Friday, October 29, 2010

 

Favourite Sydney Spots

Two of my favouritest places in Sydney are these two. The top one is of course the fabulous Coathanger, the harbour bridge. I have walked across it, driven across it in a car, been across it in trains, cruised under it in boats, and flown over it in aeroplanes. It always looks great, specially at night when it is all lit up. It makes a great base for fireworks as well and someday I will nag the Oldies into taking me down for the big New Year's display.The bottom one is Fort Denison, built in 1857 to protect the central harbour. There are cannons in the round tower and a lighthouse on top of it. You can get to the fort by ferry, take a tour of the fort, and even have lunch out there if you wish. There are no soldiers there now, just tour guides and National Park rangers. Well worth a visit if you have a spare couple of hours when you are in Sydney.

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Bowning's Beaut Cafe

This might look like a run-down old bush cabin, but in fact it is one of the nicest cafes that we have found on our travels around the Canberra area. It is at Bowning, a little village north of Canberra. It is also the place where I met the horses you can see three posts down; they were waiting hopefully by the back fence. The cafe has been built to look just like the old slab huts that the pioneers built. Dad says that his grandparents lived in a house just like this 60 years ago at Southgate in northern New South Wales. The walls are big slabs of timber and the gaps between the slabs are filled by plaster and small gravel. The inside walls are lined with ancient newspapers and most customers spend their time reading the walls while waiting for their order to come. If you are passing through Bowning, or near it on the Hume highway, roll on in for a snack. Actually, that's the name of the cafe, the "Rollonin".

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Tuesday, October 26, 2010

 

I'm 8!!!

Last week I turned 8 years old. That's not bad going for a small bear. Actually, Mum says that it's a miracle that I have survived so long, given some of the mischief that I get into. We had a special birthday party on Sunday. My Oldies, Aunty Enid and Unka Barry and their small bear Rufus, took me out for lunch on the "Southern Cross" boat that cruises Canberra's Lake Burley Griffin. As you know, I have been on lots of boats and know how the controls work, so I showed Rufus how to steer the boat away from the dock. Then we settled down at our table near the window for lunch and great views of the city. Of course there were presents. I scored my very own garden gnome, a cute birthday micro-bear, shampoo to prevent hair loss, and a pile of choccies (that's chocolates in Australian). The only thing that I couldn't understand was that the crew and the rest of the passengers thought it a bit strange to see four Oldies celebrating a small bear's birthday. Sometimes I wonder about people.

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Monday, October 18, 2010

 

More DaVinci Magic

It seems like there is not much in the engineering line that Leonardo DaVinci didn't think of first. Here's another couple of things. The left model is of a ratchet gear to make it easier to lift weights. Just about every windlass and winch since then has used this system. Wind the handle around, the weight goes up.When you let the handle go a stopper slips into the cog teeth and stops the handle whizzing backwards and tossing the small bear off the table.
The gadget on the right is a model of probably the first extension ladder. The design is for a ladder that can extend its length, be raised and lowered, and mounted on a turntable so that it can reach in all directions. It also uses a ratchet gear to stop the moving bit of the ladder falling back when the winding handle is let go. You can see the modern version of this sort of ladder on some of the big fire trucks. Modern versions use hydraulics to do the lifting and extending, and guess who designed the first hydraulic machines? My cobber Leonardo, who I have now included in my list of heroes.

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Un-Hungry Horses

Here's two horses that I met on our trip out to Burrinjuck Dam. We stopped for a coffee break at a little town called Bowning, and in the yard behind the cafe these guys were waiting. Now you might think that the little one is the foal of the big one, but that's not so. In fact both of them are full-grown horses. The big one is a Clydesdale draught horse. Back in the days before tractors, draught horses did all of the heavy hauling on farms. In cities they hauled goods wagons. These days they mostly just laze around. Actually, this one is standing by the fence hoping that somebody will feed him left-over bread. The little guy is a Shetland pony. He is great friends with the big one and follows him wherever he goes. No use for the little one to stand around hoping for a handout. You can see that he has a muzzle on him. It is there to stop him eating, except at meal times. With all the rain we have had, the paddocks are full of nice fresh grass and he has eaten so much of it that he has bloating problems so has to be muzzled until his tummy is back to normal size. Maybe a muzzle would work on Dad.

