Sunday, April 28, 2013

Risksmart, where the palms come pre-greased...

As I said in my previous post, they're subdividing the unit block next to the old house for some redevelopment. This is the size of the yard, which stretches out to the back of the cubby house they're taking down in the picture
 and this is the original house
Want to take a guess about how many people the greedheads are going to squeeze into that space? Three town houses and affiliated parking, in other words 6 more people (and 6 more cars) will be slotted into this gap
They're also moving the Queenslander forward to give a bit more space, so instead of the house sitting back in the centre of its own leafy garden it will look something like this
Subdivision and redevelopment is getting more common and the original Queenslander is shoved to one side, accompanied by a concrete corridor which leads to the townhouse behind. Really fits in with the character of the suburb hey?
The developers submitted the justification for their application and quite openly admitted that they weren't meeting council regulations for low-medium residential development because -
  • The shared open space wasn't adequate
  • The rear boundary was 2m too close to the back fence (4m instead of 6m)
  • The development exceeded maximum height guidelines
  • The roof design didn't meet required standards
  • One of the town houses only had 60% of the minimum required ground floor private open space (21.6 sqm instead of 35 sqm)
There was also a lot of community concern, not just because of the lack of privacy that having three new houses at the back of the property able to peer into neighbouring residents bedrooms would bring. The road that the house sits on is already very busy and is full of schoolkids on a weekday morning - we've seen one accident already - and adding a new and regularly used driveway literally 6m from a roundabout is going to add to the chaos. I give it a month before a resident is back-ended slowing down to pull into the driveway when the guy behind thinks he's turning at the roundabout. 

Obviously once the plans were posted there were a few protests, both from local residents and from the local councillor. So you'd think that the development would at least get a close look from the local council team tasked with monitoring local development. But no - the developer submitted their response to the objections with vague arguments like justifying the lack of open space because 'the planned development is adjacent to a park', and five days later approval was given. Five days. With no audit trail & no reasons as to why the development regulations were allowed to be flouted. 

Turns out the development team were 'Risksmart accredited'. Risksmart is a Brisbane City Council scheme which is designed to speed up the granting of 'low risk developments that have little impact on the neighbourhood and environment and which comply with the requirements of the City Plan'. Given that this development is trashing the neighbourhood, endangering kids on their way to school, blatantly ignoring the City Plan and has been called 'a terrible solution' by the local councillor then it makes you wonder why the development went through so quickly.

I guess that the Risksmart scheme allows you to register your brown paper bags early.
 

Goodbye old friend

We lost a good friend the other week. A huge Camphor Laurel tree in the adjacent garden to our old unit used to butt up against our block and keep us company. It gave us shade for the bedroom in the morning, privacy from the neighbours, some sound insulation from the road and we used to lie in bed in the mornings listening to the sound of the wind rustling its leaves. It was also the home of numerous birds & animals




 
Sadly the tree is no more, chopped down just after we left to allow for a redevelopment of the adjacent property
Goodbye old friend, and thank you for your company over the last 8 years.

Welcome to your new home brew

Our new place has a garden, which means that I don't have to leave everything in the kitchen with a slightly sticky sugary coating and the whole house smelling of hops afterwards. I bought a 3 ring gas burner so I could do the boil outside, but you really need to keep an eye on it to stop it overboiling. And that vigilence isn't easy...
 

Now with added music links

It sounds like those people browsing this site with tablets, in particular those 'lucky' enough to be using I-pads, are having problems viewing the tunes. So I've just added direct links to the last 4 or 5 music posts, and will add them  as a matter of course from now on. So if you've not been able to view the songs, have a flick back through and catch up!  

