Apple Watch, one year on: fitter and healthier than ever

I blogged last year about getting an Apple Watch and the 23rd of this month marked a full year of owning it! I’m extremely pleased to say that I’m now fitter, healthier, and stronger than I’ve ever been in my entire life. 💪🏻 I’ve also closed all three activity rings on every single day since I bought the Watch!

I mentioned in that post that I was down to 70kg, after that (but prior to COVID) I hit 69kg, which I haven’t been since I was in my very early 20s. After we started working from home full-time in mid-March, I settled into a really good exercise routine: during the week I finish work around 5:30pm, then on every day but Monday and Friday I’ll go for a burn on the elliptical while watching an episode of something on Netflix (Saturdays and Sundays are also elliptical time, but at whatever point I feel like doing it during the day). It’s amazing how quickly time passes when you’re not concentrating on the fact that you’re exercising. I’d started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation prior to COVID, but went through the episodes much more quickly after it, and finally finished it last month.

Fun side note, I thought I’d watched way more episodes than it turns out I have… as I was making my way through the episodes, I’d remembered seeing the pilot episode before, then a random smattering of maaaaybe five to ten episodes in the middle, and then the series finale, but that was it. It was pretty fun to watch the progression of the series, and I think at this point I enjoy Star Trek more than I do Star Wars. After I finished TNG, I took a brief Trek break to watch Warrior Nun (IMDB’s blurb says “After waking up in a morgue, an orphaned teen discovers she now possesses superpowers as the chosen Halo Bearer for a secret sect of demon-hunting nuns.” HIGHLY recommended, I loved it), and have now started watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I’m only a few episodes in, but again, I’ve definitely seen the first episode before but none of the other four I’ve watched thus far.

The elliptical has its own calorie counter in it, I have no idea how accurate it is because it doesn’t take into account your weight, and the Apple Watch doesn’t take into account the fact that I’ve got the incline on the elliptical at 14 degrees and the resistance set to 14 out of 22, but regardless it’s a hell of a workaround. After a typical 45-minute episode of a TV show, the elliptical says I’ve burnt around 650-700 calories, and the Apple Watch says 425-450 calories.

On Mondays and Fridays, instead of using the elliptical I do some weight training. I bought a pair of neoprene-coated 4kg dumbbells and have been doing twelve of each of the exercises from this article, three times each. I really like that Women’s Health Magazine article because it’s not pretentious and just says “Hey if you want some toned arms, do these things.” Pretty much all the ones aimed at men that I found were all of the “RARRRR GET RIPPPPPED BROOOO” which I just… just, no. 😑

As a result of all of this, I’ve actually gained weight and am now 71kg, but it’s all muscle mass, aw yiss. I’ve never actually had properly visible muscles, so this is a new look for me. 😛

On the odd occasion that I’m feeling a bit pooped-out for whatever reason, rather than using the elliptical or doing weight training, I’ll just go for a brisk walk on the treadmill and listen to part of a podcast. (Speaking of podcasts, I’ve basically entirely stopped listening to them except for when I’m occasionally using the treadmill… my commute into the city was my podcast listening time, and with that gone, I just don’t really do it anymore).

My primary use for the Apple Watch is still definitely fitness, but I’ve also really enjoyed the little notification buzz you get on your wrist when you get an iMessage or SMS. It’s totally unobtrusive and as someone who leaves all of their devices muted at all times, it means I don’t actually miss messages that need a timely reply, but if it’s not important I can just ignore it. The other handy thing I’ve found is using Siri to set custom timers. I don’t have any of the “always listening” Siri stuff on on any of my devices, but I have the Watch set to activate Siri when you hold the digital crown in for a couple of seconds. It’s super-handy when I’m timing my bread-making or barbecuing to just say “Set a timer for four minutes”, or whatever non-standard time it is, rather than having to futz around pressing things.

A year on, the Apple Watch is still one of my favourite gadgets and I’m keen to see what sort of additions Apple makes to it in the coming years!

Ten years of Atlassian

Today marks ten years to the day that I started at Atlassian! I blogged LiveJournaled at the end of the first week back in 2010 but looking back on it, it didn’t quite capture the brain-dribbling-out-my-ears aspect of when I started. Jira was — and still is, really — a complicated beast, and attempting to wrap my head around how all the different schemes interrelate was something else, especially when everything was called a <something> scheme!

I started doing support for Jira Studio at the beginning of 2011 — where we would host the products ourselves versus what I was doing when I first started, supporting Jira Server which is running on the customer’s own hardware—, was promoted to senior support engineer in 2014, and then left the customer support wing of the company entirely nearly three years ago and started doing support for our internal PaaS (platform as as service)!

I’m still in that same “Shield” role, still doing a good amount of coding on the side, and have been rewriting vast swathes of our internal documentation which has been received extremely positively. (We have very clever developers at work, but writing clear and end-user-focused documentation is not their strong suit. 😛) The coding has been primarily on the internal tool I mentioned in this post — except we’re now using Slack instead of Stride — and there’s been an increasing number of teams adopting it internally, and I’m actually getting feature requests!

Granted I’ve worked at exactly three companies in my entire career, but I honestly can’t imagine being anywhere else. Here’s to another ten years!

Another vehicular upgrade!

We bought a new car today! A shiny new 1.5-litre Toyota Yaris in white.

We’d been thinking of selling the old (2000 model!) Corolla and getting a new car for a while, and a friend of a friend of Kristina’s had an urgent need for a replacement car so we actually sold the Corolla a couple of months ago and have been managing with just the Cerato in the meantime.

We decided to go test drive the Yaris, and Kristina immediately loved it. The turning circle is hilariously tiny, and the visibility is fantastic, so we put down a deposit in early November, and went and picked it up today! It has a surprising amount of pep for a 1.5L engine, more than what the old Corolla’s 1.8L had — though granted that was also 19 years old. You definitely feel less like you’re sitting in the car compared to the Cerato… with that, you’re down in the seats whereas the Yaris has a much higher-feeling seating position. We’re getting a carport added to the front of the house so the Yaris isn’t sitting out in the open all the time (we’re still going to be parking at the station), but that won’t be until early January, so hopefully we don’t get any hail before then!

Cardiovascular health and a new shiny: Apple Watch Series 5

We bought a treadmill back at the start of 2014 and it came with a heart rate monitor that you wear around your chest, which is pretty cool. I gave the treadmill a pretty good going and was doing one of those Couch to 5K programs, but I keep having issues with my knees where running messes one of them up. We bought an elliptical in August last year — which apparently I didn’t post about here — and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using it. The one we have has a tablet holder right at eye level so I’ve been watching TV shows on Netflix while using it, and it really helps pass the time.

