Tonight we watched it.  It was pretty cool to see all the been-theres!

Other than that, didn't feel like I achieved much today.  Too much work crap.  And feeling a bit blah tonight.  Think will go to bed..

Tomorrow I guess I'll go back to the more disagreeable tasks.

Eighteen months ago today we went to Durham cathedral and Alnwick Castle (Hogwarts!!) before heading to Edinburgh.  One of the ultra-rare days where it was sunny all day.

So after pondering over beer bottles and brewing equipment in Haymarket and the pink dots, I went online and found out the little pink dots all over Sydney were part of a street art project called "Beer Line - from Barley to the Bottle".  It started in Haymarket with some real barley planted in planter boxes.  Unfortunately the barley had been harvested when we were there and it was just grass left.  This morning I went to the start of the line and found some more information.  It was partly in memory of the Castlemaine Brewery, and went in two directions - right towards Redfern, and left towards Circular Quay.  I had intentions of walking the entire line, however I only managed to get as far as Wynyard before I had to get back for Art of the Brick, and then the rest of the week was too busy to finish it.

Beer bottles

Barley planter boxes (harvested, just grass now)

Start of the Beer Line

Space invaders in Haymarket

Footsteps on George Street

Hopscotch outside the QVB

Near Wynyard there was a branch off to the left with basketball lines

Here's some of the other stuff I stopped to take photos of along the walk

The hear/see/speak no evil monkeys had santa hats on

Queen Victoria statue outside the QVB

Dog sculpture outside the QVB

This was all kinds of awesome, but I'll put that in a separate entry

It seems Sydney Buses forgot that hundreds of people want to go to the beach during the school holidays, and were running a regular weekday timetable (actually there was probably a few extra buses that day otherwise we *never* would have gotten there).  So we queued for like half an hour, then had to squeeze onto a bus and stand the whole way.  I didn't have my swimmers since I'd been at Art of the Brick and was expecting Stu and Kore to have gone a lot earlier.  So I sat under a tree.  And got very grumpy at someone who was completely unsympathetic to my not being able to take photos at Harry Potter.  So sat there feeling pretty miserable.  Blah.  Had a snack later with Stu and Kore before heading back to the hotel to recover.

Queue for buses at Bondi Junction

Squeezed onto a bus

Super crowded Bondi Beach

Too many annoying people, but there was a whole collection of nautical-themed Lego setup which made it pretty awesome.  Apparently the company that owns that Aquarium also owns Legoland, so they were doing a promotion.  Worked for me :):)

Triton in Lego

Freshwater crayfish

Some sort of dragon

Either a Murray or a Trout Cod

Eastern Water Dragon

Minifig with penguin

Red Indianfish

Cowfish

Little Penguin

Common Sydney Octopus

Jellyfish

Mermaid in Lego

Dory the blue tang

Fish in the dugong tank

Fish in the dugong tank

Fish in the dugong tank

Dugong

Stingray

Cuttlefish

Shark

Turtle

Nautical-themed cupcakes

Shark in the final tank

Sawfish

Fish in the final tank

Kore in the final tank

Kore about to be stabbed by a sawfish

Kore found Nemo (well Marlin actually)

Clownfish

Super awesome Lego display at the end - the white whale made out of Duplo and the biggest Lego mosaic I've ever seen in the background.  The baseboards had been spraypainted with the colour to be used, and plates attached on top.  But the plates weren't glued down, so there were patches around the edges (and even in the middle) where people had pulled off the plates and stolen them :(

Had a few super yummy pizzas and a couple of drinks and had a nice chat

Crazy pizza stands

Salumi and prosciutto - sopressa, prosciutto crudo, mixed mushrooms, roast garlic and fior de latte.  This pizza was awesome!

Kangaroo - potato base with marinated kangaroo, roasted pumpkin, pine nuts, feta and chopped parsley.  I also really liked this pizza, and it was Kore's first taste of kangaroo.

Marinara - tiger prawns, mussels, vongole, calamari, chili, mozzarella and parmesan cheese.  I didn't actually have any of this one, not a bit fan of seafood pizzas.  I'm told it was good though.

As we left Eat Love Pizza we saw a bunch of people seated watching the Pyrophone Juggernaut.  There were people there testing the flames etc for tomorrow night.  Unfortunately no show, we would have had to come back the next night :(

Didn't sleep very well *again* last night :(:(  Blah.

Headed out a bit after nine and met the little brother at the local McCafe.  Had brekky (bacon and egg mcmuffin and a hash brown.. yumm) then wandered through the Devonshire Street tunnel to the station to buy our tickets.  We decided to get a MyMulti (Zone 1).  

Art in the Devonshire Street Tunnel

Headed to Town Hall.  I went down and got myself a ticket to the Art of the Brick show on Friday morning! 

