Thursday morning I headed up to Sydney.  Stopped in at Picton and watched David feed all the snakes.

Then we headed to the parent's place for lunch with Aunty Rhonda.

And then across to Rookwood for Nana's funeral.

The whole family was there which was really nice.  The funeral itself was lovely.  My mum and uncles read a beautiful eulogy and Ken had put together a wonderful slide show of Nana's life.

Lots of people hung around for the wake in the Reflections cafe.

But the shocker of the day for me was finding out I have another cousin.  

!!!

Mum was reading the names of all the grandkids during the eulogy, and it included a name I'd never heard of.  Later I asked mum about it.  Turns out my uncle had had him after he'd separated from his first wife but it was all a bit awkward so he doesn't get talked about in the family.  But how did I not know about this at all??  Sheesh!  Apparently he was at the funeral too.  So that was all very bizarre.

So then we battled peak hour traffic and went with Diana and Graham to the Tradies for dinner.  Every time I've been there in the past few years it's been different.  Seems they've completed their renovations now, and there's a huge front entrance now.  The roast of the day was pork, so five of us except David had it :)  

Then back to my parents' to pick up stuff, then back to Picton to pick up my car, and then home.  I was super tired, but made it safely, with Harry to keep me company.  Got home a bit after midnight.

As well as "Life", here's the other jigsaws I completed in March..

Waterfall jigsaw from work

Lord of the Rings

Lighthouse, one from my parents from over Christmas

Toybox.  One of the $1 jigsaws from Kmart, the one I raced Nat with

Hot air balloons from Annie, but the box was split and had had kid involvment so a few pieces missing.  This was 750 pieces, but I completed it in about 3.25 hours - probably the fastest I've ever finished at 750-piece puzzle.

New York.  One of the horribly cut jigsaws in the same series as the swans and the fish.  The pieces are so similar that I couldn't do the top edge until the rest of the sky was done, and even then there were mistakes that I couldn't fix.

This was a $4 1000 piece jigsaw from Kmart.  Very flimsy pieces.

Today I finished the fourth quarter of the "Life" jigsaw (but only the third quarter I've done - there's still the third quarter to go).

I might have cheated a bit when it got to all the blue goo.  Place one section on top of another and work off the template below (does make colour matching harder).

And so fifty hours later ..

I set a timer to limit myself to half hour blocks (otherwise I could just sit there for hours).  The breakdown was:

• 4.5 hours - sorting the pieces into sections
• 0.5 hours - edge (three edges on this section)
• 3.0 hours - planets
• 6.5 hours - pink sky
• 4.0 hours - sails
• 1.0 hours - marlin or whatever that big fish jumping is
• 4.5 hours - night sky
• 1.5 hours - boats (the hulls)
• 5.0 hours - water (the horribly rippling stuff - quite hard)
• 8.0 hours - coral and fish
• 11.5 hours - all that horrible blue stuff

Might get some other jigsaws done before finishing it off!

So had Chris and Geoff from the club over for dinner tonight.

The sweetie cooked a lovely bolognase and then we had a dip in the pool and then dessert and chatted about travel and life and church and other such things.

A lovely evening :)

So this little blog turned ten years old today!

Happy blogiversary to me! heh

Ten years, or a quarter of my life in writing and online.  Ten pretty big years with a lot of ups and downs, four big overseas holidays, a wedding, a new house, a new job.  And mostly all chronicled here, to varying levels of detail.

I had no idea when I started this blog how dependent on it I would become.  Simply as an easy place to find when I did things or find a photo to show someone.  A place to put photos online for friends/family/strangers. My only regret with the blog is not starting it earlier (even though there really wasn't such a thing much before 2003).

I had wanted to update the style/design of the blog, but ran out of time, on account of being away the entire Christmas holiday, and having last weekend taken up by simply FTPing files up and down.  So I may get something new online in the next little while.  Maybe.  The best I could do was update a few things like the footer, my blogroll and the site description, add navigation links to each entry, and republish the whole site (took twenty seven minutes this time).

Thanks to everyone that's come along for the ride, it's been great!

Day 1

The day after boxing day we made our exit from Sydney.  Since we had to be back on the 30th for my cousin's wedding, the options were to stay in Sydney, go home, or have a couple of nights somewhere else.  We decided to go to the Hunter Valley.

