Photos, missed photo opportunities and imperial visits.

Finally, I've uploaded my camera to the Internet.
New photos can be viewed in the new album at picasaweb.google.com/captainowie
I haven't yet had time to go through and delete the useless photos (Victor sometimes 'borrows' my camera), nor have I had time to apply captions, but I will get to that in the near future.

As to the missed photo ops, there's been some work done here at The Park that almost defies belief. The powers that be decided that the pavement in the main town square needed regrouting, so they got a bunch of guys with angle grinders squatting on the ground grinding away at the grout. It was quite amusing to see them all there, in their little groups, with power cords running everywhere, and great clouds of grout-dust billowing away downwind. Then, of course, we saw them replacing the grout, with their tiny little trowels (I thought of them as 'jeweller's trowels'!). The crazy thing is that it looks a lot worse now than it did before!
The other photo I wish I had taken when I had the chance, involved some new construction that's being done adjacent to where we practice. They put up the 'vertical' support columns, and although their bases line up nicely, no three of their tops are on the same line! When they put up the cross-beams, it made a zigzag pattern! One beam was too short, and they had to weld an additional bit to make it reach!

Other than that, we played today for someone really high up the pecking order. I'm not sure exactly who it was - I've heard variations from "the governor of the province" to "the heads of all the OCT parks and the CEO of the entire company" but you'd think it was for the emperor or something, with all the fuss.
They had us do a rehearsal, much like last time (see Week 9) but they went to the effort of replacing all the flowers around the place, they made sure that all the windows and curtains in the flats were closed (you can see into our flats from the train), there were two trains worth of entourage and all The Park staff were scared shitless - bossing people (us) about and generally being panicky. It was a big deal, but we got through it.

Hope all is well back in the Land of Plenty.
Owen.