We took Shaina, Flip, and family home yesterday, then washed, vacuumed, fueled, and returned the van today, so next on my list is returning all my shit to my office, which was previously used as a temporary bedroom for the visiting family. Starting in almost the hottest part of the day, I went out to the back shed and retrieved the two pieces of my very heavy desk. I then put it together, plopped the desk top on top of if, started setting up my monitors, dug out all the cable-management stuff, then got sidetracked because my desktop PC was positively filthy.
So I elected to clean it up before plugging it in, otherwise I wouldn’t. While there, I inverted the motherboard again, because I’ll put it on the other side of my desk. While I did that, I pulled everything out and cleaned it top to bottom, instead of just blowing the dust out and calling it good.
At this point I started to get irritated by the fan noise - I removed the EK Furious Vardar that’s generally the primary culprit, but it’s still noisy… what’s going on? After quite a bit of experimentation and peeking, I learned that I’d made two mistakes at some point in the past. First, I plugged the case PWM splitter (which controls the exhaust and one intake fan) into the pump header, which always runs at 100%. Oops.
My second mistake was when I setup Linux on this machine, I did not configure power management on my GPU. So it’s running at full noise, even when idle, pumping out an additional ~80W of heat any time the machine is on at all. Oops.
Fixing both of these, it’s still not dead-silent (the fan I replaced the Vardar with is only marginally more quiet, but at least it doesn’t have the god awful spin-up noise the aggressive blades of the Vardar make). It’ll do for now.
As we were unable to book a tour of the Aradale Asylum, and due to the fact we couldn’t go to the Grampians (Gariwerd) due to a tremendous bushfire, we headed the other direction and went to Mount Arapiles instead. We accidentally drove to the top, due to most of the parking spots being full, but near the top we found a nice shaded spot to leave the van.
We started down one path before deciding it was a bit difficult, and headed up to the other lookout. We found a sign that showed a fairly short loop, so we opted to set out on that, following the trail down past Pharos Rock, not realizing that this trail is actually quite difficult. We also failed to take into account that driving to the top of the mountain, hiking down, and then hiking back up is positively the worst way to see a mountain, but anyway.
Down past Pharos rock we passed a small Rock Wallaby, with Joey, hanging out just outside a tiny crevice. We passed it so close, without noticing, that I was the last one on the trail and spotted it completely by accident, saying “hey, did you guys see this?”. It didn’t seem overly bothered by us, but we definitely weren’t going to get off the trail to get any closer.
At the bottom of a fairly difficult descent, we wandered around, spooked another Kangaroo which equally spooked some members of our group, then started up another ascent to finish the loop - ironically ascending on the same path we decided was too difficult, but in for a penny in for a pound we needed to finish this thing and get back to the car. Saw a nice shingleback type lizard just hanging around on the path - Shaina actually thought at first that someone had taken a shit on the trail until it blinked at her.
Back to the car, exhausted, we had a lovely drive home then stopped off for ice cream, which should have happened in Halls Gap, but alas, they’re evacuated right now.
Back to Ararat again today, this time to vist J Ward, an old prison and later asylum. Sabriena, Duncan, and I have visited this before, but Sabriena and Shaina in particular are really interested in creepy stuff so we thought it’d be fun to do. We looked into it too late to be able to do the Aradale Asylum the same day, so we figured we’d go back there tomorrow for that.
The tour is entirely volunteer run, and they actually update it as the researchers find new information, and as a result the tour has improved significantly since the last time we were there nearly 9 years ago (though it was by no means bad then). Our tour guide told us that they were apparently lucky enough to have at least a couple of former warders come through, who filled in many blanks with their own stories, and we in turn got the benefit of them. There’s still a ton of speculation, but it was a load of fun.
We also got to climb the rebuilt watchtower - these were apparently torn down when a new doctor came in to take over operations of the asylum, but the volunteers rebuilt one as the stone was left on-site and they apparently had all the information needed to do so. I’m not sure if this tower wasn’t rebuilt yet when we last visited, or whether it just wasn’t part of the tour, but we definitely didn’t get to do that last time.
Off to find some lunch, then back home to rest for the afternoon. Sabriena tried to book a tour of Aradale, but it turned out the tour was too full to accomodate us all, so we scrapped the idea, in favour of going to Mt Arapiles instead.
Sabriena and Shaina planned out an itenerary of activities for us, and then bought train tickets for the next day. So up super early to head into Ararat to catch the train (oh my god I wish they’d do a train to Horsham that wasn’t the $300pp Overland, I would totally do this every time we needed to go to Melbourne and not cart anything back, it beat the shit out of driving the whole way). It was our first time taking a coach train anywhere, and it was really nice. I think I napped a bit on the way in, which resulted in significantly less screaming than if I’d done the same thing while driving the van.
We hopped off at Southern Cross station, eventually figured out how the fuck to get out, then headed off to Batman Park to try find a sign for Flip (a big comic book nerd) to stand in front of for a photo. Regrettably, there isn’t one, unless we missed it. Straight across the street to the Aquarium to see some fish, which was very busy but thinned out as you get deeper into it, presumably as all the folks who brought kids in strollers who won’t remember shit realized that their kid wouldn’t make it through the entire thing.
After seeing a bunch of cool fish and hitting up the gift shop, we headed off to find something to eat. We figured we’d meander up to Melbourne Central, possibly stopping if something looked good on the way. We ended up getting there, where Duncan and I had Mexican that was, for once, entirely too spicy for my whitebread tastes, but I made it through it… it was really fucking good though. Shaina and Flip had Banh Mi which they said was pretty great.
We walked around the mall a bit, buying a few things here and there, with the kids spending any Christmas cash loot they got. We then headed back down and had a look at the Myer window display, which apparently people were complaining about but I thought looked pretty neat.
Originally we’d planned to see more stuff (there’s Polly Woodside, which is great, not to mention numerous gardens and so on), but we were pressed for time, so we basically just wandered back towards the station. Feet hurting, we had a coffee at Southern Cross station, while Duncan and Sabriena went back up to Dymmocks as we actually still had a bit before the train would arrive.
Despite the fact the station was incredibly busy and the signage pretty dreadful, we found our train and got boarded, ensuring we were on the front three cars due to them splitting the train at Ballarat. I napped again on the way home, before we jumped in the van to get home and fall asleep.
As kids, Sabriena and Shaina opened presents on Christmas Eve, as Shaina and her brother typically went to their Dad’s for Christmas Day, and for the longest time we kept this tradition up. A few years back, we opted to skip it, opening presents Christmas morning instead, but Duncan never quite got out of the “I don’t have to wake up early” mode and thus it’s always a pretty chill affair.
This year was no difference, we had breakfast, coffees, and sat around until he got up, then we opened up presents. Everyone had a great time, I got a bunch of neat T-shirts, a new mouse mat, and the Amiga RGB cable I bought myself. Consequently, I sat around Christmas Night and played Cannon Fodder and Lemmings for several hours.
Anyway, at around noon we started cooking the fingerfoods we packed the fridge with yesterday, which was quite the project management operation - we sorted everything out in descending order of cooking time, figured out what had to go where (for example we steamed the Dim Sims and such), and had everything on the table. I can’t recall if anyone was brave enough to try the party pies, which is rather disappointing.