The downside was that I had no heart rate monitor, as the one that came with the treadmill only works with the treadmill (it shows your current heart rate right alongside the distance and estimated calories burned and such). I’d been going pretty hard on it but had noticed that I was getting some heart palpitations, and had a couple of feeling-dizzy moments a while after I’d finished exercising. I went to the doctor and she suggested cutting down on caffeine to start with — I was on four admittedly only instant coffees a day — and see if that improves things to start with, and if not we could get an EKG done.

Quite conveniently timed, the Apple Watch Series 5 was announced on the 10th of September this year, and it comes with an always-on display. Prior models had their display totally black and would only light up when you’d either raise your wrist or tap on the screen. I’d been eyeing the Apple Watch off for a couple of years, and finally decided I’d jump on board because it’d be usable as a regular watch even if the screen doesn’t fully light up. I got the 40m stainless steel with black leather Modern Buckle band and it looks classy as hell.

(I also realised after my first workout that I needed to get one of the cheaper non-leather bands as well because man do I get sweaty wrists when I’m exercising 😛).

Apple has been leaning pretty hard into the health thing with the Apple Watch in recent years, and as well as the heart rate monitor — which is constantly taking your heart rate periodically throughout the day as well as constantly when you start a workout — it comes with an app called “Activity” on the iPhone to help motivate you to keep moving. The way it works is that there’s three “rings” you should try to close each day, called Move, Exercise, and Stand. Move is just generally getting up and about and not sitting on your arse, and is set to 1422kJ for me based on my height and weight. Exercise is 30 minutes of brisk movement — I walk fast enough that I get a few minutes counted towards it each time I’m walking to or from the station or taking the stairs at work. The stand goal is standing up and moving for at least a minute during a one hour period for 12 separate hours during the day, and if you’ve been sitting around for 50 minutes in a given hour you get a little buzz on your wrist at ten minutes to the next hour that reminds you to stand up and move around a bit.

Apple must have done a whole lot of psychological research into what’s most satisfying in terms of motivation because god damn closing those rings feels good. You get a little round fireworks animation of the given colour of ring when you fully complete one for the day, and the one with all three when you’ve finished all of them. I bought the Watch on the 23rd of September and every single day since then I’ve closed all three rings! You get little badges called “Awards” when you complete certain goals, like getting a full week of closing all three rings, which has meant that when I’ve been working from home I’ve been jumping on the treadmill or elliptical for just a quick half hour to get my exercise goal done. I also downloaded an app for the Watch called HeartWatch that gives you a little speedometer of heart rate when you’re exercising and ensures you keep it in the correct zone — not too fast and not too slow — for what you’re trying to do, in my case just generally be fitter.

I completed October with every single day’s rings fully closed, which I’m pretty chuffed about!

A screenshot of the Activity app for Apple Watch showing every single day in October having all three rings closed

We’d also bought a set of smart scales last year that sync with the Health app on iOS, I’ve been weighing myself each morning and as a result of all of this fitness I’m hovering around 70.2kg, which is a weight I don’t recall being for many years now; I was at 82kg a few years back. The heart palpitations have definitely decreased as well and I haven’t had any dizziness since I’ve been monitoring what my heart rate has been while exercising.

I don’t do much by way of outdoor exercising, but the Apple Watches all come with GPS as well so you can keep maps of the routes you’ve taken and see the speed you did during each section. Overall I’m wildly impressed with this bit of technology! I hadn’t worn a watch since about 2001 when I got a job and bought my first mobile phone, but now I feel naked without it, haha.

Twenty years of VirtualWolf

Today twenty years ago marks the earliest point I can find of where I started going by “VirtualWolf” online! That’s over half my life. 😮

I had posted previously back in 2009 (back when this blog was on LiveJournal) about being VirtualWolf online for around ten years at that point but it was pretty vague in terms of dates, and I’ve since consolidated all my old websites and put them up online. Further digging reminded me that I have a whole bunch of other sites that I never actually finished — I should add those to archive.virtualwolf.org too, now I think about it — and there was one called “DevlinSlayer’s Imperium” from February of 1999 so it was clearly after that.

The earliest mention of VirtualWolf I can find is from my Realm of the Wolf site from the 28th of June 1999, and the name of the Myth II map I’d created, “Realm of the VirtualWolf”. Unfortunately that file has been lost and I cannot for the life of me find the original anymore. I was able to recover all but one of my Marathon maps from various places, but I can’t even find the original pre-compiled image files for the Myth II map. The only image related is the overhead map view from the website I created after Realm of the Wolf.

Since that point, it’s been all VirtualWolf, all the time. I’ve owned the domain virtualwolf.org since the start of 2002, and have made a point of ensuring all the old links to images I’ve posted here and on Ars Technica still work even now.

Here’s to me making a post in twenty years saying “Forty years of VirtualWolf!”. 😛

Ten years of marriage!

Ten years of marriage!

Ten years ago today, on a very cold and windy but at least sunny day at Dee Why headlands, Kristina and I got married!

TEN. YEARS.

I have no idea how it’s been ten years, it doesn’t remotely feel like it’s been that long. I’ve mentioned on this blog before, and on LiveJournal before it, that everything is so effortless, and it still remains true!

We originally knew each other from Everything2, which is still around but very much dead compared to the old days, and has been for many years now (my registration date there is May 2000). There was a bit of a mass-migration from E2 over to LiveJournal a couple of years afterwards, and I have a happy birthday wish from Kristina on one of my LJ posts from 2003! She said I was always “That guy in Australia who likes metal”, but we got to chatting more towards the end of 2007 and then on a whim decided to come visit in March of 2008, and the rest, as they say, is history!

With both of us being keen photographers we tend to be behind the camera instead of in front of it, but we’ve got a few photos together over the years!

Kristina and I
The first one of us together, in August 2008 in Boston the first time I visited (we don’t have any of the two of us from March when Kristina first visited Sydney). This was right before I trimmed my goatee entirely down because it’d started just triangulating outwards and getting all wispy.
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November 2008, we were up in the Blue Mountains when we got the call that the engagement ring was ready to be picked up!
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Then our wedding, of course. I love this photo so much!
December 2011, being all arty!
Selfie!
This was taken in May 2014 when we bought the Fujifilm X100S. Kristina looks so hilariously unimpressed.
Kristina and me
December 2015!
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Then an attempt in February 2017 at taking a photo with the two of us and Beanie. It didn’t go so well.
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And finally the most recent one of us together from December of 2017, taken with the flash and massive parabolic umbrella directly behind the camera.

