In the morning it rained, rained, then rained some more. Garden nicely soaked, and even the bits of the back lawn that have been bare are (touch wood) starting to grow back.

It conveniently stopped just before 11, when I had to go out.

The kids and I strolled down to the shops, bought fruit and bagels that were so fresh the Glicks lady advised us to leave the bag open at the top.

We mucked around with the computers and played video games. I finally won that tricky race in PGR2.

We ate those fresh bagels for lunch.

We played some more video games.

For some exercise we got the bikes out for a short ride down to (and around) the park. Jeremy has now truly mastered two-wheeled riding, and was so enthusiastic he did eleven laps of the oval.

We all sat and watched an episode of Doctor Who together. With Daleks in it.

I walked the kids back to their mum’s place and marvelled at the spectacular orange in the western sky.

In the supermarket, half the customers were singing and/or dancing along to American Pie (it’s a clichéd classic hit, but undeniably catchy), I didn’t have to queue at all at the checkout, and the checkout chick may have worked out I was carrying the shopping home, and actually swapped things around in my two green bags so they balanced. Or maybe she was just putting all the cold stuff together.

If it hadn’t been for the Cats losing, the general poor quality of my footy tipping, and me losing my temper at one point due to a computer playing up, it might have been the perfect Sunday; we could all do with more of these kinds of days.

(Marita might beg to differ, having spent much of the day writing an essay.)

Some great quotes from Lorraine Sommerfield in The Hamilton Spectator, Canada, on walking:

“I watch people drive their children to every sport imaginable, to make sure they’re getting enough exercise. We’re idiots.”

“Start walking to the gym — or perhaps instead of the gym.”

“I don’t need to run out and buy a hybrid car out of guilt. … I can certainly hang up the keys more often and probably achieve the same effect.”

In this spirit, a Sunday or two ago I took the kids to the Diamond Valley Railway, without the car. Out in the boondocks of Melbourne, where the bush meets the city. And it’s not near any (real) train lines, either.

“Right, that’s it”, I can hear you saying. “Bowen’s gone mad. Clearly flipped. This whole clean travel thing has got totally out of hand. Exploring Lower Eltham without a car, with the kids, on a Sunday? He’s crazy.”

But no. It just took some research: figuring out which buses running on Sundays went close to the destination (there’s two of them) and which railway stations they connect to and at what times. With my advocacy hat on, my assessment was that all in all the standard of public transport service out there is pretty damn crap, with each of the two bus routes only running about every two hours. Appalling, really. It may not be a high-density area, but it certainly has heaps of car traffic.

But I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the level of fitness of the kids and myself, and the fact that simply doing more walking can help that a lot. And the continuing quest to teach them how to navigate the city under their own steam. Along with the usual stuff about travelling cleanly (and cheaply). So with my PT-martyr hat on, that’s the plan we went with.

And you know what? Having done the prep work, it all went very smoothly. All combined, the buses were about every half-hour, and not too bad at meeting up with the trains. Everything showed up when expected, we got a bit of walking done, and a lot more talking than when driving, I got to see the scenery on the way rather than watching the road, we got to breathe in the fresh(ish) air out there, and made good use of our cheapie $2.50 Sunday Saver tickets (and my Yearly). Try doing Bentleigh to Eltham and back on $5 of petrol.

And the Diamond Valley Railway itself? It’s the biggest miniature (if that makes sense) railway in Victoria, and I’m guessing probably ranks as one of the biggest in the country. Heaps of people were there (some fighting over parking spaces), but with lots of trains running, the queues moved pretty quickly. $3 a go is pretty good value for such a lengthy ride (15-20 minutes), and the kids were kept thoroughly entertained, with tunnels, bridges, signals, junctions, and of course the trains themselves.

(If it’s not showing up in your RSS aggregator, click here to see the video.)

Really, having 20-30 people being hauled along by a miniature steam (or diesel) engine along a 7 1/4 inch gauge track really is a marvel of mechanics.

