Wombat action

Ah wombat.

Ahhh I gave in.

Well I finally got face book so everyone can see how few friends I have.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=537484886

Things that were seen over the last few weekends

Well it's been a reasonably productive last few weeks for critters.
Here are a few pictures.
First up a rather friendly red bellied black snake.


Pseudechis porphyriacus


Possibly the world's most photographed eastern bearded dragon.


Good old Chelodina longicollis


Black-shouldered Kite


Physignathus lesueurii


Good eatin


Small funny looking chicken (Coturnix australis / Brown Quail) as someone mentioned to me upon seeing the photo.


Allan's snake lizard (Hemiergis decresiensis)


Wedge tailed eagle, a lot of these were seen in and around coolah.


Wombat


Egernia cunninghami


Egernia cunninghami


Ctenotus taeniolatus


Egernia whitii


Managed to get the nose in this photo for the first time in many an echidna photo.


Hemiergis decresiensis


This little yabbie was wondering about the fields after the heavy rain the night before.


Not really sure what this is.


Chelodina longicollis

Coolah Tops

It was hot, riddled with flies and very nice.
On Friday Allan, Iain, Leon and I headed out to Coolah tops national park.
The park is particularly good for mammals with Hundreds of Kangaroos as well as wallabies, gliders and echidnas. Unfortunately there were also a lot of goats, pigs and foxes about.


Made you scared of weet bix


There were a few flies around, they were also overly fond of orifices.


Sunset


There was supposed to be bats in this cave but the only thing we found were about a centuries worth of goat droppings.


On the way to the cave there were some interesting sections to negotiate.


Breakfast.


Surrounding farmland


The hut.

Job

Well I got my job. Or more importantly improved the contract I was on for the job I currently have.
So now I get a little more money but more importantly get four glorious weeks of paid holidays and also get paid for public holidays so no more needing to work a days worth of overtime to avoid getting shafted a days pay for the privilege of being on holiday.

Texting

I forgot to mention that my phone has not been working properly for probably about a year but I've only recently became aware of the fact. So if you sent me a text message from overseas and wondered why I didn't reply it was because my phone for some reason won't send messages to overseas numbers.

Snakes, birds, fishes, lizards and turtles.

A good solid weekend for reptile and bird spotting but the fish were pretty poor.
On Saturday morning prior to going to beer tasting some snorkelling at a beach near the airport that was infested with naked people trying to catch melanoma in strange places. Some all right fish and a lot of jellyfish but nothing to great.
Luckily though there was a little snake on the walk down to the beach.
Sunday was considerably hotter and out west where the bird watching was it was rather unpleasant. Still managed to get four new birds and Iain got one even better though was the five snakes hundreds of water dragons and about four turtles that we managed to see at bushels lagoon. Some of the snakes were rather close including a reasonable sized brown one I nearly tread on when trying to climb over a fence.

Slackness

About time I made a post.
Haven't been doing a lot especially on the correction front, but I think I'll fix that today.
Did go snorkelling over the last few weekends and got to see some port jackson sharks before they move out of the bays, which was good.
Went for a walk to look at some aboriginal rock paintings a few weeks back, there are some photos below.

Pogona barbata


More Pogona barbata


Hands


Punters

The weekend

Well it was a moderately productive weekend.
Went for a cycle to botany on Saturday and got to sample the lovely aroma of jet exhaust from the airport. Did see lots of birds though strangely enough, including some lovely red rumped parrots.
Then on sunday went wandering from woywoy to point clare on the central coast. The walk is pretty straight forward and only 10 km of pretty flat fire trail that could be done in a few hours if you wanted. Didn't see much apart from lots of feral kids a few fish and a couple of noisy miners. Still anything is better than spending the day rotting away in marrickville.

Cycling to olympic park.

Decided to go for a cycle on the weekend and found a nice little track not far from the flat where it's possible to cycle nearly all the way to the Sydney Olympic park without going on the road. Unfortunately its nearly 50 kms all up so the legs were hurting by the end of it.
There was a good amount of birdlife, including quite a few grey butcher birds.

UNSW Chemball

I went to the chemball last Friday, where it was held upstairs in some pub near fox studios.
It was pretty good apart from the Kareoke which was atrocious and the fact I started pouring down with rain 5 minutes before we were due to leave.


Adelle, Sarah and I.

Berrowa to Kuringai

Redid (is that even a word) a walk I did a few years ago with Simon and Aleshia, but in reverse this time for no particular reason.

I was a nice walk but unfortunately the oxfam trailwalker had been through recently so everything had been trampled and there were piles of human excrement pretty much on the track in places.
Still I did get to see my first variegated fairy wren.