Friday, April 26, 2013

Waltzing Matilda

In honour of Anzac day yesterday - The Pogues, 'And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda'

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPFjToKuZQM

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Views of Sydney

For this visit to Sydney we somehow scored a penthouse apartment on the 13th floor - fantastic views over the suburbs and in the distance Sydney CBD and the Harbour Bridge, although you can't really see that in this pic because of the strong sunshine. There's also lots of birdlife over the river - micky birds, flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos, magpies and small swift / swallow things like my mate perched on the top right of the photo checking me out. This picture doesn't do it justice, it's a beautiful 180 degree view
 The mooring for the Parramatta 'River cat' is next door and must be a nice way to commute to work, even if it is just a bus that floats...although at low tide there's apparently a section that actually needs a bus to get you through...
Unfortunately I had to leave the bedroom and go to work, no more than 20km away but a journey which took more than an hour each way.
I could have ridden faster, and I'm a slow fat bugger. Slower & fatter every week I spend down here too....

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Bailing out the bed

It's official and you read it here first - moving sucks. We may have shifted the major bits of furniture over last weekend but there was still a lot of smaller stuff to move, plus of course cleaning up the original rental so that it could be handed back with hopefully no loss of bond.

We had a waterbed at the old place (yeahhhh baby) and that needed to be drained. This entailed sticking a hosepipe in each of the four bladders in turn and siphoning it out to the drain downstairs. There's a fair amount of hydrostatic head once it's been sucked down two stories...
 There's always leakage as well, which meant we needed to bail out the bed at regular intervals
It's almost done now - the old place has been fully cleaned and everything has been shifted. We just need the carpets to be cleaned and to give the garage a final sweep. But it's amazing how hard cleaning down the walls on even a two bedroom flat is.

Unfortunately rest is not an option for a bit - I fly down to Sydney tomorrow for three days, then the whole of the next week, then another three days. 11 days out of the next 15 working days in all, which is a bit rubbish.

Next month I may have some time to relax, make beer, ride bikes and enjoy our new place. Here's hoping.....

Friday, April 19, 2013

It's your choice Bro'

Joke courtesy of Pete -

A father watched his young daughter playing in the garden.

He smiled as he reflected on how sweet and pure his little girl was.

Tears formed in his eyes as he thought about her seeing the wonders of nature through such innocent eyes.

Suddenly she just stopped and stared at the ground.

He went over to her to see what work of God had captured her attention. He noticed she was looking at two spiders mating.

'Daddy, what are those two spiders doing?' she asked.

'They're mating,' her father replied.

'What do you call the spider on top?' she asked.

A Daddy Longlegs,' her father answered.

'So, the other one is a Mommy Longlegs?' the little girl asked.

As his heart soared with the joy of such a cute and innocent question.

He replied, 'No dear. Both of them are Daddy Longlegs.'

'The little girl, looking a little puzzled, thought for a moment, then lifted her foot and stomped them flat.
'Well", she said, "that may be OK in New Zealand, but we're not having any of that shit in Australia."

Congratulations to New Zealand for legalising same sex marriage, let's hope the powers that be take a step forward and do the same for Australia. I can't understand how in the 21st Century anyone can think that they have the right to interfere in other peoples lives and to prevent two consenting adults from choosing to marry.

What's even more worrying is that people still vote for the idiots.....

The Streets

We had a Mean Streets ride last night, and I had a little bit further to go now we've moved. Not bad for a pub crawl...


I would have put this on Strava but there's nowhere to record the beers.

Anyway, some music for the regulars -

 
 
 
 

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Tightly packed

Turns out you can fit 5 complete bikes in a Land Rover -


They were so tightly packed that there wasn't a single rattle for the entire journey. Either that or the bikes were quietly wondering about their new home.....

Monday, April 15, 2013

Moving in spurts

We finally moved over the weekend, and although we transferred a few carloads ourselves we hired removalists to help with the big & heavy items - I am far too old to be carrying fridges or sofas down two flights of stairs.

Unfortunately the weather was against us and it was a pretty wet & miserable day with continuous heavy drizzle
The removalists turned up two hours late as well, although once they pulled in we could tell that we'd hired a reputable company.
The two guys manning the van turned out to be completely professional, hard working and very careful of both our stuff and the walls but I'm not sure what our new neighbours thought. Liz also had a chat with one of our old neighbours and her mid 80's mother with the side of the van in plain view behind her, which was apparently a little uncomfortable.  

