Archive for May, 2008

Liz…
Has just done her neck in. She was walking along the other day and something went ‘ping’ and she’s been in pain ever since. She went to see a physio, who said that it was entirely due to her sedentary QWERTY-bound lifestyle. Physio did some work on the back and neck, but it didn’t do much good and Liz continues to endure quite a bit of pain from the injury. Not sure what to do in the longterm – just hope it fixes itself I guess, because inevitably all the doctor will do is prescribe pain killers.

Smoking…
Packed ‘em in. Again. Don’t know how many times I’ve booted the things before. Was quit for six years at one point, still managed to end up back on the bloody things. My plan is to stay off ‘em and get in shape over the course of this aussie winter. As any smoker will tell you though, it’s so very very easy to keep putting off.

The turning point for me came when I was round at a customer’s house the other week fixing his PC. He was a really nice old bloke, very intelligent, well travelled etc. Anyway – he’d been a lifelong smoker and had his first heart attack at the age of 49. Since then he’d had quadruple bypass surgery, and two more heart attacks. He still smoked – reckoned quitting them would finish him off. Anyway – didn’t want to find myself sitting where he was 20 years from now. So we’re nine days in now – Liz’s gone cold turkey and I’m on the patches. So far so good. Have been out socially and wasn’t tempted. Eaten out and wasn’t tempted. Haven’t had a post-shag ciggie in 20 years so I don’t think that’ll be a temptation either.

As a reward for kicking the smokes, Liz updated our Austar package. We now have the Showcase channel, which shows all the decent American imports from HBO along with the Stella Artois stuff off Channel 4. All of which is costing us the equivalent of one packet of smokes a month. Given what we were smoking between the two of us, we’ll save ourselves $350 a month or $4182 for the whole year. That’s a lot of wonga when you ain’t rich.

Wii aren’t fit …
Ah yes – and I ermm, depleted the funds we’ve already saved from not smoking – by buying us a Wii Fit. If you’re not au fait with this, it’s an add-on for the Nintendo Wii console. It looks like a squat plastic step and is filled with sensors that detect how you’re standing on it. In combination with the Wii Fit games, you can monitor your weight/BMI and get in better shape. Being realistic it’s not going to get you fit enough to run a marathon, but it’s a good first step for lardy bastards like myself.

Anyway – some of the games are a hoot. My personal favourites are the skiing, the hula hoops and the step class. There’s all sorts in there – from stretching exercise in the form of Yoga moves, to muscle exercises in the form of press-ups, lunges and the like. Yes, I could probably have saved myself $120 and, like, got on my mountain bike … but this way I get to live. Liz, Jack and myself all have our own ‘Wii Mes’ little avatars of ourselves. When I did the first fitness assessment on the WiiFit, my Wii’s avatar ballooned right up – if that’s not incentive enough to lose some weight I don’t know what is.

C’s b’day …
Liz celebrated her birthday this weekend. My parents wanted to buy her some artwork to hang above the bed in our bedroom, but Liz said she’d rather pick something like that up herself (well, you would wouldn’t you). So she suggested they have a barbie round theirs and invite my big sister and BIL down and some mates. And as it was ordained – so it came to pass. Had a nice piss-up and barbi, lots of food, dancing and general merry-making. I was the chef for the evening and, given that it’s two days later and nobody’s suffering from food poisoning – I reckon I did alright.

Backdoor action …
It’s getting towards the end of autumn here now – edging into winter – so when it’s not raining and cold, you make the most of it. Sunday was such a day – warm (about 22c) and sunny – and Liz suggested we go for a drive. So we did.

It was decided that we’d visit Comerong Island. Now – bit of geography here. We live in Barefoot Bay which is on the northern edge of the Broughton River. On the southern edge, over approximately 500m of water – is Comerong Island. In two years we’d never been there – which is a bit of a shocker since it’s literally on our doorstep.

So we drove down to the Swindon bridge which is the first (and indeed pretty much only) place to cross the river and then headed up river again on the opposite bank. It’s about 15km from the bridge to the coast and goes through some very nice countryside. In fact Numba is where they originally put Swindon – only it kept flooding – so they moved it to its current location. Swindon’s loss is Numba’s gain.

There’s a small six car ferry that takes you over to the island itself. We’d never been on this, so had our $4.00 fee ready – but the bloke waved me off when I went to pay, “Not today,” he said. Cool. We drove up the only road on the island, past the extremely posh houses we’d glimpsed from our cheapo side of the river and then passed into the national park itself.

There were plenty of signs about that impressed upon you in no uncertain terms that 2WD cars were probably not the best way of getting down the tracks. So it was with some surprise that we had to pull off into the bush to let a brand new Audio A6 and then a Suburu Imprezza pass us. About 4km in and the road forks and a sign tells you that there’s a carpark and a further 5km of track which is most definitely best suited to 4WDs only. We pull into the carpark to get our bearings and walk onto the beach. There’s a couple of families enjoying an autumn picnic and some hardy souls who’ve walked from further down the beach.

