The farewell lunch (Star Trek High Five!).

Do I look tired? That's because I was fucking tired. And I wanted kwoffee.

Touch down.

We went to the airport at 06:45 to pick up Nicole's parents who were coming back from vacation. This is their Air Malaysia flight touching down. The landing looked very gracious.

Wog fest 2009. Naturally, because I wanted to make a photo of them arriving, some unknown force in the bloody universe decided to plant 3 families in my line of sight.

The in-laws. Tony and Vicky.

This is my international drivers license with which I can drive a car anywhere in the world for a year. I dunno, it could also be a WWII pass of some sort...

Today we had our farewell lunch at Uleybury. Here we see Greg, Gianna and Nicole.

Stephen, Anna and Greg.

Karin and Stephen.

A particularly good photo (if not the nicest ever!) of natalie and Luke (who actually drove two hours to be there!). Thanks so much for coming guys!

STAR TREK HIGH FIVE!

A bit of after chit chat in the parking lot.

We drove home the scenic way, through the Adelaide hills. Everything was still very green. Pretty soon it will be dry and brown again.

We past a hot rod with a dog in it.

While going home we decided to hit the beach. We went to Largs.

Larg's jetty.

Largs beach.

People fishing at the top of the jetty.

A seagull on a pole.

Do I still look tired? That's because I still was bloody tired.

Me! me! me! ME! mE! ME! me! ME!

The beach

Finally, more than 2 weeks after my operation I went for a drive with Nicole again. The beach is my favourite place here so that's where we went to.

Passing Semaphore.

A bit further down the coast...

Larg's jetty!

The gulls are still there.

Lovely beach where the land slides in to the water.

Enjoy my 'happy' face ;-)

The beach was a bit dirty with dead sea weed but still beautiful.

Bling bling.

Our shadows.

We had fish and chips. I hadn't had any in ages. There is always too much chips so we feed that to the birds. I like to hand-feed them, it's awesome. They must've missed me because they were daring like never before. One actually stole from the box and they came really close today, I could feel the wind from their flapping. Awesome :-)

The chimneys I photographed on my very first holiday here.


At home one of the doves was around.

The experiments

I studied all morning into the early afternoon. After this it was time for some excitement so I was going to conduct some experiments. First I wanted to test the little water pump I bought yesterday to find out how much power it needs to be useful. When attached to a 4 V power source it takes a current of 72 mA. This means it consumes 0.3 W and it will just do what I want it to do: pump water about 20 cm upwards. The smallest solar panel I could find actually produces 1 W of power so this pump will definitely rock. I will actually have to restrict power generated by the solar panel. Maybe I can use it for something else as well. Hmm...

Then it was time for lunch. I watched another Family guy episode. I love this cartoon, it's so funny.

I have some tiny solar panels left that I bought about 20 years ago. I took them into the garden to find out their power. Now these are very old cells so nothing spectacular came out of it: 0.47 V with a maximum current of 2 mA. Awesome, not :-)

In the late afternoon we went to Largs jetty to get some Fish and chips. We hadn't been there for ages. I also had a "Dutch croquette roll" also known as "Broodje kroket". The previous owner used to be Dutch and they kept the things he introduced. So if you order a cappuccino, you get a "speculaas" biscuit (apparently people do not say "cookie" here) with it.

Where I was throwing chips to the seagulls or hand feeding them, Nicole has more class and used a fork. Very funny.

We walked up the jetty where it was VERY windy.

The white stripes are sand being blown over the beach.

I wrote another letter about the Government's "Clean feed" internet censoring plans to my member for parliament Kate Ellis. At the least they are spending your tax money on something that's 100% useless and doomed to fail (and they should know!) and at the most they will censor and cripple your internet access. If you live in Australia and you have not taken any action against these plans, well, you obviously don't care about your rights and don't mind being stripped of some...

The Larg's bay fishies

I really wanted to have a swim. Since today may be one of the last warmer ones for the next months we went to Larg's bay.

Larg's jetty from the water for a change. Notice the HUGE mountain of dead seaweed washed ashore. It came up to our knees while walking in and out of the water.

I am still very happy with the diving gear my ex-colleagues gave me. Today I actually had a good snorkel. I wore the goggles tighter than last time and there was hardly any water coming in so I could stay down very long. Also I figured out how to make the airpipe stand up properly so I wasn't choking all the time.

Nicole came in as well.

Larg's jetty the other way.

There was an incredible amount of dust, sand and what not in the water unfortunately.

Under the jetty is where you find the fishies. Rather big ones too. I don't know what kind they are. The stupid thing is that there are always a lot of people fishing from the jetty throwing their hooks far away from the jetty but the fish are right underneath! I reckon if I had a spear I could have brought some home. I rather photograph them though.

Here's one coming right at me. See that killer look in his eyes?

Side view. Hmmmmm. Obviously I need to get the quality better next time...

Close-up of a jetty-pole with a yellow tag.