Australia Day

The weather has remained hot and humid the last few days with some welcome rain overnight and into Friday morning. Then on Friday night the weather radar showed this small heavy shower of rain right over Caloundra. This obviously developed as we had quite heavy rain overnight Friday with a very welcome 31 mls (about 1 1/4 inches) in the gauge Saturday morning. With a day which was always going to be hot and humid, this overnight rain made for an exceptionally sticky day on Saturday. For much of the day the humidity level remained in the 70's.

We had been promising to go out with new neighbours for a few months and out we all did go on Saturday night to our favorite "Spirit Of Tibet". We all enjoyed the night, the food and the company very much. The weather was perfect (quite warm) for sitting poolside and enjoying a few more drinks when we arrived back home about 10 pm. It did not take long till the warm weather and the alcohol gave way to the lure of the pool. It was sobering to hit the water at about 11 pm as you can see. Andy is enjoying a relax in the pool.

Trish had warned me about mixing drinks etc Saturday night and this was the case on Sunday. I hardly budged from my chair in front of the tennis on TV.

I bought a new router early November last year. It has been running for nearly 3 months now and is as solid as a rock. However we continue to have a couple of hassles with the Voip phone calls when people ring us. Just after I installed the new router I updated the firmware on the previous router, a DLink. You can adjust the settings in routers through Internet Explorer or Firefox. This was possibly the first time I had restarted the old router from 'cold' with the new upgrade and I can't get into it to adjust settings. Right now it won't let me get on the internet either. Possibly the upgrade didn't work properly so now it may have to go in to DLink to be reformatted.

Today is Australia Day. It celebrates the day Captain Arthur Phillip landed at Botany Bay with the First Fleet in 1788 and claimed Australia (New South Wales as Capt Cook had named it) for the British Empire. It has become a day of immense national pride with celebrations all over the country. However not all Australians celebrate Australia Day, the indigenous aborigines see it more as Invasion Day when they lost their country to the invader. In this country aborigines have only had the right to vote for about 40 years. There is some talk of changing Australia Day to another day of the year so it truly reflects a day of celebration for all Australians.

Today is also a big National day in India.