(I know it, she knows I know it but still it can be said publicly ;-)

Last month she spent half a week completely on her own, while I was in Adelaide talking about debian at the SAGE-AU 2008 Conference. She weathered that easily, without any problems, trouble or silly stunts (there were no party remainders - that I could find ;-). Well done.

Adelaide was fairly cold and with a very European touch; not a place I'd like to live in, reminds me too much of Vienna (minus the goodies). But the botanical gardens were very nice! A few pics of my strolls through Adelaide's CBD and the surrounding areas:

The last one is the conference hotel's pool - on level two or three, which I found an interesting setup.

So Conny was solo and brave while I was away, and got a few presents for that achievement. The next weekend we went to the zoo in Currumbin (sigh), and of course had to take the obligatory heaps of photos of cute pettable kangaroos. (Conny being her mother's daughter of course had to pet the small roo peeking out of the pouch.)

Here are some earlier pics, at the Trulson's place in Beechmont. Jasper has a quad, and Conny was allowed to ride it - which she loved.

I don't know why she had to give my workbench a thumbs down, after all it served her well for her birthday party!

Apropos birthday, Conny's thirteenth was on the 23.8. and she, her friend Taylor and I spent that day at MovieWorld. One of the rides they had to do 6 times in a row as far as I recall...

This is the one and only thing I appreciated at MovieWorld: nicely groomed hedges. (The rest was all glitter and fake and kitsch.)

For her birthday she got a few nice, a few nifty and a absolutely no nasty presents, but all were well received. A day later she also had a party with some of her friends. Lots of water balloons, a treasure hunt, pinata, horrible pop music, food and snacks and fun and wet kids...

And because that was all a bit much, we also go for camping (+flying) weekends in Killarney every now and then. These two photos are from July, it was cold and windy but still nice.

Last weekend was another camping weekend, and this time Conny got to fulfil yet another of her desires:

Note to self: having a car with low-range is very useful for teaching a 13yo to drive a manual car for the very first time; it converts awful certain stalls (with the resulting despair) into jackrabbit starts which build confidence (and wear out the starter less). Anyway, Conny was pretty good at it and got to drive around quite a bit.

She's also quite good with technology, and learned enough HTML by herself to cook up this site which I'm duly linking to (nevermind that my eyes hurt from all that cuteness).

So, all in all Conny Rocks. Well done, kid!