In the time we’ve been married we’ve been to:

And that’s not counting the day trips or single night trips of which there have been plenty.

Here’s to many more years of adventures to come! ❤️

Five years of Beanie!

Five years of Beanie!

As of today, we’ve had Beanie for five years!

We got him as a rescue dog when he was a year old, he’d already had three previous owners before us, and the house he was living in when we got him had two other much larger dogs that apparently were taking most of the food and generally bullied him. The idiot woman who owned him also had him on some “raw chicken” diet where he’d have basically just raw chicken pieces, and his hair was all short and his tail was permanently very tightly curled — which is how he gets when he’s nervous or anxious — and didn’t wag at all for the first three or so weeks that he was living at ours.

A very young-looking Beanie when he was one year old at the end of our hallway in the midst of running back to us.
One of the very first photos of Beanie shortly after we got him.

He had quite bad separation anxiety, we eventually went to the vet and got some anti-anxiety medicine because he would scratch at the door repeatedly when we’d leave the house, to the point that he was scratching the paint off it. The medicine combined with giving him a marrowbone treat whenever we leave for a period of more than an hour or two has definitely helped, he now gets excited we’re we’re getting ready to leave because he often gets a treat. 😛

He’s never liked other dogs, and generally still doesn’t, but we were able to take him to puppy training session where he at least got some exposure to dogs around his size, and that led to our now-regular visits with Leo!

Leo, a Jack Russell, and Beanie facing each other about to leap at each other.
Leo and Beanie playing in Leo’s backyard.

Because Kristina and I are out of the house for a good 10-11 hours a day, we have a dog walker to comes every day after lunch to let him out and give him a walk. We have her come around anyway if one of us is working from home or sick, and he gets so excited when she arrives.

Beanie is a good boy, he never gets into any trouble whatsoever: he doesn’t chew things, he goes to bed at night when we do and doesn’t get out of bed in the morning until we’re up (or even after we’re up on occasion), if one of us is sick he’ll happily snuggle up on the lounge with us. One of his favourite things to do is to “up” at us, which he frequently does after we’re lying in bed and getting ready to go to sleep!

Beanie sitting up on his hind legs, smiling.
He thinks he’s people!

The only irritation is his bark… there is ZERO wind-up or warning, and it’s an extremely loud and sharp bark that gives you a heart-attack! If he’s bored he’ll find things to bark at which can be super-annoying, but usually a quick walk around the block will tire him out and he calms down afterwards. Given how destructive other dogs can be though, I think we have it pretty good with Beanie. 🙂

Nostalgia and the Classic Mac OS

I’ve been a Mac user my entire life, originally just because my dad used them at his work and so bought them for home as well. My earliest memories are of him bringing his SE/30 home and playing around in MacPaint. We also had an Apple IIe that we got second-hand from my uncle that lived in my bedroom for a few years, though that doesn’t count as a Mac.

The first Mac my dad bought for us at home was the LC II in 1992 (I was 9!), and I can remember spending hours trawling through Microsoft Encarta being blown away at just how much information I could look up immediately. I also remember playing Shufflepuck Café and Battle Chess, and I’m sure plenty of others too that didn’t leave as large an impression. There was also an application that came with the computer called Mouse Practice that showed you how to use a mouse, and we had At Ease installed for a while as well until I outgrew it.

After the LC II we upgraded to the Power Macintosh 6200 in 1995, which among other things came with a disc full of demos on it including the original Star Wars: Dark Forces (which I absolutely begged my parents to get the full version of for Christmas, including promising to entirely delete Doom II which they were a bit disapproving of due to the high levels of gore), and Bungie’s Marathon 2: Durandal (which I originally didn’t even bother looking at for the first few months because I thought it was something to do with running!). Marathon 2 was where I first became a fan of Bungie’s games, and I spent many many hours playing it and the subsequent Marathon Infinity as well as a number of fan-made total conversions too (most notably Marathon:EVIL and Tempus Irae).

The period we owned the 6200 also marked the first time we had an internet connection as well (a whopping 28.8Kbps modem, no less!). The World Wide Web was just starting to take off around this time, I remember dialing into a couple of the local Mac BBSes but at that point they were already dying out anyway and the WWW quickly took over. The community that sprang up around the Marathon trilogy was the first online community I was really a member of, and Hotline was used quite extensively for chatting. Marathon Infinity came with map-making tools which I eagerly jumped into and made a whole bunch of maps and put them online. I was even able to dig up the vast majority of them, there’s only a couple of them that I’ve not been able to find. I have a vivid memory of when Marathon:EVIL first came out, it was an absolutely massive 20MB and I can recall leaving the download going at a blazing-fast 2.7KB/s for a good two or three hours, and constantly coming back to it to make sure it hadn’t dropped out or otherwise stopped.

After the Marathon trilogy, Bungie developed the realtime strategy games Myth: The Fallen Lords and its sequel Myth II: Soulblighter, both of which I also played the hell out of and was a pretty active member of the community in.

After the 6200 we then had a second-gen iMac G3 then a “Sawtooth” Power Mac G4 just for me as my sister and I kept arguing about who should have time on the computer and the Internet. 😛 The G4 was quite a bit of money as you’d imagine, so I promised to pay it back to dad as soon as I got a job and started working.

macOS (formerly Mac OS X then OS X) is obviously a far more solid operating system, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the Classic Mac OS even with its cooperative multitasking and general fragility. We got rid of the old Power Mac G4 probably eight years ago now (which I regret doing), and I wanted to have some machine capable of running Mac OS 9 just for nostalgia’s sake. Mum and dad still had mum’s old PowerBook G3 and I was able to get a power adapter for it and boot it up to noodle around in, but it was a bit awkwardly-sized to fit on my desk and the battery was so dead that if the power cord wasn’t plugged in it wouldn’t boot at all.

There was a thread on Ars Technica a few months ago about old computers, and someone mentioned that if you were looking at something capable of running Mac OS 9 your best bet was to get the very last of the Power Mac G4s that could boot to it natively, the Mirrored Drive Doors model. I poked around on eBay and found a guy selling one in mint condition, and so bought it as a present to myself for my birthday.

Behold!

