Happy Birthday Kath!

It is Kath's birthday today. Her folks kindly offered to baby sit James, so we decided to hire a "Tinny" speed boat for 4 hours and cruised around Pittwater from Cottage Point. It was a beautiful day. We found a lovely little beach and had a gourmet picnic.

James decided to give Hungry Hungry Hippos to Kath for her birthday. He is addicted to it. I must admit, it is a pretty fun game.

3D Thermal Riding

Recently I have been playing around with OziExplorer's 3D profiling program, looking at some past flight tracks.

In September last year I had a very interesting flight that involved getting caught in a thermal. We took off in the afternoon, which was warm but not hot, from the paddock behind our house at Binalong for a short flight. As part of my practice for the Worlds, I was flying a Kavanagh EX65, which is designed to handle fast vertical speeds. We cruised (quite quickly) up to 3000 feet above the launch site and then leveled out. Then a strange thing happened...

Without putting much heat into the balloon, we found ourselves in a sudden rapid ascent and within a minute and a half we were at 5500 feet where it rounded out. The balloon handled the climb very well, it was more a surprise to find ourselves at that height. After a fast descent, we landed on the other side of the hill having only traveled 2km.

Australia Day

James (now asleep) and I have just returned from our annual trip to Parramatta Park for the Australia Day ballooning. We haven't flown there for a few years, but we are making it an annual tradition to let Kath sleep in and we go and crew for Sean.

Useless Dog

A nice film about a useless sheep dog.

An age to remember

James turned 4 on Friday! Wow he is growing up fast.

Four has always been a significant age to me because most of my earliest memories are from when I was 4. I think it is probably because a lot of memorable events happened to me during that age, like starting school, starting ballooning and my grandfather dying. I probably remember events earlier than 4, but these milestones give time relevance to memories. We had a pretty full on year last year (Japan, America and moving house), so I wonder if James will remember these things.

One thing that has made me very happy is that James (thanks to some nice birthday presents) has discovered the joys of Lego. He is not ready to start building things, but he really enjoys playing with it.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

We had a quiet night at home last night for New Years Eve. We did however discover that the view of the Sydney fireworks from our car port is fantastic. Sydney has 6 barges of coordinated fireworks situated in different spots on the harbour. From the carport we can see 5 of them. So even though we are a long way away, we still get a great perspective. So much so, for both the 9pm and the midnight fireworks, we had strangers (who were looking for a good vantage point) hanging out in our carport as well.

We also watched Kenny last night. Geez that is a funny film.