Omigosh what a terrible book.

Yeah.

I bought this book a long long long time ago, with a book voucher I'd won somewhere.  I bought Superman III the same day.  I can't remember if I ever read National Velvet when I was younger.  I started reading it just after Elizabeth Taylor died earlier this year.  I was reading it before bed but it was so painful to read that I stopped reading it, in preference to playing games on my phone.  I only finished it by making it bus reading material.

The whole first half of the book it's pretty much just her family life, but it's written in the really odd style that chops and changes scenes and assumes you already know what the heck is going on.  It makes really obscure references to things and several times I was rereading several pages at a time to figure out if I'd just missed something (or even Googling!!).  Painful painful.  There's no detail in the training of the horse whatsoever, just a sentence or two to say that it was happening.  And then the race.. told from the point of view of someone who never actually saw any of the race!!  Biggest waste of time ever.  

Verdict: don't bother. I'll be donating this book to Lifeline or something.

So Friday afternoon I left work super early and headed off into uncharted territory (Lachlan Valley Way - which I don't think I've ever been on in my life before!) and headed north.

It's a three and a quarter hour drive to Parkes, but amazingly pretty (compared to the Hume Highway to Sydney which is quite boring for a lot of it).  Had the road to myself for a lot of it, and the sweetie had given me some podcasts to listen to, so was a great drive.

Well that is until the bugs got so bad I couldn't see out the windscreen anymore..

Ha!  That's where the bogans come from!

I arrived at my motel at 6:40pm, and had to wait while they tried to find the room key.  Had just barely enough time to dump my stuff and go to the loo before Tony and family picked me up to go to dinner.  We went to Bellas in town which had good reviews.  And we all agreed, the food was delicious.  Although I did eat too much and it meant I took forever to get to sleep!

"Pollo Insalata" - proscuitto line chicken breast served on baby spinach and sweet roasted pumpkin with roasted hazelnut butter and crumbled fetta

Fountain next to my motel, by night

Watched a bit of The Mummy Returns while waiting for dinner to settle.

Saturday morning it was foggy.  The motel also had a couple of police teams staying the night, apparently to cover the roads to Bathurst.

We were going to have breakfast at Tony's motel, but they don't do breakfasts on weekends.  (?????????)  Lame. So went into town and found an open cafe, and I had bacon, eggs and a hash brown.  It was bigger than I expected but did keep me going all day.

So off to The Dish!!

It was still foggy, but that made for some cool photos.

We wandered through the visitors' centre and joined the queue for the telescope tours.  I think we had to wait maybe three quarters of an hour?  The queue length really didn't change the entire day.

They did have astronauts on segways, classic cars arriving, and Einstein to keep the crowds entertained..

The tour was pretty cool.  

We got to climb up a temporary staircase on the outside to the outside platform.

Here's a view you can't see every day!!

Then you climb *into* the top of the dish support.

And down into the control room!

There were even some real astronomers doing some real observing.  Well so they say, I don't know what sort of results they would have gotten with all the people around with mobile phones and video cameras, and moving the dish around all the time..

And finally out the front door

Next we had a wander down the train tracks past the old Kennedy Antenna (not in use anymore)

A quick look back at The Dish at a different angle

Past the earth-air heat exchanger.  This is where they take outside air, then pump it underground for eighty metres to get the air to a constant temperature and into the twelve metre dish they have setup for testing for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

Twelve metre dish setup for Square Kilometre Array testing

A Lego version of the SKA (not accurate - the real thing will be a lot more "random")

Then headed back up and had a look around at the classic cars.

One of them gave us quite a surprise - it had wallaby joeys in it!!

The dish from another angle

Then it was time for the official ceremony.  So they brought the dish down till it almost touched the ground.  So low in fact that it nearly took out a bottlebrush tree as they swung it round.

They attached a banner to The Dish and raised it up during the official speeches by Prof Phillip Diamond (head of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science) (I think) and Dr Megan Clarke (Head of CSIRO).

They also had one of the sopranos for the night's opera lead a chorus of Happy Birthday (Helen Barnett I think)

Then Jess went off to make some Sandtastic art, so I wandered around and took photos as the sun was coming out.

This is Jess' sandtastic art - it's just a sticky bit of card with all these stencils you pull off one at a time and cover with coloured sand.  Sand sticks to the card and you shake off the excess.  Way cool!

I didn't play cricket on The Dish..  I think maybe I shoulda bought one of these! :)

Another wander while Jess made a paper SKA

Jess and her paper SKA dish

There were a bunch of people there from the Central West Astronomical Society, some of them with telescopes pointed at the sun.  Which has some super awesome sunspots going on at the moment!

