Christmas

Family, Food

Christmas for 2008 is nearly over and it has been magnificent.

The day started a smidgen before 5AM due to the heat and by 5.30AM I had to get up. We were aiming to be over at George & Jude’s by 6:30AM to begin the present opening festivities – however we ended up getting there a little late by the time Hugo awoke and we organised him. As it turns out, when we arrived the house was still basically asleep and Cam, Tina & their kids hadn’t arrived yet either so we didn’t feel so bad. Once the kids arrived and we started opening presents, it was pandemonium – so much excitement and they were buzzing! We packed up some of our stuff and headed home at around 9AM.

Hugo went down for his nap when we arrived and as soon as that was sorted, the second of the ceremonies began. I munched down some cereal and savored a ham & cheese crassoint. It seems to be a bit of a tradition that the present session with the Buchanan clan goes off; every year the intention is to make it a little smaller than the last and a more metered but it never seems to pan out that way!

We worked our way back over the George & Jude’s for lunch with Andrew, Belinda, Ben, George and Jude and it was fantastic. Mum has been making the same style Christmas ham for a long time now and every time I eat it – it is positively delicious. Not wanting to go hungry, Jude had also prepared a collection of superb desserts – fair to say that we probably all ate too much but it is just so hard to say no to great food! Emily, Will, Anita and Oliver came over not long after we’d finished lunch to pass on well wishes for Christmas and we talked and caught up for the next few hours.

At 3PM, we made our way back over the Sterle, Lorraine & Grandma’s place where we chilled out for an hour or two. Conveniently, while the Lattimore family traditionally does a Christmas lunch, the Buchanan clan does a Christmas dinner. So with a couple of hours of recuperation from lunch, we got stuck into another excellent Christmas meal – which was followed by more scrumptious desserts.

We’ve been pleasantly surprised yet again by how tolerant Hugo has been with us today. We dragged him with us over to George & Jude’s early this morning for breakfast and he was presented with a mad house. We came back home to more people and then back over to George and Jude’s for lunch. He had his lunch time nap over there in a strange house, strange room, strange smell and didn’t seem to care one bit – which we’re obviously very happy about.

As an aside, one thing that you can’t take away from a small country town like Chinchilla, is that it doesn’t ever take long to get from anywhere to anywhere. While we were tripping about a little bit today between the two homes, which are on opposite sides of the town – we’re talking about less than 10 minutes of drive time. That is certainly something I miss about living in a city like the Gold Coast.

It has been a great day, lots of family, friends and plenty of decadent food. A bonus from Christmas day is that there is always left over everything, which makes for at least one day of excellent lunches and dinners. Bring on Christmas 2009 I say.

Road Trip A Non-Screaming Success

Family, Travel

Last night I mentioned that Claire, Hugo & I were taking a road trip from the Gold Coast to Chinchilla this morning and that it could be quite eventful.

We got away from the Gold Coast at about 9:15AM and topped up on fuel on the way to the motorway. To my surprise, the traffic was flowing smoothly over the M1 and the Logan Motorway – which was further improved by a lack of any crazy driving from other motorists. We pulled into the Parkhouse Cafe on Margret Street in Toowoomba 11:15AM to feed Hugo and have a driver reviver. As an aside, the cafe has been refurbished and had a slight change in name since I proposed to Claire there in 2004. I really like what they’ve done with interior of the cafe – much more comfortable, modern and fresh. Back on the road by lunchtime and we arrived in Chinchilla at about 2:15PM – more than enough time to unpack a few things from the car and prepare a 3:00PM snack for Hugo.

Claire and I really weren’t sure what to expect with the long drive, as it meant that Hugo was going to miss out on his normal play time between 11:00AM and 12:30PM-1:00PM. Instead of going completely bonkers, screaming and crying – he just cruised along with what we were doing. I suppose we shouldn’t have been so surprised, to date he has been fantastically flexible with us carting him around the traps and tolerating us breaking his rhythm from time to time.

Road Trip

Family, Travel

Today was my last day at work for 2008 and I can’t wait to relax with Claire & Hugo over Christmas and New Year.

In the morning, we’re driving from the Gold Coast to Chinchilla to spend Christmas with our respective families and friends. The trip out to Chinchilla could be quite eventful, as it’s the first drive we”ll have taken with Hugo much over an hour.

Belinda has suggested that we leave when Hugo is due for his morning nap and stop in Toowoomba for a break. Due to our distance, the timing of that couldn’t have been much better as we’ll arrive at approximately 11:30AM. After the pit stop is complete, we’ll continue on the second half of the drive. Traffic and driving conditions permitting, we should arrive in Chinchilla no later than 2:45PM – which will give us a little breathing room before we need to feed Hugo again at about 3:00PM.

We’re on a schedule here people, lets hope it unfolds according to plan!

Bad Luck & Poor Timing

Blogging, Software

My run of bad luck continued tonight as I went to upgrade WordPress on #if debug.

I backed up the database, downloaded a copy of the source files and set about uploading WordPress 2.7 – only to have the power go out twice during the event. That not being enough, I happened to pick a time to perform an upgrade when my web host scheduled my server for maintenance. This was completely my fault, I received an outage notification – I just thought I’d get it all done before the outage window began and I would have if it went to plan like normal.

After I finally got everything successfully uploaded, or at least I thought I had, I was then unable to ‘upgrade’ as the script would terminate without an error and without completing. That resulted in the web site working when you’re browsing it but wouldn’t allow me to login to the admin area – as it kept requiring me to complete the upgrade.

I assumed that the power outage that was the root cause of it – leaving one of the core WordPress files in an incomplete state. I deleted all of the core WordPress files from the server and starting clean and the upgrade of WordPress was then fast and painless.

I still find it amazing that I could be struck by another bit of bad luck, albeit very small and through my own fault walk into a wall – of bad timing.

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre, Poor Service

Family, Travel

This afternoon Claire, Hugo and I traveled to Brisbane to attend Lucy’s graduation which was held at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre. The graduation was from 2:00PM, which meant we’d need to feed Hugo while we were out. Our carefully laid plans became slightly unhinged when we needed to heat up the bottle.

The Brisbane Convention Centre is considered a best of breed facility, which you’d think would mean that they’d have all of the smaller points handled with ease. You can imagine our surprise when we went into the parenting room to fix up Hugo, that they didn’t provide a microwave to heat up a bottle. In lieu of the microwave, they provided a note informing people to go to the cafe inside the centre – a little odd but maybe they had people abusing the microwave. I head over to the cafe and ask them to heat up the bottle in their microwave and was told that they don’t have a microwave. Instead, I’m provided a paper coffee cup with hot water in it – quality.

After managing to get enough heat into the bottle that Hugo would probably drink it, I thought a couple of drinks would be nice. I order a coffee & a strawberry milkshake and they don’t do milkshakes – how many cafes do you know that don’t serve a simple milkshake. Moving on from that, I later ask for some plain potato chips and they have only salt & vinegar and BBQ flavours – a tad limited for such an large conferencing venue. I then notice that they have a Four’N Twenty hot box on the counter – nothing against Four’N Twenty but it seems a tad out of place in this setting.

All this mind you when they have a graduation on, where they conferred approximately 330 graduands. Doing the math on that for a moment would suggest that there was quite comfortably going to be at least 1000 people in the venue and they couldn’t muster a microwave for the obvious families attending, a better range of chips (of all things) and a milk shake from a so called cafe that serves Four n Twenty from a hot box.

The Brisbane Convention Centre itself was well presented, clean and the staff on the floor were polite and helpful. If only they could have got some of the smaller things right, this could have been a very positive review of a top notch facility.