Back on line

Well I finally moved in to the new house and I'm back on line.
Got bored and installed linux on my computer and it is working suprisingly well. In fact it has been better than windows at playing music so far. Also works pretty well for browsing the net so can't complain.
Not much else has been happening. Working life is very sedate. About time I got out into the mountains again I think and did some climbing.

New flat

Adelle and I spent saturday looking for flats with a sizeable portion of sydneys population. The average number of people looking at each flat was about 50 which made it a pretty horrendous experience. Luckily though we managed to get one of the ones we wanted the most. Supposedly they really wanted good tenents for this place above all else, which considering I have only stayed in established share flats and have not been on the lease of any flats in Sydney it's quite amazing they chose us.

The palace from the outside.


Cockroach breeding area.


Pretty colours.

Cowan to Brooklyn

Went for a wee walk from Cowan to Brooklyn. The first half is very nice with even a small beach section where there were a lot of weird blue crabs. The walk is pretty easy and mostly downhill apart from two short sections. Overall it was very nice apart from the large amounts of rubbish left at one of the camp-sites along the track.

Whale retching

It was a lovely day out on the boat, although I did have a head ache before I got on the boat you always feel so much better when those around are suffering greatly. Therefore, when half of the people on the boat started throwing up as soon as we got out of the Sydney heads I felt a lot better. Some of the passengers on the boat managed to see quite a few whales as well as a few albatross, a nothern giant petrel and some Australasian gannets.

Not the best of scans But you can take my word for it that this is actually a butterfly. Also I have come to the decision that I really need to start to do some more tramping. Particularly back home in the southern alps, it's been far to long since I have felt cold, hungry and tired over a prolonged period of time. Maybe another trip to Tasmania will have to do for the time being.

Finally an Update

Well I finally got internet access in my flat and with a bit of luck should be able to update my blog a bit more regularly. Might even move out of this dingy hole soon and find myself something a little nicer. Really not looking forward to moving though it is pretty horrible at the best of times and it is amazing how much crap I have accumulated. I'll write more soon, maybe...

Finished

Printed off my thesis last night and handed it in this morning, it's good to finally get that out of the way.
Also I got a job which I start tomorrow, should be interesting I will be working for NICNAS.

Cowan to Berowra

Went for a nice walk on the weekend from Cowan to Berowra both which must be pronounced with a horrible Australian accent if you want anyone to understand you. The weather was good perhaps a little to good as the water supply did not last long. The views were good with plenty off lookouts along the way such as the one below.


The track quality was also very good and well marked as it is part of the great north walk which goes from Sydney to Newcastle.


Luckily I wasn't navigating so I could just wander and enjoy the scenery. Still it would have been hard to get lost with all the signs around.

Nearly Finished

Well I have completed all my chapters, now I just have to wait for the boss to read them. In other exciting news I went climbing on Sunday at mount piddington in the blue mountains and did a staggering three climbs in a full day. Still it was really nice to practise leading and I have a slight suspicion that some of my placements may have even held if I had slumped on them gently. Still managed to climb the wrong route at the end of the day due to guide book error. This ended up being a bit of screw up as it took me quite a while to battle up this other route as it was a 16, which should have been quite easy. However, it was raining making the less than positive holds rather unpleasant and the bolting was rather archaic and very well spaced out, nonetheless after scaring myself a bit by nearly falling as I went to clip until I noticed a reasonable foot hold that made it a bit easier I eventually made it up despite a huge amount of rope drag. The immense rope drag mainly being caused by the two wet single ropes that I was trying to use as a pair of doubles on a 55m pitch, the huge dogleg in the climb wasn't helping much either. After getting to the top and setting up a pretty crap anchor I then tried to belay up Dimpy but couldn't see him or hear him and I sure as hell couldn't feel his weight on the end of the rope due to the drag, so just pulled as hard as I could and hoped for the best and after a while he made it to the top. We then proceeded to cock up our decent. As the belay anchors had been removed from the top of the route and the tree we were belaying off was a long way from the edge we decided to find a better tree to abseil off further down the cliff. About 60m further on we found a nice sturdy eucalypt to abseil off but what looked like nice from the top turned out to be rather interesting experience through alot of scrub and the top of a tree. To top it off the ropes still couldn't be pulled anyway and we had to walk back around to the top of the cliff to get them in the dark. Anyway if you are ever climbing hocus pocus a three star 10 at piddo the guide (2003 or 2002?) is wrong the climb is actually a bit further to the right.

