Autumn weekend in Canberra

I love Autumn, beautiful blue skies, crisp days and cool nights. Friday night I arrived home with extra children, M&D arrived from Sydney and chaos reined. Chicken and salad for tea and a long evening chatting (I did give the extra children back at some stage).

Saturday M and I went shopping while D went off to the galleries. Back from the shops and the girls M, MLR and Mondo went shopping again, this time to an education bookshop and FSW (shoe warehouse). At FSW we squeezed into a car park right in front of the shop and I was reminded of a time long ago when we got run into in this car park. MLR was about 2 and had fallen asleep in the car, so AJR and JSR got out and shopped while I watched MLR. A station wagon pulled in next to us and I felt a bump, I stared at the car as it backed away - then I realised it was coming into the space again and again I felt a second bump!!!! The car backed out and went off down the row. I got out of the car and started to look at the damage, which fortunately was limited. The people in the car came up to apologise and I realised that I knew the mother of the driver them from our local primary school!!!

JSR had the best afternoon, he scored 84 in golf (first time he broke 90, and he only broke 100 in January) maybe I am living with the next "shark".

Back home to clean and dust and wash. Then CJK and the kids came over and chatted, while I continued to clean. We had cheese and biscuits out in the patio, with M and the children ran all over the place. Towards 5pm we added a glass of wine and D came back from the galleries. About 6.30pm Bron and Andy, A-R and B-J came over for dinner. Not the most exciting dinner
party I have ever had, the company was fine, however the food was ordinary.


Sunday M&D went off to the opening of the Canberra Glassworks in Kingston (aparently about 4,000 people went through in two days) and then they went next door to the Bus Depot Markets. We headed off to Kingston for lunch, followed by a walk around Woden and back home at 5pm. D had chopped all the claret ash and it is now ready for the green waste, thanks D.
After tea M, D and I did the word quiz in the SMH, where you solve a nine letter word puzzle - we were excellent, finding 40 words out of PERISCOPE - I checked the answers today and was disappointed to see that the paper had used words like Prep and french language words to get their 40!!!

More cool sites

Here are several interesting sites

Stars in You
Insert a photo of yourself and see which star you most closely resemble!!!!


The internet can change your life
which is a series of lessons on many aspects of the internet, from guitar lessons to widgets, put together by a Librarian in Guam, so can't be too bad!!!! (thank you again JC)

RSS or Really Simple Sindication
In case you need to look like you know all about this, here’s a cute video to explain it.

Mondo

Dendy and Romulus

After promising myself that I would go to the Dendy cinema (replacing the iconic Electric Shadows), ever since it opened in December last year, I finally made it last Tuesday evening. The Dendy is part of the extensions that have been made to the Canberra Centre over the past 18 months. It is up stairs from Borders Bookstore, and a food court and so from my perspective is ideally situated - books, coffee, food and art house film - what more could you want.

In my quest to experience this cinema, I nearly went with the Library Technician's group, who were booking one of the rooms out at the beginning of this year for a get together. Unfortunately this was cancelled when Dendy had to close due to the storm damage Canberra suffered on New Year's eve. The water damage for the Dendy is now fixed, although they are still fixing other parts of the Canberra Centre, more about that later.

Dendy has 1100 seats, in two parts - the standard cinema setting with very comfy seats, and being new is a treat. The other part, Premium Class, has two cinema's, one with 30 seats and the other with around 100 seats. The premium class has its own exclusive lounge, full in-seat dining and bar service as well as opulent electric reclining seats, with drink holders, bottle coolers and lift up arms so that you can cuddle!!!

LR had free tickets to see an advanced screening of Romulus, my father an Australian movie, starring Eric Bana and Kodi Smit-McPhee, directed by Richard Roxburgh. Kodi is an amazing child actor and well worth watching.
So LR, SM and I headed for the 6.30pm session on Tuesday evening. We all stopped for a kebab in the food court and then went up the stairs to the cinema. It is an interesting movie and despite the seriousness of the issue that it explored, ended up being positive. Go see it. It opens on the 31st of May. After the movie finished, the three of us went and had a sticky beak at the premium class and we were very impressed. I suggested that LR might want to book out the smaller cinema to celebrate her 40th next year!!!!When you book out the whole cinema, you can screen your choice of film, which for LR would be science fiction or science fantasy.

At about 8.30 we went off in separate directions to our cars. Unfortunately for me the way back to my car was blocked off by workmen fixing the walkway, part of the ongoing development and storm damage work going on at the Canberra centre. I spent the next 40 minutes or so working out an alternative route back to the right car park (there are many car parks and they all look the same), I then paid an outrageous (for Canberra) $6 for parking and headed home again.

Interesting IT Tools

Here are two gadgets that people might find useful. Thank you supersleuth JC.

BibMe

To make your bibliographies as you go along from the resources you are using online.

Open Source PDF writer

This enables you to create PDF documents, that are compatible with adobe acrobat, without having to purchase Adobe Professional or Adobe Writer.