Kore's first ever train!

Deck chairs outside Town Hall



Then we had a wander through the QVB.  Stopped in to look at HobbyCo.  Nearly didn't get Stu and Kore away from the anime section ;)

Old freight trains
Thomas!
Crystal pavilion thing in the QVB

Christmas Tree in the QVB

Left there and went and got our tickets for the Tower/Wildlife World/Aquarium from NRMA (10% discount - same as online).  Then to Sydney Tower!  I didn't worry about panoramas this time since I did that last time.  Just zoomed in on all sorts of things, and did the tour guide thing for Kore.  And far out it was crowded!  Queued to go up, queued to go down.  And then got stuck in the lift.  Well not really, it just didn't start.  Ended up just hitting the door open button to get out.

Sydney Tower from King Street

Sydney Tower under construction

In the "4D" show
Harbour from the tower

Don't know what this kid was looking at..

Kore up the tower

Darling Harbour

Pacific Jewel

Highest post box.  Except you can't actually buy stamps up the tower.  Pointless!

By this time it was lunch time, so we went to the Westfield foodcourt.  I had subway! heh. Poor sweetie.  Sydney is super crazy busy at the moment, and even at 2pm the food court was packed.  Basically the sweetie's idea of hell :( 

Then headed across to Hyde Park to see the Archibald Fountain and St Mary's cathedral (didn't bother going in - since "pics or it didn't happen" would mean it didn't happen heh).

Kore and Stu inspecting the wicker concrete on a building in Market Street

Kore in Hyde Park

Archibald Fountain

St Mary's Cathedral

A bit of a wander down Macquarie Street.

Hyde Park Barracks

Stu picks hogwart's nose

Parliament House

State Library

Ibis

I told Kore they look better in flight

Conservatorium of Music

And down to Circular Quay, to go see the Opera House.

Obligatory Harbour Bridge photo

Kore discovers the Opera House is tiled

And back to Circular Quay and the Manly Ferry!

Circular Quay station with barricades up to stop people watching the fireworks there

Circular Quay

This was Kore's first ever ferry

Manly Wharf

Wandered up The Corso to the beach.  

Smiley face in sweat

Bubbles!

There are several taps along the Corso for filling up water bottles.  Best idea ever!

The Corso

Manly men in Manly

Manly beach

Kore dipped her feet in :)

Then back to the Steyne hotel for a beer.  We originally had a table in the middle, but then noticed a window seat was free, so we all moved over there.  I tell you what, a nice cold beer, seat by the window with a lovely sea breeze and a view of the ocean was AWESOME!!  Really really nice.  Even the sweetie felt better after the stressful morning.  Decided to get "fish and chips" there because that's a traditional beachy thing to do (and Kore had never had it before, in fact she'd never even been to a pub before!).

Then wandered back to the ferry, which we timed nicely for some lovely sunset pictures over the harbour.  

They haven't finished the barricades on this side yet

Kore's second train

And finally back to the hotel.  

Had to point out that the moon is upside down here

Bat!

Took over 1100 photos today .. whoops!!  Not sure how my experiment to deal with photos on a daily basis is going to work!  OK so an hour and a half later and I'm still not finished processing photos, let alone select some to blog, resize, upload and enter them into the blog.  Might work on that tomorrow morning if I get a decent nights' sleep and wake up early enough.

It was pretty much a case of the usual - eating junk food, eating pizza, drinking beer (and a sparkling shiraz), going to the shops for the paper, going to Myrtle Beach for a swim, jigsaw, wii, crosswords, kenkens, and of course, going in the spa :):)

Also had a play with the new Eee PC and got some stuff setup on it, including the GPS software so that made me happy.

On the walk to the shops, I took my new "random" camera to have a bit of a play with it.  Generally I'm happy with it (especially for macros), however its noise reduction is very aggressive, to the point where it almost looks like one of those "paint" filters in Photoshop where big gloops of colour are the same and picture quality is lost.

(this one looks better at higher res - irfanview is pretty sucky at saving big blobs of red)

On our drive to Myrtle Beach we had to stop and wait for the bridge over the Clyde to open/shut.  But we were so far back in the line of cars we didn't get to see it :(

A nice walk through the trees to the beach

We were actually worried that we were going to get rained/stormed on at the beach - this big storm was brewing to the west.  However it moved to the north and the beach stayed in the sun.  

These are some of the clouds on the way back.

After playing sports resort on the Wii if you just leave it it goes around the various sports locations and shows your Miis hanging out.  Weird..

We had three small pizzas - a meat lover's, a ham and pineapple, and a putanesca for the sweetie

The jigsaw I did

A weird but kinda cute concrete chicken that's appeared in the house since last time.

