A Bit Different

Things seem a bit different today.  It is Saturday morning and I am not at Computer Club!  It must be getting close to Christmas and the Computer Club has gone into recess until January 10th.

And I am at home and I have already completed a 12.5km bike ride and had a swim!  The live cricket on TV is around 20 minutes away.

But most importantly it is cooler today.  One of the Test Cricket TV commentators spoke with several of the Indian cricket players and asked them about the heat during the game here in Brisbane.  After all they play in cities such as Mumbai which regularly has heat well into the 30's.

However all of them said 35 or so at the "Gabba" (in Brisbane) was hotter than almost 40º at Mumbai.  They said the sun would burn you here whereas it wouldn't burn you in Mumbai!  The sun was more fierce here at this time of the year making conditions for playing cricket amongst the hottest they had faced.

Today is a little cooler with a S/E wind change early this morning.  So it will get to around 30º today but there will be that slightly cooler breeze.

We eventually got our 'promised' thunderstorm into the evening on Thursday.  We had 32 mls pelt down giving everything a well deserved drenching.  The gardens, the lawns and even the pool enjoyed the rain giving the plants and the lawn a new lease of life.

We do our aeroplane trip booking down to Melbourne regularly from here and have got cutting out the extra 'fees and charges' down to a fine art.  We use a special recommended fee free credit card with Tiger Airlines.  This saves over $8 per person per trip.  Without using this credit card our $160 return trip for both of us in August 2015 would have cost almost $200!

So we helped Chris and family out with their bookings for flights up here for later in January using this card.  There are 4 of them and with one 20kg suitcase they are flying up to Brisbane and back to Melbourne for well under $600 all up.  That is pretty good for mid-January school holiday flights!

Without the 'special' credit card it would have cost them almost $70 extra!

Another advantage of the recent thundery rain was it put my bike riding for that day on hold.  So I did a bottling instead.  I now give all the bottles a double pre-bottling rinse.  This is on top of the previous initial brush out and soak in water and bleach, followed a day or so later with a hot wash and two further rinses.  Then the bottles are whisked out with sanitizer and dried in the sun.

The photo above is of the bottles being drained just prior to bottling.  The bottling went well.

We had a great Skype chat with Kate late Friday afternoon.  They continue to enjoy it there, especially the safety aspect where the kids can wander down to the park for a play, bike ride or hit of tennis.  We are looking forward to getting over there in May 2015.

The cricket on TV beckons, I must away