No wine festival this year, but there were still flowers!

The National Parks Website doesn’t have any info about this walk for some reason. There were signs at the top and bottom with information though. The ascent trail starts at First Turkey just past the waterhole and toilet block for the mountain bike tracks, with a sign that says to allow for 4 hours each way. We were staying with Rachael’s parents whilst in Rocky so I just walked from there with the plan to meet Rachael at the top for lunch.

When I first started playing with Home Assistant the first thing I thought to automate was our air-conditioner. When we bought the air con for our living room it cost way more for the “smart” ones that you could control with your phone and we didn’t think we would use it anyway, so we just got a dumb one. But since it can take up to five minutes or so before the heater works, it’s definitely good to have it automatically turn on on cold mornings, or turn it on from your phone in bed.

On the weekend I took part in the World’s Greatest Shave. Thanks to everyone that donated, we were able to raise $1,847 for the Leukaemia Foundation. Anna won the honours of operating the clippers. Below is a video timelapse, I thought she did a great job with some interesting intermediary hair styles. And the final product… If you like, you can still donate for the next few weeks!

Last year I came across this reddit post (just before going to bed) which completely blew my mind (like the boyfriend in the post). So many sayings and things from movies (flashback scenes) finally made sense, but I still thought I must be understanding something and that the minds-eye visualisation described was exaggerated. I was eventually able to get to sleep but first thing in the morning I made Rachael watch this video.

Like always I limited it to one song per artist. Ball Park Music - It’s Nice To Be Alive (2011) I came close to going for Coming Down (2012) but went for the one more likely to get in the Top 10. They had a bunch of songs from across the whole decade so hopefully they place highly. Bluejuice - Act Yr Age (2011) Bluejuice likewise had a bunch of hits I could have voted for, but chose this as the top pick.

Alex Lahey - I Don’t Get Invited to Parties Anymore Methyl Ethel - Trip The Mains The Chats - Pub Feed G Flip - Drink Too Much Tame Impala - Borderline Holy Holy - Maybe You Know Ali Barter - Ur A Piece Of Shit Ruby Fields - Trouble Kita Alexander - Between You & I George Alice - Circles

When we bought our house the real-estate agent said it was “Post WWII” (after 1945) but didn’t really know exactly when it was built. The survey plan we got for the block said it was updated in 1952, so it’s a safe bet it was about then. Looking at historical aerial imagery that the Toowoomba Council publishes as an ESRI map, you can see it appear sometime between the 1946 and 1955 imagery.

When we moved into our house it had an old accumulation meter (read every 3 months) that was probably put in when the house was built (as it was apparently installed by the Toowoomba Electric Light & Power Company). We got a ‘smart’ meter installed a few years ago. Unfortunately there is no way to get access to the data from it directly, so you can’t really use it to do home automation or anything useful in real-time.

This was the first year since we moved to Toowoomba where we haven’t been to the wine festival, but we were still able to enjoy the gardens. Mum and Dad brought my grandparents down this year to see the flowers (and Lyra). It was 70 years of the Carnival this year, so that was the theme at Laurel Bank Park And we even managed to visit a few prize gardens.