Sydney Christmas 1999 to New Year 2000

I departed Santa Rosa on December 24th, to arrive in Sydney on December 26th, having completely missed Christmas Day. Kay had gone 10 days earlier. This was our first trip back to "The Old Country".

Denis picked me up at the airport, as this was the first day Meri had been willing to sleep in, so Kay was allowed to have the extra sleep.
The first event was Meri's Birthday, complete with Cake (celebrated two days late, so that I could be there). I got the idea that she did not really know what was going on, but she understands the opening of presents, even if the wrapping still competes with the contents in terms of pleasure potential.

Meri, with a birthday on 24 December, may be in for a hard time from some people. This card from Ian and Vicki suggests that it is not an unheardof phenomenon.
Nevertheless she seems to have done very well in the loot department, given the amount of stuff we carried over, and the fact that we carried more back, of which not all that much was socks. She got showered in Leura, and in Sydney, on several separate celebrations.

Being a very bah-humbug sort of person I was not distressed at missing the central Ramsbottom Christmas festivities. Here is a picture, which is about as close as I like to get to such events.

I must not be alone in this: The air tickets were quite outrageously priced, the premium presumably being worth it for the harried businessman to be spared the sticky parts of Christmas.

The above notwithstanding, it was nice to meet Jane's partner Chris, the man to whom we send the largest shoes imaginable (was that size 15?). And I thought Bigfoot was an American tale.

That very afternoon we absconded to Maison Mills. Eric's new house is nothing short of spectacular. The view above is taken from Mad Warwick's speedboat (of which more shortly), looking up from the Lane Cove River towards the house. The prominent establishment at centre is it. It has a commanding river view, and in the other direction a view of the Harbour bridge.

Our host and his new partner Jane, and new cat Bonaparte, greeted us. It was so good to see Eric after so long! This picture says a lot about the new Mills lifestyle, from the cat to the decor to the wineglass, even your shirt, Eric, seamlessly expressed the New Mills Way.
Meri at once discovered that she and Boney communicated on the same level.

Warwick turned up soon after... well soonish, he got trapped for two days in Canberra through the tactical blunder of having travelled there in someone else's car. (Who of us has not done this sometime?) Sorry to say it Warwick, but you should have known better, especially knowing your relatives.

Griping aside, I had not seen Warwick for two years, and it was much too long my friend, and too little time was available to compensate us for that absence!

Anyway, Warwick had his new toy, a (hand built) bowrider sporting a 4.3 litre marine V6 with power everything.
Witness at left Kay and Meri (who got used to it after a few minutes, she's a speed demon that little girl) braving the 50 m.p.h. wind created as we went wake-jumping.

The photo at right was taken after Meri got used to the idea, and stopped for a "high-speed-feed".

I wish I could say I had got used to it. Taking photos from the bow, I attempted to swivel 180 degrees to catch Warwick in his manic pilot mode, and judging wrongly from the lack of white caps that I had a few seconds without the boat flying and crashing down, managed to get thrown up and smashed down with injurious vigour.

I spent five hours waiting at RNS for two five minute consultations and a self-powered visit to radiology. I would not have minded, but the wait was quoted as two hours; indeed it was still being quoted at two hours as I was leaving, although the waiting room had become quite busy as the evening wore on, and I pointed this fact out to the nursey-thing just as she was briefing the next poor sucker, much to her chagrin.
Needless to say this does NOT happen here in Santa Rosa, no sir. Here you either get service pretty chop chop, or if uninsured they have the courtesy to explain the best way to bleed to death with a minimum of fuss.

Herewith the X-ray: I'm damned if I can see what he was looking at, but the doctor quickly confirmed that I have a "crushed T-12 vertebra": The bad news is that this is like a broken rib but worse; the good news is that it does fix itself.

Enforced light duties suited Kay and Meri.

I found time to visit MU and spend some time with Tony. We put together the hardware for an experiment. You see here the stack of gear for measuring vacuum tubes... the main parts had been purchased before I left Australia, but there was not the time to finish the job, what with working at RFT and getting ready to leave for California.

Our plan is to do this, partly as a labour of love, but more as an experiment in distance working. Telecommuting is real here in California. One colleague's wife who lives here but works in San Francisco telecommutes a couple of days a week; a lady who works with another colleague, whose cube is next to hers, is as I type this moving house from Germany to Spain. She appears for a week every now and then - I was introduced as part of my current project just before the visit to Sydney - but her primary residence was then in Germany, and is now in Spain. That is real flexibility. We have another engineer who prefers to work out of a small town in the wilds of Wyoming.

This is all feasible, I hear you say, if you are a programmer, but what about the kind of engineer who is very hands-on, hardware-oriented? Well, instrumentation is currently undergoing a revolution, so that control and hardware are connected only by a network. This might as well be the internet, although for me, day-to-day, it is about 20 feet from my cube to my lab. This tube-characterization experiment will be carried out with control, software and data reduction in Vallejo Street, but with the (high voltage!) equipment and devices in Room 250 at Macquarie University.

We will let you know if it works.

New Year's Eve saw us alternately watching fireworks and returning to Maison Mills for top-ups of company and alcohol. We all got pretty topped up.

Meri came with us to Greenwich Point to see the 9PM fireworks. She was fascinated (much fascinates her), but actually quite liked the noise, which strongly resembled artillery fire in the distance.