Power Mac G4 MDD

Dual 1.25GHz G4 processors, 1GB of RAM, 80GB of hard disk space, and a 64MB ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card. What a powerhouse. 😛

There’s a website, Macintosh Repository, where a bunch of enthusiasts are collecting old Mac software from yesteryear, so that’s been my main place to download all the old software and games that I remember from growing up. It’s been such a trip down memory lane, I love it!

Tea, five years later

I’d posted back in May of 2013, just before we moved into our house, that I was really enjoying my nighttime cuppa, and nearly five years later we’re now at the point where we have an entire shelf of our pantry that has nothing but tea on it!

Our selection of tea

We’ve got a handful of loose-leaf teas, but I tend to forget about them because they’re buried at the back and it’s a bit of a pain to clean up afterwards. A cup of herbal tea after dinner is glorious, especially when the weather has cooled down. The brand “Celestial Seasonings” has quite a few very tasty ones, and we’ll frequently pick up a new interesting-looking type when we’re out at the shops too (hence the whole shelf of tea that we now have).

I still don’t tend to drink a lot of black tea, mostly because it’s not caffeinated enough compared to coffee, but we discovered McVitie’s digestive biscuits thanks to a British documentary series (called “Inside the Factory”) about how they’re made, and ohmygod they’re so good dunked in a nice hot cup of black tea! ?

Christmas 2017

Christmas and Boxing Day this year were pretty great. My sister and her husband and kids were able to make it up from Nowra again, so we had the family Christmas at my parents’ place with everyone. My niece Arya, now three and a half, is GODDAMN ADORABLE. She’s totally happy to just go off and play by herself, and there wasn’t a single tantrum the whole time we were there either. Lily and Scarlett were happy to hang out with each too and got along very well.

It was interesting to see that Scarlett’s reading is definitely not at the same level as Lily’s was at the same age… Lily was eight when I posted this but she was absolutely tearing through pretty much everything, whereas Scarlett was struggling a little to read the jokes inside the Christmas crackers.

Beanie was terrific, he mostly just wandered around keeping an eye on what everyone was doing and didn’t bark once. Arya was a afraid of him to begin with, because he was so excited to see someone vaguely at his height that he kept jumping up on her and trying to lick her face! My sister’s dog at home isn’t one for jumping, so Arya wasn’t used to that. She got over it eventually, though, and was able to sit down and give him scritches.

Showing Scarlett how to Minecraft

Pennie, Mark, and Arya

AHHH A DINOSAUR BOOK!

Beanie amongst the Christmas paper

Snuggles with Aunty Kristina

Sitting on dad

I’ve been a bit stuck for what to get for Christmas and birthdays of late, so I’ve asked for mostly just books. This year’s haul:

So that should certainly keep me occupied for a while!

We went back over on Boxing Day for mum’s birthday, and went down to Collaroy Beach in the afternoon. It was completely overcast but the weather was otherwise glorious… temperature in the mid-20s and a lovely breeze. There were more photos, of course, and I gave the 135mm lens a good workout for once!

Waving from the kiddy pool

Posing

Strutting

Playing in the sand

Getting splashed #1

Even cheesier grin

Getting splashed #5

A holiday in Perth

We went to Perth for a week last week, and it was damned lovely! A friend of mine, Mat, who I’ve known for over fifteen years and originally met through the now-mostly-defunct Everything2, lives over there and was able to offer some advice on places to eat at and suburbs to stay in.

We arrived on Saturday and stayed in a house in Highgate, which is about a 10-15 minute walk from the city itself. Less than a block away is Hyde Park, which is lovely, and so green (Perth has had like a month or two straight of rain, versus the next-to-none that Sydney’s had).

Path

Gazeebo

Departing

There’s a bunch of street art all around the place as well, and lots of interesting buildings to take photos of (full album is here).

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Five

High Grounds Coffee

On Sunday we visited Fremantle, to check out the markets there and hopefully get a view of a sunset over the ocean (something we’ve never seen given both Kristina and I grew up on the east coasts of our respective countries). It was indeed getting very nice, but sadly the clouds moved in right as the sun was getting low to the horizon.

Down the street

Ferris wheel

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Playing

Lighthouse

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Fremantle is the main cargo port for Perth, so there were the giant cargo cranes there and also a massive submarine in dry-dock (have a look to the right of the second photo)!

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Cranes

Monday was spent first at the Western Australian Botanic Garden and then wandering Northbridge and the CBD itself.

The Garden is massive although there’s a lot of just regular bushland as well as flower beds.

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The Swan Brewery Co. Ltd.

Northbridge was neat, there’s a lot of laneways and little alleys, and most of them have art on the walls, often on a very large scale.

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Small steps

Dragon

Sugar glider

Goat

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Those last two would have been probably four stories high!

We wandered through the CBD itself as well, had dinner at Durty Nelly’s Irish pub (highly recommended, the food was incredible), then continued wandering after night had fallen.

Spring

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Gothic windows

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Stairs

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On Tuesday we visited Rottnest Island! We made the mistake of taking a bus tour, which was filled with loud, obnoxious, racist boomers, and we only stopped to actually get off the bus twice. Otherwise we were driving past all this wonderful terrain and the occasional quokka, and everyone was snapping shitty photos out of the bus windows.

Thankfully that only lasted an hour and a half, and we were able to go visit a colony of quokkas that were all of about ten minutes from the main buildings on the island, and OH MY GOD they are adorable! They have no natural predators on the island so they were pretty well unafraid of people and we were able get up super-close to them.

Smiling

Round

Mine!

Gnarled

The water around the island is crystal clear.

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Tuesday night, we had dinner in Northbridge at a Mexican restaurant called La Cholita, and holy crap if you’re in Perth you need to visit it. The food is amazing.

Chopping

Kristina and Mat

Taco and sangria

Afterwards we went for another wander around the area and snapped some photos.

Mat's ridiculous icecream

Waiting

Meat Candy

Wednesday was spent briefly at the Araluen Botanic Park (briefly, because Kristina’s legs were massively hurting from crouching down and getting up constantly on Tuesday while we were visiting the quokkas and the Botanic Park was filled with lots of hills), and then a leisurely wander through East Perth.

The weather starting turning a bit crap on Thursday, so we visited Mat’s sister and her boyfriend on their rural property and just hung out there with their horse Archie and hilariously uncoordinated Maremma sheep dog Iorek, then went back and played some Diablo III.

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Iorek the Maremma sheep dog

I can’t believe how well-timed the trip was, we booked it back in July and the week before the trip was almost non-stop rain and it’s now back to raining again for the next week! There would have been so much we wouldn’t have been able to see if the weather had been awful.

