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 A very big week for us this week – the kid in particular.

Wednesday morning the cast comes off her arm, and then Wednesday afternoon she has a half hour interview at school. The teacher will use the time to get to know her a bit, assess her skill level in a number of areas (numeracy, speech, etc) in preparation for when she starts.

Then, Friday, school starts. Her first day of school.

I know it’s a total cliche to talk about how fast they grow up, but oh boy, is it true. I can still remember holding her in the delivery room like it was yesterday, and now she’s off to school. The years just whizz by.

No blogging at all over the weekend. I’m sorry, dear reader, that I didn’t keep you informed on the fascinating details of what happened over the last three days.

Boring fireworks, gardening, and .. umm .. gardening.

We planned to go to Horsham for a few days but called that off because (1) the Australia day fireworks were on in Ballarat on Friday night, and (2) the garden has sprung up so much over the last two weeks that I needed to attack it.

So.. we went to Ballarat on Friday. Crappiest firework show I’ve seen for a long time. Really, really dull. The Moonambel fireworks were way better. I took a few photos anyway, but it was a really disappointing show. Almost at the “waste of fuel traveling over” kind of level. It went for close to 15 minutes, but the final 14 minutes were a repeat of the first minute.

Then, gardening. I spent a huge chunk of time Saturday cleaning up the backyard, and moving a heap of dirt in from the pile in the front (left from the driveway works) so we could top dress the bare patches, fill some of the holes the dogs have dug, and use our new grey water diversion hose to try and get some grass growing. It looks a whole lot better than it did a few days ago; still more work left, but it’s starting to look half decent.

Lisa did a lot of mowing, and despite the fact that there are still a number of bare patches there’s a very definite greenishness to the whole block. It’s starting to look good, and if the BOM make good with their plan to deliver us some rain in March we’re going to be sitting pretty come next summer.

We’re also starting to think about how we’ll get a decent outdoor area out there – deck, shade sail, etc. Bit of planning and thinking left, but we’re on the right track. Anything that involves smacking bits of wood together with the Paslode is fine by me.

Woohoo! The new series of Top Gear starts Monday night — 7:30 on SBS. According to the BBC they’re going to show the hamster’s crash at the start of the episode.

Fred pointed to this ripper of a photo. For some reason I can’t get flickr to nicely format a blog posting with this wordpress theme; I’ll work on that some time. For now, just trust me and check this out. Great capture.

Here. As one of the commenters said — just wish I knew who made this film.

If you haven’t already read it, check out Robert Cringley’s latest article. A very interesting take on google and their aspirations for control of the internet. Not sure that I totally accept everything he’s saying, but it’s an interesting read:

Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.

I suspect that silicon valley pundits sometimes underestimate how many people in society still view the ‘net and technology as an adjunct to their real lives; it’s a world they connect with for an hour every few nights to check their email. Living in that technology world the entire time would easily distort you view. Still, over the longer term, technology will dominate everything we do; it’s just a matter of how many generations it takes to get there. There’s no doubt Adelaide’s children will view a fixed line telephone as being an antique.

Looking back through photos and videos of the last few years I found this beauty.

We’re 21 weeks today, but this is close enough…

Update: Just in case you were wondering, this isn’t our actual baby… it’s an image I found on the web that’s representative of babies at the same development level as ours.

All fixed. No harm done (except to wallet). Car good. Lisa happy.

Anyone want a new life?