The Home of Tom & Morven

Last night was the wombat catching for Laura, with Jesse. I truly had an indelible time! (That’s dictionary.com’s word of the day, indelible) It was a lot easier than I expected, although still quite difficult. The project was a week long wombat catching exercise, and Jesse and I helped just for the one night. We met some really nice people, namely Ron, Ingrid, Dave (Tags), Bill, and Elise. We went out a few times, the first time we split up, and it was a relatively unsuccessful expedition, and I let a couple wombats get away that I should have been able to catch. The way it works is that someone drives a ute, and you have at least three on the back of the ute. The spotlighter shines the light on wombats, amongst 1 million small shrubs that look very similar to wombats, and then presses a button which triggers a light in the cabin for the driver to stop. The light stuns the wombat for long enough for the shooter to get ready, and one or two or even three runners with nets to jump off the ute and get ready to run. Another person will shoot a rifle pellet to deliberately miss, which then stuns the wombat completely (most of the time) and scares it from moving at all, so you can run up to it away from the light, and catch the wombat with the net unaware.

Jesse and I both caught three each, I think we did really well for our first time, considering I got extremely sick by the end of the night such that half of the time I was too sick to do anything. Both Jesse and I did a couple really sweet catches (if you don’t mind me saying) and we work pretty well as a team! Tags (Laura’s supervisor) is incredible to watch catching a wombat, and was really good at teaching us the intracacies of the art.

Later that night we got back at 4am, and sat around a fire until 5am, telling stories, until we crashed. I woke up shortly after going to bed, feeling like I wanted to throw up, with the taste of blood in my mouth. Jesse couldn’t sleep either, so we came back really early. I would love to have stuck around more, but uni/work commitments don’t really permit for either of us Hopefully Laura has just as good success for the rest of the week, and I look forward to hearing how she goes! And remember Laura, we want to be on the Acknowledgements page of your thesis

I’m now still feeling like absolute crap, but I’m stuck back into my work and pretty much on top of it again.

What can I say, it went really well! We had a few hours of good sunshine, followed by a light drizzle, but it was still warm enough for thongs weather. There were a few late comers such as those that went to shindig nation the night before, and many people didn’t even come, perhaps due to the weather. I guess I know though more now who my friends really are It was unfortunate to hear from a friend that a mutual friend of ours had a friend pass away. He (Tom W.) was someone known by all of the A-Team, and I distinctly remember playing wingman for this guy one night at the Havelock. I never really knew him well, but my heart goes out to Gary in particular (one of his good friends) and all the rest of his family and friends. Hopefully we see you soon Gaz. I remember Tom being very determined, not only with ‘chatting up the ladies’ that night at the Havelock, but also his efforts on the track. Tom was a bit of an inspiration to me with his running, he had invited me to join his uni athletics club at some stage, I wish I did. He kicked my arse at the City to Bay last year, and I was hoping to kick his butt back this year I hereby dub my efforts for the City to Bay this year for Tom Wright, even though I never really knew him.

Last night Jordan had his first “Shindig-Nation”.

This is a once off occasion, where for one night and one night only, jordan’s house is declared as a seperate nation from Australia, for the purpose of a shindig. Passports will not get you in here, only an invite. There are now laws, rule, morals, or ethics, and Australia currency does not exist - it’s the currency of alcohol that matters!

Anyway, it was great fun. Jordz made some of the best pizzas, if not THE best pizzas I’ve ever had, my favourite being the one with blue vein cheese. We got to meet some more of his work mates, and caught up with some of his uni mates, and even some of Vi’s mates. I have now learnt the A and E chords on one of jordzys guitars, and intend on borrowing one from him for the purposes of learning the guitar

NICE ONE JORDZ! Party of the year.

An awesome surprise from my brother Mike tonight - Team_Bammann has made it to a new world ranking: 1822. This break in the top 2000 is due to a result that Mike returned. Nice one, Mike. He’s going to be doing some smaller numbers for a while now, before returning to the big gun ten million digit numbers.

Tonight I made an awesome Country Keiche, using pastry mix. Next time I make it I’ll write it up with the recipe, and add a photo maybe!

Tonight I measured the distance of the last run that I did, which I thought was 21km. I was bitterly disappointed to find out it was only about 18.5 - this means tomorrow I’m going to go get some non-chafing shorts that I can run in till well after the sun goes down, through the night, and into the next day, and smash this 21k barrier.

Today I confirmed with Jesse and Laura the details for catching wombats on Tuesday night, for Laura’s honours science project on a wombat skin disease called Mange. It should make for an interesting meeting Wednesday moring at work!

Today I’m still working on the layout for my first LaTeX2e typesetting document, for my research proposal for work. Hopefully I can show some good work next week. Yesterday I stayed home and worked on the computer for about 16 hours. Even when friends came around for pizza and a movie, I somehow managed to miss the movie and keep working. I’m really “in the zone” at the moment. It’s scary.

Sweet as, last night I won a CD from a competition on Fresh FM, my favourite radio station. You can listen to fresh live on the net. The CD is Electric 01: Gavin Keitel - I’m listening to it now, it’s pretty sweet.

