On Friday night Fiona arrived in town.  We had some muscat and chatted for a while before bed.

Saturday morning we went into Braddon and met up with @chrispycon at Sweet Bones for brunch.  They had some nice cupcakes and Fiona got us some nachos as well.  Was good to see Chris again, it's been too long.

We left Fiona to her own devices for a while and came home and listened to the #Classic100 and did some housework.  Got some takeaway Dumpling Inn for dinner.  We started watching Dark City but we kept talking and missing stuff, so decided to put on Labyrinth because then it wouldn't matter if we talked over the top of it.  That, and we could admire Jareth's bulge ;)

Sunday morning we chilled out and listened to the #Classic100 while Fiona went off to the markets.  In the afternoon/evening we went to the Roller Derby which was a lot of fun.  

This morning we went to Black Pepper for brunch.  Then home for a while before Fiona left for home.

Tonight (after being inspired by the #Classic100) we watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

So quite a lovely weekend, with a nice mix of socialising and down time (letting me do lots of photo sorting!), and it was great to catch up with Fiona again.

Tonight us and Fiona went along to the finals of Skate-turion - a roller derby tournament.  It was surprisingly fun!  The only exposure I've had to roller derby was the movie Whip It that the sweetie and I watched a couple of weeks ago.  So didn't have too much idea what was going on to start with.  But after reading up on some of the rules in breaks, and just watching, I got a bit of an idea and it was quite fun to watch.

We arrived just as the C-Division game was finishing so didn't see much of that.  Then moved into the other room to see the B-Division and A-Division finals.

The B-Division final was between Perth and Canberra.  It was a pretty good game, but Perth was much better than Canberra, and won convincingly.

Mary Fagdalene from Perth Roller Derby.  She was really good.

Then the A-Division game started.  And oh my!  Those girls were awesome!  Canberra made a very strong start and one of their jammers, ShortStop, made the most amazing moves.  The crowd went crazy.  But Brisbane played very well and hit the lead and managed to keep it, although Canberra did make a come back, it just didn't quite work.

1337!

ShortStop

We were there for four hours.  Note for next time: take a cushion to sit on!  Most people had done it before, so were well prepared.  Us, not so much.  heh.  Also, the whistles blowing were super loud, which hurt my sensitive ears somewhat.

But it was great fun event.  We might just have to see more bouts some time..!

So my fate at work changed not only from day to day but from hour to hour, and in fact within the same meeting apparently.  So still waiting to find out what will happen.

Other than that, the usual busyness.  Although there was one day where I was trying to find something to do.  Not for want of having anything to do, just not having anything not boring to do ;)  But that resolved itself and by this afternoon I was working to the Bolero, which was entirely surreal.

Tonight we watched some Firefly, and then put on Dragonheart.  I love that movie.

Fiona should be here shortly.  Hope she has a nice weekend here.

I decided last week that I needed to stop reading my three busiest news feeds - Boing Boing, Life Hacker and Neatorama.

They were basically becoming a burden that was killing me.  They'd only take twenty minutes or so a day to do a basic skim through, but if you missed a day the next you'd have to spend forty minutes, and the next day would be an hour.  But then there'd be the "interesting" articles that I'd want to read or look at later, which meant either dozens of browser tabs, or dozens of unread articles I'd have to scroll past until I got around to looking at them.  I found I was spending what seemed like hours on the weekend just trying to keep up.

So I'm letting them go.

Boing Boing is usually the quickest to get through because I don't need to read many of the articles.  But at 30-50 items per day it was a struggle to keep on top of.  This feed I held onto for a long time, simply because it's my only source of internet "news" (albeit very biased).  How else was I going to find out about the bigger memes and general world news?

Lifehacker was usually the hardest to let go because there are always so many interesting articles.  But I figured if I need to find anything about the topics they cover, I can always search it later.

Neatorama always has lots of cool stuff, especially for travel, so I found myself leaving them lying around so I could add them to the travel todo lists. 

And I think I'll unsubscribe from Dooce as well.  Ever since she stopped putting full articles into the RSS feed (presumably to make more money from click-throughs) it's been a pain to read them (plus I feel a bit used by *having* to go to the site to read her content).  I'll just read the ones she links to from Twitter.

But with google reader meeting its demise, it was time to do a big declutter, and take a stack of dead blogs etc out to minimise what I have to take with me elsewhere.

