Having done all that we had to do in Brisbane, we headed north to spend some more time with the Procters.
In the evening, I got the printer out and ran the xmas card address labels.
In the morning, Jean went shopping with Helene.
It started to rain very hard so I decided to set up the electric bucket to recover the run off from the awning. I managed to get it working while it was still raining and put 240 litres in the tanks. I had to change my clothes which had become saturated.
In the afternoon, I started to write the xmas cards. I took a break for a bit and dropped off to sleep and didn't wake up till five o'clock.
We happy houred with the Procters and didn't return to the Motley until a quarter to seven.
In the morning, Jean went shopping with Helene again. I spent the morning ripping more CDs to the iBook and loading them onto the iPod. I also did some more xmas cards.
In the afternoon I helped Philip correct some errors in the co-ordinates of camp sites I had surveyed. I was concerned to find out how errors had been introduced into the data. There is inevitably a manual transcription of the GPS data and sometimes substitutions (for example a digit one off 153 instead of 152 or 43 instead of 48) but some of he errors had no obvious explanation. Happily the error rate is low. I am determined to make efforts to avoid manual transcription errors in future by extracting data from the GPS to the iBook electronically. I will need to get a MacOSX version of the GYPSY program. I also plan to get a GPS mapping program and the NATMAP 250K raster maps because Philip has demonstrated how powerful this software is in both using and in checking the data. I might have to run Virtual PC to make all this work but it will probably be worth it.
I discovered that many of the music files I had imported onto the iBook and transferred to the ipod were missing from the ibook. I must has done something pretty silly while trying to tidy up the files and I will have to re-rip about 80 CDs. Oh, well, it's good to have something to keep you occupied.
I had promised Helene a curry dinner on Saturday so I cooked a couple of beef curries.
More CD ripping.
I cooked the dhal and the vegetable curry in the morning and we dined very well with Rosie's dessert of strawberries, ginger and dark chocolate.
More CD ripping.
We finished the Xmas cards There was enough curry left over to provide another dinner. I did some bhajias as well so we dined very well again.
The weather had turned from very, very wet to very, very hot so we all took refuge in airconditioned spaces.
Philip had the proof copy of the first half of the book back from the pre-press guy. I spent the day going through the proofs in the final format. There were very few typos but I noticed some errors in some of the data which had only become obvious when the entries were laid out as in the book.
Jean had put some laundry in Helene's washing machine but it failed to complete the cycle. I finally found that the drain pump was no working properly and went to Cooroy to try and get a replacement. The spares business had closed down some time ago so I'll have to go to Noosaville tomorrow.
I got a new pump motor and a new drain hose from a guy in Noosaville. The motor seemed to be the same as the one I had taken out but worked fine when I installed it.
I spent more time checking stuff for "The Book".
I spent a considerable time ripping CDs and finally got them all done very late into night. Jean will be happy now that I won't have my head buried in the iBook all the time.
I cooked some fish for us all for dinner. I had bought some crusty bread so we had dukkah as a first course. The extra virgin olive oil I had bought at Casino went very well with the dukkah The last time I had served it up, I thought the oil was too strong for the dukkah and decided to use extra light oil but this oil was very good. I'll have to do some research into different brands of extra virgin oil to see if the brand matters.