Then had a look in the receiver room.  I never realised that they actually change the receivers all the time!  Takes them a few hours to change them over.  Dad would have loved all this stuff - he would have understood what the dude was talking about :) These are some of the receivers actually in use at the telescope!

Finally we headed back through the visitors' centre to have a look at the displays.

This is a panel that they made up for the movie The Dish (2000) and donated to CSIRO afterwards.

It's only a model! Shh!

We stopped at a couple of lookout places on the way out.

Then into Parkes to see the War Memorial.  It's supposed to be a lookout, but it was all locked up and nothing there to say it ever opened.  What's the point of a lookout if you can't go up it?  Too many trees around to have any views of the town, so that was a bit fail.

Then headed to Forbes for a late lunch.  There were like two places open in the entire town, one of them being Subway, so that's what we had.  Then filled the car with petrol and headed home, arriving a bit before 7pm.

So yeah a super fun day away.  Pity the sweetie bailed (still feeling too sick).  We might have gone to Dubbo for the Sunday, but those plans had to be cancelled.  Thanks Tony/Heather/Jess for putting up with me! :)

14th March saw us heading down to Yarrangobilly Caves.

First up was a walk down to the thermal pool and then along the river walk.

Went around to the Glory Cave entrances but decided we wouldn't have time to go through it properly before our tour of Jersey Cave started.

So went back and did the Jersey Cave tour.  This cave was amazing.  Lots of really pretty formations, and lots of bacon :)

Photos can't capture the beauty of this pool and all the crystals of rock around it

Another pool that was a bit easier to photograph

Then it was back to South Glory Cave, which was a self-guided tour.  This cave was completely different to Jersey Cave - it was all white!

The hole in the roof is only relatively recent - Tony remembers going there when there was no hole!

My brother could probably explain why streaks of water come out as dots??  Something to do with the camera sensor?  I don't remember there being any fluoro lights around..

Quite a bit of wild life around the buildings, real and, er, stuffed!

And heaps of cunninghams skinks!

All my cave photos were hand held, the majority without flash.  I did take a tripod, but it was too much like hard work to set it up - especially on the guided tour with lots of other people around.  Sorry, I'm just not dedicated enough ;)

So cool!  You hear about this sort of thing on the internet but it was cool to see it actually done in real life.  An enormous waste of resources though...

This morning was up at a very uncivilised hour (that is a shock coming from me ;) ) to get to Scope at Mt Stromlo by 9am.  Coppins Crossing road was closed for a cycling event, but we didn't see the sign til it was too late, and ended up having to continue 5km out of the way before we could turn around legally, and then back again to go the other way.  Epic grunt.  So ended up arriving ten minutes late.  And nearly got blown off the mountain by the wind - it was insane!!

So we went to Scope to meet up with Fiona (aka @phonakins aka The Little Lioness) and Rish, Lisa (aka @bakebikeblog aka Bake Bike Blog) and Chris (aka @chrispycon), who turned out to be an ex colleague of Stu's from Queensland!  It was a great little twitter/blogger meetup.  We talked about various topics, mostly things like Canberra life, food, travel etc.  

I had their eggs benedict which was pretty decent

Scope has a fantastic location, it'd be nice to go back in weather that was good enough to sit outside and enjoy the view.  And plenty of gluten-free options which made Fiona and Lisa very happy :)

Popped into town to pick up Stu's car which had been there since Friday night, then did our food shopping, then came home.

Having a busy afternoon catching up with stuff.

I separated the jigsaw into its six identical 999-piece sections and stacked them up so they don't take up as much space, to give me room for other things I want to do.

Planning a roast dinner tonight, and hopefully an early night!

5994 down, 17982 to go .. ;)  

But maybe in a month or two, I want to do some other things first :)

I'll leave this out for a week or two, then will divide it up into the six 1000-piece sections, stack them and set them aside for the final reconstruction.

Barely got any sleep after 3am this morning.  Hoping I have better luck tonight.

!!!!

Who knew eight and a half years ago that I'd still be blogging now?? :)

Well after spending a week and a half doing the edge and fish in the jigsaw, last night I did all the balloons.  In just one night.

Progress today was much slower - just sorting all the blue pieces and starting on the water.

We also did our food shopping, and have some lamb shanks in the slow cooker :)

Ha!

It's gonna take me days and days just to even document what we have (because a lot of it has simply never been documented before).  And *then* when we know what we have we can do the tidying.

At least I know what I'm doing for the next few days.  And a few days in the week after that.  And a few days in the week after that ...

Other than that, my life has consisted entirely of jigsaw.  I can't help it.. it calls to me!!