We've got families of Sulpher Crested Cockatoos living around us and a few babies have recently hatched. This one camped in our front yard tree for a couple hours, squawking and preening itself. Funny how they get their flight feathers and golden crest before their body feathers develop. You can see its ear hole below and behind its eye. My Mum had a green Amazon parrot for 25+ years. Mean old thing it was - still have the scar on my finger where it bit me to the bone! 28 Feb 2005 

Who is stealing our brake lights?!

This is really getting me worked-up. Check-out the number of cars on Adelaide streets that have a brake light not working! It's amazing how many cars are making their way around out streets with only one brake light. And we are letting them get away with it.

This came to my attention last year when I briefly flirted with the idea of selling my car and about the only serious interest I got was from an old guy who said he would buy it except for the burnt-out brake light. I promptly fixed the light, but then he changed his mind, and from that point on I notice EVERY car that has a missing bulb. Every one of them! I'm driving the kids spare, 'Look, another one! Left side gone!' 'And there, the red Volvo, right side missing!' Beth thinks it's great that I don't have anything more serious to worry about.

So where are they going? We can't blame it on South Australian power utility brown-outs that shorten the life of all electrical things domestic. Who is masterminding this phenomena and why aren't the SA Police onto it right now! Perhaps we need a Royal Commission set-up to investigate this growing problem. Mike Rann - hop to it!

Whew, so glad I got that off my chest!

Play a joke on your dentist

I was at my dentist's office yesterday getting 'fitted' for a partial crown. Which I always thought sounded regal, but is actually only in cost.
You know how when you are in the chair, mouth wide open, dentist's digits diligently denuding dentine despite demonstrations demanding demilitarisation (well, it WAS going well...)

And then they start talking to you, asking questions when you really can't talk. 'Ungh,' or 'Arghh,' you reply. They seem to understand you when you do this; perhaps they take professional development courses in speech therapy as well? Or maybe the truth is that they aren't really listening to you at all and just keep the one-sided conversation going no matter what noise you respond with.

Now my dentist is a wonderful guy. Probably the best dentist in Adelaide and I thank a good friend for the introduction. My dentist lectures overseas, he is up on the latest in all the neat dentist toys and techniques, and I, as a newly declared sculptor, love asking him questions about the tools of the trade. He always loses me when he starts talking about 'the crystalline structures' of this and that and 'when you remember back to your university chemistry classes...' (hah!) But the guy really knows what he is doing. And I like him. Otherwise how would I relax in the chair when he is grinding away, what sounds and feels like, part of my skull.

So knowing that I would be in the chair for about an hour, and that it is generally a boring/terrifying experience sitting there, I thought I would play a joke on my dentist by answering with nonsense sounds every time he asked me a question, just to see how he reacted. But wouldn't you know it, he was so pre-occupied in what he was doing that for the first half of the treatment he didn't ask me any questions at all while I couldn't talk, and for the second half of the treatment a new medical rep from South Africa was doing her sales call to him from behind me while he worked on my tooth. (That was funny!)

So I'll have to save my little joke for another time. Don't tell him though!

Once the dental dam was out of my mouth we did have an interesting conversation about glass blowing and sculpture, metal sculpture, and how some people are better at working in 3d than others. Is that why some people become painters and others become sculptors?

Have a nice day, as they say in the old country.

Deep, deep! sea fishin'

The world just keeps getting smaller as one gets older. Ever noticed that? 'Six degrees of separation'? All that stuff?
It turns out that Grant, our friend who spends about 9 months of the year in Brazil, 'commuting' from Australia, working on a drill ship, was working as the derrickman on the Diamond M Epoch the night that the old rig started to tip over in Bass Strait. I was working there as an ROV pilot/technician as well, but didn't meet Grant for another 15+ years in Adelaide.

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to rave about today.

It was on the Diamond M Epoch, a semi-submersible exploration drill rig. We were three young, cocky, 'know-it-all' ROV operators. We could make that submarine fly over the sea bed like a giant shark stalking its prey. We could fly around the blow-out preventer like a space ship circling the space station. We could grab and retrieve the dropped welders hammer at 800 feet below the surface and return it to the rig floor. Waddn't much we couldn't do with that little unmanned ROV.

So one day, when things were quiet, we needed another challenge. Something to write in the ROV operators' log to inspire the next shift to even greater achievements.

19 January 1983- The rig was anchored in 820 feet of water in Bass Strait, the drill crew had all the subsea gear on the bottom. The driller was doing his job, pushing drill string down the hole turning the bit, eating into the earth looking for something that would justify spending the millions of dollars it takes doing offshore drilling. The huge BOP was cemented to the seabed, keeping the surface-supplied mud down there and any high pressure 'hydrocarbons', as they said in the trade, from blasting up at the rig, displacing the water, sinking the rig and killing us all with the by products like hydrogen sulphide. In other words, a typical drilling day on the rig. Not much for us to do, operations normal for the drill crew.

We had watched all the movies on the rig. It wasn't meal time. We'd already swapped all our reading material including the magazines with titles starting with 'P'. All the new jokes we had learned onshore were no longer funny. It was going to be a slow 14 day shift. Once a well was spudded-in and drilling operations were happening it was quiet times for us 'divers.'

John was flying the sub around the BOP and we saw on the video monitor a very large, ugly fish hanging around the base of the BOP. Apparently some fish are attracted to the BOP because the mud pumped into the well from the rig makes the water around the BOP warm. If you asked me before this if I knew that fish liked to be warm I wouldn't have guessed the truth. There you go. A little bit of trivia perhaps useful for your next fishing charter: don't bother with burley over the side, try throwing little woollen blankets to the fish.

This fish was nearly a meter long (yeah, I know, sure it was...) and was quite slow. We flew the sub close to the fish and it didn't seem too concerned about this activity, unlike most fish that would scatter whenever anything as ominous as the ROV approached them.

Our ROV had two hydraulically operated 'manipulators' on the front (technical talk for mechanical arms.) One manipulator could extend like an arm would, slew sideways, and open and close its three pronged gripper. The other manipulator had a different range of movement and had a rotating gripper which was useful for opening and closing shackles underwater (oh yes, we were very clever little vegemites!)

Back to the fish. This one was ugly, very ugly. I guess you don't need to be beautiful if you live 800 feet below the sea.

John slowly extended the main arm, opened the gripper and eased the jaws over our trusting little heat-loving fish. The fish stirred slightly and moved a few inches to one side but was still between the grippers. We three ROV crew, young, bored males, thought this was a most interesting and amusing situation so John next did the logical action and closed the gripper around the fish. He was gentle though, having had hundreds of hours as an ROV operator, and only held the fish instead of scissoring it in half as the gripper could easily have done.

The fish woke from its heat-induced stupor but too late. Like a kitten caught in a toddler's grip, terror filled its body ('It was a dark and stormy night...').

So what now? Well, we caught the fish so the thing to do was to bring it to the surface. Maybe even take it to the caterers for cooking and eating? Getting back to the surface meant flying the sub back to its submerged cage, then winching the sub in cage the 820 feet back to the rig moon pool floor where we could inspect our catch.

We think the fish blew-up in the process of bringing it to the surface as it was even uglier in person than when we saw it on video and caught it. From my special effects days I know that with enough makeup and the right lighting that anyone can be made to look photogenic. Same for fish, you reckon? Daylight was harsh on this sucker.

So there we were, three dudes in their 20's, using a million dollar machine that cost who knows how much per minute to run, staring at an exploded, slimy ugly dead bottom dwelling fish still held in the ROV's arm. Well, that killed an hour. Maybe we can get the welder to drop his hammer over the side again.