Mark Thomson

Haven't had the time to update in a while. Lots of things have been conspiring to keep me busy: wife was away for 3 weeks in PNG with youngest (usual adventures with earthquakes, tsunami warnings, and giant pigs), infighting amongst bosses at the office, daughter starting at new school, frantic drawing of the next issue of Rally Mark, continued painting of 40k armies so we can get some games going, and of course, little Olive joined the clan.

Things are starting to settle down now, although no less busy. Still frantic at work, although thanks to a change in internal structure, improvements are occuring, and things are looking up. The weather's been all over the place lately, so we're trying to keep up work on the property when we can. Went out the other day and found the grass was up 1-1.5 metre's high, so we've been working to cut that down and get it under control again. The house should start construction fairly soon, with backing from the bank, and just a few little points to sign-off on now.

Bit stressed out yesterday. Apparently there'd been an earthquake centred on PNG yesterday morning - 6.7 on the Richter scale, with a 6.1 aftershock. Our friend's in NZ rang to let me know, because as usual if it ain't Australian, you don't hear about it here. (To be fair though, abc.net.au did have something in their foreign news later in the day). Then alerts have gone out, and they're evacuating people from some of the islands, because of tsunami potential. So this sends me into a panic, because I don't really want half my family wiped out in a tsunami. Of course, when I finally manage to get hold of Rob, she's wondering what all the fuss is about, because they haven't heard anything, and didn't really notice the earthquake. Typical! Everytime she goes up there, something happens - last time they were running from the volcano erupting. I really hate them going there.

Well New Years was a gigantic washout. We've been trapped inside for the last week with 100kph winds, intermittent rain, and generally crappy weather. We were going to go the New Years Eve fireworks in the city, but by lunchtime it became pretty clear that wasn't going to happen. I can't believe they were stupid enough to hold out till minutes before the event to decide whether it was going to go ahead. It was pretty obvious the weather wasn't going to improve at all. So we stayed inside and watched 28 Days Later and A Sound of Thunder which I hadn't seen before. Later TV offered up The Beatles Help from 1964 - they must have been smoking some crazy weed when they made that film! At least it helped me get to sleep. I know we desperately need some rain to break the drought, but the continual gray bleakness, and being trapped indoors is giving me 'cabin fever'. I desperately need to get a change of scenery.