Results tagged “Events” from Kazza the Blank One

Twenty years ago today I went microlight flying with John Hales.  I put all the photos up on kazza.cia.com.au afterwards with this description:

A couple of months ago John, a friend of my boss's, had mentioned going microlight flying but never got around to actually going. I mentioned to him that I would like to go along too if he went. So he said if I booked us in, he'd drive us down. So I did. I booked in for Saturday the 17th, but Paul who runs Sydney Microlight Centre called me up in the morning and said the conditions were not good for flying and that he'd call Sunday. A change was forecast for Saturday night, so I did not fancy my chances of getting to fly Sunday either. Anyway, Paul called me up the Sunday morning and said the weather looked good. So John and I headed down there and arrived just on 12pm (with some rather ominous clouds looming in the south). There were not enough craft available for John and I to go up together so I went up first. It was amazing! It was a lot of fun, although very windy! We flew down to Kiama and round the lighthouse, then back again. I got to fly a couple of times (between taking photos). John had a flight after me. He took it more seriously and did a lot more flying. Below are some pictures from the day:

I didn't include all the photos for this blog entry.  If anyone wants to see the rest of the photos let me know and I'll reupload the original html page with all the pics.

The controls of the trike

Lake Illawarra

Intersection of the Princes Highway and East-West Link (under construction)

One of the other trikes we flew down to Kiama with

Jones Beach, Kiama Downs

Bombo Quarry

Kiama Railway Station

Lighthouse and the Blow Hole at Kiama

Kiama

Kiama

Returning to the airport.  There's a 747 parked in the middle of this photo nowadays, I really must go down and have a look at it some time.

Final approach to the airport.  We actually landed on the grass rather than the runway, no idea why.  I had this feeling we were going to flip as soon as we hit the grass but it was fine.

John Hales about to have his turn to fly

Andy, our pilot

I absolutely loved it.  And it's probably the cheapest and easiest way to be able fly.  I never did go again though.  And John's wife took one look at the photos I put up and vetoed him from ever going again either.  Oh well!!

Twenty years ago today Mum and some friends of hers and I did the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb for her birthday.  It was pretty amazing.  It's certainly not very strenuous as they stop every hundred metres or so to tell stories or take photos or whatever.  The girder is so wide that you can't really even look down.  The only place you can look straight down to the ground is when you're walking along under the approach to the arch/pylon.  Of course you can't take anything with you, and they make you attach glasses and tape up rings.  But they wouldn't let you attach a camera because then you'd take your own photos and wouldn't buy their overpriced ones.  Communication is done via these headsets that don't actually go into your ears - they sit just in front and work by vibrating your whole skull, so the bones in the ears pick it up.  Pretty amazing.

Friday night a week ago, a bunch of us went in to Library Up Late.  It was an interesting concept, with a keynote discussion with Ben Law and Jenny Phang (of Law School fame, although I'd never actually heard of them), live music, displays of ephemera and other talks and entertainment, as well as food and drinks available.  We quite enjoyed it.

The sweetie and I went to SplunkLive today.  It was a pretty good day.  I was hoping for a little more deep diving into the cool stuff Splunk can do but it was really only hinted at in the demos.  It was still good to get an overview of the sorts of things people are doing with Splunk.

Biggest disappointment though: #epicfail with the tshirts.  The keynote speaker (who *totally* reminded me of Sheldon) was even making a big deal about big data and analysing who's in a room and what you can do with all that data.  And they were all oh yes we work for a tshirt company that also sells software.  But for all their fussing they couldn't even get a simple thing as a mix of tshirt sizes right.  They had exactly two sizes available - XL and XXL.  And by the end of the day even the XXLs were gone.  Epic. Fricken. Fail.  I don't even know why I'm so bitter.  Maybe because they made such a fuss of it, but then couldn't get it right.  Oh well.  At least I got a bit of wine out of it.  And a nice lunch.

Came home and watched some Voyager, and Finding Dory, which the sweetie hadn't actually seen.  