A vehicular upgrade

We bought a brand-new car today! \o/ It’s an extremely handsome-looking Kia Cerato hatchback in dark metallic grey.

Our brand-new MY18 Kia Cerato

We’d been toying with the idea for a little bit, then Kristina came across some videos of crash tests comparing somewhat older (from ~2000-ish, which is exactly what our current Corolla is) cars impacting with newer ones. They’re nothing like the utter crumpling of the cars from the 1970s, but still somewhat alarming. She did a bunch of research and found that the current Kias are extremely well-regarded and reliable, and it turns out there’s basically nothing else in the same price range that offer as much power and features; the equivalent cars like the Corolla and Civic and such were all several thousand dollars more, with less power and fewer included features. The Cerato has a 7-year warranty as well, which seemed to be more than most other cars.

Speaking of power (112kW and 192Nm to be exact), we took one for a test drive on Sunday… I put my foot down and was accidentally doing 70km/h almost immediately! There’s a hell of a lot of room as well, it’s only marginally larger on the outside compared to our Corolla, but it’s so spacious inside. I’m excited about having a hatchback again too, there’s been a few situations where we were trying to put something into the boot and it just wouldn’t fit. Now we can go to town and put the back seats down and put EVERYTHING in it! *maniacal laughter*

We’re going to keep the old Corolla for a while just to go to and from the station in, because parking there means the car is permanently covered in dust thanks to all the construction going on, and when it rains everything turns to mud and the trucks going along the road just splash mud across everything.

A photographical upgrade

Last Wednesday, we upgraded from our trusty Canon EOS 7D to a brand-new Canon EOS 5D Mark IV! It’s a hell of an upgrade in terms of basically every single aspect… the 7D originally came out in 2009 and the 5D4 was only last year and is full-frame to boot, 18 megapixels versus 30, and the 5D4 also has the insanely awesome autofocus system from Canon’s flagship ~$8k-for-the-body-alone EOS 1DX.

I fairly obsessively tag my photos on Flickr so it’s easy to find things, and the final tally for photos taken with the 7D is 2641!

The very first photo taken was of this flower at my parents’ place, when I got our original 35mm f/2 lens for my birthday in 2010 (the camera and lens are not mine alone, both Kristina and I share it equally, but getting the lens for my birthday was a handy way to not have pay the entire cost of it ourselves :P).

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It’s difficult to pull only a handful of favourite photos out of twenty-six hundred, but these would definitely be amongst them, in many cases more for the memory than any particular quality of the photograph…

Kristina being nibbled by a horse on our first wedding anniversary—
Horsey Nibbles

Meerkats warming themselves at Taronga Zoo—
Warming glowing warming glow

Dan looking right at a well-placed “Look right” sign—
Dan is waiting for a bus

Kristina looking stunning with our ring-flash—
My beautiful wife

Lily writing her name—
Writing

The train tunnels at Wynyard—
Into the tunnels

Lily feeding the lorikeets—
Feeding the lorikeets

A toothy grin—
Toothy grin

Christmas excitement—
Excitement

The first photo taken in our new house—
Tedison's new home

Kristina being extremely nudged by a calf at Featherdale—
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My very first photo of Beanie when we got him—
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Nanny at Christmas hugging one of Lily’s presents—
Nanny hugging Lily's pillow pet

Beanie in the office—
In the office

One of the several actresses we got in at work one Halloween, who were done up as zombies and CREEPY AS FUCK—
Zombiegirl #3

Kristina cracking up at how ridiculous Beanie is—
Cracking up

Lily and Scarlett’s matching bears at Christmas—
New bears

Family photo—
Family photo!

The fantastically creepy decorations and lighting for the latest Halloween at work—
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Playing around with coloured gels on our flashes with Adam and Stacey—
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Beanie playing with his best friend Leo—
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The extraordinarily epic storm aftermath we had—
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A photo walk we did at work one lunch where we had some volunteers to do a pseudo-modelling shoot—
Marlene

Leo and Beanie zooming down the hall—
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Wandering around Barangaroo before going to the Maritime Museum—
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We sold the 7D to friends, so it’s definitely going to continue on in a good home. It was an absolute workhorse, I didn’t think to check the shutter count before we sold it but it never once gave any sort of trouble whatsoever. Meanwhile, we’ve already started taking new memories with the 5D Mark IV and I’d say we ought to get at least 10 years out of it if not more.

Back to Tasmania

We went back to Tasmania again last week, and it was pretty great!

Where last time we stayed in Hobart for the whole trip, this time we drove up to Bicheno first, which is about a two and a half hour drive north of Hobart. The accomodation itself (the “Diamond Island Retreat”) was not great, the house was built in probably the 1970s and had clearly had next to nothing done with it since. The kitchen was terrible and the two frying pans were both quite burnt and scratched up, and there was zero internet access (at least in terms of wifi, thankfully there was plenty of 4G reception). It was completely clean and tidy, at least.

That being said, the location was amazing. This was the view from the back deck –

Diamond Island

You could walk down the paddock and down to the beach, which had some of the whitest sand I’ve seen. The first sunset was pretty epic as well.

Sunset

Reflections

Walking

More patterns

They do “penguin tours” right near where we were staying, there’s a whole section of land that’s restricted to the public and they get lots of penguins living and breeding there. We went during the decidedly off-season and so only saw a couple of penguins, but one of them waddled its way up the beach and right past us to its burrow! The other penguins we could only see in the distance down on the rocks near the beach. The tours are done after the sun has set and the guides have special torches that emit really yellow light so as not to hurt the penguins’ eyes. During the breeding season you can apparently see upwards of a hundred penguins all coming ashore to feed their chicks.

There’s a few other things to do around Bicheno as well, one is Freycinet National Park which has some epic hiking trails through it (neither Kristina nor I are hikers so we opted to just go by what we could reach by car).

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Cape Tourville Lighthouse

Then right up the road from where we were staying is Douglas-Apsley National Park, which is the same deal as Freycinet with the hiking, and requires a good couple of kilometres of dirt road to get to the carpark.

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(There’s a few more photos from each in the photoset).

The last bit of Bicheno we saw was East Coast Natureworld, a big wildlife sanctuary and conservation area.

Esther the wombat

Emu

Lazing

Ostrich

Don’t ask me why there was an ostrich there, I don’t know. 😛 The baby wombat at the top is named Esther, and she was just sitting there in the keeper’s arms dozing while the keeper was talking. They also do conservation and breeding for Tasmanian devils there, and we got to see one of them being fed which was pretty neat!