We let the GPS guide us out of Sydney, and we managed to avoid the most horrible piece of road in Sydney, which is the five kilometres between Gordon and Hornsby, where it's just stop start the whole way.  The GPS took us round the north of all that, and it was much less stressful.

It's amazing the number of L-platers that were out.  I reckon they should either be banned from highways altogether or allowed to do the full speed limit.  Because forcing them to slow down on the freeways just makes everything slow for everyone else.

We decided not to go up the Sydney-Newcastle freeway, opting to get off at Peat's Ridge and take the back way.  We mostly had the road to ourself, and it was a much prettier and less stressful drive.

Bucketty!

Coming down the valley along the Great North Road was very pretty

Spaceman in a sculpture park north of Wollombi

Cessnock is very pretty at the moment with all the trees in bloom

As it turned out, we probably should have gone up the freeway, because we decided to go out to Minmi, which is right next to the freeway.  So it was a bit of a detour, but we weren't in any hurry so that was ok.

Crazy big house on Richmond Vale Road

Minmi Courthouse

Caboose in Minmi

I want a liqour shelf like this!  Pretty!  Popped in here to get a (non-alcoholic) refreshing beverage

Then out to the cemetery to find graves of Stu's rellies

Minmi Cemetery

Stu hunting

Found one!

These guys found their own rellies

Then onto the Crowne Plaza Hunter Valley.  A little pricey, but very nice.

Crowne Plaza reception

We got a hotel style room in the main building.  There's a tonne of self-contained units around the place that hold quite a few people.  They looked lovely, and people were out with deck chairs sipping wine, which totally looked like the life :)  They're a bit further away from the main building, and something like $800/night - ouch!

View from our room - not that exciting

What I did love about the place was the abundance of power points.  Something like 14 of them around the room, in nice useful places, like right next to the bed. 10 points right there!

Settled in and got ourselves freshened up, then went for a walk around the place

The huge pool.  A bit emptier at this point, but it was full of people a little earlier.

Giant chess set (there was a checkers set in the main building too)

Beach volleyball court

Waiting in the Vista Lounge before dinner

The Red Salt restaurant (also the breakfast buffet)

Our view for dinner

We started with this lovely Adina (a local) Pinot Grigio

The sweetie enjoys the wine and the view

Stu's entree.  I think this was "Caramelized Tart, of golden shallot and baked locally sourced goat's cheese, witlof salad"

I had "Warm salad of lobster, kipfler potatoes & frisse endive, poached quail eggs & black truffle dressing"

For mains Stu had "Coq au vin free range chicken, braised in Hunter Valley pinot, golden eschalots & smoked bacon, roast garlic puree, fried bread crumbs".  This thing was delicious - and look at that huge chunk of bacon!  Yum!

I had "Confit duck leg with cassoulet of white beans, lovedale smokehouse sausage & bacon, poached quail eggs".  The duck was nice, but too many beans for my taste.

We also had a side of "Sauteed mixed mushrooms with garlic and sherry vinegar (Swiss Browns, Buttons, King Oysters, Enoki)".  Omigosh this was so delicious!  One of my favourite parts of the meal!

We also had an amazing Rosehill shiraz - so smooth!  Yumm!

For dessert we had some Brokenback vintage cheddar (we were too full to eat any more!)

After dinner I was so full I went for a little walk around the place.

Took this nice HDR shot from the entrance area on my phone

 

Day 2

We had breakfast the next morning at the resort.  A pretty decent buffet of food.  Was quite crowded though, even though we were there near the end of service.

At 1pm we piled into a little minbus with a family of Swedish people and headed out on a winery tour (stopping to pick up some other people on the way).

Our first stop was Peacock Hill Winery.  This was quite a small winery, and was much like the tours we did at Yass last year with a very small cellar door and crowds of people.  I found it a bit stressful, but the lady was reasonably well organised, so it wasn't too bad.

They have dinosaurs, which kept the two little Swedish boys amused

Peacock Hill selection of wines

Yeah being driven around the Hunter Valley tasting wines is a lovely way to spend an afternoon

The next stop was McGuigan's.  Having heard of this winery it wasn't surprising that they had a much bigger cellar door.  And they have this whole room setup for tour groups that looked pretty amazing.

Tour group wine tasting room

Us at McGuigan's

This cork stool looked pretty cool (but $249 and not particularly practical)

McGuigan's also make and sell cheeses.  We might have bought some, but didn't have a cooler bag or a fridge at the hotel.