The other week we finally finished watching Star Trek: The Original Series.  Last night we started watching Star Trek: Voyager.  I tried getting into Voyager when it was on tv twenty years ago, but after a season and a half I lost interest.  So watching them all again now.

In other news.  Saturday morning was up for a few hours in the middle of the night thanks to hurty.  So had a very late start.  Did house and hobby type stuff in the morning then headed out for lunch and then out to Fyshwick to have another go at going to Material Pleasures.  There was barely anything in the way of evening wear, and the few things that I did try on looked pretty hideous or just didn't fit.  So left in tears, further cementing my hatred of clothes shopping.  Did our food shopping on the way home.  Stu wanted to go to Aldi.  We always spend a lot less there, simply because they just don't have much.  They're ok for meat and cheese and maybe frozen food, but that's about it.  They're absolutely terrible for fruit and veg and anything that's a little bit non-standard.  Like you can't buy a single cucumber, you have to buy a whole tray.  And you can't buy a single brown onion, you have to buy a whole bag.  They don't have rice bran oil, or any of my toiletries.  Really don't like going there.  So I went next door to Coles to pick up all the essentials.  And a cucumber.

Today went with Chrissie to the Beer and Meat on Stick Festival (aka the Multicultural Festival).  The last time (and first time) I went was the morning after dad died three years ago, which made for a very strange day.  Today we had beer and meat on a stick.  And potato on a stick.  And fetta/spinach pastries.  And gozleme.  And cider.  It was pretty crowded, but there was seemingly a lot more food and drink stalls (including at least three potato on a stick stores) so you could always find one with a short queue (a couple of stalls did have very long queues, we just avoided those). 

Came home and did papercraft and we cooked Scotch eggs for dinner and watched more Voyager.

I think it was Thursday night that we watched Star Trek Generations.  I can't actually remember.  Could have even been Wednesday.  Or even Friday.  No don't think it was Friday.

Friday morning I woke up at 3am and never got back to sleep.  Damned insomnia.  Annoying too because I had a *lot* of work to do on Friday.  Didn't really get it all done either.  Had lunch with Doc and Neil at Chatterbox though because I had a voucher I won last year.  On Friday evening the little brother and Kat came to stay.  We worked on a jigsaw and I had an early night.

Saturday I was at work all morning replacing firewalls.  It actually all went fairly smoothly.

In the afternoon I was all set to settle down and *get things done* when EffanC called us up and invited us over.  Which was lovely.  But it did mean I was out all afternoon.

Went home before dinner.  Had pizza for dinner.  Watched Footloose on tv (because I'd never actually seen it!)

Sunday morning was the Airport Open Day.  Spent all morning there.

In the afternoon Dave and Kat left, replaced by Graham and Pam.  We chatted for the afternoon (Pam has grand plans for our garden.  I'd rather not have a garden at all).  Then because we hadn't had any time to ourselves all weekend, and therefore no time to do any shopping, we went out to Dumpling Inn for dinner.  

Today I just felt like I needed a weekend to recover from my weekend.  At least Stu got a bit of down time.  

Today started off ok at work.  No dramas from the firewalls.  Just the proxies.  *sigh*  Got quite depressed about the whole thing actually.

Came home exhausted, hungry, tired and grumpy.  Had dinner, then helped move Kit's lizard (and associated large tank) down to Chris's.  Then just trying to catch up on life.  Have now finished geotagging all my Canon and iPhone photos from the last trip.

I'm tired.

Today is the 50th anniversary of decimal currency in Australia.

For reasons unknown, the Mint had an open day to celebrate it yesterday instead of today.  So Neil and I went along.

Whereupon we were instantly frustrated with poor crowd control.

We arrived at about 8:15 for the 8:30 opening.  We'd paid for our factory walk tickets on Friday, so we expected to be able to line up for that, do the tour, and then go and buy the special edition coin after that.  Except that there was a lot of confusion about the queuing.  There seemed to be only one queue, and several stalls setup.  One seemed to be ready to sell the coin, but they said they weren't open yet.  Fair enough.  But both a security guard and a person in the booth said we should go join the queue (I said we already had our floor walk tickets).  So we did that.  But people in the queue didn't have their factory walk tickets, so I was wondering if we'd have to wait in line behind everyone buying tickets, when we should just be able to go straight through.  But after a while, someone wandered down the queue and said this was actually the queue to buy the coin.  We decided since we were there, we may as well just do that first, then do the tour afterwards.