The other thing I'm unsubscribing from is FlyLady.  I joined this list at the end of 2005 when I first met Annie.  But it also has dozens of mails per day and I found I just wasn't reading them anymore.  Well I never really read them all that much all along, but now I rarely read any at all.

So now I just need to make sure I use the spare time wisely, and not just playing mindless games...

Went to the coast on Friday night for the weekend.

Saturday was lovely.  Walked (ran) the dog, did a jigsaw, went for a swim at Myrtle Beach (swimming in the ocean in late May - unheard of right??) and watched the moonrise.

As for the rest of the weekend, probably the less said about that the better.

.. with something that was going on thirty years ago this month.

All shall be revealed on the weekend.  Hopefully.

Not that anyone except my family will likely care..

And just to keep some colour in the blog, here's some pics..

Some leaves that were in our trolley at Coles the other week.  I thought they looked pretty.

iPhone sunset shot

For Christmas in 1992 I received a small counted cross stitch kit.

I finished it last weekend.

(sorry about the dodgy photo)

So for our anniversary we both got the day off work, and decided to go for a drive out to Captains Flat.  Cute little town, although really not much there.  The pub didn't open til dinner time on a Friday - only open for lunch on weekends.  So we had some "lunch" at The Outsider cafe.  There was only SOS mobile reception there, presumably only Telstra has a tower there.  We went up and look at the old entrance to the mine.  But sadly we didn't go out to the radar, which was half the reason I wanted to go.  Stu says "next time".

Captains Flat sign, including ducks and horses

Residents can get emergency water supplies from here

A photo of the mine on an info board

A memorial for miners who lost their lives

Stu inspecting the Molonglo River (that little bit of brown in front of him)

Isn't he a cutie?

Captains Flat from Beazley Street

The Outsider cafe

Captains Flat hotel

Lake George Mine entrance

Captains Flat from the mine

Old railway bridge

Church at Carwoola

I think we ate all day on our anniversary!

Starting with oven-baked bacon, and eggs, for breakfast

For lunch, well we happened to be in Captains Flat, and the only thing open was a little cafe - The Outsider.  So we thought we'd just have a slice of cake each to share for a snack.  

Ha!  

The slices were huge, and came topped with cream and chocolate and berries.  So instead of a snack, this was our lunch!

For dinner we went to Pulp Kitchen.  We'd been there some years back (holy crap, was it six years ago?!?), and again it was a great experience.  So much yummy food!

Oysters kilpatrick ($3 each)

Oysters with Gin&Tonic Granita ($3 each)

Seared duck magret, house made duck sausage, fried duck egg, sorrel salsa verde ($35).  I only got to try a bit of Stu's duck, but it was great.

I had roast sirloin steak, braised brisket, butternut pumpkin, garlic and herb puree ($33).  Those little green balls are actually a beef ball wrapped in a dough and baked.  Odd, but delicious.  Steak was pretty awesome too.

Salad of green peas, bacon, croutons and herbs ($9).  Excellent salad.

Selection of Australian and European farm house cheeses ($19).  This rivalled the fantastic cheese platter we had in Scotland.

The weekend started with drinks at La De Da.  And chorizo.. yum!

Saturday morning we went to Black Pepper for breakfast.

Saw these little guys as we were walking back to the car.

Went and did our food shopping, them came home.

Pretty quiet afternoon.  I was in a bit of a strange mood which didn't help.

Went out for dinner - ended up at Little Siam in Gungahlin.  Turned out to be quite a nice little restaurant.  We got a chicken red curry and a pork larb, which were just on the upper end of my spiciness tolerance, but pretty good.  All the onion made the sweetie suffer afterwards though :(  Very reasonably priced.  In fact our two dishes and rice were only ~$30 - cheaper than breakfast!

Afterwards we went over to Potty's and we all just hung out and chatted.

Today was another quiet day.  Probably wouldn't have left the house, but the sweetie wanted to take his car out (it had a flat battery the other morning, don't know why).  So we went went for a tour of the inner north of Canberra, then up Mount Ainslie.

Tonight I cooked a roast pork.  It was only a small roast, so decided not to do the extended high heat at the beginning.  So the meat came out beautifully, as did the veggies, but the crackling wasn't the best.

Woke up at stoopid o'clock this morning.  Will be nice to wake up with the light again for the next little while...