Here you see Kay carrying her in the backpack, champagne glass in the other.

Later on, Kay's back provided support of another kind.

New Year's Day brought some degree of relaxation. Here you get a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge behind Kay and Jane in Eric's guest suite kitchenette. (I assume Kay is describing the size of Warwick's bits after his 3AM skinny dip in the icy-cold pool the previous night.)
I needed help getting out of bed, by this stage, and the last two days had not involved either any "messing about in boats", to use the phrase from Wind in the Willows, or much photography for that matter.

Warwick had done us proud the previous evening, with 8 bottles of vintage Moet. (We pretty much agreed that the "Dry Imperial" was the best, though by far not the most expensive, of the bottles. The Dom was just not in the running for value.)

The bottles had all been opened ceremoniously with, well not a rapier but a decent-sized chef's knife. As the evening wore on, Warwick became less precise with his blows, as the videotape testifies. You may observe that the necks of the bottles depicted here are not cleanly severed; this was partly a consequence of Moet's careless shaping of the rim that the cage grasps, but more a consequence of the reduction of Warwick's clean blows to a kind of intoxicated hacking.

The body visible on the balcony had retired there during the night to escape Warwick's snoring.

The above photograph was designed, set up and taken while Warwick slept. In fact, this will probably be the first time he sees it.

The day after we moved to Andrew and Deborah's place, just in time for me to upload the now-full camera's memory to California before the party to celebrate our visit started.

We ate a lot of convivial lunches in A&D's courtyard in the coming week.

Meri was delighted by the Koi Pond, known also as a "Water Feature". She was found variously fishing for duckweed with a stick, signing wildly (she has a sign for fish, and is keen to tell you what she sees, like most kids, even though she can't talk yet), grabbing at flotsam, or just generally having fun.

Jan and Amelia stayed a couple of nights as well. Meri loved this.

So did Clayton, who knows a dog-sucker like Amelia when he finds one.

Amelia and Kay and Meri and I went into town. We caught a train to Central (to show the real thing to Meri), visited Paddy's Market, caught the monorail from Darling Harbour to DJ's, then rested in Hyde Park.

Some of my earliest memories of Sydney involve the Archibald Fountain in Hyde Park.

Here I am with my two girls in front of that very fountain.

We had a very pleasant time on the grass, feeding Meri her lunch, making gaa-gaa faces in the escalator mirrors, embarking on brief excursions around the park and to the shops in search of Computer Socks and Coconut Tea.

We played cathedral before breakfast, and we ate out in Newtown.

We visited Ian and Vicki in their wonderful studio, and we ate out in Newtown. (Here is Shaelene at The Peasant's Feast).

We visited parks (of which facility SR is a bit sadly lacking), and we did Yum Cha (Dim Sum). Meri is getting good with the chop stick.

I miss times with you guys. I know Kay does too. Pac Bell knows Kay does, too. Meri needs more people like Bryn with whom to interact.

Meri gave Kay a hard time for the first couple of weeks in Oz. I guess she was in a strange place, and she was being passed from person to person, it must have been wearing on a little person. However, I saw a dramatic effect about a week before we left... she suddenly became more confident, as if she felt that she was with friends. She would let Vicki carry her and go off walking; she would let Amelia carry her about, even when Kay was in sight.

This view down Newman lane as we took our leave of Vicki and Ian manages a lot of emotion for me.

A few days before, we had had a marvellous afternoon in Stanmore Park.
It was there that I really noticed how well Meri had started to cope; she was quite happy for Vicki to wonder off quite a distance into the bandstand with her.

We found time for another nostalgic activity...

Thank you, Stephen, for organising a band practice. It did my soul a great deal of good.

I think it made me feel old, what with my back, Andrew's arm, and the difficulty Dave finds for such things these days, but then half the great musicians of the 1970s are probably feeling a lot older.

Of course, we also attended Tony and Gloria's wedding. It was a quiet but a very beautiful affair.

Below-left you see the happy couple getting a bit tired of the posing business, and to the right, us on our way there.

Deb had bought Andrew a model rocket with an SR71 bodyshape, and he waited for our visit to launch it (thank you!). Kay timed this shot just right to capture it at lift-off. It made a ferocious whooshing sound on launch, which Meri did not like at all.

The first flight was less than successful, but hey, I bet Werner did not get it right first time. The nose cone was so augered in that it took significant force to extract it from the ground. It is a testimony to Andrew's skillful construction of what was after all only a few bits of glue and cardboard and plastic, that it survived. Subsequent flights were actually very successful indeed.

We visited Donna in her new apartment, which is our old apartment. It was so good to see you settled in and looking happy, Donna! We wandered into Newt and had a superb Indian meal---perhaps the best outside England---for about $15 each including beer. The location has its advantages.

Meri had a kip in the loungeroom. The colours on the walls are a passing failed attempt at interior decoration to which Donna will soon be turning her paintbrush, we are assured.

Meri was reasonably good on the flight back. She has some advantages, like being able to walk along the tray tables, and regarding a chair as a spacious expanse. Nevertheless, she would (or could) not sleep except on Kay, so Kay had an awful flight. (When you read this, Meri, in several decades time, take note of what your Mum did for you!)

I should conclude with something pithy, but it is risky to choose one thought from the cacophony. I think I will leave serious reflections for Soapboxes to come.