Australia

Well my parents have been flying now for three hours and forty five minutes on their way to Perth, Australia to visit my cousin Sue and her family.... My mother was really nervous about flying, she hasn't flown before, I'd presumed she had flown out to Holland when she was a young woman before meeting my father but no.... she's never been on a flight before or a plane of any description.... so here she is signed up to fly on the biggest jet airline thus far the A380 Airbus.... she's DVT socked up to the eyeballs as is my father .... They have a stop off at Singapore airport for refuelling then off to Australia and Perth. My mother couldn't get it into her head the time differences ..... either way I think her body will tell her she's just flown nearly 24 hours even if her watch won't !!!

They have a busy time out there because Sue has an itinerary with all the good places to visit and my parents have promised FOMO boy a boomerang (real) and some aboriginal art for teenage moody strop daughter because she's doing that in her GCSE syllabus.....

They will have a blast I'm sure, it will be so hard lazing around the pool at my cousin Sue's house in the suburbs of Perth ......waited on hand and foot.... rather them than me .... (not!!!)... seriously though they deserve a decent break.... and three weeks isn't bad in Auz !!

We've just had our friends around Niki and Justin and they have plied us with mulled wine and beer and some festive mince pies (bit early but who cares ?)..... Xbox boy's 18th birthday is looming I'm sure he will have a blast, he usually does...... regardless

as for me ..... well I'm waiting for the Ipod to die again .... to give me something to do !!! ho hum

I did however take this rather stunning photograph of a rainbow just outside our house this morning...... as you can see the weather is lovely ...... bet they don't get rain in Australia like we do here in Wales ;-) .... I'll have to visit our neighbour to see if I can steal his pot of gold !!!

Itunes and rain

It seems the latest incarnation of Itunes (version 9.0.25) has killed quite a few ipods, I was thinking it was Freya killing ours with the Sharpie pen and consequent rubbing with wet wipes... but my iPod died again.... Itunes has definitely something to do with it judging by the numerous posts on the Apple forums.... I've resurrected ours again ... how long it will stay resurrected is another thing ... we shall see....

Then there is the rain of which we have had plenty of these past few days, I took xbox boy for an interview for a job in Llanelli (which he got !!) and on the way back the heavens emptied it was like driving underwater on the back roads from Llanelli.... Needless to say Duran Duran coughed and died when it was driven past a moist hedge on the way back.... to be fair it was more than a moist hedge the water was at least 5" deep on the road, and even though I crawled through it at just a bit faster than the spread of bacteria.... it still coughed/backfired twice then died... so I had to wave the traffic past us on a pretty sharp corner.... I wasn't looking forward to getting my feet wet, but thankfully the engine sprang to life after a couple of tries.....phew :)

The trip back home after picking up FOMO boy from school early because of the torrential rain was a bit more exciting.... we have a T-Junction at the bottom of the Bancyfelin road and it was completely underwater by at least 5 to 8 inches of water.... just scraping the sills on the door I think.... we got through that on a wing and a prayer, only to be confronted with nothing short of a running waterfall that was our normal road home ....... the hill looked like a very flat waterfall.... I've never seen so much water on a road before.... it was at this point I thought "we aren't going to make it up this hill...." it was that bad if you had got out of the car and stood in the middle of the road the water would have been shooting past your knees with the spray off your feet... but Duran Duran did us proud .... coughed a few times but got us up there....

apparently it's not the worst of it we have more on the way ... St Clears I think is going to be particularly badly hit because the Taf and Cynin rivers have a flood warning and St Clears floods if somebody spits their drink out in one of the beer gardens.... so I think they are in for a bad time...... We are already cut off at our T-Junction and Meidrim is probably out as well....Andrea barely made it back from her marathon training session ......that only leaves the back way to Banyfelin left .... mind you if the water reaches our house..... all my readers are dead anyway !!! not that we are high up or anything ;¬)

Wasn't expecting this at all !!

I was doing my usual trawl of the BBC news website when I came across this item about an old friend Brannan Tempest .

He lives in Leeds and is madder than a box of frogs, but I was sad to hear his girlfriend Pippa had been injured in a car accident....I hope she fully recovers...... That said it does kind of follow that only Brannan could get a 2.4 metre high carved horse from Indonesia nicked from outside of his house......

This is the man who found a display firework mortar bomb which hadn't gone off at Rounday Park in Leeds after a commercial firework display....you know the ones where you hear the "thump" as it's fired into the air from a mortar tube then you get that massive star burst.... well he took it home and set it off in his field.... I think that's where the US military got the idea for the "Daisycutter" bomb.... his field remained pretty bare for several weeks....I suppose it's one way of cutting your grass !!! ..... thankfully he wasn't injured .... just deaf for a while... ahhh the things you do when you're young eh ?

Anyway it was nice to see him even if it was on a BBC News report about stolen wooden horses I hope they catch the thieving swine's !! I'm pleased to say he has less hair than me.... but not by much ;¬)

Addendum :- I've since found out that they recovered his trojan horse from a place called Castleford and it's been handed back to him !!! :)