Ok so I took a lot of photos in Germany. I’ll soon have 12 albums worth for you to peruse, but for the meantime here’s just a few tempters.

If the 12 albums is a little daunting just remember that it’s only about 380 of the 1000 photos I took.

But really, if you’re pressed for time, and you don’t mind that I’ll never speak to you again, you can skip the full treatment and just check out these highlights.

To the people and places that didn’t make it into this selection, don’t take it personally, or placeonally?

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Today I walked around Bruce and O’Connor Ridge, it’s the first time I’ve been since before I went to Germany. Unfortunately things have gone drastically down hill since then.

Whether you agree with the road or not, it’s not nice to see Canberra Nature Park ripped up like this. And I don’t believe it’s a road we really need, which makes it even worse.

A lot of the orange ribbons that STR tied around the trees have had things written on them. There’s an interesting mixture of pro and anti-road stuff. Obviously some of the GDE Now folks came down and cheered on the bulldozers and wrote slogans on the ribbons.

The metal sign is part of the “Calvary Veterans Walking Track”, which will soon be scenically situated about 20 metres from a major road, therapeutic I’m sure.

I climbed up Black Mountain on the way home, the last shot is taken from the top, it’s of the Caswell Drive part, not Bruce Ridge.

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I headed to Nowra today with the ANUMC, we climbed at Tompson’s Point. The weather was absolutely awesome, almost swimming temperature.

We spent most of the day at the far left end (from the carpark) of the climbs. I did my third lead on “Gecko” an easy 15. I also top-roped a weird 14 left of Gecko, as well as Sloth and Couch Potato.

I didn’t get to try Everything But The Wasp, although it looked good. Instead we headed to the Descent Gully wall and did some more leads. On the Descent Gully side wall I led the 14 twice, whatever it’s called, and then did the 16 just before we left. An excellent day.

On the way home we stopped at the Friendly Inn in Kangaroo Valley. We were expecting slightly dodgy pub food, but weren’t fussed . As it turned out the beer was cold and the food was superb, I highly recommended it you’re in the area.

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As I mentioned the other day the house for sale again. As much of a P-I-T-A as that is, it does mean it gets nice and clean for once.

The dodgy panorama is my room, cleanest its been since I moved in, literally.

The Kitchen now features a cool pseudo-island bench that Sarah created out of something or other. Very cool.

And there’s a shot of Sunset from Commonwealth Avenue bridge as I rode home on Friday.

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I’ve been riding to work this week, the stretch along the lake is amazing. Check out the blosoms. I can’t wait for summer!!!!!

I also couldn’t resist taking a photo of the mess on Parkes Way. This is just gonna get so much better when all the Gungahlin traffic joins via the GDE, glad we’re spending $70 million on it.

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Hi Dad, can you tell me what’s wrong with my plant? It used to be all green.

While cleaning my room the other day I rediscovered a book mum got me for Christmas a few years ago. It’s a collection of all (or the best?) cartoons from the “Bringing Down The House” exhibition of 2001.

Basically all the cartoonists from all the papers, and a bunch of others, submit their work and it’s put into an exhibition at old Parliament House. I’m not sure if they still do it, but it was a great idea.

Here are three of my favourites.

John Howard’s obviously been to one of Bin Laden’s training camps, he’s certainly learnt this lesson well.

A nice point, which doesn’t ever seem to be mentioned. The “War of Terror” (Phillip Ruddock) is not a “clash of civilisations”, or “good vs evil”.

I missed it in the photo, but the title of this one is “Liberty weeping”. Indeed.

I headed to Sydney last weekend for Ben Crowe’s 30th shindig.

Catherine, Kirsten, Jess and I got a hotel on Williams St. It turned out to be one block away from the club we went to, so in the end a few other people crashed there too.

That was “Club 77″ by the way, a really small, cool, grungey place. Downstairs, ie. underground, lots of weird and wonderful people and decent music too.

The actual party part of the party started at 5pm at the Glenmore in the Rocks. We had a great spot on the roof beer garden, the view was sweet.

We discovered that starting at 5pm can lead to a serious hang over by midnight. But luckily we recovered and danced the night away.

Most of the photos are blurry pieces of crap, thanks to the darkness, and the strangely unstable ground. But there’s a few worth looking at …

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Just a few random shots of the garden, which is looking lovely. I think these are still the bulbs I planted a few years ago. They just come up, how nice!

The bad news is our house is for sale, again! I’m not too worried, it’s not nice enough for someone to move into without a lot of work, and because it’s only a half-size block I doubt anyone’s going to buy it with a view to building.

Fingers crossed of course.

I foolishly let my sister use my camera, hence the cat and donkey shots. Hi Ange!

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The Labor and Liberal parties’ vision for O’Connor Ridge. (Thanks to Ben for the picture)