Fun Stuff: August 2011 Archives
Probably no better, and maybe even worse than Monday :/
Ok so this is really old news now: Mid July the little brother came down with his German tourist friend Conny in tow (he'd met her a few days earlier on Town Hall steps and they'd been doing the tourist thing with her). They stayed with us the Saturday night after the booze train run, and Conny did touristy stuff on the Sunday while David worked on the train. So Sunday night we put on a lamb roast (I mean what else are you going to serve international guests? :) ) and after dinner played some card games. Monday night we had leftovers and Conny made a tiramisu for us for dessert. And since there was leftover egg whites, we made meringues as well :)
A year ago today we decided to escape the Japan heat and travel around the Kii peninsula by train. It took us a lot longer than we thought it would but did get to see a lot of the coast which was really nice, and escaped the heat for most of the day, which was the point!
Have I ever mentioned how hard Geotagging photos is? Especially from trains? In other countries with not great Google Earth coverage in places?
Yeup.
This only took like ten hours to do.. almost as long as the trip itself!
So was geotagging photos again today and discovered this crazy freeway interchange between Osaka and Kyoto. Never noticed it before!
Bored yet? :)
410 photos. And all of this was walked - no trains as we didn't bother with the Tube strike that day.
As I was reading the blog entry for that day last night I remembered I'd actually already tracked where I'd walked for the first few days in London in gmap-pedometer. I'd so totally forgotten them that I hadn't even downloaded them off the usb stick I've been carrying around ever since then!
Although I did note that there was a pretty big mistake on the Hyde Park track. Funny how a year later I had a better memory of it than that the same day I was actually there..
This was our next day in London. Quite a bit more spread out.
Ever wonder what a day of wandering around London looks like?
This apparently.
That was our first day in London a year ago. One of the best days of the trip.
Here's my two (tangible) birthday presents (I also had various meals and drinks bought for me by various people :) ).
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 :)
Since the weekend I've been keeping my news feeds under control. A typical day takes about 20 minutes to read all the news feeds for (it was a lot longer before I culled lots and lots). Which doesn't sound like a lot until you miss a day or two, then it adds up very quickly. So got today's feeds read and spent the rest of the evening geotagging. Well sort of. Finding photos taken over Japan, Russian and Germany and tagging them in Google Earth.
Just for fun, here's some pool freezage we had on July 30 - the best we've had this winter. Solid enough to hold up the bird seed container easily.
When I came back an hour or so later, it had refrozen!
Had to smash through the ice on the bucket of water - and the crystals forming underneath the surface were amazing!
Went to a trivia night for Stu's work tonight. Was lots of fun. Only six rounds though, and *lots* of blank space between each round, so not a good enough range of scores and the night took *ages*. I got a few that noone else got which was pretty cool. Although they didn't listen to me when I said a bulls eye in archery was 10 points. Oh well heh.
The theme was "If I wasn't working here I'd be a..." .. Stu thought he'd be a hobo :)
The Friday night we saw Harry Potter, we had a bit of a wander around Civic.
The ice rink looked so cool. I'd love to have gone skating, but somehow the month got away from me and it was all too hard. Maybe if they do it again next year..
24th July saw me getting up at stoopid o'clock to head down to the snow with Steve and Alan W.
It snowed pretty much the whole day, which meant for super awesome snow all day, but not great visibility, made worse by goggles that kept steaming up and had heaps of blind spots around the edges. So a little frustrating and it meant I went a lot slower than my normally slow speed.
Heading up the Interceptor Quad
Another shot from the Interceptor Quad
Snowflakes!!
Heading up the very pretty Ridge Quad. Unfortunately as I was taking these photos, I dropped a glove :( This was above Excelerator. I really didn't want to do Excelerator as it's very steep, but alas I had to retrieve it. Steve and Alan got there first and got it for me, but it was in a non-groomed bit so it was very icy and I stacked while trying to stop with them. Got a big bruise on my leg to show for it.
The ice on the trees was pretty cool. And this isn't even a lot - many other trees had heaps more ice.
From Side Saddle looking across to Blue Cow terminal. I had my other stack of the day down the bottom nearish the lift.
Looking from Blue Cow terminal across to Summit. Had lunch of a few snacks and just sat down for half an hour to recover from my morning.
More pretty snow on the trees
Looking down to Perisher resort
I don't think I've ever seen Lake Jindabyne so full!
Yesterday I had a play with the GPS track I took of the day. It was super cool! I took 17 lift rides (actually that reminds me, I need to create an account so I can look at the MyRide stats - ski passes are now all RFID and you swipe past them as you get on the lift, so you can see all your stats). I did 15 green runs (although a decent chunk of those were the very easy Pleasant Valley) and 3 blue runs. Next time I go I'm going to make much more of an effort to go on different runs and lifts all over the resort to make the GPS track look even better :)
OK so this entry is a little late (only five months!!)
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 ;)
My neighbour has a full-on menagerie. As well as her goat (Goat!) there are two doggies (Petal and Reggie) which are meant to be guard dogs but would only ever lick you to death. There's a four foot tank in the garage with a blue tongue lizard. Inside there's a tank with three frogs (don't know what sort) and another huge tank with eight gorgeous green tree frogs.
Soooo cool! :):)
A couple of weeks ago Windy said there was an office upstairs that had been alfoiled and I should go take photos.
So cool! You hear about this sort of thing on the internet but it was cool to see it actually done in real life. An enormous waste of resources though...