Ella , Flynn and Emily pay us a visit

We were delighted to host our daughter, Emily, and her children Ella and Flynn at home just a week or so ago. They're visiting Australia for Xmas from their home in California's Silicon Valley and the weather turned out to be brilliantly hot a sunny.

We had a great time together as a family and these few pictures hardly do justice to the things we saw and did. Here are the grand-kids helping to construct our artificial Xmas tree

Here's Flynn practising the piano. He only coming up to 3 years old, but if he continues he might emulate Mozart!

They put on capes and ran around the house playing with balloons before heading back to the piano for a performance.

And they helped Grandma make some sandwiches for a trip to the park.

Here we are in the park with Armidale's creeklands looking beautiful in the morning sun. We saw lots of ducks either on the pond or sheltering under trees and bushes from the hot sun. And there were flocks of white Corellas making a din either on the ground or up in the trees.

E and F enjoyed crossing bridges and running around on the grass.

A lovely time was had by all

AS

Dawn Over the Pacific

The hotel I stayed in during the conference I recently attended at Surfers Paradise in Southern Queensland was located right on the beach-front> Moreover, my room was on the 17 th floor and I had a good view over the coastline so that when I rose early in the morning I saw beautiful sunrises.

The following pictures were taken at about 4.30 before I set off on one of my daily power walks northwards along the Promenade. I think you'll agree that the views were terrific. The first thing that caught my attention in the morning sky was a brilliantly bright planet, namely Venus.

Next, I cast my eye southwards towards Collangatta in the far distance at the southern end of the Gold Coast and saw a slight brightening of the sky. This view effectively looks south-east and, of course, in mid summer it's the south-eastern portion of the sky that brightens first.

 This picture was a taken a few minutes later and shifts perspective around more to the East.

At ab out this time I saw some people on the beach expressing their admiration for each other through a nice piece of design and textual content. I'll leave you to fathom it out!

Next, the gold-red orb of the sum pokes above the horizon. Believe me, it's just visible on the horizon in the first of the trilogy.

Ans it's clearly visible in the next to. Notice how flat the sea looks in the absence of any significant breeze

AS

An Elevated Reception

I'm up here on the Gold Coast in south-east Queensland from Tuesday to Friday to attend the latest State of Australia's Cities (SOAC) conference. It's all about urban management / planning and I'm chairing a session today and also presenting my paper, which has been accepeted for publication.

We started with a reception on Tuesday evening atop Australia's tallest residential building - and perhaps the highest in the southern hemisphere. This blog post presents the views we had from the top - and 77 th - floor of the very recent and elegant building shown here:

This picture was actually taken the following morning when I went out for a long walk starting at about 5.30 am. It's nice and cool then! The rest of the pictures were taken at sunset the previous evening and may seem a little dark. Surfers Paradise, the name of the district where the conference was held is probably Australia's premier seaside resort, with lovely sandy beaches, waterways, and so on - with a backdrop of green hills. And, as the pictures will show it's a bit like Miami Beach in Florida, replete with lots of white towers that serve as hotels or private residential accommodation. Would you believe that 70 years ago, at the end of the second world war, the only thing you'd see in most of the views presented would have been a few beach shacks, probably made of wood and corrugated iron! Now there's a city of 500,000 + inhabitants with a great life-style and burgeoning high-tech economy.

This shows the Nerang River which flows into a broad estuary full of expensive boats and tourist attractions like Seaworld.

Looking South the City of the Gold Coast stretches in the thin ribbon towards the NSW border, with the border ranges rising right background.

Many of the residents live on high-priced properties dotted around canal estates etched from the Nerang river's flood plain. There you can have two garages, one for the cars and the other for your boat. I hope that the forecast 2 m rise in sea-level won't happen any time soon. It could rpove rather expensive for the residents!

I'd better head back to preparing my presentation for today

AS