Feeding Dennis the Tasmanian Devil

Nom nom nom

After that, we drove back down to Hobart and spent the rest of the trip just wandering around some more.

The side path

190

Up the hill

Mirror selfie

Lit from below

Aurora Australis

Grafitti

Happy doggo grafitti

Under construction

Docked

The huge orange ship is an icebreaker

Aurora Australis is an Australian icebreaker. Built by Carrington Slipways and launched in 1989, the vessel is owned by P&O Maritime Services, but is regularly chartered by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) for research cruises in Antarctic waters and to support Australian bases in Antarctica.

And it’s quite an impressive sight in person!

We also went up to Mount Nelson, which is the next-highest mountain in Hobart, but unfortunately they were doing hazard-reduction burns (basically controlled bushfires) so it was really smokey and you mostly couldn’t see anything. 🙁

Despite that, all in all it was an excellent trip.

Photos

On a lark I did a Google search for “virtualwolf”, and once I got past the first handful of pages (links to main things like my Twitter, Flickr, etc.) I was fascinated to discover just how many of my photos were being used in news articles and the like. I’ve always obsessively tagged my photos so they’re pretty easy to search, but a couple of years ago I went and changed the licensing on most of them to the Creative Commons “ShareAlike” license. The thought process was mostly, I’m never going to earn any money from my photography and have no desire to anyway, so why not! Flickr has the ability to search for images with specific licenses, so I suspect that contributed a lot as well.

There’s quite the range of subjects—

It’s pretty gratifying, really.

Beanie’s dog training

We went to a doggy training class today, on the suggestion of the dog trainer we had over a couple of times. She thought that he would do fine whereas we thought he’d just melt down as soon as he saw the other dogs and we’d immediately have to leave.

We’ve never been happier to be wrong! He was initially extremely barky when the first dog arrived but as soon as he got a good butt-sniff in he settled right down. It was quite incredible! I took a few happy-snaps on my iPhone, of course. At the end the next class arrived, which was a puppy class, and Beanie was happily running around and snuffling them as well.

The actual “training” part didn’t go quite so well, mostly because he was more interested in running around with the other dogs than paying attention to us, but still!

beanie1

beanie2

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beanie4

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Seven years

The subject has come up on a few occasions recently of how long people have been married for (three years, two years, two months!), and my mind is blown anew each time when I point out that as of today we’ve been married for seven years!

I picture seven years in my head and I think, “Yeah, that’s a pretty good length of time”, but then I realise that’s how long we’ve been married and it just does not even remotely feel like it’s been that long. It’s witchcraft! Before we got married we always used to joke that we had time-warpy powers because we’d be doing something and a bunch of time would pass and it wouldn’t feel like it’d been several hours. The same powers have clearly continued into marriage!

<3

Hunter Valley farm stay

Kristina and I went up to the Hunter Valley for a long weekend last weekend. We stayed at a place called Hunter Hideaway Farm, and it was mostly nice but… a bit odd.

We arrived at about 2pm on Saturday, and there’s a long dirt road leading to the house that winds through fairly dense trees and bush. The lady that runs the place with her husband does ceramic sculptures and had put some of them on the trees and along the side of the dirt road as you start to get closer to the house. I understand the effect she was going for but it ended up just coming off as really creepy… a distinct “Someone who is insane and is going to kill you lives here” sort of vibe. It was even worse coming home after dinner when it was pitch black.

After that weirdness, we had just gotten inside when we heard a dog barking. We looked out the front door and there was a fairly sizeable dog barking loudly and in a very unfriendly manner at us. The husband rushed up and grabbed a hold of the dog’s collar, saying that the dog isn’t friendly and they weren’t expecting us yet (despite check-in being at 2, and why on earth would you have an unfriendly dog on a place that constantly has new people in it?!). After that he hauled the dog off into their house, but all of this was a slightly off-putting start to the vacation. The place had a kitchen in it, but it also had a sign saying that you needed to wash and clean and put away everything or there’d be a charge. I can understand not wanting people to leave the place as a complete mess but the sign was worded very passive-aggressively and really rubbed both of us the wrong way.

The view from the second story was pretty nice though.

View from the second floor

The farm itself is an actual working farm, they breed Angus cows and have some horses and a couple of ponies as well. One of the horses was very derpy, which was great, but the ponies were completely uninterested in people and apparently were also prone to biting.

AWW YEAH!

Ponies!

Neither of us drink wine, so we were mostly interested in the food of the area, but the first night’s dinner was underwhelming. It was at the Royal Oak Hotel and was recommended by the farm stay people but mine just wasn’t hugely flavourful and none of the flavours that were in Kristina’s dinner went together. The sheer distance that everything was from everything else was a bit annoying as well, not that that was entirely unexpected.

Saturday night’s weather was totally clear and a new moon as well, so the view of the stars was incredible; standing outside looking up at the Milky Way is always humbling.

The second day was spent doing some more wandering of the property in the morning (during which time that angry dog was out again and came running at us, but we just stood still and the wife came out and apologised and called him back, saying that he’s normally tied up—so maybe keep him tied up then), going out and buying lots of really nice cheese and chocolates, then relaxing and reading books in the afternoon. There was another, much friendlier, dog there that seems to have been a neighbour’s dog, and she was wandering around with us but mostly just running everywhere at full speed. There’s also an extremely picturesque lake that the cows enjoying sitting in and drinking from.

Running

Drinking

Sunset brought some really nice light and some great photos. The switch out of daylight savings was perfectly timed because we could admire the sunset and then go out to dinner, as opposed to all the gloriousness occurring while we were out.

Grasses

Horses running

Sunset

Sunday night’s dinner was amazing. We went to an Italian restaurant called Lillino’s, and it was one of those meals where just everything was perfect and it needed absolutely nothing—no extra salt, no extra parmesan, nothing. If you’re in the Hunter Valley you really need to go eat there.

It was definitely nice to get away from everything and spend some time relaxing and taking photos, but overall we’re not going to bother going back to the Hunter Valley, it’s not really our thing (and the farm stay was weird).

Home improvement: Curtain Edition

Lounge room with new curtains

We put up new curtains—and a new curtain rod—on the door leading out to the patio today, and it looks so much more cozy in here now (previously the window had on it the same horrible blue/grey straight-out-of-an-office vertical blinds that are still on the front window).

Kristina commented that it’s the first place she’s lived in that feels like an adult house, and it’s true… when renting you’re really just temporarily occupying someone else’s place for a period of time, whereas now we’re actually able to put our own mark on things and do what we want and it’s pretty great.

