... And Flooding Rains

Just a quick one, for the moment, as I'm about to walk out of my office for the final time this year and in four hours I have to be on a plane to Perth.

Which is not a bad thing, the way events are moving here in Canberra at the moment. Like a lot of the east coast, we've had some rain in the last few weeks. So much so that there is a fair bit of flooding going on. This morning they started evacuating Queanbean, and earlier today they opened up all the floodgates on Scrivener Dam for the first time in, well, pretty much forever. (Actually, I seem to recall reading somewhere that this last happened in 1976)

To give you a rough idea, here are a couple of photos that one of my colleagues took, a little earlier today. The first is of Scrivener Dam (For those not in the know, Scrivener is the Dam which creates Lake Burley Griffin, which is, in turn, the main water body around which Canberra is built)

(Photo: Greg Battye)

This one shows four of the five floodgates open (the fifth, closed, is on the right of the picture) and the water pouring into the Molongolo River, which is usually a slow moving, muddy trickle, but which now looks like this:

(Photo: Greg Battye)

In any case, it's a good time to be leaving Canberra. Preferably not in an Ark, either, though I suspect that's not far away.

As of ten minutes from now, I'm actually on leave and this time tomorrow will be sitting out the front of a little house on Rottnest Island in Perth, along with Min, Toby and my parents. I imagine that there'll be beer involved.

Anyway, as I have a few little bits and pieces to do before I can leave, I'm going to sign off now.

T'was The Night Before Christmas...

...and all through the house, 

Not a creature was moving,

Except for my son who, on Christmas eve, decided that it was time to start walking. There we were, down at the lovely little beach house we'd hired for the week, and suddenly Toby is strolling across the kitchen. Literally like that. One second he's crawling and cruising around the furniture  just like always, and the next he's standing in the middle of the room looking at us all and wondering what all the fuss was about.

And since then, he's been on two feet as often as possible.

So now we have a toddler. For real.

It's really strange - yesterday while tidying my study I was looking at some photos from a year ago, when he was just a tiny little squidglet of a baby, and it's hard to believe that this little fella toddling around and getting into everything is the same person. I've been looking forward to him walking all year - looking forward to the independence and increased interactivity that it brings with it. But now that it's happened, there's also something ineffably sad about it. I hadn't expected that at all.

So... on to other news. We had a lovely week down at the coast. It involved beaches, swimming, lots of reading and sleeping and playing games and eating. Christmas day we cooked a nice lunch, and called families, and just generally had a mellow time. Our internet access was basically non-existent, which was a great excuse not to even think about work. The dog got to go to the beach, which she loved. Toby came to like the beach, although at first he was a little reluctant about the entire experience:

But he soon came around:

Now we're home again, and have another week until work opens again, which I intend to use to get a few outstanding jobs done around the house. I've also got vague plans to do some writing. I've got the first five thousand or so words of something new done, and I'm hoping to make a real dent in it over summer. It's tentatively called 'Orion: The Hunter' and it's a high pace, just a little silly, action adventure mystery - really different to my last couple of books, and is proving a lot of fun to write. I'll post a few more details as it progresses.

Anyway, the boy is awake, so now my day begins in earnest. Hope you all had a lovely festive season. 

Random bits of News

Happy holidays, everyone! A bit later today, our little family is off to Tathra, on the south coast, where we'll be spending the next week keeping to a vigorous schedule of surfing, eating freshly shucked oysters, catching up on reading, playing with the dogs on the beach and generally just kicking back. I've also got grand plans of really getting into the writing of a new project which I've been waiting for an opportunity to launch into for about six months now. I may or may not, depending on the vagaries of Optus mobile broadband, have internet access, so this may well be my last post for a week or so.

So - writing news first. I'm finally, and utterly, done with  Daywards. After a fairly mammoth effort this week, I got the final proofs back in the mail on friday afternoon. Hopefully this means that I'll never have to read that book again. Not that there's anything wrong with it, you understand - actually I'm really proud of it, and really happy with it as a conclusion to the trilogy but, as all the writers out there will know well, by the time I'm done with the final read through of any of my books, words cannot describe how completely over it I feel. Either way, it's done now, and on time, too. 

Next bit of news - we got a new family member for christmas. One of these:

For the uninitiated - it's a Roomba. A vacuum cleaning robot. I think I might be slightly in love with it already. We call her Betsy. She's awesome. If you, like us, have a toddler and the only dog on the planet disinterested in cleaning up under the high chair, then I cannot recommend one of these enough! Basically, this was Min and my christmas present to each other. The only problem with it is that it's supposed to be a labour saving device; just set her going and get on with other things. This idea falls down, though, because once Betsy is in action, it's just about impossible not to sit there watching - it's so damn hypnotic. And clever, too. Climbs small steps, goes around corners, table legs, untangles itself from carpet tassels etc... Actually, it makes me feel slightly inferior, intellectually. I got a little worried when she started following me around the house shouting 'EXTERMINATE, EXTERMINATE', but Imogen tells me that's a normal part of her programming...

