Since Al has his car back and can once again help Sarah with her shopping and so on, we decided to get out of the big city and spend some time with the Procters at Carters Ridge.
We had a bit of shopping to do so after breakfast I dumped the black water and parked the Motley outside the caravan park and took the Little Motley to Chermside. Returning to Aspley I loaded up the car on the trailer and we set off up the highway. I wanted to buy some hardware so we stopped at Bunnings Warehouse but the carpark was absolutely full of Saturday morning shoppers so we did a go round and headed back to the highway. Unfortunately, the microwave door wasn't closed properly and the glass plate fell out and smashed on the floor, causing a further delay.
Eventually we got on the road and, after a stop for very nice lunch at the Ginger Factory, we arrived at Carters Ridge in time for afternoon tea. This was followed, as is our custom, by happy hour.
In the evening, the Procters went out to the anniversary celebrations for the Carters Ridge Hall which is some number of decades old, and we repaired to the comfort of the Motley.
I was up early and went for a walk. After breakfast I fitted the new DO NOT OVERTAKE TURNING VEHICLE sticker to the back of the trailer. Now it will be legal for us to use more than one lane to turn.
I also weighed the towball of the trailer. I was surprised to find that the vertical load measured nearly 300 kg (135 lb). This put the trailer mass just a tad over two tonnes (2 tons) , the towball and socket are rated at two tonnes so I can't add anything heavy to the trailer, like a 200 litre (70 USgal) water tank, as I had planned.
The axle weights are 2.2 tonnes on the front axle, 4 tonnes on the rear axle, 300 kg on the towball, and 1.8 tonnes on the two trailer axles, giving an all up mass of a little under eight tonnes.
I can now use Road Rule 8(t) which states that vehicles less than 8 tonnes have to make their own arrangements to keep out of my way.
Philip and Helene had to clean out the shed in preparation for the delivery of four tonnes of books. I did a little to help and they used my Karcher to scrub the floor; it did a marvellous job.
In the evening we had a barbecue and talked far too long into the night.
We went shopping at Tewantin for curry spices and at Cooroy for groceries and meat.
Philip had been having trouble with the battery in the motorhome going flat in two or three weeks. I found that the 24v-12v converter was taking an idling current enough to flatten he battery completely in a few hundred hours. The cure is to switch off the low voltage system when leaving the motorhome unused. Phil plans switch the system off and to run the mains powered battery charge every week or so to keep the battery fully charged.
It was pretty hot so Jean spent the best part of the day in the pool.
I worked on the Chapter database and cooked a curry.
Helene had to do some finishing work on the stuff she is putting in the exhibition next weekend, like chains to hang them and so on, so we spent some time doing that.
We had a phone call from Al to advise that the mechanical repairs had been done to the old Beep and the testing and registration in NSW had all gone without a hitch.
Before breakfast, I helped Helene finish the work on her exhibition pieces and load up the van.
After breakfast, I did more work on the Chapter database and cooked the dhal and vegetable curry ready for dinner tonight.
We had dinner early to avoid any hint of indigestion. We dined outside the Motley and, with the sandalwood sticks burning, had little trouble with mosquitos. Philip provided a bottle of 1990 Shiraz which was particularly smooth and much appreciated.
I went into Cooroy to do the laundry and the shopping.
Philip had been having trouble getting anyone to fix a problem with the CGI script which processes orders on his Camps Australiawide website. The feedback form was working properly so I had a look at both scripts and found a syntax error on the order form web page. We corrected this but uploading the new page didn't fix the problem which was very strange. Advice from Bigman revealed that ISPs usually keep ftp and http servers on different machines and only load updates across on some kind of schedule. In the event, the script was working on Saturday and Philip received his first order via the website on Sunday. Score one for the good guys.
In the evening, we went to the end of year Art Exhibition for the TAFE Certificate course Helene has been doing all this year. .
The show was really surprising. The students were untrained in any technique when they started the course a year ago and the work covered several different media. Almost without exception, the standard of technique and of artistic expression was astonishingly high. One would not have been surprised to find work of this standard in a show by a group of experienced artists and potters.
Helene won an encouragement award, one of four in a class of twenty, so her misgivings about the quality of her work were misplaced.
Sadly, none of the pieces would go in the Motley so we didn't buy anything but sales had already reached eighteen pieces, out of perhaps two hundred, when we left at nine and the show goes on all weekend. Helene had sold four pieces and had given away another to a fellow student who wanted to buy one.
We had arranged to see a house just a few kilometres down the road because it had taken Jean's eye in the local real estate paper.
The house was a typical modern Queensland house built on a slab but it had some good features. The verandah and patio were nice. The property is five acres and has two big dams and a second building big enough to live in but really just a studio. In the event, the agent offered to send us some other addresses to check out.
We went to Eumundi to buy a coin wallet to replace the one I had lost recently. I also bought a woven strangler vine ring to rehang the wind chimes
Helene was most taken with some drums and discovered that there is a drum class every Tuesday evening in the CWA at Cooroy where she can get some instruction and some practice to see if she really wants to invest a significant amount of money in a good drum.
After an early morning walk, we had a leisurely breakfast and veged out.
In the afternoon, I rebuilt the wind chimes I have been carrying with me since we left Bluegum Crescent. I used the strangler fig ring I bought yesterday at the market and a section of an old branch from the firewood pile for the donger. It is very quiet because the donger is not as big as it should be but it's nice to have it working again.
We went to Gympie to dump the black water. I took the Little Motley on the trailer and we left the rig at the Six Mile Rest Area and drove into town in the car.
I needed some parts from Dick Smiths and we did some shopping before having lunch at the same cafe we patronised last time we were in Gympie.
By the time we had done all the grocery shopping, returned to the Six Mile, loaded up the car, filled up with fresh water and driven back to Carters Ridge, the whole day had gone.
I worked on the problem I was having with the iBook connecting to the internet. Remote Access had become totally useless as it crashed consistently. I tried, unsuccessfully, to fix it by trashing the prefs but that didn't work. I tried to re-install it but the System 9 disks, both 9.1 and 9.2.1 refused to work. I finally found that if I switched DialAssist off the crashes went away. I still have to get to the bottom of the failure to install but at least I'm back on the air.
In the afternoon I did a little repair work on Helene's wind chimes.
We had a barbecue dinner with a bottle of McGuigans Verdehlo which went down well.
After dinner I worked with Phil to debug the laptop PC/Nokia phone problem. He found the root cause of the problem, I wasn't using the master account name in one of the ( many) places where the dial in access is set up. Its all working now. I also took the opportunity to fix the names in the other accounts. Well I tried to fix them but a stray https (in place of http) kept producing bad results. I guess I'll one day learn to interpret microsoft error messages! They are all fixed except the President's account which I won't change until I've checked with the President.
A day of rest, relaxation, a little repair work, and a dinner of corned beef, carrots, brocolli, white sauce and mashed potatoes followed by rockmelon and icecream (low fat and low sugar) - just scrumptious.