This is the blog of a Norwegian (Marianne, aka 'M') who moved to Australia in 2007 to be with Roger (aka R) and feels lucky to have escaped a comparatively communistic country with ridiculous weather!

Don't forget, when Germany wanted change they got Hitler.

- Spoken by a Usatian about why she is voting Republican -

Thus is the intelligence of Republican voters....

Obama won the election. Yay:) Our news even announced it as "good news" which shows how the country feels about McCain. It was funny:)

In a Usatian forum, I just found this statement:

Welcome to Socialist Hippy America. Now we can watch the country crash and burn.

Spoken by a typical republican who thinks change is bad and socialism = communism, and the same person also announced that they are leaving the country. How mature.

I don't really know much about Taiwan.. but I really like Thai food.

- Comment made by a Usatian on the Amazing Race -

We went to a barbecue at our friend J's place on Sunday. He moved in a few weeks ago, and the property has a big garden with an aviary in it. When J moved in, it was full of budgies. The owner of the house came and picked up all the budgies, except two. Why they decided to leave them is unknown. But they promised to come back and pick them up.

That was weeks ago, and nothing has happened. J informed us that they were running out of food and water, and he was looking for someone to take them off his hands.

R and I went to inspect them, and didn't find any food or water anywhere. The door had a big padlock on it, but getting the door open was a simple matter of undoing a couple of screws, so why they bothered with the big padlock I don't know. We filled up their water, and informed J that we would take them.

On the way home we stopped and bought some bird seeds to give to J so he could feed them until we were able to pick them up. (Birds have really fast metabolisms and shouldn't go without food for very long.)

On Monday we went to the nearest pet store to look for a suitable cage, but they didn't have anything. We then didn't get another opportunity to stop by a pet store until yesterday. But they had what we needed, and we also bought a couple of toys to go in the cage.

Later in the afternoon we went by J's place and he caught them for us and we brought them home. So I am now the proud of owner of two very pretty budgies:)

They were very freaked out last night and huddled in a corner together, but today they are moving around and making noise:)





Edit: We originally thought they were two females, but it has turned out they are male and female. It has also turned out that they have both internal and external parasites, which they will need to be treated for.

They are settling in quite well, considering they're not used to being inside nor around humans.

The cage we got for the birds seemed a bit small, so R suggested getting another identical cage and merging the two.

This turned out to be a very good idea. A cage which is twice as big as the one we got costs $160. Getting two of the small ones costs $90. So we got $160 worth of cage space for $90.

And now the birdies have heaps of room to move and fly around. They also got heaps of new toys.

Here's the old setup:


And here's the new one:


Much better:)

Thunderstorms are quite common here in summer. We get them up to several times a week, and we are just a little too far north to get all the bad stuff they get in and around the city, like hail the size of golfballs. The storms have usually nearly fizzled out by the time they reach us. We get a bit of lightning, lots of rain and flickering lights. Usually nothing dramatic.

Yesterday was kinda hot and humid, and that usually means we get a storm. We heard the rumours of yesterday's storm long before it reached us, as it had caused a lot of damage further south. But as usual, it wasn't too bad once it reached us. We got more rain than usual, and the road was flooding, but other than that nothing special.

It had nearly passed over us when the power went out at 5:15. This is quite common, and we expected it to be back on within minutes. But an hour came and went, and still no power. We decided to go out and get dinner, because sitting around at home with no power was really boring, and we expected the power to be back on by the time we got home. But it wasn't. So we went for a drive around Redcliffe and then Brisbane. It was past 11 when we got home, and still no power.

We had slept in that morning, so there was no point going to bed because we wouldn't be able to sleep anyway, so we thought we might as well stay up until the power came back on. We sat around playing with candles and matches until about 1:30, when the lights flickered and then came on for about a minute before it was gone again. We then figured they were working on it and the power would be back shortly, so we went to bed, discussing how utterly ridiculous it was that the power had been gone so long. (Lazy Energex people!)

R found his battery powered radio and lay in bed listening to it. I fell asleep, but when I woke up a couple hours later R told me they'd said the power was likely to be gone until some time in the afternoon.

We got up at 8:30 and I tended to the fish tanks. Without working filters they get low in oxygen and toxins start to build up in the water, so they needed some attention.