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Tuesday, October 12, 2010

 

My Phantastic iPad

I have a fantastic new techno-toy. Mum thinks it is hers, just because she bought it with her tax refund, but I know better. It is an iPad. iPads are great things. They can hold movies, music and games and you can do your email and Facebook stuff on them as well. I am the family expert on the iPad. Here are a couple of pictures of me in action. In the top one I am teaching Dad to play solitaire. He is not very good at it yet and can't finish a game of any of the dozens of types without help from me. In the bottom one I am showing the Oldies a really cool thing that I discovered on our way to Sydney in the train. If you run Google Earth and have "locate me" active, then you can see exactly where you are on the Google image as little blue dot that moves. In this case it was, naturally, moving along the image of the railway line and it even showed where we were when we were in tunnels. This is great fun because you can find out what all of the things you can see out the window are, and can see what interesting things are coming up ahead of you. No doubt about it, iPads are great fun and Mum will always be wondering why the battery is so low when she gets home from work.

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Another Concert

We did another quick train trip to Sydney last weekend to go to a very special concert, one that Mum has been waiting for for years and years. It was by a lady called Petula Clark. Mum has been playing her songs for longer than I can remember but has always missed seeing her on her concert tours of Australia. The last time round Petula even came to Canberra, but the concert was on the same day that the Oldies were witnesses at special friends' wedding so we missed that chance to see her. This time there was going to be no possibility of missing. As soon as the concert schedule was out Mum had us booked into the concert, the accommodation in Sydney, and the train. So what was it like? Well, there was a possibility that it might have been a bit disappointing. After all, Petula is now well over 70 years old and very few singers are still good when they are so ancient. No problem, she is still superb, even Dad thoroughly enjoyed the concert. An added bonus was the venue. The concert was in the State Theatre. If you have never seen this place, then go take a look at it. The architecture inside is totally amazing. And guess what? It turns out that Petula is coming to Canberra this time as an extension to her original tour. By the time Mum found out that Pet was still great all of the tickets for Canberra had been sold, but that doesn't matter because there is no way that the venue in Canberra can match the magnificence of the State Theatre.
The pictures are a bit dark and fuzzy because they were taken on Mum's (my) iPhone. You can't take cameras into the State.

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Wednesday, October 06, 2010

 

Tanked

Here's another one of the great models of Leonardo Da Vinci's machines in the exhibition at Floriade. This is his version of a tank. Imagine this thing creeping towards your castle or your mob of soldiers. Lots of soldiers inside the tank pushing it along, lots of cannons aiming in all directions, and the whole thing protected from arrows and muskets by layers of sloping wood and leather panels. Of course the section left open on the model would be covered in the real thing. The commander rode on a platform at the top where he could see out and tell the guys which way to push and what cannons to fire. The idea is not so different from modern tanks. No doubt about it, Leonardo was way ahead of his time. You may have noticed that the model is just the right size for a small bear. Now, if I can get Dad interested we could make one of these, put radio control in it and scare the dickens out of stray cats.

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Our Dam Weekend

Last weekend was a long weekend. The weather was not so good, cloudy and showers so obviously the choices were stay in bed or drive somewhere interesting. No choice really, so we made a dam good weekend of it. That is, we went and checked some dams. Now for years the dams in this part of Australia have been getting emptier and emptier. The rain just hasn't been falling. They say it's because of somebody called El Nino. But now things have changed and we are getting skads of rain. The dams are filling up again and the dry old country is looking green. So green that some cows and horses are getting into trouble by eating too much fresh green grass. These are two of the dams we visited. The top one is Burrinjuck Dam, about two hours drive out of Canberra. It was built in 1928 to supply water to the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, one of Australia's most important farming areas. The good news is that it is totally full. The drive to the dam gets a bit hairy near the end. The road is narrow and winding and has some steep drops off the edge in places. You can't get any closer to the dam wall than the spot we were at, so you can't see the narrow valley that the dam is built across (of course you can always Google Earth it). All you can see is the control building on the top of the dam wall. The Oldies said "dam" about that. The bottom dam, Googong Dam, is the important one for Canberra because it is where most of the water for Canberra and Queanbeyan is taken from. There are other dams in the Canberra supply system. One of them is being extended right now and I will get pictures of the work soon. Googong was nearly dry last year but now it is around 75% full again. You could walk right across the dam wall the last time we were there, but now there is a lot of construction going on at the spillway on the far side and the dam is fenced off. The Oldies said "dam" about that too.

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