Well I have to say it's not only Americans that do it.  Just about everyone I've met in Australia has done it too.  In fact they did it so often it used to drive me completely mental.  I used to *HATE* meeting people at church, because I'd ALWAYS get the same questions - Where do you live? What do you do?  I automatically got so defensive about it and once I was quite rude to someone that did it to me.

Yeah I'm pretty screwed up.

So Friday afternoon I left work super early and headed off into uncharted territory (Lachlan Valley Way - which I don't think I've ever been on in my life before!) and headed north.

It's a three and a quarter hour drive to Parkes, but amazingly pretty (compared to the Hume Highway to Sydney which is quite boring for a lot of it).  Had the road to myself for a lot of it, and the sweetie had given me some podcasts to listen to, so was a great drive.

Well that is until the bugs got so bad I couldn't see out the windscreen anymore..

Ha!  That's where the bogans come from!

I arrived at my motel at 6:40pm, and had to wait while they tried to find the room key.  Had just barely enough time to dump my stuff and go to the loo before Tony and family picked me up to go to dinner.  We went to Bellas in town which had good reviews.  And we all agreed, the food was delicious.  Although I did eat too much and it meant I took forever to get to sleep!

"Pollo Insalata" - proscuitto line chicken breast served on baby spinach and sweet roasted pumpkin with roasted hazelnut butter and crumbled fetta

Fountain next to my motel, by night

Watched a bit of The Mummy Returns while waiting for dinner to settle.

Saturday morning it was foggy.  The motel also had a couple of police teams staying the night, apparently to cover the roads to Bathurst.

We were going to have breakfast at Tony's motel, but they don't do breakfasts on weekends.  (?????????)  Lame. So went into town and found an open cafe, and I had bacon, eggs and a hash brown.  It was bigger than I expected but did keep me going all day.

So off to The Dish!!

It was still foggy, but that made for some cool photos.

We wandered through the visitors' centre and joined the queue for the telescope tours.  I think we had to wait maybe three quarters of an hour?  The queue length really didn't change the entire day.

They did have astronauts on segways, classic cars arriving, and Einstein to keep the crowds entertained..

The tour was pretty cool.  

We got to climb up a temporary staircase on the outside to the outside platform.

Here's a view you can't see every day!!

Then you climb *into* the top of the dish support.

And down into the control room!

There were even some real astronomers doing some real observing.  Well so they say, I don't know what sort of results they would have gotten with all the people around with mobile phones and video cameras, and moving the dish around all the time..

And finally out the front door

Next we had a wander down the train tracks past the old Kennedy Antenna (not in use anymore)

A quick look back at The Dish at a different angle

Past the earth-air heat exchanger.  This is where they take outside air, then pump it underground for eighty metres to get the air to a constant temperature and into the twelve metre dish they have setup for testing for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

Twelve metre dish setup for Square Kilometre Array testing

A Lego version of the SKA (not accurate - the real thing will be a lot more "random")

Then headed back up and had a look around at the classic cars.

One of them gave us quite a surprise - it had wallaby joeys in it!!

The dish from another angle

Then it was time for the official ceremony.  So they brought the dish down till it almost touched the ground.  So low in fact that it nearly took out a bottlebrush tree as they swung it round.

They attached a banner to The Dish and raised it up during the official speeches by Prof Phillip Diamond (head of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science) (I think) and Dr Megan Clarke (Head of CSIRO).

They also had one of the sopranos for the night's opera lead a chorus of Happy Birthday (Helen Barnett I think)

Then Jess went off to make some Sandtastic art, so I wandered around and took photos as the sun was coming out.

This is Jess' sandtastic art - it's just a sticky bit of card with all these stencils you pull off one at a time and cover with coloured sand.  Sand sticks to the card and you shake off the excess.  Way cool!

I didn't play cricket on The Dish..  I think maybe I shoulda bought one of these! :)

Another wander while Jess made a paper SKA

Jess and her paper SKA dish

There were a bunch of people there from the Central West Astronomical Society, some of them with telescopes pointed at the sun.  Which has some super awesome sunspots going on at the moment!

