The new birdie in town

It was chilly today. We're 3 weeks into our summer and around 10:00 it was only 17C.

But Christmas is here soon and Nic is cooking Christmas lunch so ingredients needed to be bought. Hence we were off to the Central Market once again.

This is the new parking garage opposite the Central Market entrance. Not many people are using it yet so it's always nice and empty.

Before we went in we had a very late breakfast at the Thai.

Inside an Asian choir was singing Christmas songs. It was not bad at all to be honest (I can say this because I have 10 years of choir experience :-P ).

When we came home I got a very special surprise. As I walked out of the flat, a young sparrow (NL: musje) sat in the most well lit spot in the garden so that I could not overlook it. It looked at me and tjirped. It let me come really close and it didn't seem scared at all. Then it flew up and I thought it tried to land on my shoulder. It was a bit hard for him I think and instead he went into the tree next to me, still very close. That when I took this first picture.

As I stayed close I noticed the birdie tried to come closer hopping from one branch onto a closer one. That's how I made this picture. I was of course very excited so I stayed where I was and guess what? The little sparrow friend flew a little bit and eventually landed on my shoulder where it sat for about a minute. It wasn't doing anything, just looking as if it just wanted to say hello. All this took me and Nicole by surprise so much that we unfortunately have no picture from this. After this it flew into a tree again, hung around a bit and then it went to another garden.

Was this coincidence or does it have anything to do with the other birdie? Who knows?...

In the afternoon we went to Harvey Norman to buy our TV. GOPOWER had parked there and later in the evening Karin and I saw this car driving past us again.

This is the tellie we bought. I never ever want a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screen anymore I said so we entered the world of LCD. This one was a bit of an investment but it should serve us very long.

Late afternoon Karin and Vicky joined us to Cibo for ice cream and iced tea. A grand opportunity to picture the 3 Leist girls all together :-)

Vicky baked cookies that looked a LOT like oversized "pepernoten" and they actually tasted a bit like them as well.

In the evening Nicole and I drove to the Larg's jetty.

The sunset was once again beautifull.

The rain

Just incase you were thinking it's -always- sunny, here's a blog drained with todays weather. We woke up with rain. HEAVY rain also known as "flash floods".

It rained on and off all throughout the day and as I'm writing this post (on my saturday morning) it's raining again.

As an example of how special this kind of rain is here these days: Some of our friends here have children. About 2 months ago the same happened. One couple went outside with their little 3 year old girl to show them what this kind of rain was. Another couple video-taped it for their 1 year old boy.

I reckon that in The NL young parents will soon have to start video-taping sunny moments (and maybe also snow) for their young children ;-P

Rain can also make for nice photo's.

Close-up of the water falling into the tank.

The garden in the rain.

The path to our flat in the rain.

Infront of our flat in the rain.

The drive way in the rain.

And then we had an emergency... Rain was comming down so hard that the somewhat blocked gutter couldn't get rid of it anymore and it started pouring onto our window. Because there's a small roof over the windows to protect rain from entering I had just opened one to get the beautifull fresh air inside. If you have the window open, the water doesn't get ON your window anymore but it goes INside. That's right, splattering on the table onto my papers some 20cm next to my brand new computer.

Luckily the computer is unharmed but the papers needed to dry.

We will have to prevend this because you never know when a gutter is blocked up. Something can start blocking it even right after you cleaned it.

So, all this happened in the morning and in the afternoon routine picked up again: SHOPPING!!!!

. We went to Big W to return a toaster that we bought the day before because it was broken. This is the Arndale shopping centre entrance. (picture taken with my mobile phone so everything is crooked again)

In the evening we were driving Karin and gavin to their dinner with colleagues and they had a different rainy surprise. All over Adelaide (drink)water pipes had burst because the sand around them went from super dry to super wet. Aparently this means something, don't ask me. Luckily for Karin and Gavin the mains waterpipe infront of their house only broke a little bit. We all know what nice fountains broken pipes can make, not to mention sink holes!

It took the watercompany about 4 hours to get someone down here to fix it. With the waterrestrictions on this was a HUGE waste of water. Gavin made a little detour for the water so it went over the grass. Everybody in their street came by to fill up buckets to water their gardens, lawns and trees.

After dropping them off we went to Harvey Norman where we want to buy a TV. First we wanted to buy a tiny LCD TV for a mere $299 but it looks like we're going to end up with a model a fair bit more expensive but it will be able to show Ultra High Definition pictures. Let me explain about this.

In Australia you can receive 4 kinds of signals for your tellie these days:
- Analogue
- Digital Standard Definition (SD)
- Digital High Definition (HD)
- Digital Ultra High Definition (Ultra HD)

Analogue is going to be phased out so everybody will have to buy a setop box or a new TV to receive Digital SD TV. All digital is looking better than analogue + it is widescreen.

