wurple.net

It’s only Saturday night and this Christmas weekend is already feeling pretty massive.

Dave’s Christmas party was, like usual totally, packed, but at least this time, the furniture was moved out to make space. Even better was the snow-pit. Well. As close to snow as you’re going to get in Melbourne in mid-summer. The KK also went down quite well and for the first time in a couple of years, I received a gift that wasn’t chocolate. Thanks Sherwin! Of course, there were plenty of photos.

And straight after the party, it was off to Phillip Island to meet up with Albert, Andrew, Sharon and Wendy. Was quite nice to get away with a small group, even if I was only there for a day. Would have liked to stay the 2nd day, but duty calls! Oh yes… and… photos.

How many accessories can you put on a bike handlebar?

Grips, shifters, brake levers, computer, HRM, bell, reflector, aerobars, mirrors, bar ends, handlebar bags, GPS and now THIS!!

Oh the childish destructive side of me finds this so utterly amusing.

I remember when I was taking this photo, I was thinking to myself “I wonder if…”

Then I found out about this on the weekend.

Hah!

Poking around the archive of photos on my computer, it appears that there are around 10,000 files from Jan-04 until now. Assuming that I keep a full sized and resized version of each file, this means I’ve taken at least 5,000 photos in three years. In reality, I don’t keep two versions of each file – I only resize the ones worth uploading, which is usually in the 50-75% range of the photos that I’ve taken. So it’d be somewhere around 6,000 photos that I’ve taken on this camera. More disturbing than that is the fact that I’ve taken approximately 10% of that 6,000 photos in the last month. Eep! Well I suppose someone has to take Mel’s job as shutterbug while she’s overseas. :)

Anyway, there was a point to this yammering. A colleague of mine was poking through my photo galleries and pointed out that “You’ve got a fair few pretty decent photos. You should enter them into that competition”. I have absolutely no idea what competition she was referring to, but it was a good point. Somewhere in those 6,000 photos, there are bound to be a couple of photos worth having another look at.

So here they are.

Went rowing along the Yarra today for the Life Group end of year/Christmas event. The plan was to meet up quite late in the day at Studley Park Boathouse for a picnic dinner, then a quick row around. The picnic went well, with plenty of food, bugs and dirt on my picnic rug (thanks Steph!). The weather was perfect too. It all however almost turned into a disaster when, after finishing eating, we decided to move over to the boathouse, where we found *dramatic music* they were closed.

Oh nuts.

Luckily, I remembered reading that the Fairfield Boathouse closed at dusk. So, with nothing to lose, we all piled into a couple of cars (of course, there were FAR too many cars for the number of people) and moved off to the other boathouse. Luckily they were still open, but with Lee Mei still on route to the new venue, we decided to hang back for a little while until she arrived. A little while become a long while and became a very long while. She actually ended up in the city somehow, then Victoria Street, then Clifton Hill (getting closer) before finally getting to Fairfield, with James guiding her in by mobile phone the whole way.

By the time we got on the water, it was already getting a little bit dark and quite cool, but we’d come to row, so row we would. There was talk of having a race, but we ended up getting strung out along the river as different people struggled to learn to use oars. I also discovered that it’s actually quite difficult to take photos on a moving boat, in semi-darkness. No matter, still managed to get some okay ones.

To top off what was already quite a busy evening, we decided to also check out the Christmas lights on The Boulevard in Ivanhoe. All I can say is – “What a disappointment”. It’s been a couple of years since I went there, but we did a LOT of walking and in the end there were only about 10 houses to look at. Of those, probably half of them were pretty poor.

Overall though, still a good day out with the LG.

Photos!

I don’t really have much to say about this ride…

But for completeness, it’s all here…

Last two days of riding have been rather interesting with smoke/smog from the bushfires descending upon Melbourne. The smog on Saturday was worse, but I left earlier and went mountain climbing (on the fixie!) to avoid the worst of it. Today wasn’t quite as bad, but combined with a stinking hot northerly, just a simple 50km down Beach Road became rather uncomfortable. The bad part is the nasty black stuff that comes out of my nose after a ride in these conditions – I’ve found it’s actually worse than city riding.

Blargh.

I think I need to go lie down.

They say that riding with clipless pedals provides a feeling of connectedness with the bike. Check.

Others go further to say that riding a fixie provides a further feeling of connectedness with the bike. Check.

I think I’ve now gone and achieved true one-ness with the bike…
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Welp, I just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress.

Things look rather different here in the admin interface, so hopefully nothing’s broken.