It was pretty cold overnight so I thought it would be wise to move on to Samford Showground. I rang them and they said we could stay two nights because they are setting up for the polocrosse next week and need to get rid of all the campers.
We had to do a bit of shopping. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get Anaconda to replace a Coleman camp chair which broke after a couple of uses. They wouldn't exchange it for a new one because i didn't have the sales docket. We went to Patricks Road after lunch and spent a couple of hours with Sarah and the kids.
I spoke to the caretaker at the showground and she told me that she had got the dates for the polocrosse a week out so we can stay on here for another week.
We went to Ascot to have coffee with Alain at a cafe he had found which serves the best Di Bella coffee in the area. They have a wireless hot spot so I booked in for a half hour session. When I tried to use it to download some software, the speed was such that I could not do anything useful in half an hour so I planned to visit Al at Next Byte during the week to get the software I need.
As we drove across the city, Jean wanted to kill a little time before our next visit. We passed a carwash and as the Little Motley had been decorated by lots of birds I spent a half hour getting it clean again.
We spent the afternoon with Barb, Ron and Ruth catching up with what they have been up to and talking about their up coming trip to UK. It was great to see them again.
I needed to do the laundry and had to find the nearest laundromat. There isn't a laundromat within 25 km (15 miles) but I found a laundry service in Samford so I left the laundry there.
I was pretty short of sleep and also very stiff so I spent the afternoon lying down.
I went to Samford Village to pick up the laundry. The cost was not significantly more than the cost of a laundromat and the laundry service folded all the clothes so I was pretty happy.
I decided that another rest day was called for so we stayed in.
We had a late start to the day as we had both slept in.
We went to town to visit Al at Next Byte.He had obtained a copy of NeoOffice for me as I hadn't been able to afford to download it on my Telstra account without breaching my download limit. We had coffee with Al, visited Dymocks (without buying any books), and the shop that sells the most excellent Greek yoghurt. We had lunch at Brookside, did a bit of shopping at Woolworths and drove back to Samford for an easy afternoon.
We were up early and out in time for Jean's appointment at the hairdresser at Mitchelton at nine o'clock. We were back at the Motley at about ten and settled in for another easy day.
I found some odd behaviour on this MacBook so I investigated. I had to repair the hard disk, it had a very minor error. I found that Terminal was behaving strangely. Whenever it is launched it ran the .rsync script I use to update the website. Try as I might I could not find the cause of this and resetting the preferences didn't cure the problem either. I remembered Al's advice and trashed the preference plist and the problem went away. Hooray for Al.
The day dawned bright and clear if a bit windy. I had slept a full eight hours so I felt pretty good. I went to Samford to do some shopping and to check the time for the Performer's Cafe which we plan to go to tonight because the lead performers from Night and Day are performing.
We met Sarah , Kelly, and Ross at the Cafe. The place is quite small and was packed when we arrived but Sarah had saved seats for us at her table. The first act was a group of lady drummers called Mrs Hits. The played conga drums and two big xylophones. The music was vert loud but quite entertaining. They had obviously spent lots of time practising because they were extremely well synchronised. The next act was a classical guitarist who sang in Italian. Jean wasn't impressed but I enjoyed his work. The highlight of the evening was Dale and Judy who started there set with "Night and Day" which really switched us on with fond memories of their performances at Everton Heights, Samford and Mt Coot-Tha. The played more of our old favourites and some new songs including a sweet little satirical piece about "taking over the world" in the style of Michael Moore. They got an tremendous reception from the audience and I thanked them for their beautiful music. They were impressed when I spoke to them after the performance because I told them about Radio Motley, my iPod, which features Vilvaldi, Bach, Handel, Tchaikovsky and Night and Day.
We went to the football field to watch Ross play. He was playing in the midfield in the first half and seemed pretty confused about what to do. In the second half he went to his favourite position of fullback and played much better. He did so well hr was named player of the match. He was delighted and very proud.
In the afternoon I helped Ross try and repair one of his remote control cars which had stated to do burnout circles when it was supposed to go straight ahead. After much investigation, I eventually diagnosed a sticky front wheel bearing but when I rectified this the problem didn't go away. Ross will have to rely on his Uncle Al to fix it with his magic karma engineering.
We dined on Thai take-away from Aluntum Thai in Samford and, as usual, it was delicious.
Sarah had asked me to try and fix her iBook which fails to boot up. I tried everything I could including booting from the Apple CDs which came with my G3 iBook but Disk Utilities would not allow a repair. I tried running Disk Warrior without any success so I guess I'll have to give it to Al to fix.
I had taken the opportunity to copy some Night and Day CDs so I set about loading them onto the iPod. I had to delete some tracks to make way for the new stuff and doing that I found that the playlists I had generated were corrupted by some multiple entries of the same tracks so had to find and correct all those entries. I now know why we had been having such odd random shuffle effects. The tracks with more than one entries were being treated as different tracks and got repeated more often than the tracks with only one entry.
We had arranged to have coffee with Al at one of our favourite cafes in Wilston so we had to be out quite early. We had a very good chat and Al agreed to get Sarah's files from her broken iBook onto my old G4 iBook. He will try and fix Sarah's old G3 iBook and use it as his standby machine.
We spent the afternoon at Patricks Road. Ross took us to the park to watch him riding his new bike. He was amazingly proficient considering the fact that he had not learned to ride properly on his previous bike when he was a lot younger and he has had this bike for only two weeks. Kelly cut her finger quite badly on the soap dish in the bath and Sarah had to do a bit of first aid. We made our farewells and returned to the Motley to prepare for tomorrows departure.