Off they go

This morning the two baby doves were still in the nest.

Late afternoon we went to Henley Beach. I had never seen it this busy.

It was a very good day for a swim.

When we came home, one little dove had left the nest. During the ONE minute I wasn't outside watching the birds the second one left the nest as well.

Victor Harbor

We drove to Victor Harbor today. Just to get out of the house. We walked a fair bit.

They have whales in the town pond.

And a mini ferris wheel.

We walked to Granite island. It's a rather beautiful little island.

You get there by going over this bridge.

Upper class uses the horse-tram of course ;-)

The cyclists

We liked yesterdays breakfast at Scoozi's so much that we made it our first breakfast of 2009 as well. We shared the terrace with lots of cyclists. I had a few happy new year phone calls with my mom and dad, my sister and Mic and Mickey.

The rest of the day was spent at home. We did laundry. I had a nap and now I feel out of it. I looked in to OS X programming (Objective C) a bit. I decided I'm going to order this train-set which will launch me in to the digital era of mode railroading. I played some online poker against eight other people, came third and thus made US$2. I'm gonna be so rich man... I hand-fed the doves and I fixed some paint on to-be fountain parts. Oh, and I also played guitar again. There is this song called '39 from Queen that I once learned. It's a good song for practising I think. I can't play anything else but it did refresh some of the chords in my memory.

Happy New Year!

We didn't have much for breakfast in the house so we went in to town for breakfast. We went to Scoozi's to be exact. And what a great breakfast we had. Not too much, but sooooo damn tasty. Great start of the last day of this year.

This was our view: Rundle Street.

We looked for shoes but couldn't quite find what we wanted.

Well known Belgian beer available here.

And then we went to the beach.

Nicole doing the 'vogeltjes dans'.

The water was refreshing but not cold enough. A few kilometres away a 4 metre great white was swimming we later read on the news.

Gull walking to the left...

Gull walking to the right. The beach can be thrilling.

The little steam train was riding as well.

Around 21:00 we drove down to the big park in town for some New Years eve festivities. There was a stage with bands playing on it, there were some food stalls and plenty of toilets.

Because we had skipped dinner we first went to the guzleme stand. Guzleme is a delicious Turkish dish. It's kinda like pizza dough, folded, with spinach, feta cheese and lambs meat inside. Hmmmm.

Like I said before, bands were playing on stage.

The fountain was changing colour all the time.





And at midnight sharp the fire works started. Pretty nice fireworks too, for 15 minutes.

Mic called me to say happy new year but we couldn't really hear each other very well. We'll catch up tomorrow.

The fireworks were lit from a bridge. At some point it looked like the whole bridge was on fire.

Boom.

Cross country trainer

CHRISTmas is over. Masses of people have been giving other people lots of crap presents that they don't want or need. The more the better. Well, it's not really better, judging by the 15 metres line up in front of Target's return-desk.

These are the latest babies of the two doves that live here. I haven't seen their previous offspring for weeks so I think they were told to piss off and look for their own place somewhere else. These two will be told the same thing in a few weeks. There's no emotion involved, just instinct, maybe.

This is my and Nic's CHRISTmas present: A new cross trainer. Top of the range professional equipment also used in gyms. Lets see if we can find the discipline to use it.

Fans

We drove to King William Street this morning to check out some perfume shop Nicole had heard about. We found it. It's called Jo Malone.

Nicole had a good time in there. While I was waiting outside.

Not much going on in King William Street.

OH! Cars!

My sisters CHRISTmas card arrived.

I painted parts for the solar powered zen-garden fountain that I'm -very- slowly working on.

While doing so I noticed I had two fans. One dove sitting above me on my left. He or she is actually just to jump on my phone. They are hilarious. They also try to land on you sometimes. One landed on my back twice.

And one dove sitting on my right. I like to think they were interested in what I was doing. But I think they just wanted more food. Nevertheless they are nice birds to have around you.

I heard the shark laugh

We went to Henley today and discovered the Henley Beach kiosk. We didn't know it existed. We had a rather nice cappuccino there.

All was normal until a helicopter came flying past. It was the shark patrol. And yeah, it started circling above the water. We have had an above average amount of shark sightings the past months. You hear about one on a daily basis at the moment and yesterday a man was killed by a great white (that's one like "Jaws") in Perth.

This whole shark thing became quite a circus because they try and escort it away from the beach. The audience was growing.

At one point there was the helicopter, two boats from the surf life-savers and one police boat. Oh, I forgot the little surf life-saving quad that was on the beach. I guess they are there just incase the shark tries to come on land...