I decided to get the kids and myself out of the house the last couple of days.
Yesterday morning I took them to Natural Bridge. There’s a big stone bridge made by nature with a waterfall underneath it. It looks very nice. I will upload some photos and perhaps movies (if Gallery 2 supports it). There is a 1km sealed walkway from the carpark, down to the Natural Bridge and back up again. Sienna wanted to walk the whole way and not be carried. I’m surprised she handled it. Blake came along too and had fun walking along and looking at the scenery. When we finished our walk we went back to the car and I drove to a country cafe I saw along the way. It was a small, quaint place. They took about 20 mins or so to make two vegemite sandwiches, a ham and cheese croissant and a iced chocolate drink, though. That’s a bit long for two kids to sit around. Fortunately, I had bought a chocolate paddlepop icy pole for them so they had that to eat for a while. The place wasn’t really that busy. They had a few people come and go while we were there. After that, we headed home. Sienna fell asleep in the car on the way back and I carried her inside and lay her down on the couch to rest.
Today I took them up Mount Tamborine for a swim. It took ages to get there and after driving around for about 20 mins I couldn’t find anywhere for us to swim so I popped into the Tourist Information centre. They said there’s really only one place to do that.. down near Cedar Creek Falls. They said there’s not a lot of swimming you can do there, but the kids can have a paddle. We set off again down a road I had already gone down and had got to about 75% the way down that road to Cedar Creek Falls and turned back, thinking there was no swimming that way. We parked the car and walked down the trail. Down.. down.. down.. down a very long way along a trail down the side of a mountain. Along the way I took photos of a big waterfall and a movie as well. We kept walking down and got to an area where there’s lots of rocks and a big rock pool with a smaller waterfall flowing into it. I had to watch the kids closely as it was very slippery and the rocks were very hot. Also, if you went down a little further you would fall down some steep rocks to the next rock pool below. We sat down and had a paddle for a while. There were some older people, probably in their early 20s, having a swim in the waterhole which was deep enough to swim in. I kept the kids in the shallow area tho. There was a small tree just near the water’s edge so I sat there with Sienna and Blake paddled nearby. I didn’t stay too long since we were basically right out in the hot hot sun. We stayed for about 15 minutes and headed back up the long trail to the car (uphill and up stairs!). We jumped in the car and changed out of our swimmers and I headed back home again after another quick drive around the area. By the time we had travelled for about 15 minutes Sienna had fallen asleep. We soon got home and I popped her onto the couch for a sleep again (the air conditioner is on in the lounge so it’s the comfiest place for her to rest). Shortly afterwards I put together some homemade pizza for Blake and myself. By the time it was ready Blake’s nunu arrived and we loaded him and his stuff into the van and they headed off up to nana’s for the weekend. They will all be back down for Christmas lunch.
I’ve been ripping DVDs to XviD avi files for the kids to watch. I think DVDs are badly made for kids. You should be able to put in a children’s DVD and it starts playing the show automatically, then autorepeats itself. Instead you are bombarded with a couple of promos then a menu to select the show, then more promos and finally the show starts.. about 3-5 mins after you put the DVD in. Kids are not that patient! Worse if the kids are upset and need something to distract them. Why on earth you want to show all these promos to kids is beyond me. Hey! If you need them, why not make them much shorter versions? 3-4 seconds each and only 1 or 2? Anyway, now they are in XviD format they take up 700mb on the server and I can put them all in the one directory and put the server viewer application "Kaffeine" on autorepeat on that directory and the kids can watch their stuff all day. Plus, I don’t have to worry about getting up every half hour to put on a new show, I don’t have to worry about DVDs getting fingerprints or scratches on them or getting lost! Don’t worry! I bought all the DVDs ages ago, so it’s not pirating. It’s just more convenient. It takes about 10-15 minutes to copy the VOBs from the DVDs then about 3 hours per DVD to re-encode as XviD, so I set it up and let it go all day or all night.
To rip the files I first used DVD Decrypter (apparently no longer in production. See this page for more info.. get DVDFab Decrypter now) to take out the VOB files then use AutoGK (Auto Gordian Knot) to convert the VOBs to one AVI file, also shrinking the size from 2-4Gb down to 700Mb or so. Does the job nicely.
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You will have to Register for an account for this to happen, though. 
