A Plague!
Our lilly-pilly tree is hosting about 10 million plague soldier beetles. They've decided that's not enough for them and are now infesting our lawn, wattle trees, and in fact anything green and plenty of non-green things too.
Upgrade, they said…
I figured OS X Server 10.8 was probably ready enough for me to upgrade to from 10.7, given it's half a year old and had two point releases, so did this over the weekend. This turns out to have been harder than it could have, due to the opacity of some of the components.
The App Store refused to replace Server.app from Lion Server. Fine, move aside the old one and place the new one in /Applications. This is required now because it contains many server binaries, it's not just a configuration tool.
Once this was done, the new Server.app refused to communicate with the server daemon, complaining about “SSL error has ocurred… blah blah whatever”. …
Roof
So we decided to install some storage space in our roof cavity. The problem with these “old” houses is that they were built when nobody owned anything, so they didn't bother with cupboards. In the modern era we all have many cubic metres of plastic from China, so we need somewhere to put it all.
It turned out to be the usual drama when getting other people in to do a job: basically there were problems every step of the way, from the dodgy quote through to actually getting the job finished. Yet to do by the contractors: fix the ladder, install power outlet. …
France
So we went to France a few weeks ago. Here are some pictures. More pictures. Some more pictures. Look, more pictures. And a few more. Yet more pictures. The last ones. Oh, except for these ones.
Of note:
- Cars in Australia are twice the size of French cars. In the seven weeks we spotted just a few X5-sized vehicles. Most people had Astra-sized or smaller cars. Over here of course it's only a matter of time before we are all driving these again.
- Rohan's breathing was fine the entire time we were away. On the second night back, his asthma started up again. …
Tripping
So we went to the Grampians last week. We camped at Trooper's Creek. This was a good base camp location; there were walks direct from the campground plus plenty close by. The kids got to climb on rocks most days, we cooked on an open fire, and there was a small creek to play beside (too cold and small to actually get in to). Furthermore there were some really chubby wallabies who'd take food from your hand, so many clumps of grass and leaves were thus disbursed.
