How bizarre. According to Wikipedia, a fainting goat is a breed of domestic goat whose external muscles freeze for roughly 10 seconds when the goat is startled. This is hilarious...
You have to wonder how Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection can explain this. Surely this is not a good tactic against a predator?
We nearly bought an house in Auckley. Even so, this is very close to where we used to live...
Even Meadowhall, OMG!..
I really don't understand this obsession with Paris Hilton in Australia. She's constantly all over the news here, much worse than in the UK.
At least one US newsreader agrees with me - Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC in the US....
The weekend is here!
I can't believe I've just completed my first full week of work in Oz and I've done absolutely nothing! The client I'm working for still hasn't sorted me out a PC or account to access the systems. Nor do I have a swipe card yet to get physical access to the building. I have to tailgate in every day, which doesn't say much for their physical security, or their security awareness training for employees as I haven't been challenged once yet.
The building is pretty nice though:
No one seems to mind that they're paying me to do nothing. They even keep apologising. I've been bored to tears to be honest. Hopefully things will be better next week.
I scared myself today. I caught myself saying yip instead of yes, just like the aussies. I was determined that I wouldn't pick up the accent but I guess it's inevitable when everyone around you speaks differently. I've already had to adjust some of the terminology I use at work. For instance here they pronounce the word Router like the Americans do, i.e rowter - row as in 'they're having a row'. There's a good reason for it though. Root and rooting, as we poms pronounce route and routing, means something very rude over here. Dealing with network security every day I obviously have to say router a lot and I cringe every time I say rowter, it just doesn't sound right to me. Like the yanks they also say darta instead of data.
I dread to think what we'll sound like in 5 years time from now. One guy I work with has spent half his life in South Africa and the other half in New Zealand before coming to Brisbane. His accent is well screwed up. He keeps talking to me about an application and because of his accent I can't tell whether the application is called Dennis or Dynis.
I luckily got to spend this afternoon at my employer's office, rather than the client's office where I'm based full time. It was much better. They've got a small team of about 20 working their in a cosy office. Everyone has a laugh and come 4pm they opened up the fridge and started passing around the beers in the office. It's so nice not having to drive home from work anymore!
It seems ironic to me that the man who has done very little for peace in the Middle East in his 10 years in power, worst still, the man who helped start a war in the Middle East which has decreased stability, not increased it, is now set to become the Middle East envoy for the US, Russia, the UN and the EU.
If I was him I'd put my feet up, write my memoirs and sit back and wait for the millions to roll in.
I'm glad we've moved. By the looks of it our old house in Doncaster could be under 4ft of water now! We've been looking at the photo's on the UK news sites and we're flabbergasted - we've never seen anything like it in South Yorkshire. It was particularly strange seeing the picture of the fish lying in the middle of the road on Brightside Lane in Sheffield. I used to drive down there to work.
While firefighters are battling to save power supplies in Doncaster, we had our own power outage yesterday. Shortly after Rach arrived home from work she heard a massive bang outside, and a second later all the power went off. It turned out a truck hard gone round a sharp bend too fast, about two streets away from our house, and careered straight into an electricity telegraph pole. The electricity company responded pretty quickly but the damage was that bad it took them a few hours to get the power back on. When I got home from work we ended up having to go out for dinner as the lights were still out. They finally managed to restore power about 9pm.
As for the rain, we've had a fair amount of it in Brisbane over the last few days and people are hoping it might finally bring an end to the drought. According to the Brisbane Courier Mail, grass has begun to poke through the cracked shores of Wivenhoe Dam. When the Queensland Government public broadcast comes on telly advising people that they need to hit the target of no more than 140 litres per person a day, and shows a pictures of a dry, cracked dam, I thought the pictures were simply graphics exaggerated for effect. I didn't realise it is in fact that bad.
Today's combined dam water levels for South East Queensland is at 18.04%. There's been level 5 water restrictions here since the 10th April because the dams have been consistently under the 20% mark. What this means is that living in a odd-numbered house we're only allowed to use bucketed water (not hosepipes) on the garden or car on Tuesday's, Thursday's and Saturday's between 4pm and 7pm, amongst other restrictions.
We seem to be the only people moaning about the rain in Brisbane. The natives here look at the pictures of the floods in England with envy!