I did yet another epic ride today after giving the motorcycle a good polish yesterday. Lofty -> Stirling -> Lenswood? -> Lobethal and down lobethal road. I’m getting heaps better at handling the bumps when cornering, and committing myself to corners. I really need my new suit to wear in though, as it’s constantly pulling my back up straight, which isn’t good when I’m trying to push the bike down. Hopefully a few more wears and they’ll get more comfortable. I got passed coming down lobethal road by two brand new CBR600RR’s. I heard them coming from behind me for a while inbetween corners, and eventually they caught up. I tried to keep up with those two riders but lost them pretty quickly. I hope with regular riding my skills will improve at least to their standard. Going to ‘bike school’ at the race track will be great for my development I’m sure. After seeing those Honda’s today I’m definitely now excluding the R6 from my shortlist of next bike to progress to, and now I’m down to either wanting the Honday or the Ninja ZX-6R. My friend just got herself a Ninja 750 on Friday, I’m REALLY looking forward to seeing it

Today I ran one of the biggest runs I’ve done in the last few months, approximately half a marathon (21k) maybe a touch more. I am a bit annoyed that I forgot to press ’start’ for the first 20 minutes of my heart rate data, and due to electrical interference it stopped recording the last 20 or so minutes. The curve below shows 1 hour 15 minutes of running, so it was probably around 15 minutes of running. Since I can do 12k in 55 minutes easy, and I was running about the same pace, linearly interpolating one could deduce that the run today was 25.1 k’s. Although, I would have been only outputting about 80 - 90% the pace compared to when my body is fully conditioned such as I was in the summer, and hence my estimate of 21k’s. I should really measure this distance for reference as I’d say I’m the furthest from the form I was in over the summer before ITBFS, so I could establish a good training floor with this data. It’s a pity I didn’t manage to record it all.

I should really start working now on pace rather than endurance, as I want to get into the top 150 of the City to Bay fun run this year. There ya go, it’s in writing now Tom so there’s no excuses! I was originally aiming for top 100 this year, but after the problems with my knee and ITBFS I’m going to settle for top 150. I should however be able to get a placing in this years Black Hill Challenge.

I decided to pass up an invite to go to the Grand tonight (speaking of which, I should have gone on Thursday night where they were celebrating Hoff’s b’day, with $4 Hofftails!) as I know I’m going to collapse very shortly. It’s 9:37, and I’m going to bed - weird!

Tonight we had Matt as a Celebrity Chef - definitely close competition to Kath & Morv’s curry, although many factors are yet to be considered.

Well I haven’t posted any stuff on here for a bit, but randomonly I’ll try and note some of the events since the last post.

It’s my Dad’s birthday today, so happy birthday Dad!!! I’ll see you tomorrow night at dinner!

I learnt how to play the D chord on a guitar at Jordan’s house on Sunday night, with Ben and Adz. I guess you could say I’m pretty confident with the “D”. I made a song about it, too!

Monday and Tuesday night we had Brownyn and Kim Celebrity Chef for us, and that should be written up ASAP. I am falling waaaay behind with C.C. matters, but shall hopefully catch up over the weekend.

Last night Kami had her going away drinks, and we will all miss her dearly. I can’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure she’s going to meet up with Sarah at some stage, which I’m sure then they’ll both have an awesome time! Speaking of which, I haven’t heard much from Sarah which probably means she’s quite well occupied and enjoying her time!

It’s uni holidays at the moment, and I’m getting some good work done here now that it’s a bit quieter. It’s getting a lot harder for me, I’m in the middle of doing some (fairly) difficult maths I never thought I’d have to do after I finished my last ever maths subject.

Other news, I’m hoping to do some work for a friend of my parents, an entrepreneur. Hopefully I’ll get some first hand experience of what it’s like to start a business, which I’d say should be a very good investment of time and effort. I went to a “commercial perspective” workshop on Tuesday, which has stimulated my entrepreneurial curiosity again since high school days.

I’ve also decided this week I’m definitely going to go to the Mallala race track to practise some more advanced riding under instructor supervision in “bike school”. I plan to get my next bike around November, so learning this bike well should relatively improve my bike skills greater in the long run.

I almost forgot - I had lunch with Toey last week - It’s amazing and inspiring to talk to him every time, this time he told me he had just been practising tennis this morning, and I asked him who with. He replied in a completely normal tone of voice “asdf” (i.e. I can’t actually remember who it was with, but it was a really famous women tennis player, like top ten sort of thing!)

Well as much as I’d love to say why today was one of the top ten luckiest days of my life (well apart from one other matter) I can’t, as it may or may not involve the law. Needless to say, the S|2 crew, A-Team, and Caff-List most likely know what I’m talking about (if you don’t just ask it’s a good story!)

Today i had the privilege of fixing a family friends computer, although i didn’t finish. It’ll definitely be a format and start from scratch job - but at least it’s a fast computer so it *should* only take a few hours. This will probably be at least the 10th computer I’ve formatted for people.