Our stuff

I'd rather be fishing

This is where we went today.

It's about half an hour away, still surrounded by city. A reasonably popular place, but lovely nonetheless. The day was reasonably warm (mid-20s) with patchy cloud. The river (estuarine) was not terribly cold — Richard went for a swim and didn't shiver when he got out. Sophie went fishing. There's a video at Flickr of her spinning.

Action shot
Thinking about it
Bite, ya buggers
Having a great time

We didn't catch anything, but some of the fish did nibble the bait. Too small to do anything with, though. We might go back with a whitebait net and make fritters on the wood-fired barbies they have there.

Some kids having fun
Looking north-west
I'm going to eat you
little fishes

And although the mangrove swamps look like croc hideouts, they don't come this far south. I hope...

I am the Urban Spelling Nazi, baby

20Nov07

Vee Bee

23Sep07

The one bad thing about Australia is the utter and complete obnoxiousness of the native wildlife. If it's a plant, it will poison you, and if it's an animal it will bite and then poison you, unless it manages to first throw itself under the wheels of your suburban assault vehicle. To cope with this, the first settlers developed a fizzy, piss-coloured drink that is almost but not entirely quite unlike beer. And the only sensible way to serve such an abomination, which is to real beer what an oven-ready broiler is to a Tyrannosaurus rex, is at about seven degrees below zero because at these temperatures your taste buds freeze, valiantly sacrificing themselves for the greater good.

Because it is somewhat unseemly to queue for 3 days outside Dan Murphy's for an outside chance of securing a single bottle of Old Speckled Hen, we have been brewing our own beer. Which is, in the words of any number of ex-pats we have invited round, "bloody good". We start with one of the standard starter kits (basically barley malt and hop extract) and tweak the recipes to our liking. A couple of days ago, we bottled a brew that we spiked with a couple of pounds of raw honey (there is a honey research group at work, and we have already made 5 gallons of mead using their leftovers), and decided that we needed to start naming our concoctions.

So, ladles and gentlespoons, please raise your glasses to

ABV ~ 6%, probably. Woohoo.

Light to variable

17Sep07

As Eccles might have put it. . .

Nearly there. . .

03Aug07

Why, you might ask, is Richard taking photos of tinned peas? Because dear friends,

this is raw material for . . . wait for it . . . mushy peas!

The only remaining thing I want but have not been able to source (ha ha) in Australia is Daddies Sauce.

Post-Easter photos

25Apr07

Some photos from trips we took over the Easter hols.

Happy Easter!

08Apr07

We met some Aussie Easter bunnies on Rachel's birthday, at Murramarang national park:

Non-stop picture show

25Sep06

Lots and lots and lots of photos. Selected from NZ in January all through to a couple of weeks ago here in Aus. Strewth.

On the second day of spring. . .

02Sep06

. . . we went to the beach.

28°C. We hate it here, really, but are putting a brave face on it.

Where has all the time gone?

28Aug06

Well, we're having a great time in Oz, and have hundreds of photos. . . that I should put up on a website somewhere. Oops.

Clearing away the debris

27Feb06

We hate Telstra. But we have ADSL now, and may be reached at netspace.net.au, username grantfamily. Waitrose.com is dead, btinternet probably dead and ntlworld dying. Gmail is still live, but it won't let messages be picked up on more than 1 machine. Bah. The netspace addy gets to us all, I'll sort out individual mailboxes soon enough.

From Hill to Marsh

24Feb06

On Monday we get the keys to our new gaff in Sydney:

Ironic, really; we went from Red Hill Lane (in a flat, marshy area) to Red Myre Road (in a quite hilly part of Australia. Which is as dry as the proverbial bone).

Richard took some photos, naturally. Here's the self-consciously modern Australia Collection.

Oh to be in England

30Oct05

Hmm. That didn't work, did it? Never mind; I took Rachel up to Lincoln at the weekend and with her grandparents we went to the woods near Bawtry and collected chestnuts. It was a typically English Autumn day - no, not the fog, nor the rain, but as clear as a very clear thing with long shadows and golden leaffall. Untypically it was about 18°C, but I took some photos anyway.

Catching up

21Sep05

If I post links to last year's holiday, I might be motivated to post this year's and then it won't seem so long ago. There's Keukenhof (Mar 29 - Apr 1 2005) for a start, more to follow. Maybe.

Bachelor girl

04Jun2005

<points>Over there.

The Rover is dead. Long live the Rover

07Mar2005

Dozy *** pulled out in front of us on the A1(M) a just over a week ago. Fortunately no one was hurt, but a spin at 70 mph plus ramming the *** who caused the accident (that was not deliberate) resulted in an insurance write-off. Which was a shame.

Fortunately we found a replacement at a good price: a Rover 420SDi. And she's a goer. According to Kooij, the phrase to use is 'flash git'.

Spring 2004

20May2004

A shedload of photos from March through to a couple of days ago.

Leaded snow

28Jan2004

That was fun wasn't it?

You can just see Mr Fox in this one. He looked at me, I looked
at him, and he decided that he really didn't want to cross after all.

I've uploaded the rest of the snow pictures for the 28th; 29th - January and February.

Random sweetness

23Jan2004

Just before Christmas

Just after Christmas

See the Grand Tour of the old place.

1992