Welcome To April

March was one of the wettest months on record here in Queensland. April has started off with a wet April 1st as well. Overnight rain saw us receive 14mls (just over .5 of an inch). Some extremely dry parts of the state had their wettest day ever during the month. Birdsville is well known as a dry, dusty, and hot town in the state's west but it recorded a record 150+mls in one day in March. 150mls is about 6" of rain!

In Caloundra we had 430mls in March, about 17", and our yearly total is now over 830mls, well over 33" of rain already!

It is another wet morning here, I haven't been on a bike ride for about 5 days now.

The wet weather brings out the cane toads too. I fished three out of the pool yesterday and another one today! The 3 iron has had a bit of a workout.

We have watched a few movies recently with Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island being the biggest disappointment. It came with a great 'score' too. On Tuesday night we watched Mel Gibson in Edge Of Darkness. As with many of his movies it was highly implausible but great entertainment. Both Trish and I enjoyed it immensely.

We have a phone setup here which works well for us. Trish and I both have our own mobile phones (on the cheapest plan possible) and each plan has one hour for free calls each day.

Our 'regular' landline phone service is with the national carrier and all incoming calls come via the landline. However our outgoing calls are all voip calls (Voice Over Internet Protocol) which means they go out via the computer part of the phone line. People can call in on this number as well. (Voip calls are considerably cheaper to make than regular landline calls). Most people have heard of Skype calls and Voip is a form of Skype. Others use phone cards for cheap calls and these cards use the computer voip system as well.

We still have a regular wallphone but the other cordless phone system is connected to the Voip setup. The cordless phones can receive incoming landline calls as well as incoming voip calls. Sometimes (about 1 in 20 incoming calls) the cordless phones get a bit mixed up. Even though the voip phone rings for an incoming landline call, we hear dialtone when we pick up. After about 12 seconds the call is connected and everything is perfect. Meanwhile all the incoming caller hears for 12 seconds is silence!

So if you do ring us and suddenly the phoneline goes blank, just hang on, we will be answering as soon as the phones sort themselves out.

I have been tweaking the voip settings so hopefully there won't be too many incoming wait for 12 seconds calls! The reality is the cordless phone system is almost 5 years old and was a 'cheapie' special. A better quality cordless phone setup would probably fix the problem.