Not doing much

Slowly dribbling towards the completion of my thesis so I haven't been doing much lately.
I did get to have a meeting with Jean-Marie Lehn as part of a lecture series that he is giving in Australia. As he is a Nobel prise winner I though a good 50 people or so people would show up and I could just stand at the back looking gormless and not have to do anything. Sadly only about 10 people showed up and they were all nearly as slack as I was so for most of the 20 excruciating minutes Jean-Marie asked us questions.
Also managed to wander around the Olympic Park with Simon and Marty and see a few critter namely a nice blue tongue and some long neck turtles as well as a double barred finch.

Rebecca's Wedding

A photo from my cousin Rebecca's wedding.

More NZ

Finally got my last roll of film from NZ published.
So here are a few final shots.

Yet another photo of Mt Cook


A south Island Robin


And one final close up of Cook

Rat

There was a rat in my room last night and the little blighter managed to slip out of the window before I could euthanise it with the hammer. Still if I'm lucky it might eat a few of the cockroaches, which would be nice.

Home Again

Spent the last week enjoying the cool, wet weather back home in NZ. Got to see my cousin Rebecca's wedding and my brothers 30th as well. Could have got a little more work done but not to worry. Here is a picture of Joshua and Reese my nephew and niece, the former being the main cause of my lack of productivity during the week.

Gammy eye

Well I have no idea if won netball this week, because even though the game was at 5:40 pm I managed to sleep through it. The moral of this story being don't go climbing on 40 degree days as it is way to tiring. Also went to symphony in the park on Saturday night with a good portion of Sydney's population also attending. Still it was really nice and I managed to see my first channel billed cuckoo on the walk there.

2,4,6-Tris(2-pyridylsulfanylmethyl)-1,3,5-triazine

Scorching into humanity's pool of scientific knowledge with an outstanding impact factor of 0.581, just slightly higher than the Canadian journal of physics, is the CJK groups latest masterpiece. You can check it out here while it is still hot.

Manly to the Spit

Went for a wee wander along the manly to the spit walk. It has some lovely beaches and the ferry ride on the way over was very nice. However, it wasn't a wilderness experience with hoards of other walkers also going for a Sunday stroll. Still we did manage to see some lovely eastern water dragons and lots of wattle birds and new holland honeyeaters.
Also the might F11 won their indoor netball game today by one point.
Last but certainly not least, the helpful Australian government has an online guide to every public toilet in the country, all 14,647 of them.

Dam Cliffs

Went to a weekend climbing trip to Dam cliffs in the blue mountains.
Endimyion (Dimpy) was my climbing partner for the weekend and it was a slow start when at 8:00 am Dimpy rang and said he had slept through his alarm and was still in canberra so I went back to sleep for another two and a half hours and only just managed to be ready in time when he did show up.
We were then off on a few hour drive out past Mt Victoria and Bell and then finally the navigational troubles could really start. The map provided in the guide is very poor at best and it took a little while to work out if we were at the right turn off from the main road. We then drove down to the dam with no more problems. However, after thrashing around in the scrub for nearly an hour we realized something was wrong, apart from the fact that it was really hot and there was hardly anyone about.
Luckily there was someone walking there dogs nearby and they kindly pointed us in the right direction, still it would have been nice if the guide book had a map that was useful or even vaguely accurate.
When we got there the 30 cars in the car park suggested that it may be a bit crowded but luckily about half of them belonged to some rednecks swimming in the stagnant filth that passed for a dam. It might be nice when the water is flowing but the river had long since dried up and the water level looked at least a metre or two below the outlet level.
When we finally got there we proceeded to climb all of the easy routes we could find including one mossy piece of filth that only had three carrots in it and really was a waste of time as it only involved one easy move.
After spending the night at the mt york campsite we got up early for a change and were at the cliffs at 7:30 and had to ourselves for a couple of hours until the first of about 50 punters with a guiding company started to show up. Luckily by 10 our lack of fitness and the harder grades we were trying meant it was time to leave. The rain that started as we left made the early start even more fortuitous as climbing in the wet is always a bit dodgy especially on sand stone. It was then off to the mount tomah botanic gardens for a quick gander, which is an amazingly nice botanical garden in the middle of nowhere.

Jarvis

Jarvis Cocker of pulp fame has a new album and hidden amoungst the white noise well after the last song has finished is this little gem.
By the way it probably is not suitable for small children.

NYE 2006/7

Well another year has gone by and I am still a student.
Spent NYE at Grace and Marks flat in glebe, which had a lovely view of most of the harbour bridge. The fireworks were quite good and we could also see the ones in darling harbour and balmain from where we were. However, the highlight of the night as it often is, was a scintillating game of pictionary.