And now for something completely different: roast potatoes!

Growing up, we’d frequently go over to my grandma’s house on a Sunday evening for a full roast dinner. Roast beef, roast veggies, gravy, the works. Her roast potatoes were always amazing, they were wonderfully crispy on the outside and I never knew how she did it. Whatever my parents’ method is pales in comparison as they never get them at all crispy.

I made roast potatoes tonight following a recipe from Taste.com.au entitled The Best Roast Potatoes, and my god, they’re not joking. They’re almost identical to how my grandma’s used to come out! If you’re a fan of roast potatoes, you should definitely give that recipe a go.

  1. Preheat oven to 200°C or 180C fan-forced. Peel potatoes and cut into 5cm chunks. Place into a large saucepan. Cover with cold water.
  2. Bring to the boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to medium. Simmer for 5-10 minutes or until partially cooked (potatoes should be only just tender when pierced with a skewer).
  3. Drain potatoes well. Return to saucepan over low heat until any remaining water evaporates. Shake saucepan vigorously to rough up surface of potatoes (this will make them crunchy when roasted). Alternatively, scrape surfaces of potatoes with a fork to create a rough texture.
  4. Pour oil into a large roasting pan. Place roasting pan into oven for 5 minutes or until oil is hot. Working quickly, add potatoes to hot oil. Use tongs to turn potatoes to coat in oil, then return roasting pan to oven.
  5. Roast potatoes for 40 minutes. Turn and roast for a further 30 minutes or until golden and crisp. Season with salt. Serve immediately.

Comforts

There’s certain things that are comforting by virtue of having done or seen them many times before and thus you know exactly what to expect.

Diablo III is like that for me, specifically the story mode. The original Diablo III had you go through the (very linear) story multiple times, once for each difficulty level, and by the time you hit the maximum level of 60 you’d generally done it at least three or four times. Combine that with the five different classes you can choose, and that’s a lot of repeats. When the Reaper of Souls expansion came out, Blizzard did away with that whole repeat-the-story-many-times in favour of Adventure Mode. It’s varied and certainly less repetitive than the old story mode, but I do enjoy going back every now and again and starting a new character to play through the story from the beginning. It’s definitely comfortable.

Zombies, Run!

A couple of years ago—a couple of months after we moved into our house, actually—I bought C25K, a couch-to-5K training app. It took me longer than I’d have liked, but I eventually got up to the full 5km, though only at 7km/h which for me is barely faster than brisk walking (a comfortable brisk walk for me is 6.5km/h; I know these speeds because I do my running on a treadmill at home). I stopped for a while and decided to start it again but from the beginning at a faster pace for the running sections, but fairly quickly lost interest.

Then the subject came up at work, and a colleague mentioned a thing called Zombies, Run! that combines an actual story with your running. It turned out they also made a couch-to-5K version and it’s really well done. There’s an audio story that plays, almost like an old radio drama, that puts you in the position of a new runner to an outpost that’s survived the zombie apocalypse and they need you to train up in order to be able to complete reconnaissance missions and to go get supplies from other bases and so on. It’s done in the form of periodic radio transmissions to you, but in between you can have your own music playing. The voice actors they’ve used are extremely good; there’s none of the cringe-worthy voice acting you’d often get in the video games of yesteryear. I’ll freely admit that I’ve been fairly slack, I only completed Week 4 yesterday despite having begun the program in May last year, but it is very neat and definitely a more interesting alternative to your bog-standard couch-to-5K program!

Lily’s visit

Lily normally lives with her mother up near Nimbin (which is an almost-nine-hour drive north from our house), but they came down for Christmas this year. We saw Lily last in October of 2014, and she didn’t really like Beanie at that point because he kept trying to lick her, and Beanie himself wasn’t quite sure what to make of her as she was running all around and generally being fairly hyper. This time was a night-and-day difference, Lily was really good with him and knew how to pet him properly, and was significantly calmer than last time. When I would read to Lily before bed, Beanie would come in and curl up on the floor while we’re doing so. The only slight issue was that Beanie kept trying to hump Lily! We’re not entirely sure why (we get the occasional hump attempt, but nothing like this), the only conclusion we came to was that it was because she’s so much smaller than us.

My sister and her husband and two girls (Scarlett, 5, and Arya, 1-and-a-bit) live three hours away in the opposite direction from Nimbin, but they were up for Christmas this year too, which we had at my parents’ place.

New bears

"THAT WAY!"

Reading with Nanna Ruth

We had Lily for a week all up, from Christmas Day to New Year’s Day. Kristina pointed out that it’s so much easier to have a proper conversation with Lily now, she actually listens to what you’re saying rather than just talking at everyone all the time and not really caring if anyone else is listening. There were a few pretty hilarious exchanges, too. My favourites were these two:

Lily: Why are we doing this?
Me: Better safe than sorry.
Lily: I don’t understand.
Me: It means it’s better to do something and perhaps not have needed to, than to not do it and then have regrets later.
Lily (in a very matter-of-fact tone): You are speaking absolute nonsense. I don’t understand a word you’ve just said.

It was a serious struggle not to burst out laughing. The other one was when we were reading before bed, Lily still has some of her older learn-to-read books around, and one of them had a thing on the front:

Lily (reading the cover of the book): “Synthetic phonics.”
Me: Synthetic! That’s a big word!
Lily (again very matter-of-fact): That’s not a big word. “Intergalactic” is a big word.

Lily’s reading level is pretty impressive. Mum bought her The Animal Book, which is a big book about all sorts of different animals and plants, and Lily was just zooming through it, even reading the proper scientific names of things with barely a pause. She’d also had the rite of passage that I’m pretty sure all children go through (me included), which is where a relative buys you a big book of REALLY CORNY jokes. We were inundated with jokes the whole time, but I think the most impressive thing was how well she was remembering all the different jokes.

I’d forgotten that I had Minecraft on the Xbox One, so we had a pretty good chunk of time playing that as well, either Lily by herself or the both of us with splitscreen. She’d only played on her grandma’s iPad previously but she picked up how to control everything with a twin-stick controller really quickly! She was fairly obsessed with it and would tell me even when she wasn’t playing about what she wanted to build next or how she wanted to modify her various houses she’d created.

Scarlett, my niece, was staying with my parents for five days while everyone else went back down to Nowra, so we were able to go over and catch up a couple more times. We went to Featherdale Wildlife Park on Sunday, which mum and dad hadn’t ever been to before (naturally, photos were taken), and on Tuesday we went down to Collaroy Beach to generally chill out (where I put suncream on but managed to burn both kneecaps and the shin on one leg. >_<).

