More non-news on the road progress.

We got this flyer in the mail a couple of weeks ago but got another dose of annoyance so just put it away. Anyway here's a scan of it to show that in the last six months of waiting they've made no real progress.

Come on EBC, our lives are on hold and you're killing everyone on Fairford Road, just hang us or pardon us but don't keep us waiting on death row forever.

Still toiling away.

The Sunbirds are still working hard at having the nest up and ready, I think the male is doing his fair share of the work too, here he puts another bit of fluffy white stuff into the nest.

Merry Xmas all.

I did a little trip up town this morning to see how quiet it'd be but turned around when the chap ahead of me lit up to satisfy his drug addiction. Not everything was closed, one of the filling stations was open, and the video hire place will open this afternoon. Ingham must be changing as many businesses will re-open early in January.

I had a bad setting on the camera which I hadn't noticed so my pictures were a poor crop this morning but the fountain was interesting as it had red foamy water in it.

More bling.

I've just stuck another fancy thing out the front. I'll take Santa away tomorrow, it looks like he's already brought us plenty, but he may add a bit more cheer to passers by tonight.

Quiet.

I slipped up the street this morning to have some blood drained for tests, took a few piccies so I may as well post something.

Nothing much to look at here but at least it shows the fuel price.

This makes things awkward.

A sunbird has decided to make a nest on our xmas lights. Unless they're real fast breeders I won't be able to take that string of lights down on the 6th of January, at least I can still turn it off then though.

Good stuff.

We met our old friends John and Theresa for the first time on the weekend, where they're from will become screechingly obvious from looking at the lovely presents they gave us.

We tried the beers last night and gave them all the big thumbs up, so much so the XXXX we washed them down with afterwards was a disappointment. I'd fancy the Coors light which at 4% alcohol is between our light and full strength could become very popular here if promoted. It went down very easy in our climate. Molson's had more hops and the Jockey Club was a fuller maltier type again but still a cleaner less bodied tipple than the XXXX. Maybe it's time we addressed our brews.

I'll give the Screech a try soon when i'm in the mood to lose control of my speech.
Very impressed by it having a plastic bottle, it just makes sense.

End of the road.

This morning my last Grandparent died, my Dad's mother Betty who was just two months short of 100.
This is my last photo of her, taken at her nursing home in May 2008.
I never really knew her but she had a good run.

I found why Tru had a rear end clunk.

Her rear shackle bushes were quite knackered, so was I after doing the job, even though it's not difficult.

Cheapskate.

I noticed the other day that the old cheap can of 'ocean blue' spray paint I had was pretty close to Tru's 'shockwave' so I used a bit of it yesterday to touch up some stone chips on her bonnet. It may not be spot on but it's better than white undercoat.
Good enough for me anyway.
BTW I sprayed the paint into a little container and applied with a paintbrush to try to keep it tidy.

How it's done.

In case anybody's curious how you put these whizzbang alternators back together, that's why they put a little hole behind them. You push the brushes back, an allen key is very useful for that, I didn't want to dirty one of my good metric ones so used an otherwise useless imperial one for the job. At the same time you push a something thin (I used a 2mm drill bit) down the little hole and past the brushes one at a time. With the brushes held back it's a rather simple job to whack the alternator back together again.

Alternator

Today I inspected Tru's alternator to see how her brush wear was going. Not bad but they're worn past the fitting holes so i've ordered new ones.
While I had it apart the used 'low mileage' alternator that I ordered a week ago for a spare finally arrived and upon inspection had as much wear as Tru's 190,000 km one has, hardly what I'd call 'low mileage', it looks like it'd had a power steering fluid bath as well, yuck.

Blu-ray desert.

It's pert near the end of 2009, Ingham has two video hire shops (shown here) and a fair few DVD retailers yet if we want to buy or hire a blu-ray movie we either have to drive to Townsville or order online.
Even Target embarrassed themselves the other week by advertising a blu-ray movie that was never in danger of being transported here.

Right way up.

This plant in town got my interest today, In the centre there's a linking branch between the two staghorns. I dunno how it grew sideways like that, it helps to make it look like I've turned the shot sideways but I haven't.

More power for Tru.

I fitted an accessory power socket behind the driver's seat today, for a gadget dabbler like me they can be very useful.
It's always on so probably illegal in our nanny country but it's protected with an overload breaker from a junked jump starter that was fitted from new with a battery that had a cracked case. Little wonder it was useless, so at least I'm getting a bit of use from it now.

Not so pretty from the rear.

Our Xmas tree is a mess from the rear but at least it looks good from the front.
It only takes a few seconds to hang it from its clip over the window every year too.

GPS mount.

Quite a head scratcher working out how to mount the GPS in Tru.
I decided to unclip the top plate over the centre console and sit a lump of wood in its place which the GPSes are screwed to.
At least it's all of about 10 seconds work to remove them and make the car look standard again.

