Me & Mom on Kangaroo Point, my actual building in the far background:
Bats on Indoorpilly Island... These flying foxes take flight every night to go find fruit, they have wingspans of over a metre:

More pics

Me at Rainbow Beach on the edge of the sandblow:

Massages at the market, why not:
Chicks on the beach in Coolum:Gold Coast girl on the beach, what's that peaking out:
Frank on Mount Coolum Golf Course:

Week in Coolum with the fam

As you know, I recently had my mom & Frank and Aunt & Uncle in town visiting. When they were each here on their own they stayed with me at my place in Brisbane, but when they were here at the same time we rented a beach house in Coolum, which is about an hour north of Brissie on the Sunshine Coast. Here are some pics of that week.

Loading the board on the mini-van:

Fam in Coolum:

Frank's big catch while deep-sea fishing:

Me playing lawn bowls... I beat this guy 10-9 for a beer. He beat me the game before when we were playing for a punch in the face.

Rainbow Beach sandblow, I'm in the orange: Mom & Frank at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary:
Me and mom at the Ashes (Australia vs England):
Video of me surfing.... Thanks for the commentary mom & Frank:


More to come...

The end of the chapter

"I've seen your face a hundred times
Everyday we've been apart
I dont care about the sunshine, yeah
cause mama, mama, I'm coming home"

It's official, my last day of work on the PNG Gas/LNG Project is the 15th of December. KBR has requested that I be made available for a new project in the new year and neither me, Exxon, or Eos has put up a fight. KBR doesn't know what project I'm going to yet, but they have a few options. Right now it's sitting at around 50% Qatar via London, 25% Nigeria, and 25% somewhere else... but this changes daily. I'm hoping for the London and Qatar option... It would be about a year in London and then a year or two in Qatar engineering and constructing a GTL plant for Shell.

The plan right now is to get ready to leave Australia... I have a flight from Brisbane to Calgary (via Sydney & Vancouver) booked for 30-December, which puts me home in time for New Years. Then I'm hoping to have a couple weeks in Calgary catching up with friends and family...

Inbetween the 15th and the 30th I'll be going to the project Christmas party, then heading to Vietnam to visit Jezzer, who I used to work with on this project but he's now working in Ho Chi Minh City. I figure I better check out an Asian country while I'm still in this hemisphere in case I don't make it back anytime soon.

I still have pictures and stories from when my family was here visiting to put up, but I haven't gotten around to that yet. I can leave you with the following pictures, which were taken on my mom & Frank's last night in Australia. We went to a couple's house who we met in Coolum, they own/run a plant nursery 45 minutes SE of Brisbane. We had a great tour of the nursery, beers, bbq, kangaroo watched, and capped the night off with some good ol' fashioned Australian Cane Toad culling. Greg tee'd them up, and I knocked 'em... Notice the head is down, left arm straight, hips turning before the arms... beautiful.

Still here!

It's been a couple weeks since I've posted last and it's because of the family I've had visiting... We've done a lot of catching up, sightseeing, and holidaying so I haven't had time to update the blog. But I have a lot of pictures and will work to get them up on the next few days.

I should also find out what my fate at work and the assignment in Australia/PNG will be this week so I'll let everyone know about that too.

Hope all is well with everyone, I hear it's been below -25 Celsius in Calgary, which sounds incomprehensible to me right now...

Familiar Faces

My Aunt & Uncle (Barb & Ken) arrived on Friday after spending 12 days in New Zealand. They're staying with me until mom & Frank land on Thursday and then we all head to Coolum on the Sunshine Coast where we've rented a house across from the beach.

Our time in the city until then though has been great so far. We've hit the Powerhouse Markets, golfed Sanctuary Cove, and went to the observation deck of the tallest residential building in the world, the 80 story Q1 building on Surfers. I had to return to work on Monday and the the rels continue to explore the city during the day.

More U2 pics

Here are some more pics taken by a mate nearby...

U2 Pics

Line up outside the stadium

Sound check


Bono appears from under the stage
So close.. he looks small because he is.

Fire
Filing out of the carnage

Vertigo

Not a lot of people recognize DMX, especially here in Australia. But that's alright, I think it's going to be both entertaining and hilarious.

However, 100% of people surveyed have heard of a little Irish quartet called U2 who are kicking off the Australian leg of their Vertigo tour. These shows have been sold out since sometime in 2005 because they were originally scheduled to occur in March of '06... But it was delayed for one reason or another (I think because I hadn't arrived here yet) until NOW. And somehow, one way or another, a ticket has fallen into my lap (for the cover price!!). That's where me and 60,000 of my closest mates are off to tonight.

Everything is coming up Kranski (my Australian nickname).

One way another I need to fit the phrase "one way or another" into this entry.

NSW Surf Weekend

Always willing to expand my surfing horizons I took off on a 4-day weekend with a few mates (old and new) to camp and surf in New South Wales. We left early Friday morning and stopped after a couple of hours driving for a surf at South Ballina. While sitting on our boards waiting for the next set Steve enthusiastically recounted his week-old shark story about how a 2-3 meter long shark swam within arm's length of him in this exact location.

