Day 40 (Thursday)

There's nothing like continuous improvement and it's good to know we are doing our bit ... this morning on the way to the station, I managed to catch EVERY red light! Which is actually okay because the thing you don't want to catch on the Gold Coast is flu. People are being advised to use caution and good hygiene practices - and if you have it - people are being advised: stay at home. The woman sitting next to me on the train this morning - and sniffing the entire way - may not have heard this advice. And yes, it may have been a simple cold, hay fever or allergies but having the red lights all the way in, which I took as something of an omen of course meant I thought this was the start of the next wave of the flu pandemic and she is/was Patient Zero.

As well as being awash with flu germs, it seems that the Gold Coast is currently home to other "non-desirables". At Pacific Fair a fellow was approached by a "holy man" who asked him a series of questions, getting him to write down the answers, and then he guessed them (no iPhones in sight apparently) ... and then asked for a $200 donation to help ensure his good fortune. Elsewhere bogus $50 notes are doing the rounds - first being used for taxi fares and now for general purchases. And who knew that KPMG runs a Fraud Barometer which has Queensland as the country's major hot-spot.

Not rating on the fraud scale, except perhaps with the ATO, is Paul Hogan - who probably won't be going anywhere for a while. Soon after returning to Australia last week for his mother's funeral, the ATO slapped a "no fly" order on him preventing him from leaving the country - it is supposedly something to do with a certain $36+ million he owes ... them?

These are dollars that could well be redirected to the health care system, especially here where all hospitals were closed yesterday for a few hours. Patients transported by ambulance were taken to Logan or Brisbane for treatment.

Still no election result although it appears that there are now only three seats left in doubt - Liberals are leading in two, Labor the other. The election has slipped from the front pages but isn't that far back. Except for the story of Germaine Greer suggesting that the country would be severely disadvantaged if Mr Abbott becomes the Prime Minister. She didn't have that many kind words about Ms JG either ... that was towards the front of the papers.

It was almost cold and windy enough for Hermes' coat to be left on today - even if he had been in Brisbane for the day. Luckily he wasn't though because he would have missed the band of happy traveling farriers who came to attend to his feet. S had only been commenting to him earlier today that she thought it was about time but still she was taken a little by surprise when she heard a noise at the gate, Pearl barking at same and a wagon zooming past the house on the way up the back. Farriers.

"There's a mouse in the house", well, actually it was "Beazley's got a mouse". So into lockdown we went - with Beazley on the outside for a little while. The others didn't seem that interested in going out to join him - for which we were thankful.

We are less than thankful that the internet connection seems to have been lost. It wasn't the same for S here today without the weather on tap, or her email, or the SMH online ... or Skype. She and then I have done our best at troubleshooting - we have unplugged, replugged, turned power off, turned power on, tried the new BigPond modem, gone back to the old modem, tried over the LAN, over WiFi, on a different socket, with different splitters (three new ones came with the modem) etc etc. We have not yet solved the problem but will get Telstra on to it tomorrow.