First up, Belconnen's owl...

And then there's "Buckbeak" .. (that's what Stu's colleagues call it) .. with a freaky eye that glows in the dark

yeup....

And don't tell anyone, but I might have accidently just a little bit bought Life today..

Last night we went out to Yass for dinner - Annie did a lovely slow-cooked lamb casserole.

Today was an attempt to get our step count up by climbing Black Mountain.  Takes pretty much exactly 10000 steps to walk up and back (and around a bit at the top) - who knew?

Had a late lunch in Civic afterwards, and found Life for $385.  I soooo want to get it, even though we don't actually have any walls in the house big enough to mount it on :(  (and the sweetie doesn't want it mounted in the house anyway :( ).

Hate Sunday nights.  Hate being a girl.  Hate dealing with accounting/financial nonsense.  Can I go home now?

I've blogged about this jigsaw before.  I really don't think I'd want to do it.  Too much solid colour.  Although.  I did find a blog recently about someone that's currently doing it.  As I also discovered doing my last Ravensburger, in which the two halves were actually completely identical, they discovered the sections are identical.  So when you've done one, you can build the next one right on top of it.  Which means if you've sorted out your pieces, you can just pick them up and put them in, because you know *exactly* what shape you're looking for.  That would make it *soooo* much easier to do.  But cheating somehow too heh.

Besides, the thing is 544x172 cm big, and ~20kg.  And $595.  !!

No, I'd still much rather do this one.

This album (so far) has a trip Hao and I did to an IFES conference in Queensland, 21st birthdays for Chris Pascoe, Nicola and Hao, and some touristy things we did in Melbourne after Hao's birthday.

Firstly, a comparison of Brisbane in 1995 vs 2010 from Southbank.  Few more buildings there now!

Then there was the fig tree growing out of the side of a building in Foveaux St, Surry Hills.  In 1995 it looked like this

(in 2002 it looked like this)

Melbourne CBD from Rialto Tower

And Sovereign Hill, Ballarat

The drive down was pretty cool.  Gorgeous clouds and even a huge double rainbow.

Did a jigsaw on Friday night, another one of the mystery jigsaws with no picture on the box, and a puzzle to solve (which we failed at - the bomb would have gone off!)

Saturday morning had a nice sunrise.

Saw this interesting pigeon which we weren't 100% sure of identity.

Squirrel!

Went for a walk to get the papers, and took a heap of photos.

Vacuumed out the spa and found a chunk of glass from the thermometer.  Hopefully we got it all.

Dinner was a delivery of pizza from the Sandy Foot.  A small Zorba and a medium ham and pineapple.  We finished them both.

Today we went to Bateman's Bay to get some tubing for the bath-tub spa, which was full of crud cause it doesn't get filtered.  So got that and drained that spa out.

Were a bit later leaving that usual, because I wanted to finish this 1000-piece jigsaw of Neuschwantstein.  So basically finished it, photographed it, then pulled it apart again.  All those hours and hours effort and noone got to really enjoy it heh.

The drive up the Clyde was quite pretty cause the clouds were right down on the mountains.

And that was that.  

Driving back gives you plenty of time to ponder life.  I've decided I spend way too much time on the computer/internet just mucking around, and other things around the house and my hobbies just aren't getting done.  So going to try a forced break from the computer for a while in the evenings to get stuff done.  Will see how we go.. 

So I scanned photos for a good chunk of the day.  Got two more "evil" photo albums scanned.  One was photos from around 1989-1990.  

The other one was all my photos from the CRA National Science Summer School.  It was sponsored by CRA in 1991 so that's how we were all encouraged to talk about.  And now it's called the National Science Youth Forum.  It was a pretty awesome couple of weeks.  At the time I was most interested in Physics because that was my favourite subject at school.  So I was put into a physics stream.  But after seeing the sorts of things real-life physicists did all day (sit around big machines and crunch numbers) I was a little turned off it.  So it was a big influence on me choosing to do biology at uni.

A couple of other points of note from summer school:

* I stayed up all night for the first time while there (on the last night where it's expected that everyone stay up all night)

* I had my first ever proper kiss there.  Charles lived in WA and I've never seen him again (or even correspond)

* I met Hao there, who later became my second boyfriend.  He lived in Melbourne.  Long distance relationships suck. 

* Hao and I got an awesome tour of the Qantas hangars in Sydney from someone who went to the summer school and later worked for Qantas

* I don't keep in contact with anyone from there anymore

* There was graffiti about one the staff members (previous students) on a toilet wall in the library at UNSW.  I thought that was pretty funny.

I was thinking today I should wander by UC - I've not been back on campus in the twenty years since, and now I'm literally just up the road from it.

The other fun thing I found was a postcard of Canberra that I got at the time.  One of the small pics on it was a picture of Black Mountain - complete with both the old and the new towers!

And Potty and family came over this arvo for a swim which was nice. 

**EDIT** -  more than a few years! I actually first scanned these (at very low resolution) in 1999!!!

I backed up my photo directory tonight.  Is that exciting?  Well all except the "masters" directory cause that's too big to fit on this particular disk.  And the UK photos don't fit either.  Good thing I have two other disks that *do* fit all those photos.  I have 38gb of Canon masters, and that's only 6106 files, excluding all the UK photos.  

I have four backup hard drives at the moment.  Two fit everything.  Two fit a subset of files.  I'm thinking of ditching the two smaller ones.  I mean what can you do with an 80gb drive these days *really*?  Besides, all four don't fit properly in my offsite storage location.

Ok that's enough with the boring talk.

Here's a boring picture of my dinner tonight - a lamb red curry with some very old lamb I found in the freezer, pak choy or choy sum or something like that, garlic, a chili off a Crust pizza, capsicum and mushrooms, with red curry paste and a tin of light coconut cream, topped with cashews.  Well it was yummy anyway.

Who could forget such gems as "The Boogey Man"  (The boogey man is gonna getcha, the boogey man is coming today, the boogey man is gonna getcha, just keep outta his way) or the Suicide Song (Are you going to end your life, arsenic ratsac and cyanide, or find a cliff and jump at low tide (don't remember the next line)).  

But what I did find tonight was "Dodger's Death".  Written in around 1989 it fancifully described what might have happened to Dodger..

It was epic awesome!!

She's very funny, and can sing!  Although looks nothing like her! heh.

It was almost like she'd invited you over to her place and was just having a chat about her life and telling stories and it was just way cool.  She was even in slippers and comfortable clothes like you'd just popped by as an old friend.  

Thoroughly enjoyed it :)

Of course as soon as we got home we had to watch A New Hope :)  Meant for a very late night.. oops :)