Anyway, we made it in the end and now we're settling in. More shots of the house to come in the coming week or so, but this is the view looking out from the front of the house.
I'm writing this in the 'study' which looks the same way whilst listening to the crickets and a frog that seems to have made a home in the grass at the front of the house. It'll take some getting used to and it will definitely have its quirks, but this is now home....  

Politics in the pop charts

Turns out that I'm not alone in picking out 'Ding Dong the Witch is dead' as a fitting memorial to Thatcher. After some vigorous social media-ing it made number two in the UK pop charts this weekend. The pro-Thatcher movement kicked off a retaliatory campaign to try to get 'I'm in love with Margaret Thatcher' by punk band The Notsensibles to chart, but that only made no 35 and was apparently written as satire anyway. So that's a double fail for the Tories. Love your work old chaps.

Sadly the BBC seemed to be in the grip of paralysis about what to do during the 'Top 40 countdown' so only played 7 seconds of 'Ding Dong'. Not banned, but not played in full. So in some ways it joins other banned classics -

 Relax (Frankie Goes To Hollywood)
 
Urban Guerilla (the mighty Hawks)
 
Ebeneezer Goode (the Shaman)
 
and of course God Save The Queen (Sex Pistols)
 
Ironically, John Lydon (aka Jonny Rotten) considers the recent celebrations to be 'loathsome' . I think he's just offended that there are people out there protesting and he's not making anything out of it. Mrs T would be proud of what he's become.....

Friday, April 12, 2013

Protest songs

There's been a suggestion to post up some Thatcher-era protest songs to honour this auspicious week. It'd be hard to compile a comprehensive list. but here's some classics that I can think of off the bat...
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
and probably the most emotional for me, as at the time I was a  gung-ho 12 yr old cheering for every Argentinian death

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Ding dong

Terrible news from the UK today....


Edit - seems to have problems with mobile devices, so here's the link instead
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rHJoj9IqeKg

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Literally exhausted

Our new rental application was approved during the week so we've been preparing for the move over this weekend. Liz has done a great job during the week tidying up the incidental bits & pieces around the house and has also hit the garage in a major way. Today it was my turn to get stuck in and I tackled our bookshelves. We both love books so between us we have a reasonable collection, but after boxing then all up and carrying them downstairs I was starting to rethink our bibliographic options.

Maybe an eBook reader is a better option, I have one when I travel for work - a Sony PRS-T2 which is light, non-proprietal (unlike the Amazon / Kindle alternatives) and it currently has just over 700 books on it. Which is about the same as the number of books in these boxes. You can see the reader on the bottom left of the picture - which would you prefer to move?
The device is only around 1/3 full so will hold over 2000 books in all, and that's without adding additional memory cards.I could basically hold a room full of books on a single device the size of a small paperback, but sadly it's just not the same. There's something about paper books that is special, and once we've finished the move then we're looking forward to setting up a 'reading room' lined with bookshelves and set up with some comfy chairs.

Although ask me again after the move.....

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Unicycle

Another wee, another Sydney trip. Back in Paramatta for a couple of days - up at 5am yesterday, flew down, worked 'til 5, found my hotel, ate, worked 'til 9.30pm. Slept badly as I was next to a main road, up at 6.30am, spend the day with the client, now I'm at the airport waiting to fly back and (theoretically) arrive back in Brisbane at 7.30pm, but it's almost always delayed. V tired!

I did get to try another Paramatta Indian takeaway, this time I had Pani Puri, which is a puffy deep-fried hollow dough ball that you fill with spicy potato and a tart tamarind sauce
Followed by a chicken Vindaloo that I was warned was 'very hot', but which was more sharp than spiced. And not at all greasy.
To wash it down I had a 'Haywards 5000' lager, with a strength that 'was guaranteed not to exceed 8%'

I should have gone for a run instead, but such is life!

Anyway, just a quickie this week...can't embed this for some reason, so just follow the link and enjoy...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXCnAhr9baM