The rest of this blog post is Adelaide’s christmas letter to Santa. The editor accepts no responsibility for its content.
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dear santa,
can i please have…a mote control aeropiane sonic unleased madegascar star wars indiana jones wii games but not a aeraplane game.A moon board a hanna montana guitar game a tiger cub a princess mobile phone a princess jasmine laptop and a baby carrya .
love adelaide.
For the first time in months I went out with the camera early this morning. I found this old barn that’s about to fall over. After some minor tonemapping in Photomatix I’m pretty happy with the result.
According to The Age petrol dropped as low as $1.06 last night and could dip below $1.05 next week. Liars! I filled at $1.03 this morning without a docket. Would have paid 99 cents if I had one with me. Dang.
I visited my friend Andrew today to see why the Falcon was overheating since we did the water pump and ancilliary belt a few weeks back. Seems we forgot to reconnect the fan power connector. That would do it.
We also tweaked the brakes. I was unhappy with the pedal feel because there was a little bit of slack at the top of the pedal. It turns out there’s a way you can dial that out with an adjustable pin between the power booster and the master cylinder. We wound that out to take up the slack and it feels much, much better.
We also identified the fact that the front pads have only got 2mm of material left and that the discs are pretty stuffed. Par for the course with the AU series of Falcons, especially since I’ve done 223K on this set of discs. Andrew will order a new pair and we’ll fit new discs and pads in the next week or two.
Oh, and this Jag Daimler photo? He was working on it for a customer. I don’t know what model it is, but it’s pretty sweet. It’s a Daimler 250 with a little 2.6L 2.5L V8 that sounds terrific. All leather interior; smells like a saddlery inside. Beautiful little car.
This year’s energy breakthrough was held over the weekend. Lisa and I spent a couple of hours marshalling on one of the corners and thankfully managed to dodge the worst of the weather. Nothing serious happened on our corner, but while we were there we did have a 20 minute full-course yellow flag when an ambulance had to attend to a rider who had come off and broken her ankle.
Carisbrook Primary School (where the kid goes) entered a car in one of the categories and managed to walk away with the win. No idea what “HPV A1″ is (well, ‘HPV’ is human powered vehicle, but I don’t know what the ‘A1′ is) but they’ve done well. Full (provisional) results here (pdf).
For those who don’t know about it, the RACV Energy Breakthrough is an annual event where school kids from all around Australia (and this year, from New Mexico as well!) converge on Maryborough for the weekend. They enter vehicles that they’ve designed and built at school and compete over 24 hours in a number of different categories.
It’s all about introducing kids to the practical aspects of engineering with a view to making most effective use of energy, and it does an excellent job of that. There were some really well engineered entries.
He isn’t in office yet, but Obama is already embroiled in a controversy:
In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.
Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tic, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.
I have no idea what to say about this at all.
The Kid had a special day today because she said her promise at Girl Guides. It’s a big occasion.
I promise that I will do my best to do my duty to God, to serve the Queen and my country; to help other people; and to keep the Guide law.
Afterward she was given a sash and scarf and a whole lot of badges and patches that Lisa has to sew on. There’s one for being part of the guide movement; one for being an Australian guide; one for being a Victorian guide; one for being part of the Bluebell patrol, and a few others that I can’t remember. Lots.
There’s a gallery on SmugMug with a few shots in it; check your gallery list.
I’ll get her to write a blog entry tomorrow with her own words.
The Kid got her third virtue award at school this week. Last week’s virtue was “assertiveness”, and for some reason she won the award for her class. Can’t imagine why. Photo on SmugMug.
Oh, there’s also a slightly creepy halloween-esque photo up there too.
Who said what?