Aftermath of our beers

Of course the suckiest part of going down the coast is having to clean the entire house before you leave.  All my dreaded tasks (cleaning toilets, vaccuuming) and no way to escape.  Especially when it's so humid.  Blah.  Jumped in the lukewarm spa at the end to recover.

Also the boys both had colds which means I'm pretty much screwed... 

But otherwise, a lovely weekend.

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!

Tonight my step count was really low because I bussed all the way home instead of only half the way.  Was going to cycle but the call of the jigsaw and bed was just too strong.

Blah.

Yesterday morning we were meant to be at Questacon at 5:45am, so I dutifully set my alarm.  Except I set it for 5:51am instead of 4:51am!  Thank heavens Dave called me at 5:19 otherwise I'd have missed out completely.  So instead of a leisurely getting ready time, I was ready in three minutes flat, and had to do my hair in the car, and no shower.  Blah.

We went with Balloon Aloft, and it was all very organised.  They took us out to Kingston so that we could see the rest of the balloons from a distance rather than being right in the middle of them.

There's sixteen to a balloon - four to each of four compartments.  When it was time to get in, we hopped in, but a group of four tried to get in with us.  They'd gotten three in before the operators said you can't do that, and of course we had to get out and move.  Which was fair enough, but it turned out a bit bad in terms of positioning on the ride.  We ended up at the "back" of the basket rather than the front, which meant we were facing the wrong direction for the rest of the balloons, the wrong direction for Civic, the wrong direction for Black Mountain and the wrong direction for Belconnen :(:(:(  And if it had been sunny we would have had the sun in our faces the entire trip - luckily it was cloudy then!  Was really really frustrated that I couldn't get photos of some of the things I wanted to :(  The final insult was them wanting to charge $15 for a photo of us on the balloon.  For the price we paid ($360 each) I think they could have thrown this in!  So wasn't too happy about that.  But anyways.  

Otherwise the ride was pretty awesome.  Took 672 photos!

So we landed and came back for breakfast cooked by Neil and then went home and attempted to get more sleep (I failed!)

Inflation

We were on the Questacon balloon!  Which was way cool, cause I have a picture of that balloon on my desktop that I took from our back window one morning..

We spun around at the beginning so had a view of the other balloons

Apparently it was the maiden voyage of this balloon

Rowers

Kingston

The carillon

Parliament House

Flagpole

Old Parliament House

Two balloons, two Parliament Houses

A magpie came to visit

High court

Parliament Houses

Questacon

National Museum

Over a carpark

National Museum

Lake Burley Griffin

Civic

Woden

The burners

As we were heading for Black Mountain the clouds closed in

Gap in photos as we passed by Black Mountain Tower (on the wrong side of course)

Belconnen and Lake Ginninderra

Balloon flying low over Aranda

Deflation.  The pilot said he'd been in a balloon once where someone opened that vent at the top at 3000 feet - he said "it wasn't a good feeling"

Rolling up the balloon

All packed away!

This is where I took all the photos on the day - marked out by my photoMate GPS

Today I was slowed down but refused to be stopped.  Stu had been wanting to go out for breakfast, so we went to Black Pepper.  It was very crowded, and after nearly getting blown away outside, we only got rained on a little bit.  But the food was yummy yum.

Went down to the lake and photographed some swallows and a blue dragonfly.

Then went to the other side of the lake to feed the swans/ducks/coots etc.

Home via Gem Aquatics.

This arvo I didn't do much, really just read news feeds and started working on my 3000 Ravensburger jigsaw (which I've never actually done myself - I lent it to Marylon once and I helped a bit then).  And photographed all the Harry Potter Lego from last year.

Tonight scanned 69 photos, mostly from 1994.  Photos included a series on Snowy, my budgie, my 21st birthday and some miscellaneous photos.

This was my budgie, Snowy, that I got for Christmas (or thereabouts) in 1993.  Had him (her? - Dad always thought it was a girl and called it a Widgie) for five years.

My 21st Birthday Cake, with Alphie (sequel cockatoo to Alphie, the Alphatech mascot at my Dad's work which got shipped off to South East Asia or some such convoluted story)

This is looking down the maintenance shaft of Sydney Tower.  My mother and I climbed Sydney Tower's steps - all 1385 of them!

Aftermath of an "Oops" at Waterfall

Had another go at making a Jackstone.  Got frustrated *again* by the crazy thing.  Even watched a video of the tricky bit and couldn't see how it was done.  Persisted but still had the same problem I have every time at the end, where when I go to pull it apart, there's no folds to mark the definition of the horizontal spikes.  So it doesn't snap into place properly.  Obviously I'm doing something wrong when you have to work with the underside bit.  I even pulled it all apart so I could try and get them right.  But no luck.  So again, a pretty pitiful attempt (photo is of the best side, the other sides are pretty terrible).