Arrived a bit before midday and just had a wander around the place.

And the Busk Stop

And the colourful stalls

Our first stop musically was for Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band.  They were ok I guess.

After they'd finished we did some more wandering.

Kangaroos (costumes straight out of the Amazing Race?)

Scottish dude and his dog (apparently he's there every year) Edit: Big Rory and Ochie :)

Saw the first half of the Festival Fiddlers.

Another Festival Fiddler.  She later played snippets from Monty Python and Black Adder which was a highlight for me at that point (since I'd never heard of a single piece of music I'd heard up until that point).

Then across to Eric Bogle.  Was disappointed because he didn't play And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, but I suppose he's performing so often over the course of the weekend he's probably saving it for Monday or something.

That left me a bit grumpy, so didn't get a photo of the next act (The Fagans), and only one of Danny Spooner.  Spent a good chunk of the time on my phone reading Twitter and news feeds.

Wandered around some more and got an early dinner of Tapas (yumm!!)

Then to see Political Satire with Shortis & Simpson.  They were a lot of fun, I quite enjoyed this one.

Then stayed in the Coorong for Infinite Rocky Horror Heat 2.  This turned out to be a bit of a fizzer.  They only had three acts (Kim Cunio and Heather Lee did an operatic version of There's a Light; The Fiddle Chicks did I'm Going Home, which was a bit of fun; and another duo did There's a Light which was ok).  And they did a bit of an audience participation version of The Time Warp.

At this point the sweetie was peopled out (not helped by a very stuffy Coorong), so he went home, and Dave and I soldiered on.

Totally Gourdgeous played to a packed tent.  Penelope Swales is pretty awesome, I liked her.

Caught the tail end of Martin Pearson and the MP3.  He was fun too, might have been good to see more of him.

The Good Lovelies were kinda cute, I think the sweetie would have liked them.  Took a few videos for him.

And finally the Spooky Men's Chorale.  These guys were pretty cool.  I liked their "Swedish folk song" - well I could guess straight away it was going to be something by Abba :)  Took a few videos of them too.

So yeah.  Long day.  Not sure it's worth the $80-odd dollars to go for a day.  Well not for me anyway, not knowing any of the artists or any of the music (except for snippets here and there).  If you were into that sort of thing I suppose it'd probably be pretty good value...   *meh*  .. :)

Just for fun, here's a snap I took of the moon as we were leaving.

I was going to plan out all the things I wanted to do this weekend tonight.  I got as far as listing some of the things that need doing around the garden.

Gave up on that and played some SingStar.

Here's some pics of the moon I've taken recently.

First, one I took a few weeks ago at work drinks at sunset

Then another one at drinks a week later

And this was moonrise last night

Nice quiet weekend as always, with jigsaw-ing, spa-ing, swimming, walking, star gazing, drinking beer, eating pizza (and plenty of other junk food).  Even got a swim in the ocean at Myrtle Beach on Saturday - water was a bit chilly but not too bad.

Spent a lot of it doing the jigsaw.  The stuff that's left (maybe 700 pieces) is just dark leaves and blotchy sky.  Really irritating to do.  Just want to get the thing finished so I can put it away and get the table back.

Today we went out for breakfast and did some food shopping.  

These boats were down at Lake Ginninderra

The spider is still there near Black Pepper

The sweetie was feeling very tired mid afternoon, but instead of succumbing to sleep we decided to go for a drive and a walk.  Went down to Government House and walked around Weston Park.

I'm one step closer to getting Yarrangobilly pics online - they're geotagged at least now :)

Do need to get to the Louvre one day.  Went to Temple Church but not Westminster Abbey ($60 with no photos to show for it was just stoopid so didn't go pretty much as a protest).  Rosslyn Chapel might have made it onto the todo list if we'd had the time.

Here's a couple of pics of Temple Church in London

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.. 

In other gripes.  ReCAPTCHA has been cracked, so I've been getting more and more comment spam coming through :(:(  So now going to have to figure out some other way of stopping the spam that doesn't take me a whole weekend to figure out and implement :/

Just for fun, here's a couple of fishie pics I took last week.

Julidochromis transcriptus

Neolamprologus multifasciatus

Neolamprologus leleupi

8:46pm.  Still no pizza.

Stu called them again.  They're just going to do it now.  And give us credit for the next time.  *sigh*

So not a bad year all up :)

Let's see.  Where to begin.

The year started with me away from the sweetie - I was visiting old Sydney friends.  First year since we met that we weren't together on New Years, which was a bit sad.

Did a fair bit of other travelling during the year.  

The big trip of course was to Japan and the UK in September.  It wasn't the best holiday I've ever been on.  Japan was 34C for five days in a row, and I didn't have shorts.  And the UK was grey and/or raining for a good chunk of the time we were there, plus we missed out on going to Legoland which was pretty devastating for me.  But on the plus side, everything "worked" in terms of bookings.  We didn't get robbed.  We didn't crash the car.  We didn't miss any planes or trains.  We did see heaps of cool stuff.  So really I can't complain too much heh.