We sit down on the dunes and dine on our own picnic. Then Jack went off in search of interesting shells and I wandered into the surf to see how warm it was – answer – surprisingly nice. Then we packed up and went back to the car to explore further down the track.

This particular stretch would, I feel, have tested Liz’s Mazda Astina. My Kluger coped with it all admirably however. Parts of the track, where they were at the same level as the swamp on either side, were water-logged, but we had no problems getting through them. Eventually we arrived at the carpark at the end where, somewhat improbably, there was a couple of old ladies, sitting at a collapsible picnic table, playing scrabble. Not so far removed from the poms after all, are you, aussies!? All that was missing was a windbreak and a packet of chips in last week’s News of the World. We walked up the bank to the river where the old ladies respective hubbies were casting a line into the river. On the other side was the Crookhaven Heads boat ramp and west, down the river was Greenwell Point.

We walked up a little path out of the carpark and found this cool little beach. Two wide grooves had been cut in the natural coral on the shore and it was pretty obvious that this was used extensively in the old days – probably by Alexander Broughton in the 1850s when he was making the dumb-ass decision to divert the mouth of the river into his own canal.

Further up the path and you emerge onto the very southern tip of Dolphin Beach. There’s a breakwall here, again, constructed by Alexander Broughton. On the opposite side of the river is Crookhaven Heads and Culburra Beach. Very nice spot it is too. Peaceful, beautiful and all on our beach.

So, Liz and Jack finally got to see the opposite end of the beach we live on. I’d been there many times previously, on a quad bike, during those quiet moments on surf patrol when you can go for a ‘roving patrol’. We drove back into Swindon and I stopped off at the car wash for the $16 deluxe (hot wax) – I think the bloke thought I was taking the piss when he saw the results of our little expedition on the sides of the car.

We were invited up to my sister’s place at the weekend. She lives in Robertson in the Southern Highlands with a hippopotamus sized cat called Raylene and her rather more traditionally sized husband, Richard. Jack had a few requests for the trip, but the one that my sister reckoned she could help out with was a ride on a horse.

My sister has her own horse, called Storm, which she takes to various horsey events such as stock horse competitions. She promised the Jackster a walk around the paddock so he could decide if it was something that appealled to him. I could have saved everyone the journey by telling ‘em he’d love it.

My sis got Storm saddled up and kitted Jack out with a suitably sized riding hat. She took him down through the paddocks to the woods and then back up through the field. She asked him if he wanted to try a little trot, which he eagerly agreed to, and proceeded to bobble along like a small sack of potatos. The grin on his face told us everything we needed to know about his adventure.

The next day we set out with my sister to do a bit of exploring in her back yard.

We dropped by Carrington Falls, which is about 8km down the road from Robertson. There’s a walkway around the falls which enables you to take in the view and peer down into the darkness at the pit of the waterfall. It’s an impressive sight.

Just before the waterfall is the river that feeds it, which is just as scenic in a slightly less dramatic way. Despite the fact that we’re rapidly approaching the winter months here, and despite the fact that the water can’t have been much above 10 degrees, Jack wanted to go for a swim. So he whipped off his trousers and top and waded in. Blimey.

Oh yea. You can freely access the waterfall itself if you’re so inclined. There are no fences stopping you from jumping off if the mood takes you. I saw the bloke below eating his packed lunch right behind the sign – a sheer drop of several hundred feet is about a metre to his left.

Our last port of call was a brand new attraction in the area – the Illawarra Fly Tree Top Walk. To quote from the blurb, this is a 500 metre long, 25 metre high elevated tree top walk amongst the temperate rainforest of the Southern Highlands. The treetop walk takes you along the picturesque Illawarra escarpment and offers inspiring views from Shellharbour to Bass Point, Lake Illawarra and the South Pacific Ocean.

It costs $19 to get in (kids under 6 go free – Jack, errm, lost a year that day). It’s a great attraction and the views are amazing, but I can’t help thinking $19 is a bit over-priced, especially when you consider you can drive 500 yards down the road to the look-out and get a similar view! I guess the view’s only half the experience though, because you really are up in the tree-tops, which is a cool experience.

The highlight of the walk is the tower you see pictured above. It’s 45 metres up and affords sensational views up and down the coast. It looks over Shellharbour, Albion Park and Wollongong. Not the most picturesque towns, but you can’t see enough of them from that distance to ruin the view.

The only problem I envisage with this particular attraction is that the walkways and, in particular, the tower – are too narrow. I imagine that at the height of the tourist season over the summer holidays at Xmas, it’ll be a hellish place to visit. The steps up the tower are only one person wide, so you have to hug the rail or the central column every few steps to let people pass you. Also, the main photo opportunity sites were very busy even on the relatively quiet day we went. At one point the far viewpoint was clogged with about 20 of us, all trying to gawp at the view. Strangely – all 20 of us appeared to be British. So ‘hello!’ if you were there that day.

We’d eaten at the very well appointed cafe prior to beginning our tree walk, so we said goodbye to my sister and drove back down the escarpment to Broughton to pick up the pooch, who’d been staying with my parents. She had returned their hospitality by pissing on their bedroom carpet. Class act, that dog.

Later ‘taters.