Beach Clean No 956

 It is my first beach walk with the rubbish bag this year.  At the height of Summer and school holidays you can expect plenty of junk.  When you see beaches on those you tube shows like Catch&Cook, way up at the top of OZ and see the amounts of  stuff washed up, then this beach would be considered spotless. I did get a full bag but mostly that was a bulky dress.  There were lots of butts and small plastics but no deliberate bottles or cans.  The big item was a section of orange tubing with jaggered ends. Otherwise a pretty clean beach this time around.  The high tides are cycling thru to late afternoon at the moment but if the Sun comes out I might try it then.  

Memoirs

 I got Debbie to the Gull bus around 7:00am so she should be up in Brisbane by now.  The rain has been steady today, so time to start the next scanning project. Debbie has been sorting Beryl's papers amongst everything else but rather than wait for a complete set she has given me the first volume and it is a whopper. I looked at some of this last year with a view to running them through an Optical Character Recognition program but the one's I have are old and produce that other language, gibberish.  I am using a sheet feed scanner to reproduce an exact digital copy, as a PDF file of all these pages.  There is an OCR extension you can get by subscribing to Adobe, that will most likely produce a fair, typed, searchable document, if we want to spend the money. In the meantime I have attached one short piece as an example of how they will turn out.

The written pages are mostly foolscap so far, with a date starting 1985.  Some are flimsy and tattered but the scanner is passing multiple pages ok, so that means the output folder will have multipage documents instead of single page files. 

Open at Page One

Armstrong Creek

 Twenty four yar ago when we first drove down to checkout Collendina as a beach location, a lot of the lesser roads were just your country type roads bordered by fields. That was your Barwon Heads road. We used to take it to get to the only picture theatre around at Waurn Ponds.  We rode from Geelong waterfront this morning to Armstrong Creek. along the same now unrecognisable road. Dual carriageway in parts with a bicycle lane all the way. The ride was 35km (I was hoping for 40km). We have switched to the road bikes and the going seems better with thinner tyres.We covered a lot of the Cadel route and stopped at said creek for coffee which was the slowest ever and more expensive than the coffees we got in a paddock last week.  We got back to Geelong waterfront for fish and chips on the beach. Now I can't remember when that happened last.  The water there is surprisingly deep in a short distance, although it was high tide.  It was good to revisit but there were a lot of seadoos, teenagers and yachts.

the biggest hill is getting out of geelong

ready for a new subdivision

This area filled up quick

Someone has to carry the drinks

Queenie & Peanut

 These days it is frowned on to have animals at the Circus.  Not sure if it is too different from a zoo. I guess zoo animals are not performing but are just observed.  In any case we took Asher to a Circus inside the State Theatre.  They spent the first hour putting up the tent and the second hour they were in their costumes for the show.  Asher was the perfect age to be amazed by all the action.  It was a big day with trains to and fro as well as lunch while floating on the Yarra.  The customary side shows were there and trapeze artists but the highlight was the elephants.  Altogether there were 7 puppeteers for two elephants all while Asher had the best view from her booster seat.

Fish Fun

 I am still playing catchup and trying to workout the best way to edit Gopro media without further subscribing to their editing/cloud/storage setup.  I have two clips which I will leave separate as they take an age to load into the cheap editor. I do have another editor but that will have to wait as I have an appointment with an elephant today. This video is of a higher quality which is also why it takes longer to load. The pattern of the Sun ripples across the sandy bottom is striking.

Hero 10

 I have unpacked the new GoPro, set it up and installed the Quik app on my phone.  The last GoPro I had got a corroded door and the replacement was a cheap one that let in water. So I wont be getting cheap parts again.  This one I got for $0 via a reward points scheme. Hooray.  The design is completely different compared to the one I had five yar ago. Sound is improved as there are three microphones on there and unloading media is via wifi onto your phone.  I still need to get it to my computer though.  I took it out at high tide at high noon.  It has worked well as I have viewed, a school of fish hiding in a cave,  a ray gliding out of the grass and a rather large ugly toad fish. Apparently toad fish are poopooed but they are native and are the bays clean up fish.  My videos are running a day behind again.

Video Catchup

 What to do when it is constant rain. I have bike rides, New Years and snorkel films all in different array. Also I broke off a chunk of tooth last night which is a botheration.  So I am sitting quietly as I think I have exposed a nerve to the elements.  I have squeezed an appointment without notice from the dentist.  In the meantime I am grappling with underwater video. We recently went out to the reef but used Debbie's phone for some filming. We have done this before and part way thru it went out of focus.  The same thing happened this time but if you take it above surface it focuses then below gets fuzzy again.  As it turns out a brand new Gopro has arrived this morning (a freebie) so I will do it all over again if I can get the weather conditions right.  Also I have a short clip from the Queenscliff outing last Friday.  This is from the video camera but I always have to dumb down the quality to show clips here.