Except.

They had the most inefficient system EVER to sell the coins.  They had a grand total of two eftpos machines for the transactions, and were also recording all the sales on laptops.  It was incredibly slow and inefficient and we were standing in the hot sun with no shelter for an hour and a half!!!!! I complained to their twitter that they needed to open up more registers to sell the coins.  Later on they said they did, although we didn't see it.  I also asked someone if there could be a cash only lane to get through people more quickly but they wouldn't do that either.  The stoopid thing was, people were buying them in bulk, for the sole purpose of profiteering off them.  The coin was $20, but when I got home they were on ebay for $35-$40.  I seriously considered doing the same thing but I was already so filled with rage at all the people taking so long I didn't want to join the ranks of the people I hated.

So at 9:45 we finally got our coins and went inside.  They encouraged people to buy tickets online to save queuing, but there were no queues at all inside.  Wish they could have been so efficient *outside*.

Anyways.

Things improved enormously once inside.  The staff were all super friendly and helpful and enthusiastic about answering questions.  They were great.  The tour was just a slow walk through the tool room, the circulating coin hall, the proof room and the packing rooms.  It was pretty slow in places but it was super cool to see the coin pressing machines up close while they were running.  The proof room is where they manually press and carefully check all the coins used in proof sets.  Normally it's a clean room so I felt a bit bad for them having to deal with all the extra dust we were tramping through the room.  They had a lot of reject coins!  Interestingly, every single person working in the proof packing rooms was an asian lady!  Better attention to detail by them?  Who knows!

Afterwards we went upstairs to the gallery to have a look down at the floor.  Just for fun, here's a comparison of the factory floor in late 2002 vs early 2016..

This is the proof room.

I decided I'd come back again at a future date to have a better look through the gallery area.  Just too many people and I was tired and hungry.  So we just went home.

Mum was on the front line of the change to decimal currency fifty years ago - she worked in a bank!  Also.. happy anniversary .. :)

Also.  I've had this in my head ever since - https://youtu.be/5ZTeWLA1LAs

Tonight we used some Dendy vouchers (that I think I won in the mother's day raffle earlier this year and forgotten about them until last week) to go see Spectre.

As you'd expect from a James Bond movie, it's full of action and great locations and car chases (and all sorts of other chases) and (apparently) the biggest explosion in movie history.

And a lot of it had the *feel* of some of the old James Bond movies.

I rather enjoyed it :)

One thing that did annoy me (and this is just nit-picking) - streets empty of cars!  And the scene at the end would *not* have had a big empty space like that.  Just no.

But aside from that.

Great :)

Other than that.  Today we had a vendor thing which also included a couple of hours of Go-Karting!  We all had three races each, plus a finals race (one for the slow group and one for the fast group).  So much fun!  I came last in the first race, then I think second-last in the second and third-last in the third (or something).  Which really makes no sense, on account of I never managed to actually overtake anyone - I'm way too slow for that!  Good times.  But my everything hurts - and will hurt a lot more tomorrow!  I have to say the experience at PowerKart at Griffith was quite a bit better than at Queanbeyan where we went last time.  The seats were better (and they had booster seats for little people!) And they adjusted the pedals for me as well.  So it was a lot more comfortable this time around. 

One year ago today I went for a walk to the Regent Hotel to see where they filmed the opening scenes of Lucy, and then we began the long trek home to Canberra.

Tonight we went along with EffanC to see "First Dog on the Moon" - a political cartoonist.  The first hour he was all very funny and all, but for some reason it felt like it was lacking in *message* or *substance* .. or *something* ... not really sure what.  But then he took off the shark costume and was just appearing as a human and that felt a whole lot more *real*.. Was a good night anyway.  Then drinks at Kit's with some of her friends.