Enjoy, Mondo

Superman and the rain

As my friends in Canberra know it has rained twice in the past week, and as they have pointed out to me (many times) most of the rain falls in Tuggeranong Valley. JSR told me yesterday that the papers are now reporting that Tuggeranong is hogging the rain. Here is the Canberra Times article suggesting Tuggeranong is the rain capital of the capital!!! I wonder if this will affect house prices? Remember too that the Tuggeranong rainfall is based on the weather station at Monash, so Tuggeranong rainfall is really Monash rainfall!!!

Here is how the MonashMob celebrated the rain on Monday night!!!

Of course Superman had to help (aparently she cannot be supergirl as then she would have to wear pink!)


We are about to go to stage four water restrictions, the discussion is that this will happen at 1 July. This stage is going to be much more difficult than earlier stages. Here is a list of restrictions for every stage. Let's all really hope that this drought breaks soon.

Hyatt for breakfast

Sunday saw the 642.4 gang meet at 10am to celebrate the fortyonederful birthday of TSS. The Hyatt in Canberra is famous for its morning teas and high teas. We had lots of little cakes, little pastries and fruit. Our coeliac friend had her own plate of incredibly rich cakes. For more information check out TSS's thoughts here.

A picture of the tea lounge is here.

The next planned outing for the four of us is to Ikea in Sydney on the Sunday between JC's birthday and CJK's birthday, which should be the last weekend in July!!! We will be leaving Canberra at about 7am, which means I will leave home around 6am so that I can pick people up all across the north of Canberra.

Here are a few of my favourite things...?

Just a few interesting, strange and bizare things found this week.

If you are interested in clocks then here is a "Polar Clock" for you to check out.

More computer art.

Fantastic foodie photo's complete with the recipe's behind them. Time to start cooking...

The full Wiki. You know wikipedia, now meet the rest of the family.

The real names of musicians.

Now you can play the piano online.

Biographies online. I searched for Bob Hawke and got Neville Bonner. I searched for Paul Keating and got Tim Fisher. I searched for Cathy Freeman and did not find any Australians. Suffice it to say, it is not strong on Australian personalities.

Find out what happened on the day you were born. Kakorama. You will be pleased to know that eggs cost 57c a dozen in America on the day I was born.

Autumn in the Garden

It is definitely autumn here in the nation's capital and while the sun is out it is warm enough, but stay out of the shaddows and don't go out early or late - won't be long before the first frost!

The calistemon's are adding a really bright spot of colour in the garden right now.

Happy mother's day

Happy mothers day to all the mothers I know, hope you are having a wonderful relaxing day.

I was watching David and Kim the other morning (as you do when you are home with a sick child for most of the week) and they had a cook on explaining how to do a swiss roll. At the end they explained that the cook would not be back next week as his wife was having Mothers week and he had to stay home to look after the five children!!!! I like the idea - one day for each child perhaps?

Children are a great comfort in your old age - and they help you reach it faster, too.
~Lionel Kauffman

Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.
~Sam Levenson

All mothers are working mothers.
~Author Unknown

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers.
~Jewish Proverb


Enjoy your day (or more).

Mondo

School Holidays

Two things to report from the school holidays:
On Tuesday we took the kids to see Meet the Robinson's. We had thought that we would go to the 3D version, however the price was too expensive (no Tuesday discount for 3D). I highly recommend it if you have not yet seen it.

On Friday we went to Gametraders to get a new game for ARJ's DS. It came out in the US on the 22nd of April and is due out here in July sometime!?!?

How does that work? The world is not that big anymore that Australia has to wait an extra two months. Gametraders (Australian owned unlike other stores) thought the same way and imported them independently and they were available on Friday, we got one of the last Pokemon Diamond games at around 10.30am.

Update on large shopping centres

My ears pricked up the other day when I heard on the radio about a large shopping centre in Kent, UK and I thought about my earlier post. I have not heard of the Bluewater shopping centre. So I thought I would investigate. Despite the fact that it has 330 shops, the same as the Metrocentre in Gateshead, the Metrocentre is still the largest shopping centre in the UK.

I am therefore even more impressed that Miranda Fair has 631 stores, while everything is bigger and better (and colder) in Canada and West Edmonton Mall has over 800 stores.

Just to confuse me I have just found the Aussie "big 8" and their size is based on square metres not number of stores!!!

THE BIG EIGHT

* Knox, Victoria: 142,244 square metres
* Westfield Fountain Gate, Vic: 138,163
* Chadstone, Vic: 137,076
* Westfield Marion, SA: 132,553
* Westfield Southland, Vic: 128,028
* Warringah Mall: 127,177
* Westfield Bondi Junction: 126,779
* Westfield Parramatta: 126,754

Then there is the proposed extended shopping centre in Castle Hill, NSW which is predicted to be 170,000 square meters of shopping joy. For more information click here.

Enjoy your shopping experiences where ever you may have them,

Mondo

Audrey Fagan

What a tragedy, Audrey Fagan, Chief of Police in the ACT dead at 44.

If you want to know more about this, then click here.

Cardboard Coffins? Not for Canberra

As the political centre of Australia, it is good to see that RiotACT has finally got its teeth into something really important.

Cardboard Coffins

Actually all joking aside RiotACT is a good alternative viewpoint on what is happening here in the National Capital.