I resigned!

As of 13th December there will be no more bush work.
I have mixed feelings, as I mostly love my job, but I do need to move on and up.

No actual new job yet, but enough leads to be pretty confident of no unemployment.
I'm on the books until mid-January anyway, due to my back log of annual leave, so there's lots of time to decide on the right job.

Rings and Diamonds :)

We designed my ring :)

Lots to tell!

Its been an exciting few weeks!

We went to Cambodia to get our Australian Residency granted, and while we were there Dave proposed :)

The wedding will be back home, probably in early 2012, and to get my ideas in order and let everyone back home know what we're thinking, I've decided to start a[nother] wedding blog...
If thats the kind of thing that interests you, see

http://ellenanddave.blogspot.com/

City To Surf 2010

OK, so my blogging dropped off with my lack of marathon...

My knee issues meant I didn't put in enough training to do the full marathon, so a few weeks before the big day I dropped down to the half, and was slightly concerned about even doing that!

The day dawned warm and sunny, not ideal conditions really, especially since the half only started at 9.

For once, I was glad that I wasn't one of the good runners, because the first major mess up of the day was the lead cyclist taking the wrong route, meaning that the lead runners ran up to 3km extra. Not good! It took them days to declare the results of the female race because noone quite knew who had run what and how the finishing order related to anything. Not good when you're trying to up the profile of the race and offering big prize money!

I told my knee that it had to behave, then listened to it. After about 11km it started twinging, so I stopped and stretched and gave it a bit of a rest for a while. I didn't race, there was no zooming in on people and keeping up/overtaking. All I wanted to do was finish without rooting my knee.

So I was pleasantly surprised to finish faster than last time, despite training really hard and specifically last time. I had a piece of paper with a the Hal Higden training plan and actually stuck to it. This year I just realised I was already running far, hurt my knee and hadn't run more than 8km for 2 months. Goes to show what overall conditioning does!

The organisers attempt to separate the longer distance runners from the rabble running/jogging/walking/3-legged-racing the 12km route, so where the route is the same they partition the road with a fence. There still managed to be lots of people managing to cross over and getting in the way. It wouldn't be so bad if they were going at a decent pace. The best bit is where it splits off. I told 3 people they were in the marathon lane. The look on their face when they realised they were being split off and potentially "running a marathon" was priceless.

The other major problem was the lack of fluids. There were meant to be drink stations every 2km, with water and poweraid, and Gu packets at a few of the stops on the marathon lane. A lot of the stops just couldn't keep up, especially on the joint sections. 40,000 people is a lot for a Perth event, and a lot of the volunteers looked like they were forced to be there (think community service components of school/TAFE courses) and hence weren't really even trying to keep up.

Being at the back of the pack I saw only empty Gu packets, and not even many of those. Only 3 of the stations had Poweraide, and at one point I got so frustrated queuing up for water that I just ran on, even though I could feel the need for a drink. 

Because of the heat and lack of water, there were lots of ambulances and people in a bad way at the side of the roads. Not a nice sight, and even worse for the people themselves. As far as I know they were all OK in the end.

Overall, I had a great day. I finished pretty well, had a really good massage (the Boy's work had a tent in the finish area, with 2 masseurs for 40 people, so we got decent massages rather than the usual 2 minute corporate rub-down I'm used to) and had nice easy run chatting with people and enjoying the view!

CVs...

I'm updating mine.
I hate them.
But hopefully it will be worth it!

RFDS Boxes

We finally have a Royal Flying Doctor Service medical chest for our remote exploration camps, so we headed to their Perth offices to learn whats in it, and the procedures involved in using it. Its got lots of  basic equipment, prescription drugs and some very hardcore drugs (adrenaline, morphine etc etc)

For those that have never really heard of the RFDS, its basically what it says on the tin! It was the idea of the Rev John Flynn, a minister with the Presbyterian Church. He witnessed the daily struggle of pioneers living in remote areas where just two doctors provided the only medical care for an area of almost 2 million square kilometres. Flynn’s vision was to provide a ‘mantle of safety’ for these people and on 15 May 1928, the Australian Inland Mission Aerial Medical Service (later renamed the Royal Flying Doctor Service) came into service in Cloncurry, Queensland. 

It spread throughout Australia, and in 1936 the first services in WA officially started up, working out of Port Hedland. Some planes were working in the Goldfields area prior to that, but not as an organised service. They provide healthcare advice over the phone (and still sometime over long distance radio, but that is being phased out) to people who can't get to a doctor in any kind of reasonable time frame, and provide emergency evacuation when needed.

The RFDS now operates 53 aircraft out of 21 locations across the country, and are a lifeline to people living and working in the remote heart of the country.

Click here for more information.

So what does the chest mean to us?

Well, in theory, we're moving our camp about 4 hours drive away from site, which means we're about 8 hours drive from Port Hedland and probably about 4-5 hours from Newman. You don't want anything to go wrong when you're that far from help. So now, if something does go wrong (broken leg, dislocated shoulder, general unknown illness, car crash, snake bite, even just a bad headache) we can ring up and get a doctor to assess the situation, prescribe drugs to relieve the symptoms and let us know if we need to get them out in a hurry or when we can or if they're going to come and get us.
And everything in the chest is numbered as well as named, so theres no worry about not being able to figure out some random chemical name- "Give him 2 tablets of garble garble-adine, its number 32 and it will be in try B". A very good idea in a stressful situation!

Which means I'm much happier about being responsible for a big bad drill rig and a heard of people in such a random location.

Lets just hope we don't have to use it!

Residency...

I had a post all planned out in my head about how horrible and drawn out the visa process for Australia is.
And, you know. Fair enough.
But its very horrible when you're lost in the system for over a year and have no real way of knowing what is going on.
My migration agent thought that the thing that was holding us up was maybe our de-facto status. 5 years and no ring seems to confuse people. So she asked if we had any further proof of our "ongoing committed relationship"

But...

When I got off the plane I had a text saying to ring her.
We didn't have to worry about the extra documents, but to book some over seas flights instead.

WHOOP!
They let us in.

She'd had to ring up at the end of last week to sort something out with a different application and got a really helpful woman, so she pushed her luck and asked if she could have a look over our case, as we're in Australia, both working, nothing controversial that should be holding us up... but nothing seemed to be happening.
And today the confirmation came through.

Sp now we need to leave Australia for about a week, and our old visas will be dissolved on leaving and then the residency will be officially processed and when we re-enter we'll be residents.

I feel great!