Thoroughly recommended — no matter how you get there.

It’s ANZAC Day, and time to pause and reflect on the sacrifices made by our forebears.

Hardly the time to be thinking about money. But due to a set of circumstances last week that saw my bank balance drained to close to zero — something that hasn’t happened in quite some time — I have been thinking about money. There are times, when I look at my household finances, that I ponder the wisdom of having taken on a mortgage. Then I read the reports about how the house prices in my suburb (and in all the areas nearby) are going through the stratosphere, and feel a little better about it.

“Bentleigh and East Bentleigh continued on their extraordinary way with strong competition fuelled by buyers forced out of more expensive inner and bayside areas.” — Age 19 Feb 2007

And when I listen to the sound of my wondrous dishwasher doing its work for me, and I feel a lot better about it. I love my dishwasher. And my house.

But it’s undeniably true that the mortgage has made an impact on the money flows. Recently I looked through my spending for the first three months of this year, and as you can see from the graph below, the house certainly does dominate.

(Trust me, you don’t want to know how many actual dollars that big blue tower represents.)

What’s the deal with those little car licence plates? Particularly on big cars which have plenty of space for normal licence plates. I seem to see them a lot on SS Commodores and 4WDs.

Surely the point of licence plates is to make cars easily identifiable, in which case allowing smaller plates where they’re not needed makes no sense. I can understand why cars with a smaller spot for the plates might need them (judging from the VicRoads web site they came about because of this being the case with some European models) but why on bigger cars?

Is a small plate on a big car a sign that the driver wants more stylish, minimalist plates, or thinks they stand less of a chance of their number being noted/photographed if they drive like an idiot? Hopefully camera and character recognition technology is such that it doesn’t really matter.

Good numbers, considering it had poured with rain a couple of hours earlier.

Human sign, as seen from ABC helicopter. Channel 7 also sent a chopper. We were on the A in “Climate”, where the cross-bar thingy meets the right hand side.

Shot after the sign. They reckon about 2500 people turned up in all, which is not bad given it was organised by a local group.

The ABC helicopter passes-by low over the water.

If you’re worried about climate change, and the glacial (!) rate government is addressing it… and you’re in Melbourne, try this: on Sunday morning the Bayside Climate Change Group are getting together people for a human sign on Sandringham beach at 10am, to say “HALT CLIMATE CHANGE NOW!”

(I’m assuming the team co-ordinating don’t all have dyslexia, or we might end up with “A MECHANICAL WELT THONG!” or “A GALACTIC MENTHOL WHEN?” something.)

It’s just near the station and there’ll be extra trains to help people get down there without driving. Various media etc will be in attendance, naturally, to highlight the crowd’s efforts. After the sign there’ll be an expo with displays and so on to find out more.

More info: Bayside Climate Change Group / PTUA / Metlink

From the Daniel’s been playing around with web stuff in his copious spare time and trying to learn PHP and here’s a blatant plug department:

You know how sometimes you go to the cinema and you can’t remember which membership card you need to show to get the discount? Is it the RACV card? Or some other card? Does the cinema around the corner give a bigger discount? And what’s that deal to get cheap train tickets? Or if I’m going sightseeing in Sydney, is there a discount for the Sydney Tower?

www.findmydiscounts.com (Alpha)

See what you think… Is it useful? Would you use it? Leave a comment here…

Yeah it mostly concentrates on AU/Vic at the moment, but if you know of other cards that give discounts (anywhere in AU for now), email …

And tell your friends if you think they’d like it.

There’s not much you can say about the tragic events at Virginia Tech yesterday. Just terrible, awful stuff.

But I would note this: After Australia’s Port Arthur massacre in 1996, the State and Federal governments moved to ban a large number of weapons, and tighten controls on others. Since then, there has been no mass shootings in Australia (though the Monash shootings, killing 2, might have been the next had bystanders not intervened).

Sadly it seems such a solution in the USA is impossible — both in political and practical terms.