At 9:15 the power finally came back on, after having been gone for 16 hours. R said he's never known the power to be gone for more than an hour, and after the last storm a couple weeks ago we heard it was gone in some areas for 6 hours, which we thought was a ridiculous amount of time.

We were finally able to get back online and could check on the damage. I found this article:

Energex workers were this morning still working to restore power to more than 103,000 homes and businesses, but the supply might not be reconnected until the afternoon due to the extent of the damage. (...) "It's the worst storm we've recorded on the network in at least a decade, if not back to 1985," Mr Donald said. (...) Some areas in the northwestern Brisbane suburbs of Albany Creek, Ferny Grove and The Gap were described as looking like a "war zone" after roofing iron was torn from homes and thrown into the 33,000-volt network.

Under the circumstances I guess we can be understanding of how long it took to get the power back...

We got some cool photos:)

Storm front moving towards us:

Lightning:

Cool looking clouds:

Under the storm front, still blue sky in front of it:

Darkest area of the storm:

And then it started to rain:

Click images for bigger versions.

Edit: The article I linked to above has been changed, and now says:

BRISBANE has been declared a natural disaster area, as soldiers help repair damage caused by one of the biggest storms to hit the city in two decades.

A couple of days ago I was out with the bestest boyfriend in the world, and after we had been to the post office R decided he was hungry and wanted to get some KFC.

So we went across the road, and pulled into the car park. As we were driving through, we noticed an identical car to R's, which is very unusual because R's has a full body kit on it:



We drove past her, and she backed out. R kept an eye on her and drove slowly to do so, and said "she's following us" and she was - she then followed us through the car park to where we ended up parking, which we thought was a bit weird.

We got out after parking, and she pulled up behind us and was walking towards us, and greeted us with 'our cars are twins!' and R said 'yeah' with a grin. She then proceeded to explain that she stopped because she had a problem with the sunroof on hers, and wanted to know if we had the same problem, as she'd been told it was very common.

We didn't have the problem and we inspected hers and ours to confirm. We chatted for a while and she told us how it would cost over $800 to get the sunroof repaired, and she had some panel damage at the front and back as well that she wanted to get fixed. She also said there was an issue with the headlights etc etc. R told her he had had no problems whatsoever with his.

He then mentioned that he was thinking of selling it. This got her thinking that she could sell hers, and buy R's and it would cost her less than to get hers all fixed up, plus R's is a better model (ZR as opposed to SX) and his interior trim was accented red instead of blue, and she preferred the red.

So to cut a long story short, we swapped names and numbers and drove off. R said that even tho he was wanting to sell it, he probably wouldn't have simply because it was too much bother and trouble to advertise etc, so the fact that the sale just fell into his lap was weird.

This is how Aussies behave towards each other. It's perfectly normal and acceptable to walk up to complete strangers and start a conversation with them like you've known them forever. it happens all the time, in the supermarket, the chinese takeaway, anywhere. I like it:)

We are planning to get a Prius once we sell the Celica. We both think Priuses are very cool cars, and it's an automatic which means I'll finally be able to drive myself when I wanna go somewhere. The Celica has sports car gears, which I don't like and it's nearly impossible to concentrate on driving on the left while changing difficult gears with the left hand.

The insurance bill for Brisbane's storm damage is likely to exceed $25 million, a major insurer says. (...) Four thousand homes were damaged, including 300 with serious damage and 30 rendered unliveable. (...) Energex is still working to reconnect power to tens of thousands of Brisbane homes, a task made more urgent because residents in The Gap, Enoggera, Mt Coot-tha and parts of Keperra have been told to boil drinking water, after storm damage tainted their water supply.

Article.

The article links to a map which shows the areas with severe damage, and we are right inbetween them:


I guess we can feel quite lucky that the worst of it bypassed us completely. We just got a bit of rain...

Because this is kind of a big deal here, I decided to tell my dad about it. I thought he might read it or hear it on the news, and might be worried. So I checked the Norwegian news sites, but it wasn't mentioned anywhere. So I thought maybe the news would just need a few hours to reach Norway, and sent my dad a link to the Aussie news article on it instead.