In any case, have yourselves a merry little christmas, if I don't get a chance to post again before then. Hope yours is filled with family and friends.

Cheers

t

 

And, because it's nearly holidays...

Here are the muppets. Singing Bohemian Rhapsody.

So.... Did you miss me?

I'm back! Two weeks in the good old U.S of A, and now here I am, back in my little office at Uni, having just spent the last four hours working through a frankly frightening backlog of marking, and with the half-edited draft of Daywards sitting on the corner of my desk, glaring threateningly at me.

So it occurs to me that I *really* should post something about the trip, but the further I get from it, the harder it becomes, so here's a sort of edited highlights package. Kind of like the 'year-in-review' package that you get at the end of the evening news every new years eve...

Highlight One: Meeting my nieces. Okay, one of them - Meri - I did actually met about 18 months ago when she was 9 months old, but the other - Katie - she's a relatively new addition to the family. And, oh boy, is she gonna keep her parents busy during the next few years... They're both gorgeous.

Highlight Two: Seeing my sister and brother-in-law. They're witty. They banter.Not much good at board games, though... ;) Catching up with Sue and Rob was lovely, as we don't get to see them nearly as often as we'd like . Toby had a ball playing with his cousins and, as an added bonus, we got to visit Houstin, Texas, which leads me to...

Highlight Three: Watching a 9-year-old girl get measured up for her first gun in a shop at the local outlet mall. I am not making this up.

Highlight Four: Meeting a bunch of nice folks who, until recently, were just names on a computer monitor. For some years now, we've been online friends with a whole range of people we initially met through the web forum of a particular author we all enjoy reading. When we announced that we were going to visit with them during our trip, and even stay with a couple of them in their home, people were skeptical. Hell, if I'm being honest, we were a little uncertain about it ourselves. But in reality, it turned out to be a lot like meeting penfriends. Without exception, everyone we met in the states turned out to be just like we'd expected them to be: warm, welcoming, and perfectly normal. We got to see Minneapolis, eat Bloomin' Onions at the Outback steak house (don't ask...), eat home fried chicken on the most gorgeous back lawn you've ever seen, and eat awesome Kosher food at an L.A. Deli. (Eating turned out to be something of a theme in our trip. For some reason, this tends to happen with us...) Along the way we cemented some firm friendships, and made a few new ones.

Highlight Five: Experiencing the best that American domestic air travel has to offer. (ie: Delayed and missed flights, a 16-hour re-routing, lost bags, unhelpful / incompetant ground staff.) On the bright side, we did get a completely unanticipated trip to Vegas (for about 15 minutes, but that's okay - they have pokies beside the departure gates in the airport...) and fly over the Grand Canyon. We also got to go shopping for clothes at Target in LA, and send the bill to the airline.

Highlight Six: Coming home on the new Qantas A380 Airbus. Okay - I'll admit it, I'm the aeroplane equivalent of a trainspotter. But, damn it, this is a *very cool aircraft*. Big, too.

Highlight Seven: Clearing customs and Immigration at Sydney Airport. This wouldn't be a highlight except for the fact that it took two frigging hours! Welcome to Australia, folks - now please excuse us while you stand by a baggage carousel for 45 minutes, and in the process miss all your connecting flights...

Of course, there's a lot more I could write about: Seeing Sarah Jessica Parker in the lobby of our LA hotel (Small, kinda thin. Looked like a well-groomed stick insect) Visiting the Alamo in San Antonio, Driving our rented car (which was roughly the same size as our kitchen back home) on the Houstin Freeways. Eating Brazillian BBQ in Texas, finally discovering how to make a Starbucks coffee palatable (smallest size, triple shot, double sugar), slapping baseballs around in the batting cage, the lovely people we met at a Houstin Astros game... and so on.

Unfortunately, though, my marking pile isn't getting any smaller, and my book isn't editing itself.

see y'all later...

Holidays! (and meeting strangers you already know)

So tomorrow morning at 0900, Imogen, Toby and I get on a plane to L.A. (well, technically we get on a plane to Sydney, which will then connect with the plane to L.A, but you get the general idea...) We're off to visit my sister and her husband and two little girls (one of whom we've never met, and the other of whom is my goddaughter) in Houstin, Texas. This should be awesome.

We're flying on the new Qantas A380, which probably doesn't mean much to a lot of people, but which - to an aviation geek like me - is worth the price of the trip just on its own.

We're also doing something else which (I think) is rather cool - we're also going to see a bunch of people who we've never actually met in person before, though we've been in touch with them for years. (since, I believe early 2003, when we all met through the website of a particular author we all like...)

Yep. We're meeting our internet friends.

In person.

For the first time.

Some of them are doing fried chicken, which is never going to be a bad thing, in my opinion.

This should be equally awesome. (Meeting our friends, not just the fried chicken...)

So if my blogging isn't quite as frequent during the next week or two, then I beg your forgiveness. Don't give up on me, though - I promise to post when I can. With pictures.

In the meantime, I should probably start packing, and get some sleep in preparation for the impending 14 hour intercontinental flight with a nine-month-old, teething toddler.

Have a good few days, everyone.