First Sydney FC home game of the season

Saturday night was the first Sydney FC home game for the season. A lovely warm afternoon and 35,000 people packing the stadium. Given the last home game last season had around 7,000, it was a very different experience having that many people around. We're used to spreading out across a dozen seats with the kids and all our kid equipment. Not so this time, very few empty seats. We couldn't even force our way into our usual spots in The Cove it was so jammed with people.

I spent the second half of the game walking Ruby around with a pram to get her to sleep. She slept through Del Piero's amazing free kick goal and resulting pandemonium. The view from higher up was quite a bit better anyway, as you can see from my photos.

Gonna be an exciting season if Sydney can get their shit together. We looked good in the last 20 minutes but were pretty poor the rest of the time.

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Happy Birthday Louis

Louis is 3 today. It's gone so fast and he's grown into such a delightful boy. Beautiful day of presents then beach.

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Ahhh democracy

Spent the morning handing out for The Greens in Marrickville. The powers wielded by local government are quite incredible. According to one old Greek lady, since the Greens came in she's had to pay someone to empty her gutters of leaves, because a Green council likes trees or something.

And if you've been listening to nothing-dodgy-at-all-oh-no local "Independent" crypto-Tory candidates Vic Macri and Morris Hanna, the Greens policy is to have 24 hour, cycle-thru brothels and injection rooms on every street. Sounds like a nice little piece of small business, which is supposedly what those two are all about.

The genuine Tories even managed to find some local supporters to hand out for them this time around, amazingly. Will probably take their votes from zero to the dizzying tens.

Labor volunteers are generally quite nice, deluded lefties who think they belong to a left-wing party. Interesting interplay when the candidate, Sam Iskandar, visited the booth and pointedly ignored the two volunteers. Different factions or something?

Ahhh democracy. Fortunately most of the people are lovely, and it was rather pleasant once the sun rose over the church and we could thaw a bit.
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Let's put the people smugglers out of business

Clive Palmer has a knack for making statements that get him loads of publicity. This time around he's said something really sensible. ABC reports:
"If a family wishes to fly to Australia and they don't have a visa and can safely fly, the Australian government should instruct airlines to allow them to board," he said in a statement.

I say we take this even further and put them out of business by undercutting them. Allow anyone, no matter what passport they hold, to fly to Australia on payment of a $5,000 bond. If they're issued with a visa on arrival, they get their money back. Otherwise, profit!

Depressing to be an Australian at the moment

Our heartlessness has sunk to new lows. It makes me ashamed to be Australian.

And Labor, what a bunch of political halfwits. If they think adopting the Opposition's position is going to win votes, they are even dumber than I thought. Anyone who supports this is likely already voting Liberal and probably believes the Carbon Tax Ate My Baby stories the Tory media keeps running.

Wilkie and Bandt, I salute you.

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In which our garden gets sorted out

When we first moved in, I built some garden beds with sleepers lying at the back of the garden. I also made the rather stupid decision to have one of the beds jutting out into the yard. That dramatically reduced the usable space we had, though it did give us a good amount of growing beds for veggies.

With the sale of my rumble.net domain, we took the plunge on professionals to sort it out. Properly built garden beds. A little patch of grass. Flat and level paving. It's brilliant and feels like a whole new garden. Looking forward to Summer when we can enjoy it. This weekend: planting out!

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