The first winery was Clonakilla.  When we arrived there was only a small group of people there.  But just as we arrived, several other groups arrived as well.  So it made the place crowded and stressful.  But the dude was fairly organised and was able to serve everyone without too much trouble.

Second stop was the Four Winds Vineyard.  This place was a lot more crowded and stressful with people milling around and jostling to get to the front.  We ordered pizzas here ($18 including a glass of wine).  I ordered a "salami" pizza - salami, olives, cheese and pizza sauce.  Then went to sample a few wines.  Only tried a few before the pizzas arrived!  Luckily we'd managed to acquire a table for everyone, so that was pretty good.  Had a slice of the "potato" pizza which was also pretty good.  Finished off with a taste of their dessert wine.

Salami pizza goodness!

Four Winds Vineyard

The next stop was Yass Valley Wines for dessert.  This place had a lovely semi-outdoor eating area with a beautiful outlook to the vineyard.  But they were completely and utterly unorganised.  We had to order at the cafeteria area out the back, but then had to go back out to the front to pay.  But they only had one person on out the front, who was also doing the wine tastings.  So it was all a bit of a shamozzle.  And then we waited.  And waited.  And waited.  They were so unorganised they'd forgotten about us, and several other groups came and went having ordered full meals.  All we wanted was chocolate cake!  Absolutely pathetic.  As it turned out, we waited just over an hour for a poorly presented piece of chocolate cake and ice cream.

Only good thing I could say about this place was the lovely eating area out the back

I paid $18 for this????  Hopeless!

I complained to Tony that the reflection off his head overexposed the photo, but it turned out all right :)

Our final stop was Eden Road Wines.  This was a much bigger place with a lovely airy cellar door.  And not too many people.  So was a nice followup to the previous place.

So a pretty long day, but good fun, thanks for taking me Tony!

There was a beef satay

Pork chop with spicy peppery salt

A lemon chicken

An iridescent sweet and sour fish

Shantung chicken

And several tofu dishes

And possibly one other dish I didn't get a photo of.

All super yummy - 2 yummy!! ;)

Doc says we totally need to do their suckling pig again sometime soon..

Saturday, after documenting daffodils and cherry blossoms, we headed out to Hardly Normal to check out the new version of our couch.  We decided we'd take it.  

The sweetie likes the new couch

Did our food shopping before heading home.

Our plans for having people over on Saturday night fell through, so we drank the beer and did the roast chicken anyway.  After seeing a Hollywood apocalypse video on Neatorama, I thought we should watch a disaster movie, so settled on Armageddon, given that it was also a Michael Clarke Duncan movie, who sadly died this week.

Today we had Damien over.  We (they) chatted for a while before they went downstairs for a war game. 

I finished this jigsaw in the meantime.  Someone had done some research and labelled it "La Compania de Jesus Church, Cusco, Peru" .. a google image search of that found some stuff that didn't look like it, but a reverse image search found this site, so looks like it's actually Iglesia de la Compañía, Quito, Equador

And so ends another weekend.

Oh right, Thursday night.

So after the little meltdown, I decided I needed to watch something fun, so we put on Shakespeare in Love.  Which has a great soundtrack, and had the desired effect.  Fiona eventually came home and had a geeky friend in tow, who was gained admittance with his approval of our doormat (there's no place like 127.0.0.1).  He'd never seen buckyballs, so of course had to be educated :)  The boys talked games, and us girls, well we painted our nails.  Glittery blue-green.  I still maintain they are more blue than green!

Friday. Bosses were out of the office, which meant doing fun stuff.  Like documentation :)  Went home a little early.  The sweetie and I watched The Fellowship of the Ring.  And then my throat started getting sore.  *sigh*

Saturday morning up at sparrow-fart to drop Fiona off at the bus station.  Back home to attempt to sleep, but my feet were too cold and wouldn't warm up.  And did I mention the sore throat? :(

Got up late, then back to Jolimont, this time to pick up Stu's friend Gene.  We went to Cafe Essen for lunch, before dropping him off to watch the Swans game.  

Eggs benedict at Cafe Essen

We cleaned up the house then picked him up again after.  Had dinner at Kingsland in Dickson.  I'm always impressed at how their soy "meats" are close to real meats.

Sang choi bao, and a corn boat

Shantun "chicken"

Tofu hotpot

Mongolian "lamb"

We took Gene up Mount Ainslie

This morning we went and picked up a friend of Gene's and went to the southside markets.  Lunch was at home before heading into town to wander around the lake, and out to Belco to Lake Ginninderra.  And not a single black swan in sight anywhere!

Someone swimming in Lake Burley Griffin

Fountain-bows.  Totally going to send one of these into the Riot-act!

Stu thought the cockatoos would be more interested in the food he was offering if he threw it at them.  They weren't.