One year ago today we took off to go to Hong Kong!  (see link for pics!)

Last night we went along with EffanC to see Jon Ronson at the library.  He talked a bit about two of his books - The Psycopath Test and So You've Been Publicly Shamed - and told some stories.  He was entertaining, if somewhat distractable.

Just watching his TED talk - the psycopath stuff is the same as what we heard last night.  Even the delivery heh.

Last Wednesday night we went along to the Library to go to an "author talk" - they had Nick Davies (investigative journalist who exposed the News of the World phone hacking scandal) there for an interview and question time.  Quite an interesting night and the sweetie got his book (signed) for us to read.

Saturday was Whisky Live.  I don't think they had as many stalls as last year.  Tried quite a few different things this year - things I wouldn't normally have tried.  Then back to EffanC's place and we watched Thelma and Louise and Pulp Fiction.

Today was just about of stuff around the house and food shopping.  We watched the unaired pilot of Sherlock, and also Emperor.

Also this week I lost my longest guardian portal in Longreach.  245 days.  Super sad times.

Yesterday as a team building exercise, we ran around shooting each other... :)

So.  Much.  Fun.

:)

There were fifteen of us all up, so we split into three teams of five.

I did pretty badly the first game, being quite cautious and hiding in good places.  But the problem with that was there weren't too many people around to get, so I didn't get many points.  I came 14/15

The second game I did a lot better - walking around a lot more and getting more people.  This time I came 7/15 :)

Definitely something we're all interested in doing again (and hopefully it won't be in five and a half years - it's been that long since the last time I played it!)

Yeah it's been that kind of couple of weeks.

On the Saturday of the long weekend, Stu made a Cantonese custard with pork mince.  It was yummy!  But quite a lot of effort.

Sunday morning we had brunch at the Coffee Club, although it was so late I had an early lunch.

Then we went to the poultry show at Epic.  We didn't think it was still on at first because there was hardly anyone around at Epic.  But as it turned out, it was on, just in a smaller pavilion.  Apparently there'd been a bit of a faction split of some kind, and a lot of people weren't there.  We saw a whole heap of Kath's chookens that had won prizes.  Hers are very friendly chickies that don't mind being patted.

Then did our food shopping and came home.

On the Sunday night we had "Effan C" over for dinner.  I did the boeuf bourguignon, and prior to that we had quite the little party of cheeses.  And afterwards we sampled quite a few of our whiskeys.  And there might have been singstar that went til 2am!

Monday was mostly just culling down Turkey photos for sending out to people.

In the evening we went to Stu's sensei's place for shabu shabu beef.  Yumm.

So I called my mother last Friday night.  She'd been to see Dad that evening and the nursing home staff said that they didn't think that he was going to make the night the previous night, so he really didn't have very long to go.  She had spent two hours with him.  He was pretty unresponsive, but he responded when Mum sang Abide With Me to him.  I wondered whether he'd make it to Sunday when I was planning to come up.  I considered going up Saturday instead, but Chris was on her way down to Canberra to visit so it was going to be tricky.  I asked Mum if she wanted me to come up anyway on Saturday if Dad went but she said I didn't need to.  Chris arrived fairly late and we talked and all shared a very very nice bottle of Brokenwood 2009 shiraz.  We have a 2010 downstairs from our trip to the Hunter Valley last Christmas.  It was past midnight when we got to bed, and we were just in bed when I got the SMS from my mum: "Dad went to be with Lord at 11.55pm". #sad

Had a bit of a slow morning on Saturday.  I called Mum again.  She'd been out to the home til about 2am to say a final goodbye.  She was ok with me not coming up until Sunday, as she had a church event planned that morning and was likely to be sleeping in the afternoon anyway, as she'd only had about an hour's sleep.

So Chris and Zac and I went along the Beer and Meat on a Stick festival (aka the Multicultural Festival) to get, well, beer and meat on a stick.  But before we found meat on a stick, we found potato on a stick!  Might have had another one of those later.  And a waffle on a stick.  Did a little shopping during and after as well.

