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Wednesday, 8 March 2006 - International Sheila's Day

I saw this dude with the cool Mini again today. Last time I saw it I could only get a low-quality shot with my cell phone. This thing has a good-sounding audio setup too hehe.		From old to new. This was taken at the Brisbane International Motor Show on Sunday - nice.
Well today was apparently International Sheila's Day.		And by the look of it they all sat round and had a big feminine gossip. Typical ;) I don't know of any International Blokes Day but if there were I would imagine there would be large quantities of beer involved, and lingerie models.

Saturday, 11 March 2006 - St. Patrick's Day (kind of)

Although St. Pat's Day isn't until the 17th, Brisbane held a St. Patrick's Day parade today from the city centre through to Fortitude Valley (a.k.a. The Valley). I don't really own anything green that I could wear but oh well :)		The parade was only a half-hour effort but was full of all sorts of Irish-related goodies including Irish sports clubs...
Brass bands...		Bagpipes...
Old convertibles...		New convertibles...
An Irish Mr. Whip-Me (Whippy)...		This 15-tonne steam engine that limped and chugged its way past (it had an impressively-loud horn!)...
Shetland Ponies...		And these two, who don't look very Irish to me other than being the same colour as Guinness.
Yup, it was a jolly fun morning enjoyed by all :) Then the heavens opened and it pissed with rain. Quite convenient, I felt.

Come night it was off to Suncorp Stadium again for another round of Super 14...		...And another round of the Red's smutty cheerleaders. Yeah! ;)
Tonight's opposition was one of two new teams in this competition - the Western Force from Western Australia.		It didn't take too long - five minutes in fact - before the biffo started! Over the course of the 80 minutes at least four big fights broke out hahaha - love it!
Long story short, both teams played like schoolgirls but the Reds managed to come out 29-18 after being 3-18 down at half-time to take their first win of the competition (leaving the Force still without a win so far).		I think I was on the telly again too. This cameraman was looking in our direction virtually all night. Good thing I'd done my hair.

Friday, 17 March 2006 - St. Patrick's Day (for real)

Yup, today is St. Patrick's Day! We were drowned in the cacophony of bagpipes...
We got pissed after work (or during work in my case)...		And we drove our Fords up the arse of the car in front. Beautiful! Happy St. Pat's day :)

Monday, 20 March 2006 - Cyclone Larry
Tropical Cyclone Larry, forecast since the middle of last week, hit Australia's North Queesland coast just south of Cairns in a town called Innisfail (some 1600kms north of Brisbane) at around 7am this morning in the form of a category-5 monster. Pumping out gusts of around 300km/h, Larry all but destroyed everything in its 100km-wide path. In Innisfail, over 300 houses are roofless, and one in three have been totalled. I managed to get in contact with a friend in Cairns at around lunch time, and yeah - it sounded pretty bad (bear in mind Hurricane Katrina in the US was also a category-5 storm). Unfortunately, she couldn't get me any first-hand photos so I had to flog some from a news website. Dirty Larry has since been downgraded to a category-1 pussy as it continues to head west over land. Meanwhile, the weather down here in Bris-vegas is its typical balmy 30-degree, sunny self.

Welcome to Cairns.
"Oh goddamn it - there go the dozen pork chops I was having for dinner!"

Tuesday, 21 March 2006 - The aftermath
Well apparently I won't be eating bananas for a while - around nine months in fact. Far north Queensland has (or had) a lot of banana, avocado, corn, and sugar crops, and Cyclone Larry wrote the whole lot off (the bananas alone accounting for almost 90% of Aussie's banana industry)! So that's left farmers in financial ruin, some 4,000 people out of work, and me with no bananas (I do enjoy a good banana ). Basically the area is an absolute shambles with early estimates placing the damage bill at the $1 billion mark!

Surf's up.		Ahh geez, what's a country bloke supposed to do for 'brekky' now? (Burger King for breakfast - that's just wrong!)
The worst-hit areas are expected to be without power for over a week after uprooted trees brought down lines all over the show.		"Has anyone seen my Ford?"

Wednesday, 22 March 2006 - More aftermath

I know this is the third day on the trot I've had a good bang about Cyclone Larry, but some of these photos doing the news rounds are pretty incredible!
My humble abode.
The rains that followed the storm created flooding in a few places, and in north Queensland, with flooding comes crocs swimming up and down the street hehe.
There go my bananas!

Saturday, 25 March 2006 - My big day, in Inala!
Once again I was hoping to be able to take the bike up to Noosa today, but for the last two days another cyclone has been moving south, parallel to the Queensland coast, and although it's some way offshore I don't want to take any risk of getting stuck in crap weather for a 120km ride. So instead I went for a random 50km meander down around some of Brisbane's southern suburbs.

Once I got to a point I'd never been before and started exploring, I got pretty lost. Not quite as lost as this guy though, he passed me no less than 5 or 6 times (looking for a wedding party I assume) before finally giving up and asking me for directions to some street (I was little help of course hehe).		Eventually I stumbled into somewhere I didn't really want to be - Inala. Inala really is the anus of Brisbane. It looks like Innisfail after Cyclone Larry! I hear about this suburb on the news on almost a weekly basis, and not for good reasons. Last week an elderly lady had her house broken into and her purse stolen while she was home, the week before it was some random and unprovoked bashing, and yeah - Inala.
I figured since I was here I would take a (hasty) look around. While here I was chased by a dog, a magpie, and I noticed I was getting glared at by every person that drove past me in the opposite direction - and not the sort of glare that says, "Hi, welcome to Inala!", they were more like, "Ooo a honkie on a shiny red bike, I wonder what's in his backpack." Incidentally, this is apparently the new Inala hotel. I'd hate to see the old one!
Inala's family vehicle of choice. Check out this quote from OurBrisbane.com: "What I like most about Inala is its diversity and multiculturalism. Inala has blended and embraced many cultures from Vietnamese to Samoan." Ha! What I liked most about it was leaving (in one piece)!		The sky began to look as though it was about to douse me in the wet stuff so I decided to leave the class of Inala for home. Eventually it did start to douse me so I got a train the rest of the way, and something made me feel like steak for tea ;)

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