Then had a look in the receiver room.  I never realised that they actually change the receivers all the time!  Takes them a few hours to change them over.  Dad would have loved all this stuff - he would have understood what the dude was talking about :) These are some of the receivers actually in use at the telescope!

Finally we headed back through the visitors' centre to have a look at the displays.

This is a panel that they made up for the movie The Dish (2000) and donated to CSIRO afterwards.

It's only a model! Shh!

We stopped at a couple of lookout places on the way out.

Then into Parkes to see the War Memorial.  It's supposed to be a lookout, but it was all locked up and nothing there to say it ever opened.  What's the point of a lookout if you can't go up it?  Too many trees around to have any views of the town, so that was a bit fail.

Then headed to Forbes for a late lunch.  There were like two places open in the entire town, one of them being Subway, so that's what we had.  Then filled the car with petrol and headed home, arriving a bit before 7pm.

So yeah a super fun day away.  Pity the sweetie bailed (still feeling too sick).  We might have gone to Dubbo for the Sunday, but those plans had to be cancelled.  Thanks Tony/Heather/Jess for putting up with me! :)

I did fix the permissions on the mt-comments.cgi so people can comment again now.  Didn't take long for the comment spammers to notice :/

I wanted the food processor mainly for making biscuit bases - breaking up butter into flour by hand takes me like fifteen minutes - this thing could do it in fifteen seconds!  But it does so much more, will be fun to play with it.

The bananas are from Dave C - because bananas are a luxury item, don't you know? :)  hehe

So of course, I had to use both things and christen the blender by making a banana smoothie :)

My reaction: meh.

I mean, I blog.  I tweet.  What use would another app have that was basically just a combination of the two? So I used it all of three or four times.  I quickly added quite a few people to various circles.  But really the only people using it were people I haven't seen in forever talking about things that really have no meaning for me.  And not just their original comments, but all the ongoing conversations they have with their own friends.  Completely boring!  To filter them out I'd have to put them in their own circle, and only read the other circles regularly.  Pointless.

But whatever.

The thing that really turned me off however is their "real name" policy.  Which I simply don't want to use.  I have my online persona thankyouverymuch, I don't need them dictating that I need to use my real name online.  

There were two problems.  

1. I didn't know what other Google services would be affected by me using my real name.  This is not explained anywhere.  Would my YouTube videos suddenly have my real name?  Blogger comments?  Noone could tell me.

2. If they catch you, they don't just suspend your Google+ account - they suspend just about *everything*.  Now you have to understand, I am entirely dependant on my Google services.  I mean just look at the list:

The biggest things of course being my calendar (I *really* couldn't live without this), Reader (that'd be an epic pain in the butt to switch to something else), Gmail for some mailing lists to make some things easier to manage, Analytics for my blog, Maps for various travel maps I've done, as well as a profile for commenting on people's blogs, chat which is the only chat program left that I use with any sort of regularity, and YouTube which I have a few videos but could live without.  

So you can understand my fear of being suspended.

And then there are stories like this (and other Australians in the past few days as well) and so I decided to delete my Google+ account.  Just like that.  All gone.  Never even miss it.

The drive was quite pretty - all the wattles along the way are out in bloom at the moment.  Unfortunately I was driving on the way up and it was too dark on the way back, so you'll have to take my word for it ;)

I realised I've probably *never* taken a photo on Como station before...!

In the city, an A380 flew overhead.

And then onto the Opera House for the concert.

Heaps of people came dressed up. There were lots of Jedis and Leias and Supermen (and a Superwoman) and wizards.

The Opera House itself is a pretty funky place for photography.

So the concert.  Fantastic!!!  It was really really cool.  Unfortunately we had pretty crappy seats.  Right near the front, which gave us an awesome view of the first violinists and the harp and a few of the cellists, but other than that - nothing :(  Couldn't see any of the brass or woodwind or percussion *at all* :(:(:(  So that was pretty frustrating and disappointing.  Note to self: don't get seats there again.