In the later afternoon we had a swim to cool off.  In the evening we watched a couple of episodes of MacGyver and had another swim.

Sunday morning we got ready then meandered our way up to Sydney (Chris dropped me off).  The minister came over and we decided on an order of service for the funeral.  Then I got stuck into putting together a reflections slide show in powerpoint.  Took three nights to do, but I think it will be nice.  Will try and get it onto YouTube when I get home.

So how am I?  ok I think.  I suppose I've enough time to get used to the idea of Dad not being around.  And living in Canberra it's not like I saw him much anyway.  Mum is ok too, again, she's had months to get used to life without Dad.  Thanks everyone for your messages and condolances.

Last Sunday afternoon I went along with Nat and Andrew to this year's Lego Brick Expo at the Hellenic Club.

Verdict: the Lego was awesome, the venue was a disaster.

They've learnt from previous years, and now you line up outside the venue where they have staff come along and check tickets.  Then when your allocated time slot comes up you can all just go straight in.  So it was much more efficient getting in.  The problem was that inside things were spread out all over the place in different rooms and in corridors, so people were squeezing in to see the Lego while other people were squeezing past, and it was a rabbit warren of rooms so I was worried about missing a room just because I hadn't seen the entrance to it.

Not to mention the crowds and crowds of people.  They sold 12000 tickets for the two days.  !!  So it was jam packed with little kids that seem to know exactly when you are about to take a photo and stick their heads or hands in the photo.  It was amazingly frustrating.  We did get the last session of the day, so at least at about 5:20pm things were thinning out enough to go back and redo some photos with less crowds.

They really need to get a big room at Epic and be done with it.  I think if they do it at the Hellenic Club again next year I might not even go.

On Friday night Fiona arrived in town.  We had some muscat and chatted for a while before bed.

Saturday morning we went into Braddon and met up with @chrispycon at Sweet Bones for brunch.  They had some nice cupcakes and Fiona got us some nachos as well.  Was good to see Chris again, it's been too long.

We left Fiona to her own devices for a while and came home and listened to the #Classic100 and did some housework.  Got some takeaway Dumpling Inn for dinner.  We started watching Dark City but we kept talking and missing stuff, so decided to put on Labyrinth because then it wouldn't matter if we talked over the top of it.  That, and we could admire Jareth's bulge ;)

Sunday morning we chilled out and listened to the #Classic100 while Fiona went off to the markets.  In the afternoon/evening we went to the Roller Derby which was a lot of fun.  

This morning we went to Black Pepper for brunch.  Then home for a while before Fiona left for home.

Tonight (after being inspired by the #Classic100) we watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

So quite a lovely weekend, with a nice mix of socialising and down time (letting me do lots of photo sorting!), and it was great to catch up with Fiona again.

Tonight us and Fiona went along to the finals of Skate-turion - a roller derby tournament.  It was surprisingly fun!  The only exposure I've had to roller derby was the movie Whip It that the sweetie and I watched a couple of weeks ago.  So didn't have too much idea what was going on to start with.  But after reading up on some of the rules in breaks, and just watching, I got a bit of an idea and it was quite fun to watch.

We arrived just as the C-Division game was finishing so didn't see much of that.  Then moved into the other room to see the B-Division and A-Division finals.

The B-Division final was between Perth and Canberra.  It was a pretty good game, but Perth was much better than Canberra, and won convincingly.

Mary Fagdalene from Perth Roller Derby.  She was really good.

Then the A-Division game started.  And oh my!  Those girls were awesome!  Canberra made a very strong start and one of their jammers, ShortStop, made the most amazing moves.  The crowd went crazy.  But Brisbane played very well and hit the lead and managed to keep it, although Canberra did make a come back, it just didn't quite work.

1337!

ShortStop

We were there for four hours.  Note for next time: take a cushion to sit on!  Most people had done it before, so were well prepared.  Us, not so much.  heh.  Also, the whistles blowing were super loud, which hurt my sensitive ears somewhat.

But it was great fun event.  We might just have to see more bouts some time..!