We also realised that we didn’t have any recent photos of all of us, so I set up all my crazy lighting equipment yesterday and took some really quite nice photos of us.

Family photo!

All in all, it was just a really nice time. She’s such a good kid, her manners (both regular and table) are great, and she’s extremely bright. It sucks that we don’t see her more often, but c’est la vie.

Tasmania, and LiveJournal to WordPress

So I’ve finally ditched LiveJournal and migrated it all over to my own WordPress site. I wanted to keep blogging things, but where people might actually read them. 😛

We decided to scale down our ambitions with the five-year anniversary trip, as Kristina is currently contracting and so would be losing out on quite a lot of money, and so went to Tasmania for five days instead. We’d heard great things but had never actually been before.

We stayed in the Hobart Art House, which was fantastically close to everything. We rented a car from Budget, and specified “Suzuki Swift or similar”. A Swift would have been fine, but instead we got a 1.2-litre Nissan Micra. It’s the most gutless car I’ve ever driven, and to get up the hill to where we were staying I had to put my foot all the way down to the firewall, and even then it still struggled.

At the bar

Day 1 was wandering around the Salamanca Markets, burgers for lunch at Jack Greene (their beef and blue cheese burger is amazing), then some more wandering until dinner at Monty’s on Montpelier. Their website says “fine dining” and my god, if anything that’s underselling it. The food there is absolutely incredible.

Cliffs

Day 2 started with a three-hour boat ride around the south-eastern coast with Pennicott Wilderness Journeys. According to the tour guide it was one of the calmest days they’d seen this year, but unfortunately that didn’t help because about half-way through the trip I got horribly sea-sick, though thankfully (barely) not to the point of throwing up, but it meant I was mostly sitting there feeling absolutely miserable and not even being able to look at any of the scenery. Kristina was suffering as well, so in hindsight the whole boat trip was a terrible idea. It redeemed itself with lunch at Port Arthur Lavender (again, incredible food), then dinner at Rockwall. One of their specials was a coffee-rubbed wagyu, and it was definitely the best steak I’ve ever had. It was pretty much falling apart in my mouth, it was so tender.

The other side of the lookout

Day 3, we went to Bruny Island. The “attractions” there were rather over-hyped, but the scenery is absolutely stunning. It’s like a tropical island in places, the clarity of the water is unbelievable. The afternoon was spent walking around the streets around where we were staying and checking out all the old houses, then dinner was at Mures. Mine was quite tasty, but Kristina’s risotto was crunchy, and even after she sent it back and got a new one, it wasn’t brilliant. She got a cold seafood tasting platter afterwards though, which was REALLY good.

Looking down to Hobart

Day 4, the last full day we had, we wandered around the botanical gardens, had lunch at Blue Eye (in keeping with everything else, the food was excellent), then went for a drive up to Mount Wellington. On the drive up, there was someone in a van who was doing 40km/h in a 70km/h zone and kept drifting over entirely into the other lane. It was terrifying! Thankfully there was a solid section of broken line on the road where I could overtake them, and the little Micra managed it surprisingly well. Mount Wellington itself was absolutely incredible, I’ve never been up a mountain where there’s alpine foliage before, and it felt like an entirely different world. Dinner was at Don Camillo, which was quite tasty but not on the level of some of the other restaurants.

On the last day we walked around Salamanca Place again, and had lunch back at Rockwall before heading to the airport. Our own car is only a 1.8-litre 2000 Corolla, but it was pretty funny feeling like it had a whole lot of grunt driving back from Sydney airport after having spent five days driving the Micra around. 😛

All in all, Tasmania was excellent and we’ll definitely be back!

5 years!

It’s been five years since I started at Atlassian! That is completely ridiculous. I realise my LJ at this point is mostly me going, “It’s been x years since y, that’s crazy!” but it’s true. 😛 When you’ve been at Atlassian for three years you get an extra three days of bonus leave each year (it expires at the end of the year so you can’t just hoard it), and at five years they’ll pay $3200 for you to take a holiday somewhere! kungfupolarbear and I had already been looking at going to New Zealand, probably in spring, and so this is a nice extra. I definitely can’t imagine working anywhere else, that’s for sure. My Senior Support Engineer-ing is going very well, I play Magic: The Gathering with a bunch of people every day at work, and they put in what’s essentially an actual salad bar for grabbing stuff to put on sandwiches. So instead of the quick and lazy and very unhealthy peanut butter and honey sandwiches I was having, I have sandwiches with tomato, lettuce, capsicum, and salad dressing on them, and it barely takes more time than the previous unhealthy ones!

Also I’m 32 today! We went over to mum and dad’s yesterday for a birthday lunch, and my sister and her husband and two kids were there. We took Beanie over as well, which he always loves, and as always I took some photos.

\o/

Memories

I watched the movie Men in Black the other night on Netflix, before I went to bed. I’ve seen it so many times… I have a really vivid memory of going out to watch it in the lounge room at mum and dad’s place after everyone had gone to bed, back when I was working at Apple and finishing work at 9:00pm. I think I probably had a month or more of watching it at least a couple of times a week. There’s just something about it I really love; I think it’s the thought of there being a whole other unseen… civilisation? System of life? I don’t know what the best word for it is.

It’s the same reason I always enjoyed being out and about in the city (way back when) in the really wee hours of the morning when all the garbage trucks and cleaning people were doing their thing, and nobody has any idea that they’re there. There was a book I bought for dad from the Harvard book store in Boston called The Works: Anatomy of a City, and it had a similar theme, all about the things that have to go on behind the scenes of a modern city to keep things running.

Maybe I just like feeling insignificant in the grand scheme of things? I certainly love that feeling when gazing up at the stars and looking at space and such.

New Year’s Eve

How is it now 2015?! I have no idea where last year went!

We went over to a friends’ place for New Year’s Eve, there were two fondue sets and a raclette grill plus the cheese of the same name. It was so. Good. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much cheese. kungfupolarbear made both a spinach dip and sweet potato pie, and both went over an absolute treat, they were delicious! Our friends’ live in an apartment, so unfortunately we couldn’t bring Beanie, and they don’t have air conditioning either, so it ended up being pretty toasty with all the dinner accoutrements that produce heat!

Next year is either going to be at ours, or at another couple’s place (they just bought a house, so we could bring Beanie and it has air conditioning).

Today has been a very lazy day consisting mostly of puttering around on the Internet, and playing Dragon Age: Inquisition.