Sunflowers at McGuigan's

Next stop was the Pokolbin village for chocolate and cheese tasting.  The chocolate tasting was ok (half a dozen nibbles of chocolate), but the cheese tasting wasn't really anything special.  First you had to find the store that was doing it, then you had to ask for the cheeses to taste.  Yeah, not ideal.  

I did buy this cute little chocolate penguin from the chocolate place.

Our last stop was Brokenwood.  This had a medium-sized cellar door and we sat around barrels to do the wine tasting.  We even got to taste a wine which was normally only opened for people paying to taste the wines.  So that was very nice.

On the way back we got up close to some kangaroos, which I think all the tourists liked :)

So a very nice (although somewhat expensive) afternoon, with half a box of wines and fortified wines acquired :)

For dinner we went to the Grapevine bar for beer and pizza

This was the "Truffled Mushroom" pizza, which sounded nice on the menu (swiss brown, button and enoki mushrooms, white sauce, confit garlic parmesan, thyme and truffle oil) but was a little bland

This was the "Italian" pizza - pepperoni, capsicum, mushrooms, olives, mozzarella, parmesan & chilli, sour cream, thyme and rocket.  This was much nicer (I think the sour cream was a winner!)

After dinner the pool was looking nice so I wanted to go for a swim.  But a change had come through which made it quite cold.  So we didn't stay in long.

 

Day 3

So our final day.

First stop (after breakfast at the Scottish Restaurant in Cessnock) was a trip to Morpeth to look for more of Stu's relatives in the cemetery.  We didn't find any.  Just some harness horses trotting by.

Then to St John's College, only to find the whole place has been turned into a retirement village.  So far the historic buildings remain, but who knows for how much longer.

Walking around to the chapel

The organ is still there, but the chapel is now a little community hall

And the garden out the back has a gazebo, and the cross has been removed.  A bit different to last time we were here.

And instead of a nice view out to the floodplain, all you can see is houses

So that was all a little sad.

Kept wandering.

This is the bridge at Hinton

And we found another probable relative of Stu's in the Hinton Cemetery

Next up the sweetie thought it might be nice to head to Port Stevens, and Nelson Bay and Shoal Bay.

As apparently did the rest of New South Wales

It was so crowded it was painful.  We didn't stop anywhere along the beachside.  Couldn't have anyway - no parking!  Just snapped a pic out the window.

We did stop at the lighthouse though (only because a super huge 4WD couldn't fit into a half sized parking spot, so we got it)

Carried on.  Shoal Bay was just as crowded.

Eventually ended up at Fingal Bay where we stopped for lunch a few streets back from the beach, where there was actually parking.  Fish and chips and potato scallops.  Because that's what you do when you go to the beach.  Even though we were nowhere near the beach.

So left the craziness behind and headed back to Maitland to meet up with Margie at the Fox Bar.  This a nice little wine bar.  We had the whole front area to ourselves, but it was only when I went to the loo that I saw the lovely little garden they have out the back.

And finally headed back to Sydney.  Would have been uneventful except a horse float overturned on the freeway near Kariong killing two horses and completely closing the road.  The GPS saw it coming and we took a detour around it.  No idea if it worked out faster (it probably did) but it was certainly less stressful and no stop-start traffic for us.

Finally made it back to my parent's place and crashed into bed

Just clearing out my RSS feeds this morning.. one that I still haven't marked read is this comment spam gem:

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Today was our second of many Christmas parties.  This one was originally just our section, but expanded to include the section next door, and then continued expanding to include most of the floor.  Which is good and all, but does make logistics trickier.  But I wasn't on the organising committee so I didn't stress about it.  The only real problem was that the person delegated with the buying of the booze was on the Go Karting trip, and then his car broke down.  So beer was *very* late getting to the party.  There was nearly a riot!

I just turned off my Pentium III, 866 computer.  

I finally gave away this laptop last weekend.  It was originally a uni laptop that belonged to Jim, but was thrown out when it reached the end of its useful life.  I took it all around the USA/Canada in 2004 to download my photos, a trip to Queensland in 2005 and Lord Howe Island in 2007.  It was a great little laptop because it was so small and light.  But it was what, thirteen years old?, and only running Windows 98, so attaching devices became problematic.  We replaced it with the first Eee PC in 2008 and I hadn't used it since.  So last weekend I gave it to my Dad.  If he can make his camera and memory sticks work with it, he'll probably find it useful, but otherwise it's probably only good for landfill :(