Happy New Year everyone (and belated Merry Christmas)
2023: Flew 427 hours (and 3 minutes) despite being on reserve (intentionally 
). (Reserve is “on-call”… “standby”.) Hope everyone has a great 2024!
24 Likes
Happy New Year @Chaz ! You have me beat by a couple of hundred hours for 2023. I’m not sure if that’s a win for me or a win for you? 
12 Likes
Lovely
2 Likes
Wifey treated me to a night away from the kids at a hotel. Posh food, posh room. Wife had a venison burger that looked horrendous. I had the normal cow version as I’m not adventurous.
Got a little bit drunk in the room as well…
16 Likes
Wow! Is that an A400M?
5 Likes
Yep… was flying quite slowly having slowed right down to fly down the valley.
Should be back up near @Victork2 now.
9 Likes
Yep he’s in the circuit
5 Likes
Once again. I organise someone to come fix something in my house. They don’t show up, and I have to do it myself.
Turns out fixing toilets that don’t flush is ridiculously easy. Sealing the cistern to the bowl and stopping it flooding the ■■■■■■■ house when you flush it is irritatingly tricky.
I’m soaked and a smidge angry, i need to find time to get a “close coupled cistern seal kit” tomorrow.
I really REALLY do not know why i bother with tradespeople anymore. Its just constant bad experiences after bad experiences. They don’t show up, they show up and make things worse, they show up and do job so poorly that i have to rip it all out and do it myself. So I’m officially and on record banning all tradespeople from my property. If i can’t fix it myself. Its not getting fixed.
6 Likes
In my experience it is more of a city thing. Once when we were still living in Canberra it took two days to finally get a plumber to come out to fix a water leak, he took one look at the crawlspace under the house and said “not going under there mate” and buggered off. Took me five minutes to check it myself, 30 minutes to get down to the hardware store and back to buy a replacement water hammer arrester and about 30 minutes to fix it and an hour to get all the cobwebs out of my hair and cleaned up.
So yeah, I tend to only use tradesmen when I have to as well. e.g. A licensed electrician… but out here everybody knows somebody and if they say they are going to turn up they do, and do a decent job for a fair price. I love living in the country 
6 Likes
We have had a (thankfully) wetter than average start to the year.
The river is flowing nicely (view from our balcony):
And we have the ideal habitat for these little fellows.
Red Browed Finch (Neochmia temporalis):
And one of these days I will actually get a decent photo of our resident Wedgetails…
13 Likes
For the leak generous amounts of silicon sealant… that’s what the plumber did when we had a toilet fixed
The only thing that seems to hold new houses together is mastic and silicon, I think most plumbers and builders must have shares in the companies that make it
5 Likes
is that a WW2 style barrage balloon …