Today I checked the Norry news again, and it's still not mentioned at all. So I thought maybe the news hasn't reached Europe at all, and checked the BBC site, but there it was pretty obviously in the world news, with a video.

I'm sure if it had happened in Usa it would have been on the Norry news within an hour (like the fire in California is), but because Australia isn't Usa, no one cares.

And what's with Norry news sites mixing national news and international news? On every other news site I've ever been to, you can click to see national or world news, but on the norry sites, you have one page of recent news where national and world is mixed completely randomly, and I couldn't find anywhere to click to sort them. Weird, annoying and chaotic.

We got another storm last night, but there wasn't a lot of lightning and only a little bit of rain. I commented to R that it was a 'mini storm' and we didn't expect anything bad to happen.

But once again I got up to find that it was very bad...

Another major storm has battered southeast Queensland, with reports of flooding, evacuations and power blackouts. Brisbane, the Lockyer Valley and the Gold Coast and its hinterland all took a hammering - even as the clean-up continued from Sunday's destructive storm. The floods have been described as the worst since 1974, with major highways and suburban roads impassable, train lines cut and emergency services telling people not to travel unless it is absolutely essential.

Read the article here and another one here.

Again the worst of it didn't come near us. I think this is a good place to live....

Earlier tonight we were hit by a third storm:

Early reports had 20 homes with roof damage and up to 100 homes were left storm damaged, the spokesman said.

But once again it passed by our place without doing any damage. We got a lot of lightning, but it only rained for about 10 minutes and then it all started to clear up, so it seems we only got the very edge of the storm.

R got some nice photos:

And a cool video which R did after it stopped raining and the storm had nearly passed us:

It shows how the lightning and rumbling is constant and covers the whole sky, which I think is rather cool:)

Last night R heard noises from the garden and went to investigate. It turned out Odo had cornered a green tree frog, and the frog squealed every time Odo touched it. This luckily meant that Odo kept a safe distance from it, but was sitting there staring at it, and we decided to remove Odo from the situation and put the frog somewhere safe.

We didn't really know what it was doing in this area, as there is no water and not many trees. We googled it and found that its natural habitat does indeed include water and trees, so we decided to put it in a container and take it to a small pond in the nearby bush area.

But first we had to take some photos:





Once released it hopped off happily, and was lucky enough to escape its cat encounter unharmed.

R showed me some interesting articles today.

This one about the water cure is particularly interesting:

some years later, I had to give two glasses of water to a person who was doubled up in abdominal pain from his disease, because I had no other medication to give him at that moment. And he was in excruciating pain, and water performed miraculous relief for him. It gave him relief -- within three minutes his pain diminished, and within eight minutes it disappeared completely

Because everyone assumes that AIDS is actually a viral disease, which is a fraudulent statement by those people who presented it, because the human body is the product of many, many years of having fought various viral diseases, and has survived. (...) ...I have shown in fact that AIDS is a metabolic problem, when the body begins to cannibalize its own tissue because of certain missing elements in the raw materials that it receives through food or beverages, and the body of a person who gets AIDS, actually, is short of quite a number of building block amino acids.

Then there's this one about mammograms and breast cancer:

Breast cancer rates increased significantly in four Norwegian counties after women there began getting mammograms every two years. In fact, according to background information in the study, the start of screening mammography programs throughout Europe has been associated with increased incidence of breast cancer.

And lastly, about weight gain and eating too quickly:

A study just published in the British Medical Journal concludes that eating too quickly and until you feel full triples the odds you'll be fat. In fact, the research suggests food that is literally “fast” – grabbed often on the run and eaten until you feel totally stuffed – could be contributing to the world-wide obesity epidemic.

A new study predicts the world's coral reef systems, including Queensland's Great Barrier Reef, could collapse within 30 years if the effects of global warming are not reversed. The study says the Barrier Reef will be one of the first casualties as oceans become too acidic for coral reefs to grow because of carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels by humans.

Article.

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, Aussies are a bit tougher than most other people... Here is another good example:

A Northern Territory man has been making his five-year-old son walk two-and-a-half hours to school every day, after he was kicked off the school bus.

It has been suggested making this guy 'father of the year'.

I can only imagine the outcry and police investigation if someone did this in Europe...