Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Monday morning reflections

Another series of underwater images released by The Finding Sydney Foundation have appeared online this morning. They are of a debris field containing a lot of the pieces of HMAS Sydney which were missing from the main hull, which is located further to the southeast.

There have also been sightings of shoes which belonged to the crew, but there are no images of these. Reportedly some are embedded vertically in the silt. Either toes up or toes down, it's not difficult to imagine why. A lot more images exist which haven't been released to the public Hopefully the surveyors will reconsider moves to censor the more emotive material from the public eye.

Looking out the window here, I'm inclined to say it looks like being a grey day in the Fremantle area. It's been raining during the night. However the official forecast is for a fine day.

Our house has been invaded by Indian crickets. They start up at night when we go to bed. I like crickets, but when we are trying to go to sleep they are like nature's chain saws. They stop when the lights go back on - so far they've been impossible to locate and eject into the garden.

Yesterday morning I visited the local flea market. I wanted to check out the latest potted offerings from a Vietnamese herb lady. She wasn't there, no doubt dissuaded by the wet Saturday night. There's nothing like a bit of rain to put a dampener on flea market attendance.

However I was luck in the CD department. A young couple had a table full of CDs which had been left with them a couple of years ago by a friend who had returned to England and never returned. He'd given his permission to sell them for $2 each. There was quite a bit of the sort of music I like - film soundtracks and jazz. I ended up picking out 37 titles and spent about $40, so you can see I did a good deal for a quantity purchase.

The original owner was obviously a Lena Horne fan. I already had one or two titles by her in my own collection, but now I've got eleven more. There were also three Madonna CDs. I might not have bought them except that I could see from the price sticker on the back each one of them originally cost over thirty bucks.

I was also very pleased to acquire the soundtrack CDs for A Beautiful Mind and the Cate Blanchett film Elizabeth. Yep, that is how she spells her name. There were too many other titles to mention today.

I've been spending money on eBay too. On the weekend I successfully bid $35 for a Manfrotto camera monopod. New ones cost about a hundred dollars. I've also been watching a few camera lenses which I don't need. These things start cheap, but attract a lot of bidders and eventually the price rockets. So I'm sure I won't be winning any of them, but it's interesting to watch the other bids.

What I do want/need is a Lowepro Computrecker AW (all weather) camera backpack. These retail for about $167 bucks, an amount which I don't have spare at the moment. EBay sellers in China offer them for about half that, but I suspect they are fakes. I don't want to go down that road.

We had a family lunch yesterday in respect of our twins nineteenth birthday. It seemed to go down okay. I've put some pictures of food in the "What we eat" folder in my Picasa site. Otherwise, click the image below:

What we
eat

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!