Buckbeak has a little brother

Finally, Stu dropped Gene off late in the afternoon while I put on the dinner (a nice roast we picked up at the markets this morning with some yummy ball carrots) and washing.

So after having people in the house since last Wednesday it was kinda weird to go back to just being us two.  Trying to get back into routine now..

Coughing a bit from the cold I got, but seems it's just a cold, not a flu.  Also Thursday was just a false start, real start was today.  

So after a stressful couple of weeks, the body decides that TTotM should start six days early (this is after a few months ago where TTotM started five days early in Egypt and caught me completely by surprise (thank heavens the place I found out was also a servo that had supplies, and there were people with pain killers to tide me over til I got back to the hotel room that night!)... and so I'm like really body, REALLY???  Most people have a twenty-eight day cycle, and you want to make it nineteen days? Yeah thanks.  NOT.

And did I mention the stressful couple of weeks?

So even coming off oncall and four beers did nothing for me, and instead of coming home happy and/or tired, I came home a weepy mess.  Yah, not pretty.

Le sigh.

(you didn't know they still had these in Australia did you?)

Word on the street is Australia is set to follow suit.  This may be your last chance to buy Buckyballs, so go get some before they ban them!

Strong warnings are not good enough.  People are still too stoopid.  Stoopid people get fun stuff banned. (I'm looking at you, you idiots who liked to blow their faces off with fireworks).

All my Buckyballs, I think there were two leftover

The four 5x5x5 packs *almost* make an 8x8x8 cube

Buckysheets

And I'm still disgusted that Australian companies would sink so low as to pay comment spammers to increase their Google rankings.

The other day I posted this rant about an Australian company using comment spam on my blog.  Further investigation revealed six comment spams from the one iiNet IP address - 203.217.2.46.  Several of them were spamvertising Australian companies, including the first one, Adamant Solutions; as well as Washroom Products of Mawson Lakes, South Australia; ERW Engineering of St Helens Park, NSW; Unreel Fishing Charters of Melbourne; Mini Bins Adelaide; and Anything Hot Water of the Gold Coast.

The owner of the last one contacted me about the rant.  As it turns out, he had paid an SEO company called SiteClick (run by the aforementioned Adamant Solutions!) to increase his website's Google rankings.  If you look at their website, one of the things on it is this:

So they submit their site to thousands of websites.  In other words, they use the comments feature of my blog to post a link back to these other company's websites.  In the blogiverse this is known as comment spamming and it PISSES US ALL OFF!!!!  It may not be illegal but it's damned dirty.

You know those ads for places that let you "work from home" and "all you have to do is fill in forms on the internet"?  This is what those people do.  They employ humans to get around the ReCaptchas on blogs which prevent bots from doing it.

These poor unsuspecting companies have paid SiteClick to increase their Google rankings, at the expense of giving themselves a bad name on the internet and enraging bloggers like me.  

After a morning of fighting with it, Neil and I went to lunch, deciding we should go somewhere licensed.  

We settled on the Ha ha bar, and had a very nice lunch and several mulled wines.  Not very alcoholic, but super tasty.

Yummy mulled wines

"Beef Tagliata" - rare beef, rocket, parmesan, capers, balsamic reduction and olive oil - yummmm!

Monster clouds

So back to work but I wasn't in the mood for any more crap.  So answered a few queries and phone calls, and went and annoyed people.  I went and annoyed Fred for a bit, and he had this big pile of 5c coins on his desk.  So as I do, I went through them looking for 1972 5c coins.  Not expecting to find any.  Because I've been collecting coins for probably nearly thirty years and I've never seen one.  In fact for years I didn't think they existed because I'd gotten every other minted coin until the eighties, but never a 1972 5c coin.  But a while back I found out they do actually exist, but are pretty rare.  In fact they sell for about $5 each on ebay.  But we were just chatting and I was going through the coins, and holy crap I found one!!!!!  So was super excited by that.  I kept chatting and looking and OMG ANOTHER ONE!!!  I've never seen one of these coins in my life and suddenly there's two in one place?!?!!!  I was spinning out at this point but kept looking AND THERE'S ANOTHER ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!   THREE!!!!  IN ONE PLACE!!!!!    Do you understand how amazingly unlikely this is?!?!!?  The last one had a super big scratch across it, so not worth anything, but the chances of finding three of these coins at once absolutely gobsmacked me.  

Anyways.  

Sent out the word early that we'd be at the Ha ha bar from 4pm, and invited the usual crowd.  It was quite peaceful for a while, outside by the lake, quiet, not windy.  Very pleasant.  Then the heaters or refrigeration turned on so it got noisy.  Oh well.

Afterwards Tony and I were going to walk home but it was getting a bit late, so cheated and took the bus that goes half way.  Then I stayed for a very yummy mac&cheese dinner.

So a nice end to what started as a super crappy day.