Had quite a few smaller trips as well.  Spent a couple of days in January at the coast with all of Stu's family.  Would have been better if I'd brought stuff to entertain myself with heh.  Went to Mogo Zoo then.  There was a quick trip to Sydney for my parents' 40th wedding anniversary.  Went down the coast to DaveC's house three times in March, August over my birthday and October where we had a great whale sighting.  Went to Melbourne over the Easter weekend to see Cats with Nat&Andrew.  That was a cool weekend, we'd love to go back and do more Melbourney things.  In July we went to Queensland for a long weekend to visit Chay and David.  Decided that July/August is definitely the time to go to Brisbane, so will probably do that again this year.  And another quick visit to Sydney on Boxing Day. 

Had a very busy year at work.  Rolled out new proxies at the beginning of the year, but they were fraught with problems from the start and it was very stressful.  After several patches during the year, they finally settled down, only to have the upstream proxies start playing up.  Blah!   

Semi work-related were a ball in March where I managed to squeeze into a ten year old dress, but only just barely!   I also made a slightly drunken bet that I'd wear a dress to a Melbourne Cup lunch if all the boys wore suits.  Our director unfortunately decided to take it seriously and made all the boys wear suits.  Reluctantly I had to go buy a dress and wear it.  We also ran a trivia night that I think went really well.  And attended work drinks pretty much every week I was in the country ;)

One of the big projects at work took several months and was so stressful I'm sure it led to a high blood pressure reading in July.  I've been working on relaxing at work (and at home) and subsequent readings have been a lot more normal.

Otherwise healthwise I had a great year - just a cold early in the year but nothing else.

Spent a lot of time with Nat and Andrew during the year.  Those guys are always so much fun to be around, we really enjoy their company.  Also did a few Singstar nights with Windy and DaveO and saw Damien and Amanda a few times as well.  JamesC came to visit a few times, and the whole family stayed with us a couple of weeks ago.  The Hokins clan came to visit, as did the parents a couple of times and the little brother a few times.  We've spent a lot more time with DaveC in the second half of this year.  Seems I get on with him a whole lot better now that we're not working together heh.  

Had another heat wave early in the year which meant us putting quite a bit of ice into the four foot tank to try and keep the temperature down.  Seemed to work and we didn't lose any fish from it.  I'd moved the danios downstairs so they wouldn't overheat, and found a couple of months later some baby danios that had been surviving quite happily unattented.  When I later moved the danios back upstairs, there were more babies in the downstairs tank.  Win!  Stu got a colony of duboisis for the four foot, which are great fun, and will follow you around when you go to look at them in hopes that you'll feed them!  Stu's also gotten back into killifish and has been diligent at looking after his fish again.  We're back up to fourteen habitated fish tanks now!

On the opposite end of the weather spectrum, we had a very cold winter.  This year the pool froze over probably a dozen times (it only froze over twice last year).  One of the days the ice was a full 3mm thick in places!  We even had snow in October.  Go figure!

On the Lego front, a whole stack of Toy Story Lego was released so had to get all of that.  And six new Harry Potter sets as well, although really only one of those is "new".  There's a few other cool sets I want to get too.  Went to BrickExpo in August which was very cool, and made me wonder if I should put anything in one of these years.

Other toys included an iPhone for me, a Blackberry for Stu, a video camera for Stu, a Canon 500D for me and a PS3.  

So I've had the 500D for four and a bit months and have already taken 15000 photos on it!  The majority of those in the UK of course ;)  I still haven't sorted my UK photos *at all*.  I did however manage to sort enough of our Japan 2009 and Europe 2008 photos to get the highlights into the blog entries.  One of my next projects will be making photo books of those trips.  I did make a photo book of our wedding as a Christmas present for parents.  Having seen the finished result (which I was stoked with) there's a few little changes I want to make and need to fix up some of the images before we get our copy printed.

Around the house, we bought a whole stack of bookshelves for the downstairs room and set those up.  So that room is quite well setup now.  The garden has gone slightly feral though, especially with all the rain we've had recently.

Shows seen this year:

Movies seen this year:

Books read this year:

And a few other bits and pieces:

Phewf.  Yup, busy year :)  I'm actually amazed I got this thing written *before* the end of the year - that never happens!! :)

Six hours to go.  Have a great 2011 peoples!  Happy New Year!!

Never thought I'd see this!!

Compare today ..

with last week...

Side by side..

 
And had to get a pic of this!

And so another weekend comes to a close all too quickly :(

As usual, very relaxing, doing such things as..

Whale watching from the kitchen window..

Documenting Benny..

Doing a jigsaw..

Going for a walk along the beach..

..in the rain..

Eating lots of pizza.. (we felt a little guilty getting them deliver it when it was *pissing* down with rain from the storm.. oops..!)

And enjoying the spa..

Not much today, as the sweetie needed to get home early.