Also: whatever is broadcasted in SD is also (by law) broadcasted in HD.

Ultra HD is basically normal HD but on a much higher resolution to match those supersized LCD and plasma screens. And some broadcasters have created special Ultra HD channels where they show different stuff (mainly movies and sports events) from their "normal" HD or SD channel.


In the evening at home Nic didn't want to be photographed.

Twice.

Also to show you that not everything is better or nicer here, here are 2 pictures of (mosquito?) bites on my leg. They itch like HELL sometimes, especially when they're tsjp tsjtsjtsjptsjp tsjptsjp fressshhh and they make lovely little tattoos for about 2 weeks. This is my left leg.

This is my right leg.

After picking up Karin and Gav and dropping them off home again we drove around a bit and saw some amazing christmas decorations. Some people go nuts here with decorating their houses.

It's like a bloody funfair!

The Churches

Wake up...

Get in the car...

Go shopping. Usual start of the day sofar.

This is Nicole's church: Woolworths. Isles twice as wide as in The NL, isles twice as long as in The NL, isles twice as full as in The NL. About 10 times more choice than in The NL (20 times more than Albert Gein). People at the checkout are helpfull and will at least greet you and sometimes have a little chat with you. Rather a difference from the grumpy assholes that we used to get behind the supermarket checkouts in Amsterdam (except for Aldi).

We usually take stuff home after we had a service in this church.

My church is called "Harvey Norman". They preach much better stuff than Woolworths I think. I paid attention today and scored this beautifull HP printer/scanner/fax. It has a top feed and it prints 2 sides!!

By the way: Sometimes I go to another church called "Office works" but I'll leave that for another time!

The phone connection

I was stunned early morning by a visit of 2 Telstra men. They drove up in our driveway and as I greeted them and asked what they came to do one of them said (and I had not met him before!) "Are you the guy that came by there on the corner yesterday asking about your phone connection?". So I said "yes" and they told me that they'd fixed us up temporarily about 4 minutes ago and that they dropped by to check the connection. And guess what? It bloody works! it is however a temporarily connection. The number is solid and we can start using it. But the phone-pole is so buggered (due to an experiment from the 70's which was cancelled in the 80's!!!!!) on one side that they're going to have to transfer all the wires to the other side of the pole which remained unused. So the line has a lot of buzz on it but it works. ADSL shouldn't even be bothered by it.

Nic and I have set our minds on hooking up with an ISP called Internode who gave me the impression they are the most progressive ISP around town. We might be hooked up soon!

Late morning the temperature was already 29 degrees Celcius. Un-real. The whole day it was very hot and really humid. I am stinky and sweaty.

We had to drive up to Hahndorf to buy some apples but before we left we first needed to top up the car.

And along the way we got a quote (nothing more than a certain amount of money written on the back of a business card but alas) for having airconditioning build into the car. I was dieing inthere today. For some reason I'm almost always sitting on the "sunny" side and trust me, it gets hot!


The rest of the day we stayed at home doing nothing. We wanted to go to the beach but the weatherbureau gave a very serious "severe storm" warning. of course it never came and we missed out on one spectacular sunset. Some things are just like in the NL...

R.I.P. little birdie.

A terrible thing happened today. The little bird has died.

This picture was taken in the morning when he was still happy sitting on the fence. He was flying further than ever before and we were ever so happy seeing him. It was a hot day and we hadn't seen his mom for a while so after we came back shopping we made a very undeep plate for him filled with water. It was his first time ever that he saw water but he soon learned how to drink and bathe. It was such a wonderfull thing to see. Untill he kept falling over backwards...

We took him out of the water and noticed he wasn't moving his left wing and leg anymore and he couldn't keep his head up. Eventually we put him in a shoebox-lid where he could rest his head on the edge and we sat next to him for almost an hour watching his every move. Unfortunately he started breathing slower and slower and in the end died after a short wiggle of his little tail and right wing. Eventhough many people will think it was just a bird, we were rather devastated and somewhat emotional after witnessing his progress of the past 4-5 days.

I'm still very sad.

Note: Later I read on the internet that you should never let a baby bird drink water by itself because it easily chokes. I'm still puzzled why it was breathing after we took it out and why he could only use 1 side of his limbs...

We had a drink and cake at the Central Market

Santa was there too and had a rather lovely looking little helper with him who unfortunately managed to make herself invisible...

After the bird-tragedy I wanted to go to the beach. Apart from the fact that it's just really nice to be at the beach I also needed some distraction. Pictured is the jetty where people often fish for crab. In the back you can see rain comming down. Unfortunately it was watering the sea instead of the land.

There were clouds above the land, but no rain. (It did rain a bit in the evening though)

We can all sleep safely now. It appears Buffy (the vampire slayer) lives in Adelaide!

There was a meeting of funny Chrysler owners. Funny plates guaranteed: "ENEMY".