Blogger problem

If you are reading this and not getting an error message you are fortunate. Not fortunate that I'm about to impart words of wisdom - which I'm definitely not, but fortunate that you don't have the incredibly annoying and frustrating experience of trying to do something that is supposed to be easy and user friendly and makes Bill Gates extremely rich, but is in fact a form of psychological torture.
"Operation aborted" has to be the psychological equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard.
Please bear with me in this and I will eventually find a solution while increasing my computer geek education in the process.
I'm about to start trawling through a 2" thick book on Java script. It's all part of the torture.

Uncle Jingles turns 5,081.

His birthday was last Tuesday and as a result Jingles had nearly a week of celebration. You have to celebrate with your mates, with your other mates, with your wife, with your family - the list goes on and it takes time to meet all of these commitments. By Saturday it was time to have the family 'do', so Aunty Jingles organised me and we had her parents and sister and S.H. (sister's hubby) and Jingles sisters plus family(Chimera, D.H., Cheetah, Little Bear and Mummy & Wolf McTavish, Lion & Dragon) all over for dinner. It was a great night.
The gluten free apple cake was decorated with candles by Lion and Dragon. They did a wonderful job of it.

Can you guess how old he is?

Here is a close up of the candles? Do you need a hint?

Uncle Jingles was 22. The only numbers we didn't have were twos. But I guess if you don't know what a 2 looks like (as Lion and Dragon don't) it doesn't matter anyway.

Happy Birthday Jingles.

Cousin love

I've been a bit slack lately with my posts so while we have this break in transmission, I thought I would just post one of my favourite pics. This is Cheetah looking after his little cousins Lion and Dragon. They have just enjoyed a play in the park (Winter time obviously, so about 6 months ago). There is a wee bit of hero worship happening as the younger two just love 'big' Cheetah. Sometimes I can't believe how lucky we are to have such loving and lovable grandchildren.

All we need is love

Several weeks ago Lion and Dragon wanted their photo taken with Grandad while they were wearing their new pj's. They were so cute as usual.

Little Bear loves her cousin Dragon. Really she does. She also loves her Grandad. But she is just a little bit competitive. So Dragon was closer to wonderful Grandad than she was and this meant tears and drama.

Very graciously Dragon gave way and let Little Bear have the 'seat' next to Grandad and he got an appreciative hug from Little Bear.

The appreciative hug got tighter and tighter. Dragon was getting worried.

The next photo would have been the one with Dragon crying and coughing and Grandad and Grannysaurus trying to make sure that no lasting damage had been done and giving Dragon big cuddles to make up for his traumatic experience in the loving arms of his little cousin.

But no one was left to take that picture.

A new worry

I guess if you are not getting rain or if you are somewhere cold, the North Queensland obsessiveness about our rain could be getting a bit boring. In spite of that I just had to add one more thing.

At about 11 pm last night Mr Sunshine and I were about to go to bed and a funny thing happened in the toilet - in the toilet bowl to be exact. You know how, when you flush it, it is supposed to all disappear down the S bend. It didn't. The water from the cistern just emptied into the bowl and stayed there. In fact it looked like it was actually filling from below as well. Water was rising in the bowl. Do you know how scary that is late at night when you really want to unwind, go to sleep and not have to worry about waking up and finding that your bed is floating around in an indescribable smelly soup?

The good thing is that it was all pretty clear water. Not pretty as such, I mean fairly clear water.
You see this is a very flat city. It gives the civil engineers a big headache trying to get drainage right. Drainage only works if everything can run downhill. When you get lots and lots of rain, it confuses the drainage system. I think my junior science teacher said, "Water always finds its own level." When you syphon a fish tank you have to have the end of hose in the tank higher than the end out of the tank. Right? Transfer that logic to sewerage. The sewerage pipes are all well underground, but lately the ground water level from all of the rain is above ground - and we are trying to make the sewerage in the pipes run down lower than the surrounding ground water. You see the problem?

What to do? The bowel water (that was a typo, I meant "bowl" water, but the typo fits so well) level seemed to stop about 10 cm from the top so, (just in case) I got a collection of bathmats and placed them around the bowl to stop any overflow from escaping into the bedroom - I hoped. I worried, checked the weather bureau's radar maps of where the heaviest rainfalls were and went to bed. The rain had eased off at last.

In the nick of time, if you ask me.

Biblical proportions

It's official. It's been raining for 40 days and 40 nights. The newspaper says so.
Just last week I was telling someone that I felt like Mrs Noah, but then I thought about it and rephrased my statement. I actually feel like one of Mrs Noah's neighbours who watched the ark float gently away on the rising flood while being left with a mop and bucket and lots of misplaced optimism.

My rain gauge said we had 200 mm (8 ins) of rain from noon yesterday till noon today. The surprising prediction for tomorrow is . . .




rain.

Bikers

If you click on the collage you will get a larger view.

Uncle R (I shall henceforth refer to Uncle R by his old nickname of Jingles - it's easier) got a motor scooter a few weeks ago to add to his growing mechanical menagerie. Lion and Dragon had the good fortune to be visiting when Uncle and Aunty Jingles came over. Even better they (the Jingles) had their helmets and a spare helmet. This was a few weeks ago, on what was apparently, judging by the photos, a rare sunny day for January 09.
The boys had their bikes in the back of Grandad's ute. You can't pick up a lot of speed in a ute tray, but you can sure look cool on your bike with a real helmet on. Cool bikers don't smile, they just look serious.
No point in wearing a crash helmet without a crash. Back inside, racing up and down the hall, the purpose of the game seemed to be to end up in a head on collision as often as possible.

If you didn't crash you just weren't doing it right. I can hardly wait till they are old enough to get a real motor bike.

Even wetter

We have a cyclone on the way now. Just what we need! The ground is so wet it is more like soup than soil and now we are going to add wind into the equation. You know what will happen.

Probably around lunch time tomorrow it will be on our doorstep. It's only a mild one, but when the ground is so waterlogged already, we only need a mild one. It's happened before when we've had this much rain. Trees fall over like drunken sailors. Some will land on cars and houses. You don't have to be a prophet to know this. Let's just hope people are sensible and no one gets hurt.