Tired. Long-haired. Mackay.
So I'm in Mackay.

I woke up at 05:00 and did the necessary preparations for leaving my room all alone (lock windows, then realise that I should leave a little gap open in the screened one; change my sheets; clean off my desk). Passport, check. Licence, check. Dollars, check. Bag, check. Camera, ipod, phone, keys, mints, water, Semper Floreat (pretty good edition, actually), check, check, checkity.

Wake up Schultz to drive me to the Towoong railway station. (Thank you very much Josh, you saved me like ... $20 in cab fare.) Take some photos of the railway station (I really like the first one). And I'm off to the airport. Wee. Watched an unfortunate guy pick up his comically oversized rucksuck at the International Airport only to have the plastic components of the arm-straps bust. Unlucky.

Get to the Virgin check-in area and see that there's tonnes of bewildered looking people milling around the self-check-in kiosks. Seems that they've taken the jump from having them just for individuals with hand luggage, and now we get to check our own bags. (The magic is diminished somewhat because you have to take it up to the counter to deposit it anyways, so meh.) I got chastised by the guy telling people to use the machines because I didn't bring a print-out of my flight itinerary (which has the bar code to do the self-serve). Seriously, what's the point of ticketless air-travel if you need to print your own ticket? One of the wonderful things about the Australian airline industry in the last four years has been that you can just rock up at the counter and give 'em your name. Easy as pie, no fuss.
And besides, didn't want to waste my printer quota.

Photos out of the terminal. I was waiting for a security guard to come tap me on the shoulder, but I suppose they just realised I'm a sad, sad geek and not a terrorist. Took photos on the plane. Nothing exceptionally exciting as the window really prevented that - it's not particularly reassuring to see hundreds of tiny stress fractures in your plane window, but above all else it ruins a photo.

I took one of the "Life vest" notice, because it's always concerned me for a long while that there could really be no life vest there. I mean, removing it probably doesn't sound an alarm, and an inventory on safety equipment certainly doesn't happen before every flight. (If you did, they'd want to pay someone a lot for wandering around in knee-guards checking under each seat and that cost just isn't represented in the ticket). So someone may have pinched your life vest. And you'll never know. Until you really, really need it. Just end up hoping there's a toddler who can't use his daddy-sized life vest sitting next to you. Or even better, that you plane doesn't ditch into the ocean.

Little brother and his girlfriend picked me up from the airport and we went to the Department of Transport so I could renew my Learner's License for the fourth year ... yeh. Drop in at my Mum's work to see the staff, check out the new entrance/education facilities/lots of high ceiling-ed echoey spaces, take some photos.

Get home, check out my Mum's new iPod nano. She's such a hipster. She bought a mini four weeks ago, and when the nano came out, she had to have one of those. So now she has two iPods and only one set of ears. Shame that. Set up ml_ipod to transfer music from her mini to nano. Very neat little plugin that.

Fell asleep for a few hours, and just had a splitting headache afterward.

And now I'm here, for your benefit.

Woo.

I'm going to have dinner.