Blogwonky

Just across the road from our house, the loggers have been working hard – destroying trees along the edge of the college grounds. Apparently they were ‘bad’ trees which had to be destroyed by the government for the good of society…

Tomorrow is our final council waste collection at Mother’s house for 2009 (they only allow four per year). So today Yuko had Sam (the magnificent gardener) come over to put the garbage out on the nature strip. When I saw it in the evening I was shocked by the amount. The council limit is three cubic metres, and I was sure we had exceeded that by a significant margin.

Garbage at Mother's house

Although it’s our final waste collection at Mother’s house, we do have another house – and therefore another set of four waste collections we can use. We therefore spent some time this evening transporting garbage from Mother’s house and placing it on our nature strip too. This made the garbage at Mother’s house look a bit smaller, and the pile at our house should be under the volume limit.

Despite this, I’m still concerned that the council dudes might not take everything.

Garbage at the Noswonky house

While I was removing bags of garbage from my car to place on the pile, I carelessly left the car door open. When I returned to the car after only about 30 seconds, an animal had intruded…

The promenade at Circular Quay is now open again and i was able to inspect it carefully to see what they’ve been doing behind the opaque barriers for the last several weeks…

Sure enough, I found a row of bricks that looks new! other than that, there’s no change…

As I mentioned some time ago, a big section of the promenade at Circular Quay has been boarded up for several weeks for ‘improvements’. Today the boards were gone, although it hasn’t been re-opened to the public yet. A casual inspection from a distance shows that it looks the same as before!

Another great achievement for Nathan Rees and his Government…

A few weeks ago we both entered the ‘Lane Cove “Captured” Photography Competition, which was organised by Lane Cove Council. Tonight we attended the awards night in the council building. The theme of the competition was “The Great Outdoors”.

There were about a hundred photographers entered, and there was a picture from each of them on display. The crowed milled, viewing the pitures and sipping wine…

In a humiliating twist of fate, they had hung my entry sideways…

Yuko views my entry - rotated 90 degrees

Then the prizes were announced. There were three prizes in the student category, and three in the overall category. After seeing so many excellent pictures on display, we didn’t expect that either of us would win anything. But we were wrong!

And here’s the video…

It was very exciting indeed!

Yuko Accepts First Prize from the Mayor

After the awarding of prizes, Yuko became the centre of attention and she met the three judges who told her why her picture had won. They said it was the picture that best represented the theme of the competition – “The Great Outdoors”.

Yuko's Entry

The winners gathered for photos with the Mayor…

The prize winners with the Mayor (2nd place winner absent)

Later, the winning photos were posted on the council’s web site here.

After the awards, we went to the Red Chopstick to relax and celebrate. Yuko said it was the most exciting thing in all her life!

This evening I downloaded a file, the contents of which is not important here. But it was a big file, and being accustommed to third-world download speeds, I was shocked to see the speed at which my file was downloading. I have never seen a download this fast on our home connection. Perhaps Kevin Rudd has been digging up cables in Lane Cove and replacing them with optic fibres…

The free wi-fi at Lane Cove is working again after Harley Davidson spoke to them about the recent problems. We were both merrily Internetting, when I encountered this screen, telling my that I was not allowed to access my own site…

Blocked!

I was blocked from accessing the comment moderation section of this very blog! I assume this is because most of the comments promote the viewing of lewd acts.

Perhaps this is part of the government’s Internet filtering trial, but I was shocked and appalled and by this unwarranted censorship.