Month: December 2004

Called Buenos Aires to confirm that Nykolai and his mom had arrived OK – all fine and a big family reunion going on. They’re off to Pinamar in a couple of days so it looks like everything’s going to be pretty crazy over there for a while :)

I drove Nykolai and his mom out to the airport today for the first leg of their journey to Buenos Aires (thanks to Emmanuel for the use of his car :) From Melbourne they flew up to Sydney via QANTAS then changed to Aerolineas Argentinas for a quick jump across to Auckland. About 9 hours after they left Melbourne, the Aerolineas Argentinas flight left Auckland for a journey of about 16 hours non-stop to Buenos Aires. This flight will take them south to within about 1,000km of the pole, looping down and around on a “great circle” path (the shortest distance between two points on a sphere). From the flight deck on one of these flights you can get a great view of the ice on a clear day, but usually in the cabin the windows are too small to really get much viewing in.

As I type, they’re about an hour outbound from Auckland. Once they arrive at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires, they will have spent about 26 hours travelling and have flown about 13,200km. You can get a good representation of their total flight path from start to finish via this Great Circle Mapper page.

Before we went on holiday, our friend Emmanuel took some photos of Nykolai with a pair of angels wings. He’s doing a series of angel images and Nykolai’s going to be a part of the collection. I was at Rocio’s place while Emmanuel took the shots, so I grabbed a few myself. While the photos I took are fun, the end result of Emmanuel’s work (superimpositions, touch ups, coloring, etc) is amazing. I’ve ordered a large print of the final image for my place of course :)

Got back to Melbourne this evening from our holiday up north. It was wonderful to have a real break from everything, just relaxing and reading most of the time. A few support calls here and there, but nothing major. Christmas was great with Kitt’s extended family and we really enjoyed ourselves up there.

Murray (Kitt’s grandfather) invited us out to Murwillumbah airstrip to visit the folks at Mothcair, an organisation specialising in the restoration of early British aircraft (plus a few early US designs). It was great to visit and chat with everyone there – they’ve done a number of projects and really do enjoy their work. I managed to get a few photos while there, including some of an old Beach 18 that was parked out front.

Nykolai and I have flown up to Tweed Heads for a holiday with Kitt at her mom’s place. This is the first real holiday that I’ve had in two years and I’m really enjoying the chance to relax. Nykolai’s meeting the family up here and got invited to yet another end-of-year school breakup (another massive water fight was being held). Will get around to loading the photos once we’re back in Melbourne next week.

Nykolai’s school held their end of year break-up picnic today and much fun was had by all (it turned into a free-for-all water fight). We got to review his end of year report and he’s done very well indeed. We’re all very proud of Nykolai and hope to continue the good results next year.

As of October 2004, I became the AWU’s Technical Manager, a full time role that covers everything from air conditioning and sliding doors through to computer networks and Internet. While not employed by them, I am in there consulting to them full time so I’m being kept pretty busy.

I’ve been settling in and so far, it’s going pretty well. Lots to do, including deploying some new hardware, sorting things out a bit more in Sydney, trying to get on top of the task list and even doing Audio/Visual work (including running the camera) at a couple of recent conventions.

The worst of the bruising from the car accident seems to have gone now and my knee is working fine, although there’s still a bit of a lump on it that’s tender to touch. At least I’m not walking with a limp anymore – it’s been a long month indeed…

Now that I’m moving around OK again, I’m starting back into the exercise (about time too – fat attack occurring! :) Took Nykolai down to his first Tae Kwon Do class last night and he loved it. We’re now doing “mini-training” session at home whenever we can (eg: warm up, exercise, balancing, punches/kicks, sparring). He’s loving it and I’ll be joining the main class with him each week.

Hopefully all this will help me balance out the excesses of “silly season” when everyone’s doing their christmas dinners, drinks and so on. Probably not but it’s worth a try :)

New look versions of rights.apc.org.au and c2o.org have just been released. Add to this recent work on rlcnews.org.au, smithstreet.org, apc.org.au and the secession web site to get an idea of just how busy Justina’s been lately. We’re all very impressed with what she’s done to help revitalise our web sites.