Here is nick at the tennis. Al, vas, nick and I all headed down on Monday to see the start of the Brisbane tennis open. For thirty bucks it was a pretty good deal I have to say. Seats had a good view saw some decent tennis. Only down side was the beer was pretty expensive.

Well it feels like a long time coming. I feel like with all this sun and heat that the tomatoes would just start raining.  But anyways they are finally starting to appear now.

The only other concern at the moment is the chilies.  Their leaves are going a bit funny. Almost a bit plastically. Going to keep an eye on them.

Before the tomatos went crazy, I’ve been forgetting to pinch the tops so they have continued to grow and grow. Just waiting for the harvest now. Thanks to dad and Vijayan for their help in getting them going. I’ll put a few of the chillies up here as well.

The ozwins are profi campers so by the time we turned up they already had the camper trailer all set up and a seating dining area waiting for us. I had a go with Freddie and jasper setting up our new tent. This is a serious tent, big enough for Vas and almost me to stand up in. Defiantly was worth investing in and an upgrade on my old tent, mainly because we can fit the double air bed in this one. Make ssuch a difference in the sleeping. except when i move so does vas.

Anyways all very chilled, had lovely lamb chops and legs along with masses of cheese, schrimps, cous cous and other veg for christmas lunch plus plenty of vino.

Anyways here are a few pic from the trip

The Gunshop was budget breaking for the four of us but was delious, we were all pretty predictable and had the veal which wasn’t veal like the schniztel that we are used to back in switz  but very rare tender young calf. It was delious none the less though.  They also had a great courgette flower with a pumpkin stuff which was very flavoursome.  Interestingly they also heat/shallow fry their olives before serving them to you. Makes them very juicy.   The Sling was also a bit of a surprise as it actually opens up into this huge covered outdoor/indoor seating area at the back with this lovely plants and tropics theme. Their menu for drinks was pretyt thick as well!

So a nice chilled out time. we also had the Nile perch for supper, but this time in a ncie white wine sauce.

Anyways here we are in front of the christmas tree.

Rocking around the Christmas Tree

A small snap shot of the garden in action. In a couple of months we will be inundated with tomoatos, eggplant and chillies with any luck.

Certainly different from last year with vas here now. Much more festive. We now have our tree adimiatty artificial but adding a bit of festive spirit to the place.

Hit 2500 km on the road bike yesterday. Pretty much a year since I bought it. Managed somehow to time it so I was on the storey bridge at the time.

Anyways currently back in Brisbane while we wait, which is good. surprised vas after her Yoga on Tuesday and we nipped out to Sono up at Portside Wharf for a little romantic supper. I had been wanting to go there for a while and it is always good to go out and try something new. You can only have so much Vespa Pizza. i also had a craving for some fresh seafood after the last 10 day of eating camp food. Don’t get me wrong, some of the best camp food i have had in a long time. I think partly because it is all served up, waiting for you when you come back from the rig site, but there is an awful lot of meat. Steaks for lunch, sausages for dinner, followed by meat pies for lunch and pork chops for dinner etc etc so some fresh Sushi was just what i needed. Anyways very cool place, had a huge platter of sashami to start folowed by some California rolls and Soft Shell Crab. i would have a photo but vas told me not to.

On the garden front, vas and I had an exciting trip to Bunnings to sort out the garden. My tomatos, eggplant and chillies are storming ahead. vas has done an excellent job of lookign after them while i have been a way. So i bought some terracota pots to transplant them into. It was a bit confusing as the plastic pots are about 3 dollars and the terrcotta ones are only 5 dollars and are much nicer. So thats the role for this evenign perhaps.

And i learnt about this today, Solpsism , the idea that only your mind exsists and nothing else is real.

A great video which is always worth seeing is by Hans Rosling about the Stats you have never seen. Really fascinating stuff and he also swallows a sword at the end which si also impressive. He makes the software and a lot fo data available on his website called GapMinder. So i’ve just been playing around with the data seeing what correlations there are and the like. It is always easier when someone has gone to the effort tof formatting the data so it is read properly. The number of things at work that would be interesting to investigate for correlations or patterns but is too time consuming because the data is in several different formats and needs cleaning up is pretty extensive.

I thought this graph of Total Oil consumption versus Number of Cars per 1000 people. I highlighted US, China and UK. You can see the trend from the last 5 years, america is way up at the top with their energy use but seeing China int he left hand corner shooting up with still a very slow percentage of cars per 1000 people is worrying. I know transport only accounts for 11% of fuel use ( stats that i vaguely remember might not be true) but that percentage of transport is only going to increase which i am sure is going to push that consumption even faster. What was interesting to see as well was the other countries haven’t been experiencing the same level of oil consumption growth.

The usual Energy versus GDP/Capita is also interesting to see. The UK and Japan have been able to grow their GDP per capita which out a corresponding increase in oil consumption. While the US is requiring larger and larger amounts of oil consumption for its increase in GDP. Not sure if this is perhaps because as we often hear that America is the Worlds Engine or that they are just more inefficient with it. You can see China and India playing catch up at the left hand side.   What will be interesting to see though is if the same pace can be achieved as renewables are brought into the energy mix. For much of this graph  they haven’t been a factor but going fwd it might be the case that you can continue to increase your GDP without consuming more oil. It looks a little like that has happened in Japan where you see the increase and then the leveling off. This might have coincided with them taking up nuclear energy in a large way.

One last graph, which seems to show that demand is for energy is inelastic to the price of petrol. I appreciate that not all energy demand is for petrol but i would have thought it would have had a bit of blip when prices increased.

So that has kept me a little distracted. Also read a number of SPE papers about hydraulic fracturing. making sure i have an udnerstanding of what is going on down there. Just been reading about Pressure Dependent Leak Off and Process Zone Stress and understanding which one we might encounter. Looks like PDL. This paper SPE 107971 goes into it quite a bit.

Also read a good biography relevent to the work we are doing in Australia. Called Rock Star, all about Australia’s most prominent geologist Reg Sprigg. This guy lived life at 1000 mph. It was quite amazing to read how much he was involved in here in Australia. he discovered some of the earliest fossils, developed australias first uranium mine, had interests in nickel and other metals, drove across the Simpson desert by car, basically told Santos to drillin the Copper Basin when everyone else thought it was a crack pot idea (it has now been on production for over 40 years), built up his own oil company, was a deep sea diver, made a geophysics boat and had his own nature reserve. Well worth a read really.

Not much change to take any photography here at the moment, can’t say i have seen anythign to itneresting. But it was a great drive out ehre. Really going through the bush for the last 80km or so. Only saw one wallaby though. I was drivign a massive tank of a vechile though so they probably heard me a long way off.