Lipstick on a pig

The top of the right hand column of this blog now includes a list of pages. Only two so far: the ‘about’ page that’s pretty standard, and a new entry called ‘Wii accidents’. I’ll use this to keep track of all the stoopid things we’ve managed to break, destroy or maim while playing with The Kid’s Wii.

We had a lovely mothers day yesterday. We (being me and the kids) got Lisa some rose scented mood reeds and Ainsley’s latest book. The rest of the day was spent doing very little except for an hour or two of all cooking together in the kitchen, which was great. We prepared a couple of things to take over to Lisa’s parents for an evening dinner with the Peter & Eve, Peter & Diane, Fred & Sue. There’s some photos up on SmugMug; check your URLs.

We were planning to call Mum in the UK (Hi Mum!) but by the time we got home Adelaide was almost asleep and it was getting pretty late for us. We’ll call tonight.

I’ve got 10 invites to Evernote - ping me if you’re interested.

I’ve just spent a whole weekend on an SES search and rescue training course. The weekend was all about how to search for objects and people and doing as little damage as possible in the process. We covered the way people go missing (it’s amazing how different people go missing and get lost in different ways), how to methodically search for them, how to preserve evidence at crime scenes, etc. It was a real eye opener.

Lisa did a champion job (as usual) looking after the kids and the house while I was away.

This thing is horrible.

Last night’s SES training was a little different for me. Instead of studying theory in the unit offices I got to go out on the road and do some serious damage to a couple of car wrecks that we had for training. The unit just took delivery of a “heavy rescue” hydraulic kit, which consists of a set of cutters, a set of spreaders, two hydraulic rams and a hydraulic pump that’s capable of running three things at once.

The spreaders were fairly heavy (25kg) but they’re extremely powerful. The tip is about 10mm across when they’re fully closed, but they open up to 830mm, so they’ll easily fit into the gap between a couple of bent panels and allow you to open up a door. They open and close with 25 tons of force, so a mere car lock is nothing for them. They’ll close with the same force too, so crushing a car’s roof pillar is trivial.

The cutters aren’t nearly as heavy (only about 15kg) but they’re pretty tough too. They’ll cut through metal like it isn’t there. We took the roof off two cars — first use the spreaders to crush a pillar so it’s thin and easy for the cutters to get a grip, then use the cutters to snip through the pillar like it isn’t there. We took the roof off an old Commodore and it was pretty easy. The Lancer coupe was a little tricker because it’s a two door hatchback (very wide rear pillars) but still no real trouble. With that car we cut the top and bottom of the A pillars off and took them away completely, then had two people with a crowbar at the rear of the roof while two people lifted the front of the roof and bent it over backwards.

We also tried out the new hydraulic rams we got. We used them to push the dashboard and firewall off the front of the Commodore: cut the windscreen across the bottom, cut the buttom of the A pillars off, then use the rams to push from the bottom of the B pillars to the top of the front door frames. The dashboard and firewall move forward without any trouble at all.

We got the new heavy rescue kit (like about 50 other units) because of the increasing number of heavy vehicle accidents: trucks, buses and trains. I’ve talked to a few people in our unit and car accidents are way down on what they used to be, primarily because cars these days are safer than ever. People who were in the unit 20 or 30 years ago had to deal with a lot more carnage than we do these days. If you do have to deal with an accident today it’s more likely to involve heavier vehicles and cars with higher strength doors, side impact structures, etc, hence the heavy rescue kit.

And then there were five. We’ve since lost one more, so we’re down to four.

Here’s what happened 12 months back.

You can now post video to flickr as well as photos. Not sure I like this; the flickr community is all about photography. Take your videos to youtube, please. Leave us alone.

One nice thing that has come along with video is a bump in the size of photos you can upload. It’s now 10MB per image for free accounts and 20MB per image for pro accounts. Sweet.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on the blog. I’ve been very busy with work, Lisa has been very busy (as usual) trying to keep two kids in check, and for the last week we’ve been lazing on the beach at Surfer’s Paradise. There’s some photos up on SmugMug (check your URL) and I’ll be putting some up on flickr over the next 24 hours as well.

We had a great time while we were away. We did the usual tourist thing with the theme parks (Movie World and Seaworld) but we also got to spend an evening with Uncle Bill and Aunt Cora and Bill’s daughters. Melissa cooked a wonderful dinner for us on the last night we were there.

Surfer’s Paradise was as expected: highly commercial and full of skanks and posers, but the beaches are good, the night market was good, accomodation is reasonably well priced and the climate is brilliant.

Fred and Sue stayed with us last night. They’re up here to visit family over Easter.

We had a much later night than we planned (knowing that The Kid would, of course, be up at dawn to see what the Easter Bunny left her).

Just as we were turning the lights off and getting ready to sleep we heard a couple of sirens somewhere over near town. We listened for a few seconds then heard a long screech of brakes and a loud impact. I already had my SES stuff in the car so I jumped straight in and shot up the street to see whether anyone was hurt and needed help. As it turns out, no-one in the car that crashed appeared to be hurt. In fact, they weren’t there. They’d done a runner.

The police were already at the accident scene. The car that crashed had slid for a fair time at the end of Gladstone Street and then gone through a fence, cleaning up a few poles and bushes on its way through. The engine was still running, and the driver’s door was wide open. The copper was just in the process of checking out the car and turning off the engine as we pulled up.

After checking for obvious danger (fallen power lines, etc) I went over too and looked for any signs of blood or obvious injury. Nothing. Just a wide open driver’s door and a country & western song faintly playing on the radio. It was kind of surreal in an odd way.

Anyway, not long after that a divvy van turned up and a few more rozzers got out to help look. The cop from the first car (a TOG car) said “I’m not kitted up for this“, after which one of the cops from the divvy van said “I’ve got a can of foam in the car; want that?“. They did their thing and wandered off to look for the driver (sorry, “perp”). It’s pretty obvious the sirens were them chasing him (we got there 90 seconds after the impact and the first cop was already there and out of the car) and the driver nicked off.