As Castaneda's spiritual guide said, in some situations your best response is "controlled laughter"!

Had a call from the Hawaiian rellies: no chance of them ever returning to Oz - too easy, too blissful the life on this big island. Seeking challenges, #1 son hopes for a PhD offer from a mainland US uni, failing that it's back to big bikkies in SEA. Or off to Ireland, to sing...

Saw the little water dragon again, on a steel wicker chair outside my office - s/he must be happy that the dangerous presence of the two feline hunters has passed. Bianca takes this as a signal to renew our efforts to place 'the land' under a conservation agreement with the National Parks and Wildlife Service...

During the call from Honolulu, I mentioned to #1 son that we might sell the place cheaply to him for the benefit of grandchildren Rocco and Khalista (?) - at least it would stay in the family. We could then slope off on our grand tour without regrets, living out of the back of the Kombi, as we did when the kids were toddlers and we took them on three-month tours of southern Spain or northern Italy every couple of years... But the sanctuary must be protected before we go, for the sake of Turca the brush turkey hen, Blackie the red-bellied black snake, the flocks of red-tailed black cockatoos that nibble on the casuarinas, the water dragons, several species of threatened frogs, honey eaters and parrots of all kinds that use our sanctuary now.

You may note a certain ennui in these remarks, possibly fuelled by the second bottle of Killawarra bubbly being somewhat uncouth - I had thought about putting on ice a magnum of Deutz but thought better of it: after all, for us two oldies one 750 mL bottle of sparklers should do the trick for Christmas Eve. Instead, we finished it off in good spirits upon my return from the moving excercise, so I put a second bottle in the fridge to go with our potato salad and Continental franks dinner...

And another thing: I broke open my prezzie early (between two removalist trips) and installed the multi-
format DVD rewriter in my video editing machine Merval (you'll note, eventually, that all my networked computers have names from Jacques le Fataliste) in no time, without hassles - except for the tedious reboots necessitated by each bit of accompanying software. What amazed me, apart from the speed and ease of installation, is that you can get a unit of this capability (LG GSA-4040B) shipped from Korea, distributed in Australia and sold to you, retail, for a mere $231. When I imported my first CD-ROM drive (Panasonic) from the U.S. some 10 years ago it cost me about $800 plus shipping, for a 2X CD reader. The installation of this SCSI unit was far from trivial, and at one stage I e-mailed the U.S. h.q. for help seeing that a smell of burnt acrylic issued from the drive. They told me to return it A.S.A.P. for replacement - happily, I was able to thell them that the same smell had originated from a bug cought in my mosquito net one night: problem solved... Five years ago, I bought a Ricoh CD ReWriter, still SCSI, for around $500... Now this little LG beauty for half the price, and it does DVD RAMs, as well. Christmas come early for this aging technophile!

Have a good one!