Shaun Micallef came out between each piece for a bit of light entertainment which was kinda fun.  Didn't get any photos of him unfortunately, even though we had an awesome view.. you know.. being so close and all!  And near the end, Darth Vader and some stormtroopers came onto the stage.  That's the second concert in recent months I've been to with Stormtroopers.  Pretty cool :)

So yeah.  Thoroughly enjoyed it.  It was far too short too - only two hours.. for once I could have sat still for hours just enjoying it heh.

Anyways.

So hopped on a train home, and D&Y came over and we all went out to the Tradies for dinner.

And they played with Yvonne's polaroid

Sunday morning we had a bit of a sleep in.

I took a photo of the "Pigs and Chickens" bathroom tiles for posterity.

We headed out to Miranda Fair next, so Stu could get a nice cup of tea, and to get my birthday present.  Stu got me a birthday cake too :):)

Then went home, packed up all our stuff and headed out to lunch - met up with James and George and Liz and Luc and all the kids and had Sizzler.  Ate too much as always.  In fact I completely skipped dinner last night and didn't even wake up hungry in the middle of the night heh.

Then home to Canberra.  The end.

And did confirm that my mother does indeed read this blog.  *sigh*  hi mum....  now you won't have to ask questions all the time when you talk to me, cause you get it all here?  m,kay?

Woah boy!  It was pretty hot!  There were a couple of reasonably spiced dishes, but mostly they were insanely hot (for me).  Yummy though.

After dinner there were still plenty of leftovers so I asked that they be boxed up.  But when it was time to go, noone wanted to take any because they were all going out to other places after.  So we got all the leftovers.  And it was pretty awesome, because we didn't have to do much food shopping that week - we were set for the whole week with leftovers!  Win!

It took us fifty minutes to make our way along the queue and into the room they'd setup (which was a bigger room than last time).  There was a lot more Lego there this year, looks like a lot of SydLUG people had brought Lego down as well.

They didn't have the Hogwarts Castle this time, but there was a super awesome Space Lego setup (probably my favourite thing of the day) and an amazing western scene.

Last year when I went my camera was exactly one day old.  This year it was exactly one year old.  !!  To the day!  Since changing the focus mode in Japan last year I've been a lot happier with the results out of the camera, and generally this year's photos were better than last year's.

There were lots and lots of town/city scenes and lots of trains..

Bridges..

Towers..

Cool things from movies..

A delorean and train from Back to the Future





Wall-E and Eve




Lots of Star Wars stuff








The Blacktron vs Classic Space diorama

A big minifig


Snoopy!


A cool mountain scene


Parliament House

Another space type scene

But some of the most fun was in the detail people put into the dioramas.  You really need to look closely to see everything that's going on.  So much fun!

Fishing a skeleton out of the water

Geisha and sailors inside a very large building, that had stuff going on on all the floors

Chickens in the western scene

A bicyclist hit by a car

14th March saw us heading down to Yarrangobilly Caves.

First up was a walk down to the thermal pool and then along the river walk.

Went around to the Glory Cave entrances but decided we wouldn't have time to go through it properly before our tour of Jersey Cave started.

So went back and did the Jersey Cave tour.  This cave was amazing.  Lots of really pretty formations, and lots of bacon :)

Photos can't capture the beauty of this pool and all the crystals of rock around it

Another pool that was a bit easier to photograph

Then it was back to South Glory Cave, which was a self-guided tour.  This cave was completely different to Jersey Cave - it was all white!

The hole in the roof is only relatively recent - Tony remembers going there when there was no hole!

My brother could probably explain why streaks of water come out as dots??  Something to do with the camera sensor?  I don't remember there being any fluoro lights around..

Quite a bit of wild life around the buildings, real and, er, stuffed!

And heaps of cunninghams skinks!

All my cave photos were hand held, the majority without flash.  I did take a tripod, but it was too much like hard work to set it up - especially on the guided tour with lots of other people around.  Sorry, I'm just not dedicated enough ;)