We decided to move on shortly after this... We drove on to Wooli (a total of 350km south of Brisbane) and set up camp where it promptly started to rain. We braved the elements though and managed to get in another surf before dark. Saturday was filled with surf, rain, kayaking, and good times. We finished the day out with dinner at the Wooli pub and watched a game of footy before chatting up the locals.

Sunday was the nicest day weather wise and we filled it with beach, surf, bbq, bocci, and general chilling out.

Monday we had to head back to Brizzie, but not before another 2 surf sessions. One of these was at Lennox Head, the next headland south of Byron Bay. Apparently it's one of the east coast's premier point breaks. It wasn't too good on this day, but it was good enough. I caught a few waves there, mostly scraps leftover by the locals. It was awesome though...

Run Dmx

I just bought 4 tickets to see DMX at the Arena. Jigga wha?!

I forgot how good these were...

Where do nanners come from?

Ever wondered? Trees like these:



This weekend I visited my friend Ed at Goldie for a surf... it was blowy and messy, and I'd like to believe that that had something to do with me not surfing very well but probably not... Anyways, afterwards we went back to his place where is awesome girlfriend [Edit: Kate is now Ed's fiancée, he proposed Monday and she said yes!] cooked us pancakes with imported Canadian syrup. Afterwards they let me tag along on a visit to her grandparents place in the Currumbin valley where they have a banana and avocado farm. Beautiful country...

This picture of Ed & Kate was taken at the farm, and may qualify as the engagement photo...

To Ed's credit the box was full of nanners, avos, soup, tomatoes, and was very heavy... probably upwards of 5 kilos.

In a carton?

Aussie sour cream comes in a carton. And it's thick, so you can't pour it out if you only open one end of the carton. Weird.

I'm cooking a roast tonight, mmm...

Indy Weekend

Well, I didn't actually go to the Indy but I did head down to the Gold Coast with a friend and his gf for some beach/surf. The weather wasn't that great and was overcast the whole time, but it was better than sitting in my flat in Brizzie.

Going to join a co-worker tongiht for his b-day at the Story Bridge Hotel. Last time I was there I ended up 2-stepping and buying shooters (not necessarily in that order) at another pub.

The Sands Are Shifting

Maybe it's time for me to readdress the purpose of this blog. Its original intention, to document my travels after accepting an assignment to work in Papua New Guinea, is somewhat obsolete since I'm no longer going to PNG. I had wanted to be able to post pictures of the PNG country side, wild boars, tropical flora & fauna, cannibalistic natives, malaria carrying mosquitoes, and of course the 3 weeks holidays I was going to go on every 2 months.

I was considering asking the people that read this what they thought, but I won't for fear of not getting any responses. For the time being the content will be essentially the same even if the end goal has changed... I'll write about the notable things I get up to as well as a few un-notables.

My First Cricket Match

In a warm up for the Ashes match I have tickets to in November I attended my first cricket match with a couple blokes from work tonight. It was an non-epic battle between the 1st place Queensland Bulls and the 4th place Tasmanian Tigers. The Tigers batted first and managed to score a pitiful 172 runs in 49.2 overs, after which the Bulls blazed to glory in only 38.5 overs with Matthew Hayden leading the way 91 runs for a final of 173 to 172. The crowd was relatively sedate save for a few pockets of college kids who had hit the turps all day, but they only added to the atmosphere of The Gabba this night.
Here's what most cricket players are doing in the field most of the time, this bloke was from Tasmania and was taking a heck of a ribbing from one of the aforementioned college crowds. Good on the clam though for taking it and giving it back in good spirits.


The Gabba is the stadium/cricket-field where the game was played (AFL Aussie rules football is also played here in Brisbane). Here is a picture of it from my apartment taken tonight:

All in all another "fine" night Brisbane...

Uh oh

http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/there-goes-the-png-gas-pipeline/2006/10/05/1159641459484.html

Have a read of the above news article... Eos' (a joint venture between KBR and Worley Parsons) focus has been shifting from the "pipeline across the Torres Strait" to a possible LNG plant near Port Moresby... this has essentially resulted in a major demobilisation of our staff and left us with a team of under 30 to support Exxon's study into the LNG option. To date I have been one of the 30 left and told I would be here until December. For me, this means no more construction assignment on site in Papua New Guinea and a shorter stay in Brisbane than originally planned. However I've been told by Houston not to worry about long term employment as KBR has many other positions to send me to, so no worries there.

There is still the possibility that after this October-December period Exxon and it's partners will decide to go ahead with a LNG plant and monatise the gas is PNG that way... this would have a whole different set of ramifications that I can't speculate on right now...

In the meantime I suppose I just enjoy the next three months with my relatives visiting, the weather as it starts to heat up for summer, and the weekends... Heading to the Gold Coast this weekend and staying with a friend... the usual dose of surfing, golf, casino, and beachin'.

Save thousands on a trip to Africa

copy and paste this into your internet browser: mms://live.wildlife.wavelit.net/nk1957

Apparently it is a live web cam of a watering hole in Africa. If you're lucky you see a predator eat another unlucky animal. Credit to Bob.