Back To Normal

It is Friday morning, Trish is at Quilters and I am doing stuff on my PC.  Things are back to normal!

Before picking Trish up from Brisbane Airport around 3 pm yesterday afternoon, I spent a little time getting the lawn mower out and cutting the front lawn.  The forecast was for a showery Friday clearing up to glorious sunny long weekend here (Labor Day holiday here on Monday).  Getting the lawn cut would get one of those jobs which need to be done out of the way.  It came up OK.

The forecast showers was more like rain after 7 am this morning.  There is another 15 mls in the rain gauge and the skies remain overcast.  After an unsettled afternoon the weather is expected to 'clear' the coast and leave us with mid 20 degree days and cooler mornings.

Trish was home here, unpacked and catching up with things by 5pm.  Friends Ian and Kerrie were heading overseas to the U.S. for 5 weeks early Friday and wanted to catch us for drinks if possible.  As usual it was pleasant with a few drinks, some nibblies and a good chat.  Trish and I finished up at the local Tavern to share a $10 pizza for tea which was all we needed.

With a wet Friday I decided today would be a home brew making day.  I am making a Black Ale and the mix in the photo is around 280gms of "mix", (dried corn syrup, dextrose and malt) along with 130gms of lumpy 'dark brown sugar'.  The mix gives the Black Ale a rich malty taste.  I expect to bottle-wash Monday and bottle either Wednesday or Thursday.  This amount of mixture should create an alcohol content of around 3.5% at the most.

Click on either photo for a larger view.

No 'Friday Drinks' today as Ian and Kerrie are away and John and Margaret are off in their motor home for a "Music Festival".

We have new home owners on our right as you face the house and renters on the other side.  A "For Sale" sign went up on the rental property yesterday.  They have $396,000 on it.  I would be rapt if the got that as it would make our little place $400,000+.  At $396,000 I believe it is way overpriced by around $30,000+.

One of the TV Series both Trish and I enjoy is a UK Crime Series called "Scott and Bailey" which has just finished its second season of 8 shows in the UK.  I don't think it has come to Australian TV screens just yet.  We watched an episode last night.  Anything we had to watch previously was usually in a .avi format and a one hour show would be around 450mb download.  Many of the new shows are now in .mp4 format and an hour show is around 260mb with no noticeable drop in movie quality.  However a few of the newer mp4 files may have the audio out of sync with lip movement and Scott and Bailey is one such series.

The latest model WDTV Live SMP media player has a function whereby you can adjust the lip sync.  This is an extremely handy function to have and made what would have been an insufferable watching of TV last night into one which was perfect.  I had to set the audio delay to -400ms and it was then perfect to watch and enjoy.  Audio out of sync is a common problem with files obtained from the internet.