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

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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I got Bjork’s new album while I was in Melbourne. Unfortunately I can’t get my laptop to play it, or any Linux machine for that matter. I imagine it’s the CD that’s broken rather than Linux, but we’ll see.

It does play on my regular CD player though, thankfully.

It’s not the album you’d pick if you were trying to convert a friend to the way of the Bjork. I think Vespertine is good for that, it’s just so pretty, and sufficently poppy.

This one, Medulla, is a bit weird, there’s a few vocalumentals, and lots of clicks and pops.

It still has that certain spine tingling Bjork-ness though.

I went and saw the Datsuns last night in Melbourne. It was awesome!.

The support was some band called Fur Patrol, who were also good. They got a lot of mileage with the male segment of the crowd thanks to their rather gorgeous lead singer. But their songs were pretty good too, and they were tight.

The Datsuns blew me away, they put on the best show. It’s pure Rock theatre, lots of jumps, Pete Townshend windmills, crowd surfing and standing on risers. Awesome!

The crowd was weird, most of them were pretty sedate, although there were probably 200 or so at the front going completely mental. There were lots of crowd surfers landing on their heads, and knocking people over. I hit the deck at least twice, and one guy went down and lost his glasses, I must wear contacts next time.

The security were really shit, really agro and just complete wankers. At the end a guy reached up to the mic stand to grab one of Dolf’s picks and security came over and just threw him off the stage really violently. After the final encore a bunch of guys pulled the whole mic stand into the crowd and messed it all up, for a second I thought there was gonna be a brawl.

Within the crowd though it was a really good vibe, anyone who hit the deck was hauled up very quickly and everyone was trying to look after each other. Quite strange when you’re all jumping around like freaks and bashing into each other.

I took a few shots, it was a bit hairy for photography, but some came out.

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Went and saw Something For Kate last night at the Prince of Wales in St Kilda. It was a sort of reunion gig with the original base player (ie. not the tall blonde chick), and they played a lot of old songs from their earlier EPs and Albums.

After the second encore, Paul came back on stage and did a bunch of songs acoustic without the band. He played a few crowd pleasers, everyone singing along, including the brilliant All the things that aren’t good about scientology.

It goes without saying that they were absolutely awesome. If you’ve never seen Paul Dempsey live you’re missing out.

I’m in Melbourne this week for the AUUG conference. So far it’s been good fun, although there’s a lot of BSD love going around, which is a bit weird. I’ve been accused of being a “Linux guy” a few times.

Nice city, Melbourne. Although the weather’s been ordinary. I stumbled across the Olympics on a big screen in Federation Square, so I watched the Basketball for a while. Had excellent curry chicken in a restaurant nearby.

Last night I had the pleasure of having a few drinks with about six Liberal staffers, through a friend of mine. It was an eye opening experience.

They’re all nice people, chatty and friendly. I think there was an assumption that I shared their political views, which is something we all do. I wish I still had my dread(s), I think that would have made things more interesting, based on later comments.

Basically they seem just like me, except when they dive into a political rant it’s about how Mark Latham’s going to destroy the economy. Although my initial reaction is “what a load of shit”, it’s not too far removed from me ranting about how John Howard’s going to destroy the environment.

Some random pics.

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I bought some plants on the weekend. One for Ben, whos “Bring a Plant” party I missed, and one for my desk at work.

I took some photos on a whim, a few turned out quite nicely.

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