In preparation for my move, I’ve been reading the local Townsville newspaper, the Townsville Bulletin

As a daily local paper, there’s not often too much in the way of exciting stories, to the extent that Cane Toad eats Snake was the main headline a few weeks ago.

But on Thursday, the headline was: Pirates hijack ship for ransom after leaving Townsville Port.

Pirates!  Now I can’t wait to move there!

I’ve not mentioned it on here before now, but there are big changes coming soon in the life of me.

In a couple of months time I leave my job, rent out my house, leave England, and go live in Australia.

Townsville, in Queensland to be precise.

(If you’re Wiki’ing Townsville right now, there are two.  One is the cartoon city, home to the Powerpuff Girls and the evil Mojo Jojo.  The other is the one in Queensland.  Mine is the Queensland one).

A quick factfile about Townsville:

Townsville is in the tropics, at the start of the Great Barrier Reef, and is described as “where the rain forest meets the sea”.

It’s the ‘unofficial capital’ of Northern Queensland, and is a neighbouring city to Brisbane.  ‘Neighbouring’ in Australian terms means it’s 1000 miles north of Brisbane.

There are 320 days of sunshine a year, with a dry season and a rain season, 35 degrees in the summer, dropping to about 25 degrees in the winter.

If you can survive the abundant & deadly sharks, crocs (saltwater & freshwater), stingers, spiders, snakes, and cyclones, then apparently it’s a great place to live!

I’ll do another post soon explaining why I’m going to Townsville!

This strip was a conversation between me and WrongMark before one of our ninjutsu gradings.

Our sensei had a habit of occasionally conducting the gradings in Japanese.  Mark & me seemed to manage consistently to learn the Japanese phrases before gradings when he spoke in English, and not to do the Japanese before gradings when that was the language chosen, with the result that we failed more gradings than we probably should have.

Here is one of the few times where we learned the Japanese before the grading:

I was looking through some old stuff the other day when I found a list of conversations that I’d meant to turn in Monkeys Like Us cartoons, but never gotten around to.

Here’s one of them, dealing with Claires supernatural understanding of how clocks work, and just what mysterious forces cause the hands to move:

We made this video when we were in Vegas last December.  Keep watching after the credits for my favourite bit!