Got ready and went and returned the oncall phone to Neil.  This was too early for the sweetie so went and did food shopping by myself since I was already out.  Ran into Damien which was nice.

How good does my shop look?

(that was everything I bought this morning.  A lot less impulse buys and fancy products without the sweetie around lol).  

On the way home I stopped to document Ginninderra Creek... do you think Lake Ginninderra might be a little bit full from all that rain overnight?  Normally the creek is just a little slow flowing creek way down low on the right.  Today it was flowing strong and *way* up!

Annie and Noah came over before lunch so that also was really nice.  Then have been pottering around the house, and feeling a lot better than I have all week.

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.

Then walked henrch home only for him to discover he'd left his keys at work and had to go back - doh!!

Dessert Saturday night was pretty simple and wheat-free - strawberries dipped in white chocolate, and mandarin pieces and raspberries dipped in dark chocolate.  The strawberries especially were nommmm!!!

Sunday was mostly a quiet day at home, although I did go down to Tony's to do a plant swap - some fish tank plants for a big bunch of rosemary for the night's lamb roast.  As well as delicious lamb, we did a whole heap of vegetables - garlic, pumpkin, sweet potato, swede, zucchini, carrot, red onion, mushroom and capsicum.  So yummy!  And so simple, and apart from a good sloshing of oil, amazingly healthy (well maybe not the lamb so much hehe).

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! :)

Darrell Lea had a Jelly Belly special called "Bean Boozled" - kinda like Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans.  Eight "regular" flavours, with eight "yukky" flavours with matching colours.  So it was a gamble whether you'd get a good one or a bad one.  Silly thing is, with my disability to be able to pick flavours, half the time I couldn't actually tell which one it actually was!  Mostly the yukky ones weren't actually that bad (still sweet).  Only one I didn't like - rotten eggs, which actually tasted more like sardines.

Dog food (1) vs Chocolate pudding (1)

Centipede (5) vs Strawberry jam (1)

Vomit (1) vs Peach (3)

Mouldy cheese (5) vs Caramel corn (3)

Rotten egg (4) vs Buttered popcorn (0)

Booger (1) vs Juicy pear (2)

Toothpaste (3) vs Berry blue (5)

Baby wipes (2) vs Coconut (3)

Except maybe the cleaning of the house that we spent all morning doing.. hrmmm

So at lunch Nat and Andrew came over and we ate lots and "viewed the flowers" - aka "hanami"!   It was super awesome.  I cooked heaps of food, and will have leftovers for at least ten meals (and now for my next trick - finding freezer space!)  It was pretty cold and windy, so we decided to setup inside.  But we did have the blue tarpaulin and we could see the tree, so it's still authentic!

Afterwards the others watched a very strange Japanese movie while I geotagged Alnwick Castle photos.

Then we all headed into ANU to see Za Kabuki.  There was a lot in Japanese only, so it was a bit tricky to know what was going on (you could sort of get the general gist).  The main play itself (The Sardine Seller's Net of Love) was mostly in Japanese, but a bit of English as well which certainly helped (the story was outlined on the program too so we at least knew what was going on).  Bizarrely, all the female characters in the main play were played by guys and vice-versa - very odd!!  They very nicely allowed photos (just no flash).

Violet is 16 months, Immy is three and a half...    !!!

Then did our food shopping, and then Stu spent an hour and a half cooking dinner.  It was pretty good.

A year ago today we left Tokyo and flew to London!

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 :)