yaleman.org

So, I’m sitting in the gallery yesterday and my uncle calls me up.

Him: You’re going sailing tomorrow!

Me: I am?

Him: Yeah, a mate’s got a boat and he’s going out - I can’t go but said you would, that alright?

Me: [stunned but curious] Sure!

So, we went sailling. Pretty cool in fact, learnt how much there really is to manage to get a boat to do what you want. It’s a 31ft race boat, I’m not good with the terminology, but I helped out a bit and we ended up winning a friendly race across Jarvis Bay 🙂

Ok, another one just as I typed it 🙂

GPS odometer: 1355+change

Today was a relatively short day travel-wise, since I started in Goulburn and was heading for canberra - roughly 100km of driving. Nothing terribly exciting to report as far as the travel went, the Federal Highway is pretty boring. I went past Lake George which is rather empty at the moment, so it looks like a giant flat plain.

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This is basically as I typed it on the night, I’m too freakin’ lazy to reword it or remove the tiredness.

Arrived in goulbourn as of 11:30pm trip odometer is 1246km

God damn that was a long day, but it really seems like it flew past. Starting in Kempsey I travelled south (as is to be expected).

Stopped in the supa cheap in newcastle to try and find a sydney/surrounds UBD or similar, and got totally distracted by an intermittent squeaking noise emenating from the engine bay. I seem to be running on crazy at the moment, because it took me until Belmont to stop somewhere to find a long screwdriver to try and sound it out on the engine - all I could hear was that it was coming from somewhere at the “front” of the engine (not the gearbox end, since it’s a FWD car) and it changed when the RPM of the engine changed. I decided that I couldn’t work it out, so I sent an SMS to Darren to ask for help and he said it was probably the timing belt and to spray some CRC/WD40 on it to test it. I finally found a servo on the way out of Belmont and grabbed some - spraying some into the timing cover and onto the timing chain seemed to fix it, so I stopped in an Auto Pro at Gosford at 5:36pm to get some silicone spray as directed. Spraying that liberally in the timing case cover while the engine was running seems to have fixed the problem for now - the belt had probably dried out a bit, hence the squeak. I think it could have been aggravated by the timing case cover gasket being rather messed up, hanging out in places and the cover itself being cracked.

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Well, that’s day one’s travel done. By the time I’d packed the car and ran some errands it was about 11am before I left - being unable to stop hugging my cat Charlie probably didn’t help either :'(

I’m following the M1 down the east coast because it’s the easiest route and seems to be the most direct anyway There’s also plenty of towns and places to stop if I need to, which is a comfort considering the condition of the car that I’m driving.

Finally, I bought myself a laptop. For a very long time I thought I’d buy a macbook, having some of the best features and build quality out there, but while Mum and Dad were looking for a rice cooker today they toddled over to the electronics section of Harvey Norman and got talking to the computer guy there. Toshiba have just released a new version of their A100 series laptops, with new pricing and so forth.

Trust No Goblin, an interesting name for a doof, and Mt. Pikapene was the place it was held. I’m going to make this short, because I’m a bit over the whole adventure, but there’s plenty of photoblogging to be done of course 🙂

This is a huge post, and even though I hate the LJ “cuts” this one probably deserves it for low bandwidth people and so forth…

Friday I did a bunch of shopping, getting some kickass gloves for the three boys (Brian, Mitchell and I) and a new tent for myself. I’m really ecstatic with the tent I bought - an OZTrail Star Lite (2006 Edition) which is designed for hiking. It weighs about 2kg’s, takes about ten minutes to setup and is big enough for two people to sleep in comfortably 🙂 For $100 it well and truly satisfies all my needs for doofing and the (hopefully) upcoming super road trip o’ doom.

It was a little bit wet on Wednesday night, so we couldn’t firetwirl in the Botanic Gardens. Instead we moved just a little bit to the River Stage on the end of Gardens Point. Here’s some photos from the night…

poi

Staff Halos

Throwing Fire

I’m sad to see him go, but it’s something he wants to do and I’m happy to see him achieve his goal. Tuesday morning I got up at 6am to get ready and take Bob off to his enlistment ceremony in at the Defence Force Recruitment centre in the city. We picked up some last minute things (pyjamas, passport photos) and then into the city to drop him off.

He had to be there by 10am, but as usual with anything to do with the armed forces, there was a lot of waiting going on. First there was the wait to get his final medical completed, then there was a bit more waiting until the initial induction and briefing was done, and then a short wait for the ceremony.

The Candyman

If that weekend wasn’t an adventure, I don’t know what was. As usual, I seem to have extended the bounds of human awake-ness by staying up over 48 hours with only the occasional microsleep when I wasn’t busy enough to distract myself. I got up at about 6pm Friday night and didn’t actually fall asleep again until about eight thirty on Sunday night. Hooray! 🙂

Just as I was wondering what I was going to do at work tonight, Mogley decided to inspire me with his/her/it’s intellectual statements!