Snow Monday

6:00 rise and shine.  Frost on the ground but no snow at Sponners.
7:00 breakfast - Cerial, yoghurt, tinned pears,  OJ, Sausages, spagetti of the hot tinned variety, eggs, mushrooms, coffee.
7:30 Organised a new jacket for Dan.  Not sure why but I am sure there was a reason.
8:00 Frank, Marcus, Jacob, Chris & Dan On the bus from sponners to Perisher.

Jemma was a bit sick on the way down and has still not fully recovered.  So Megan will bring her in the Vito as that will give her somewhere to sleep.

Anyway back to today,  I had a bit of a ski with Dan and we met Chris a few times on the mountain.  Then at 9:00 dropped Chris into the ski school and shortly after, dropped Dan in for a 2 1/2 hr lesson.  This year Chris is the only one doing ski school.  The rest of us are doing the usual 2 1/2 hr lessons in the morning and then playing around in the afternoon. Marcus has is mate Jacob and so they will do things together.  Dan and Jemma are likely to pair up.  So we figured that Chris may be at a loose end.  I am hopeful he will make friends in the ski school.  They seem to have a good time and he always has the option to jump ship after lunch and be with us then.

After that Megan and Jemma arrived.  I sat in the snow with Jemma and then she did some skiing in the learners area.  We went up the magic carpet a few times and she was managing a snow plough (Pizza).  Tried the T bar but fell off.  She then said she wanted to have a sleep so we walked back to the Vito and she is now snoring across the front seats.  And that is where I am now.  I have my netbook connected to the internet via the vodafone 'pocket wifi'.

It was very hot on the slopes.  I took off the jacket inner so I was just wearing a Tee shirt and jacket outer mostly unzipped.  I got jemma to take off her long sleeved Tee shirt and just have a singlet  and jacket outer also partially unzipped.  Also took off her helmet.  (Lawyers).

Snow Sunday

Sunday.
Drove Henry's place to Sponner's.  Sponner's is the guest house where we are staying.  It is on the road between Jindabine and Perisher.  It is inside the national park.  On the way in, we purhased a 1 year NSW national parks entry ticket.  So next year we need to come skiing a week earlier.

 Our 5 day (Mon-Fri) lift & lesson pass allows us to ski Sunday afternoon.  Arrived on the slopes around 3:30pm and skied until closing time of 5pm.

Chris is snow boarding this year and seems to have gotten the hang of it.  That half hour practice in Europe must have paid off.

Close up of Chris.









Dinner at Sponners:-
7:00pm  Bread roll and soup followed by Choice of Beef sausages and Mashed Potatoe (I had that) or Chicken and vegies.  Everyone else had that except Jemma who is sick and asleep in her room.  She ended up having a bit of apple, the bread roll kindly delivered by Dan and some flat lemonade.
One can purchase bottles of wine and they write your room number on them and keep them so you get the bottle price rather than the per glass price and keep the bottle all week somewhere behind the bar.  So Megan and I have indulged in a bottle of wine each.
8:00 Marcus and Jacob anounce that they are going to bed.  So this is how to tire teens out.
 

Sun AM - Henrys

 Woke up and went and said 'hello' to Henry's [pet?] kangaroo.  It seems to just graze around in the back yard.

 Henry, Marcus, Jacob.

Chris, Marcus, Henry, Dan, Jemma, Megan, Frank.

Opening Jemma's birthday present from Henry.

Snow Drive Down

Friday Night - Drove Brisbane, Warwick, Moree.
In good Thomson style managed to leave almost one and a half hours late at 6:20pm.

Somewhat impeeded by roadworks at Cunningham's Gap where it appears that they have dug in for a while.

Had tea with Lewis and Peter in Warwick (1 hr) then drove to Moree.

Arrived Moree at about ten to one am.  All in bed by 1:10am.  We had a 'family room' of one double and 5 single beds.  $210 at the Burke and Wills.  Non smoking room with no smell of smoke.  Small simple room.  Quite happy to go there again.







Remember these wonderful climbing things.  You used to be able to climb up inside them.  I remember climbing up inside this one in the 70's.  However now a big steel plate has been welded over the entry hatch.  There is a plaque on the side that reads "Erected to commerate the centenary of education June 1970".

I guess in 1970 education like the space program looked to the stars but somewhere along the way, something changed.  So we welded over the old lofty objectives and ....

.... We built a new trendy ediface.  That looks sort of like the old one.....

But enhanced with a shuttle....

But of course like the new education system, you can only do it when the system wants you to do it and only when supervised and only the way it has been deemed the right way to play.  The rest of the time it is closed!.






Came across this as we were arriving at Narrabri.  It's a push me pull you.  There is a prime mover on both ends of the trailer with the big roll of wire on it.

Just on dusk, got stuck behind this.  Clearly the designer knew that farm machinery will delay traffic on the feeway and so made space for cars to just drive underneath.  Unfortunately we were in a van.

Fish Monitoring

We decided to freshen up Chris's fish tank.  The first challenge was to attach the light properly.  Here Chris uses a screw gun to screw the uprights to the tank stand.

 Feeding the wires that suspend the light through the bracket.

The finished light and stand can be seen below.  You may wonder why the brackets are so high  They are 1800mm high actually.  The reason is so we do not lean forward and skewer our eyes.The finished light.

We also decided it would be interesting to monitor the tank and display the monitoring data on a web page.  We are testing a Syndetic conductivity monitoring system.  The box is visible at the top right of the picture.

There is a toroidal conductivity probe in the tank.  This measures conductivity and temperature.  At preprogrammed intervals (Normaly 15minutes), the controller uses a Next-G modem to connect to the internet and send the data to a server at Syndetic.

 The user then logs ontoo a web page to view the stats.

To see this live go to
http://60.241.99.38/
Select "Syndetic Remote Monitoring"
Then use
Username = demo
Password = demo
All lower case
Choose Prototype Conductivity Monitoring System.
Enjoy the fish.

And of course we are so green as to run the whole thing off the sun. (See below)

Chris's Chinese Birthday Dinner

Chis is having his birthday party before his actual birthday date because we will be away then.

He wanted to go to a Chinese Restaurant with his friends.
Mitch, Callum, Chris, Jai & Calum (I hope I spelt that right)

I booked a table for 4 at the "China House"  In China Town Fortitude Valley.  It was great but getting there proved a bit of a challenge.  Unusually the google map had the wrong location and once we found the restraunt and were seated comfortably inside Grandma and Grandpa arrived having waited at another entrance that we were unaware of.

 After a great meal, at a cost of just over $300 for 12 we went walking through the china town mall.

 Looked at a big bell thing.

 Hung around a magician who seemed to be able to make cards jump from one pile to another and we were all watching his hands very very closely because you knew he would be sneaky.

Dual language street signs let us practice our Chinese and reminded us of Hong Kong.
















Rode home on the train closely watched by the two burley blokes in uniform in the background.

Flashpoint 31-JUL-2011

The lectionary readings are:-

• Genesis 32:22-31 - Jacob struggles with God
• Psalm 17:1-7, 15 - A prayer of David
• Romans 9:1-5  - Pauls anguish over israel.
• Matthew 14:13-21 - Jesus feeds 5000

Well the Matthew reading is the easiest and most straight forward.

SCIENCE EXPERIMENT
Insta Snow - gets bigger much larger increase in volume.