Up Close and Personal

Yeh, I know. I've been lazy with the blogging again. But nothing new has really been happening.

T'was my darling possum Ben's 25th Birthday yesterday (happy birthday babe!), and the big event was the pissup at the Norfolk Hotel in Fremantle on Sunday afternoon. I enjoyed some Asahi on tap and a smoked salmon pizza with handcut homestyle chips with aoili. On the way there I spotted my boss driving to Fremantle also, to end up parking at the Italian Club. How he didn't cop a $500 fine I'll never know.

Last week I saw an invite to an Engineers Australia tour out to the RAAF Pearce base to check out the Hawk 127. It was a group of 15 of us clambering all over this thing. I got up close and personal for a few hours, opening and closing things, pressing buttons and generally looking the jet all over. There were a few other jets in maintenance, one of which was having a 2,000 service - the first of its kind in Western Australia. Only took 7 years of operation to get to 2,000 hours, and the service itself is due to take about 50 days! BAE Systems do the hardcore maintenance there in conjunction with the Defence engineers; a pretty cool operation they've got running there.

No cameras allowed: but pinched this off the Defence website (sorry kids)


I wasn't allowed to take any photos whilst there, but I did get to speak to the engineers and a pilot about maintenance and general engineering. Turns out that the engineers there do similar things to what I do with underground drill rigs for mining. The industry is similar in theory, but looking at the workshop there and comparing it to one of ours, it's completely different. Everything is bagged and labelled, the paper-trail is enormous. In the mining industry, everything is ripped off and usually pilfered by someone else. Like assembly of IKEA furniture, there's always too much of one part and not enough of another. *sigh*

In other news, work is going well. Things have settled down and I'm not so itchy anymore. (I found out I scratch a lot when I'm stressed). I get my Blackberry tomorrow (YEY!) but my laptop was never ordered (BOO!) so I'll be waiting for that another week or two.