Grown ups club

Here's Tegan, Nana, Xanthe and Jeff discussing the future, the value of education, and who ate the rocky road.

Boys' club

The younger nephews chill out on Nana and Pop's space age sofa. We have Mitchell, James, Thomas and Jonathan.

Connor - scruffy teen or artful hipster?

Connor has finished school and is waiting on results. He's planning to do a business course.

The topic of discussion, though, was, is his hair just like that when he wakes up, or does he artfully tease it? Good grief, another little relative is now clearly an adult.

All the cousins in one nice picture!

Let's try, shall we? Let's get all the cousins into one nice picture. Shall we have them standing in a row and smiling? Nah, that's too dull, let's go for something more spontaneous.

Here we have, from left to right: Thomas (seated), Connor (cool guy), Xanthe (on-trend denim shorts), Jonathan (footrest), James (I'm fine with Xanthe hugging me), Jessamy (who can I hug next), Mitchell (let go, Jessamy), and Catriona (I can't believe I'm related to you).

And then I realised TEGAN should have been in the picture! Ah well.

Tegan's modelling debut

We're in Perth, and that means COUSINS. Well, visiting relatives generally. Last night was the one night we could get all of the locals together.

So here's Tegan, our favourite Canadian niece, on the balcony at Nana and Pop's new unit. Tegan loves the hot weather. Well, she thinks she does. This was her first 39 degree day. Ever. She just moved to Perth this year, doing the post-university thing while she thinks about a Masters degree. Or just ditch it all and go into modelling?

What Jeff and Pauline do with their spare time

Last week we found a treasure in the car park near work - a length of optical fibre cable, a bit damaged, and clearly abandoned. It was there for a few days, and finally, we couldn't resist, we took it home.

Today Jeff cut a segment out of it, and peeled away the layers to see what is in it.

The marking on the outside said "Victrack by Corning" and also "12/24". And it's rodent resistant. The system we develop at work involves drawing maps of where cables and other equipment are installed. We don't draw the maps, that's a network designer's job - we write the software that lets them do it. So, we are able to test our software by making up new cable, and new types of cable, but this is the Real Thing.

Here's Jeff peeling away the layers. The black layers are very tough. Cable gets a lot of protection. There's also a tough woven layer.

Here's what's inside. We were surprised. There as two bundles of optical fibres, the orange one and the blue one. He's peeled the orange one to reveal the fibres inside. Each one of them has a coloured sheath too. There are twelve fibres in each of the bundles, so I'm guessing 12/24 means 24 fibres in total, presented in groups of twelve. There is a very tough core, it looks like metal with a white plastic coating. That stops the whole cable from bending too much. Then there are three plastic strands, the size of a bundle of fibres, but just inert plastic. I think this is how they get various cables of different capacity to be the same diameter - pad them with plastic to fill the gaps. They are probably easier to handle if they come in standard diameters.

And here, Jeff has managed to peel the very fine red sheath off one of the actual optical fibres. You can hardly see it, but it's the one with the half-length sheath.




We're taking this wonderful bounty to work tomorrow.

How we do Melbourne Cup Day

Melbourne Cup is a public holiday here in Melbourne. It's on a Tuesday in Spring, so it is just a lovely break. We like to celebrate the special day in our family. Here's how we do it:

Print out a form guide, and choose a horse each, based on the coolness of the name, the colours the jockey will be wearing, and other important factors.

A lot of people do that, but we go one more step. As part. Of the decision making process, we draw our interpretations of the horse names.

This year, Thomas gave us "Who shot the barman?":

Catriona offers Royal Diamond, Seismos, Protectorate, and Opinion (a lawyer):

Jonathan liked Siesmos, the earth-shaking horse:

And I liked "Au Revoir"