New pixel-filling device.
I'll christen it a bit more thoroughly over the next week or so, but thanks to a rather large donation to the Camera Fund of Southeast Melbourne, I am back on the photography radar with some much improved hardware.
Though I apologise to all non-
Collingwood fans, this is an
Australian Magpie. They have a particularly beautiful warble in the mornings. Glorious bird, photographed in the grass around the Emu Flats embankment in Sunbury.
The second is of the Rupertswood Mansion, also in Sunbury. Though improperly exposed, it claims to be the birthplace of
the Ashes, a cricket tournament between Australia and England where the teams vie for ownership of a small pot of ashes from a burned set of cricket wickets. Big deal, no mistake!
Thanks very much to the much-valued contributors to the camera fund!
A goings' on...
This past weekend, my Aussie family donated a weekend at a place called
Marysville, which is in the Yarra Valley to the northeast of Melbourne. Someone special and I stayed in a really great resort tucked into the hillsides above the town. We mostly walked, ran, drank wine, cooked dinner, and ate posh chocolate (a little). In fact, we almost never go out for dinner because we like cooking in so much. It's quite nice, I have to say.
We even had a car, which is to say, we drove everywhere. We shirked work on Friday morning and went to the
Healesville Sanctuary, which is probably the best Aussie wildlife park around if you want to check out all the cool Aussie fauna. We got out to the resort for dinner time. Saturday morning we drank tea on the veranda overlooking a spectacular bit of bushland, walked into town to buy posh jam and lollies, had second breakfast, then zoomed back in toward the Yarra Valley wine region to find the most remote vineyard possible. That turned out to be
Long Gully Estate, which though nice, made wines that were substandard. We swung around the zone and sampled posh goat's cheese at the
Yarra Valley Dairy before ending up at
Badger's Brook Estate to eat posh sour dough bread and posh cheese on a Qantas blanket amongst the vines. If we got any more mature, we'd be talking about "the good old days", but thankfully those didn't come up in conversation. The evening was spent with a trail run to
Stevenson Falls and dinner of wholegrain ravioli with homemade basil pesto. Yum.
Sunday morning went swimmingly in the resort pool, then Bruce and Helen caught up with us in time for lunch and to drop us off for the bus heading back home. A very tranquil weekend all around.
The rest of my life is filled with a burning hurry to finish that is continually starved of oxygen by the wet blanket of demotivation. However, I've laid down the structure of my thesis and am madly writing to that schedule. There will be a stint in Canberra in the new year as I've officially given up with the piston cylinder at Monash. Canberra hosts some far more established apparatuses that hopefully will provide for my requirements. The first few months of the new year will be full of nothing but writing and revision after that with a submission date precisely on XX XXXXXXXX 2009.
Madness.
Though I apologise to all non-Collingwood fans, this is an Australian Magpie. They have a particularly beautiful warble in the mornings. Glorious bird, photographed in the grass around the Emu Flats embankment in Sunbury.
The second is of the Rupertswood Mansion, also in Sunbury. Though improperly exposed, it claims to be the birthplace of the Ashes, a cricket tournament between Australia and England where the teams vie for ownership of a small pot of ashes from a burned set of cricket wickets. Big deal, no mistake!