Finally the sun goes down,

And the lights look much fancier now.
Quite obvious from a couple of hundred metres down the road too.

December begins and...

It's time to put up some pretty do-dads.

I'll sort out the wiring a bit better later, but it should bring a bit of cheer to evening travelers.

Thoughtful.

The smokers may have been thinking of the poor rubbish bin 5 metres away from this plant on the footpath outside the pub. If they had gone to the effort of using the bin then it may have overflowed from the load.

I may have to edit this, perusing it I notice that I've used 'smokers' and 'thinking' in the same sentence, although in reality they do think....of themselves.

These brackets must rust on all cars.

Tru's radiator mount brackets were rusty, just like Derry before her.
Anyway in the usual non-pretty Jimmy fashion I tidied/uglied them up this morning.

It isn't pretty,

But this hack has got the cruise control functioning again.
The switch came out of an old cdrom drive that was in February's flood.

This I don't like.

Sorry Tru but your tyres and possibly wheels too have to go.
Definitely not my style, Jimmy will have to find an adrenaline ridden person with stock wheels and tyres who may be interested in a swap.

Just message me if by chance there's someone within a couple of hundred kilometres of Ingham who fancies some Reggie Racer type wheels.

What's this? a green engine!

Sure to make the greenies go a bit longer without a haircut and do a doubler on that green stuff they puff. Tru runs on LPG which they perceive as a green gas even though it's about the same as any other fuel, only cheaper here.
It has a rather large double tank in the rear with a 116 litre capacity that gives a very useful range, something like 900 km before having to top up.

Now I'm waiting for a call from Hank Hill to invite me over to Arlen, Texas so he can drool over it.

Jimmy has a new toy.

Grace is happy too, she doesn't have to climb as high.
Derry is gone and we hope someone else enjoys it as much as we did.
I have named her 'Tru' as she's truly a true-blue Ford.

A rare sight.

You don't often see any work done on the canefield behind us, so I took the opportunity to snap this bit of spraying the other day.

Some sort of bird.

It was hanging around our place so I took a couple of photos. Golly they're hard things to snap, always moving and keeping a big safety zone around them. You can't get close enough to see how good their colour is by eye, makes me glad good cameras are available to normal jobbers like myself now.

A fresh touch of paint.

The paint on the fence was fading so I touched up the number and the red top which I use to help me find our place.

The Army's changed.

Only two smokers and perhaps a third rolling one, with another using that curse of the last generation, a mobile (cell)phone. Not many years ago it would have been eight. It'd be nice to see this reduction in drug addicts flow through to civilian outdoor workers.

Keen eyes may notice the Aussie touch with Skippy's cousins in the background.

mmmmm Tim Tams

We know someone who may like these.

Nice roof.

I've gotta feel sorry for poor Jenny next door, when she had her roof done back in July they went to the huge expense of putting up scaffolding after one of the workers fell off. It took them nearly forever to do the job after all the fuss and must have cost her a fortune.
This job I saw today looks like being done in a non-fuss manner.

Pretty blue, I could buy a car like this if they made them without the wing at the back and had a smaller engine. It's a nice colour though and that's the important thing.

Love this cooker.

I got this cooker a while back and think I should give it a thumbs-up.
Maybe it's a new generation of cooker or whatever but it's a pressure cooker with a timer that makes for a great slow cooker that can be pretty speedy.

Perfect for corned meat, just wind the timer on a bit get back to the computer for a while and an hour or so later terrific corned meat with no need to observe anything.

Also great for oxtail and bacon hocks.

Panasonic ZR1 battery.

If you've bought one of Panasonic's new cameras that have firmware to prevent using generic batteries the D'OH! is over.
I saw this on ebay the other week and bought it as it claimed to be compatible with the recent firmware. They're right, it works on my new ZR1 which only has the new firmware.

The downside is that it's about double the price of the cheap generics that won't work but is about a third the price of genuine.

Another toy.

I got a hokey new watch in the mail today. It's an old fashioned wind-up job and the hands even glow in the dark. I dunno if Chairman Mao was ever that friendly but at least he waves to me.

Trouble with Limbo.

this is the old bedroom powerpoint which had become slightly intermittent. Normally I would just replace it with a new socket but because we're still waiting seemingly endless months to find out whether the Main Roads Dept. intend driving a bulldozer through our house or not, I just reused an old double point I had taken from another room a couple of years back that had one of the two sockets intermittent.
I just wish they would tell us their intentions instead of just flitting between business lunches and rostered days off. The people on our road are burning while they fiddle.

Fun display

This layout was in the window of Ingham Travel. At least the state of the track would leave no danger of a collision.

Let's call it Mango Mountain

Just playing with the camera in the backyard, not easy light to play with but it's fun learning how to play around.