2009 July | Dryad Musings

Suzuki Club trip – Meryla State Forest – Day 1

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

A couple of weekends ago (11/12 July 2009) Mat and I took the opportunity of another Suzuki Club trip to head out bush and spend a night camping, and get some off-roading action of course! Unfortunately we were a little late and so I landed the task of writing the trip report, something I wasn’t too wooried about as I knew it would mean I could use the material twice by getting a blog post from it too, instead of my usual trick of having something in draft for ages and never actually getting round to publishing it. As it happens I wrote the trip report over a week ago and it’s still taken me ages to get it up here. So here we go, a complete rip off, word-for-word, trip report as published on the Suzuki Club website (though you can only see it if you are a member):

Mat and I set off nice and early to meet everyone at Mittagong at the appointed time of 10am. However, fifteen minutes after our departure Mat remembered he had forgotten to pack the gas hose for our camp stove so decided to go back for it. This resulted in us being half an hour late and the last people to arrive, therefore by tradition, the allotted authors for this trip report

It didn’t take us long to reach the forest and not far in we reached our first site of interest, a nice hill climb with paths of varying difficulty. The site used to be an old quarry, so say, and really was the perfect start to our trip; a little playground just for us.

It was important that (more…)

29.07.2009 4x4, Personal, Pictures 3 Comments

Why did the rabbit cross the road?

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

To get to the other side of course!

The real question is what was the rabbit doing there in the first place?

I was driving home from work the night before last and taking my little alternative route down some back roads when a white rabbit with brown ears and a patch over one eye propelled itself out in front of me and charged across. I was only driving slowly so was able to watch calmly and appreciate the ammusing and slightly comical sight. It occurred to me how, in the UK, this would be a common occurance with a cat, but how in Australia cats are either a lot less common or kept locked up (a combination of the two I suspect). However, I haven’t seen many cats crossing the road in Australia and this moment just reminded me of that (but I digress somewhat).

I work at Sunnyfield in Allambie Heights and on our site, which is quite large, there are lots of rabbits, some with a normal wild brown pelt and others with a mix of white in. I thought they were peculiar to that small area but obviously they have wandered a little further afield. I assume the mix of white in their coats stems from an escaped pet rabbit that has consorted with its wild counterparts. I don’t know why I wanted to write a post about this apart from the fact that it is one of my little joys in life, to watch the rabbits. Whenever I glimpse one (which is fairly often as they seem to know they are safe from the local humans and only skip a few yards away on approach) the sight elicits a smile and a little sigh at the wonder of Nature and her beauty

I started this post yesterday morning and as usual ran out of time before I finished. I had thought I had a picture of one of the rabbits to insert here but for the life of me I couldn’t find it on my hard drive (another job to add to the list – I must sort out my photo filing). Then, as I was walking to my car on finishing work, I spotted a couple of brown rabbits enjoying an early evening silflay. I decided to attempt another photo for this post and after messing about with settings for about ten minutes I managed to capture one that was half about; easier said than done when the rabbits are about twenty yards away and the camera, when extended to maximum 10x zoom, wobbles like a mad thing. Anyway, I have just attempted to retrieve said photo off my camera’s memory card and after offering to fix a problem, which I accepted, the darned computer seems to have disappeared them, along with some nice sunset photos I took at the weekend! Hmph! Nevermind, it could have been a lot worse, I just always think a bunch of words look so much more palatable with a picture to illustrate them with. If I manage to get another photo I will add it later.

23.07.2009 Personal 3 Comments

We’re Going To See Green Day!

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Following the recent release of their long awaited new album, 21st Century Breakdown, Green Day are now on tour. They are set to play in the UK around the end of October and Sydney, Australia in December.

As soon as I heard this on the radio I decided this would be one concert Mat and I would not miss out on (previously being too late to score Neil Young tickets and also dibbing out on the Foo Fighters back in 2007). Tickets went on sale at 9am on 30 June and as Mat was off sick with food poisoning I was able to persuade him out of his sick bed long enough to hound the website until he had secured a pair

Here is sample. This is their current single in the charts from the new album: