A spruced up Tru.

Tru has had a saggy bonnet, which had become very noticeable in the cold during her recent trip south.

Anyway to pick her up Jimmy treated her to a new set of bonnet struts, so now her bonnet is happy to spring right up again.

More orchids.

Our orchid plant has fully bloomed now, and it still looks much better on camera than in real life.

No matter after looking at my last batch of photos, I think my repair job went very well.

I hope I didn't scare that little spider on the right too much, like many of my shots I never saw it until checking the result.

Voting time.

We had a federal election on Saturday and as usual we used it as an excuse for a drive somewhere, this time we chose Abergowrie where as per usual the school is where the polling booth is.

It's a very fancy school for 20 odd students but I sense they only use the little building where we voted.

One pic shows people who are heading to vote after we had finished, we were lucky enough to have the place to ourselves, that adds to the charm of voting late and in smaller places.

The other pics shows a very impressive building for so few students, hopefully we can get some more people in the area again, maybe if they had a decent broadband internet connection available that would help ease the drain of people to the big cities.

Our electorate is Kennedy and because we have an independent member it appears in this cliffhanger election to have gone from forgotten to vital to whomsoever may want to form government.

Interesting for a couple of reasons.

Checking on our State budget finds that they've finally decided to do something to give the residents west of Log creek safe walking access into town, as well as for them to get to the sports fields opposite us.

The kick in the tail is the cost, someone has pencilled in an extra zero at the rear of every project they've announced. Surely you'd think they'd have someone auditing the cost of these scams.

Queensland is broke and I think I now know why. The budget website is here http://www.budget.qld.gov.au/ so you can find some rubbery figures for yourself but I am staggered by the Log creek pedestrian bridge priced at $120,000, and $80,000 bus shelters

Post repair.

The lens seems clear enough and the ZR-1 still seems to focus.

Not impressed with the reliance on a USA spell checker though.

Be gone stubborn spot.

The clever amongst you would have guessed what was causing the dark spot on the photos from my recent trip. There was a speck of dust on the sensor, hardly what you'd expect on a fixed lens camera but I was surprised that gaining access to it wasn't too difficult, however my faith is a bit rattled right now.

You buy a fixed lens camera to avoid issues like this, now I've just struck out one of the reasons for not buying a changeable lens camera.

The little ZR-1 Panasonic is an excellent camera to travel with and worth the effort to patch it up, I even used it almost exclusively on my trip, even when the FZ-28 would have seemed the better option to use much of the time. The ZR-1 is just a lovely little unit.

Maybe it's too late?

At least the pain stage has gone for the black stump and hollow ruin that were once teeth.

I got a letter from the health service asking if I still wanted to remain on their waiting list for dental care. I do actually but I wonder how many years it takes to get a standard non-emergency service, it's been seven now.

BTW superglue is a wonderful tool for getting past the agony stage of tooth decay.