Last night on the way home I felt the back tire go down a suburb from home — a toss up whether to change the tube or catch the train, since I was almost at Murrumbeena station. I chose to swap the tube, then watched in frustration as my spare that I've been carrying around for the last few months went down as fast as I pumped up. Of course the train went past while I did this, at a frustrating distance of “if I'd not tried to change tubes I could have caught that...”

This morning I patched the first of the tubes, one down, then out to the bike to get the other one back off the wheel. While I was there I saw that the mountain bike had a flat front tyre as well! It certainly hadn't when I put it away a couple of weeks ago. Later in the day I put a patched tube back into the road bike wheel and watched half an hour later as it went down again — another pin hole in a different place in the tube! Another tube swap and another tyre pumped up. The mountain bike tube didn't seem to have a leak anywhere in it, so I just shrugged and fiddled with the valve, pumped it up and hoped I don't have to do this too often.

Gradually creeping up to 28°C inside, the thermometer sensor hanging out the lounge room window says its 44.9°C outside on the western side of the house! Back to the couch to sit and read and drink cold drinks.

Something is getting me down today. Either I ate too much last night, or Christmas is bugging me, or I didn't sleep well or something. I know I ate too much, the Chicken Parmagiana from Groove Train was a ridiculous size, I've never seen a chicken that size, it has to have been from an ostrich....

It didn't help that when I went out for a ride this morning before work some idiot drove into me in the last kilometre before I got to work — he thought he could squeeze his Hyundai Excel between the stationary row of traffic and me, it didn't fit. Thumped me into the kerb, I bounced back and came down on my hand on the back of his car, then he swore and waved his fists at me for daring to touch his car!

Christmas this year is a real pain. Jo and I just don't want anything. I want to visit people, to see them, I don't want to get anything. We don't need anything. The World Vision Give-a-goat scheme is looking more and more attractive.

Bah. Humbug.

Absolutely amazing! After just over a month of the Bigpond usage meter not working, when I checked it today it has miraculously come back to life. Still no mention that it is broken, the best I get was a confused verbal message when I rang up half way through November when I was told that some of the usage meters are incorrect for some of the accounts.

The department is experiencing a no-growth period in its operational budget

For #@$A@#$@#$ sake! The entire bloody university and every person in it is pathologically incapable of using the English language to say a single thing in plain ordinary terms. I've sat through meetings where each of the three managers say "at the end of the day" so many times to each other that I start to think that they are taking the mickey, I've heard "going forward" used four times in a single statement, and we are inundated with "issues" because apparently "problem" is now a forbidden word.

Shock Horror News! The Herald Sun excels itself at magnificent Capitalised Attention Grabbing Headlines.

On a related note, why are motorist deaths always reported as "the motorist died after hitting a tree" and with motorcyclists it always seem to be "the motorcyclist lost control and died after hitting a tree"? Don't motorists lose control? Do the trees just run out and hit them in the middle of the roads?

Why is the little paper so bad, and why do so many people read it? It scares me that this is the major source of “news” for so much of the population.

First day of summer, last day of the week, thirteen weekdays to the end of the work year. Mayhem, madness.

Its starting to be a bit of a Friday thing; leave work at around five-thirty and ride in to Richmond to meet Jo for a beer somewhere, pretend that we still live in Richmond. An odd feeling to be riding back in to the city at the end of the day when most of the commuters are heading back out to the suburbs — a chance to see again the guys I never knew the names of, but who I saw almost every day on my way to and from work!

Indecision in my route choice tonight; Malvern road rather than the bike track, everything external vanishes and the world narrows down to a single sharp-focused tunnel of bumper-to-bumper traffic snarl, jaywalkers and swerving cars, spin the bike through the gaps and don't glance away for a second. Almost a video game brought to life, by the time I've negotiated Malvern road and Chapel street the work week has faded considerably, nothing but the now remains.

Beers at the Great Britain, good company, good conversation, then walk up and over the Church street hill for dinner at Silvio's. Good pizza — again, as always — wine, pizza, coffee. A brilliant end to the week.

The ride home so peaceful and quiet, moonlight from a half-moon along an unlit bike track. No street lights, no lane markings, no traffic, no noise, no people. So different to the ride in. I wish I'd made the detour home to pick up the tandem so Jo and I could be riding along quietly under the moon. In the distance the mayhem of Friday night traffic on the tollway, so close, but so far away....