Well, it’s been yet another month since my last update (time REALLY flies….) so here you go!
A few weeks ago Timmy, Jami, and Anna kindly invited me to their place for the evening. I took along some of the homebrew we’ve made and the girls cooked some really nice food. Was good to catch up with them as I don’t get to see them in person so much since Timmy moved out. I still see Tim a lot online though 
Lucy came to visit! She arrived the first Saturday in September and stayed at our house through until Wednesday morning. Was really good to see her. We went out for curry, steak, and icecream. Unfortunately I couldn’t really take any time off from the lab so she had to entertain herself during the day, but I think she had a good taste of Brisbane before she carried on her travels to Canberra. I will make sure I meet up with her again back in England sometime over Christmas.
Other weekend activities have included seeing the Brisbane Broncos play at home twice. I seem to have broken my curse and can now happily say I have seen them win two out of the four games I have attended. Before one of the games we grabbed some dinner at a nearby pizzeria called Arrivederci’s, which I can highly recommend. They sell pizza BY THE METRE! It’s awesome. We’ve also continued with our homebrewing. We’re now up to six different brews and I can say with confidence that the first three are incredibly good. On that note, I actually spent a lot of last weekend putting together an online notebook for the brewing. We were getting pretty bad with keeping track of what ingredients had gone into which beer, etc, etc, so this should help us figure out what works and what doesn’t. That way, when something is especially good, we can always try and make it again in the future! The notebook (which wont be very interesting for most I guess…) can be found here.
A couple of weekends ago was the Brisbane River Fire festival. The main event for this involves a 30 minute fireworks display, punctuated by RAAF fighter jets that perform a “dump and burn” fly over, where the jets dump their fuel and set fire to it as they fly past. It’s an incredibly impressive display and costs nothing at all. A few of us went to the cinema (District 9, interesting movie) and for some food before sauntering over to the river to watch. I think almost as impressive as the fighter jets doing there thing were the “shaped” fireworks. Some of the explosions were in the shape of a heart or a smiley face, and at one point made up the numbers “5” “0” to denote 50 years of… something or other. I’ve never seen that before, very clever and very impressive. The next day Ben & Tilly hosted one of their classic BBQs. Was good to see a bunch of the Stanthorpe crew again and the spread of provided salads and snacks was as good as ever
That’s about it for now. Work in the lab has been pretty standard. Tutoring has been going okay, although I’ve realised that with marking comes the pressure of defending your marking to… er… “confused” students who want to know why they didn’t get full marks. Some of the papers i’ve authored / helped work on have also come out now – check out the chemistry page for some links to the abstracts and a link to one of the papers itself.
Getting excited about coming home for Christmas. I can’t wait to see everyone! Make sure you all keep a day or two free to meet up with me and have a beer somewhere