Hi!Well. Sunday evening. It's been absolutely perfect weather lately. The sun was bright and shining all day, the birds were happy and chatty, in fact the weather was so nice that the lorikeets came back and had a good catch-up with each other. They crack me up how excited they get about, well, whatever lorikeets get excited about. Now the sun has set, the groovy jazz tunes radio show is going, got the cool glass of standby white wine...life is good! Missed last week because I was visiting "family" in Melbourne, so photos to come......! Onwards!
So work. Yep. Is good. I actually had one little important thing to edit (only worth $1.5 million, so small change according to the guys in the know).
That was pretty exciting to have something real to do that took up a good part of the day. Man I miss having editing to do, like what I did at Qld Health, man I was always busy there...... I caught up informally with my Boss the other day and he knows I don't have much on and that it's ok, it's just the way it is and if I can think of stuff to do by all means do it - stuff like updating style guides...... Hmmmmmm. So at least I'm not in trouble or that they're going to let me go - he said they need an editor and just because there's not a lot happening right now doesn't mean they can let me go. So that's good! I hope!
And then there was the weekend. Last weekend that is. So headed to Melbourne very first thing Friday morning. Went down to visit Jeff and Emily and his new wife Tami. It was a fantastic visit, as always. Let's see, Friday what did we do.... I helped Jeff fill out some of his tax I.D. paperwork (because he works at Monash University now) and then he and 
Tami went off to the University to hand it all in while Emily and I walked around town. We managed to stumble across Hoosier Lane - a famous lane-way (alleyway) because of all the really good/artistic graffiti - it's been written up in travel guides and magazines. It's really pretty cool and th
ere's so much of it that you really do have to stand in one spot and just look. In fact, when we showed up there was a big group of Japanese tourists being led around. Cute. So while I got tons of photos it's hard to show what it's really like. It's pretty impressive. And then that evening we went to dinner at Scusami, the same place we'd had dinner one evening last visit. It was really good then, this time it was good, but eh, ok. Not sure if we'll hit that one again because really, it's Melbourne and there're sooooo many good places to eat that to eat at the same one almost seems like a crime!Saturday we all headed out to the hip and way groovy suburb of Fitzroy
where they have a really cool artists market called Rose Street Artists Markets, it was reeeeeeallly cool! Very hip n' groovy. I kept a few artists in top ramen for a couple of days that's for sure. And then Jeff and Tami went off to explore suburbs worth buying a house in while Emily and I wandered aimlessly around Fitzroy and then headed into the city (we're getting pretty good at the public transport system now!). But I have to say that is one hip suburb. It's dirty and run down, but a way cool place to visit and shop for cool, funky stuff. I'll definitely head back. And then that evening we went to see the 
Tutankhamun exhibit at the Melbourne Museum, which was really big and seemed really interesting but we had booked tickets for a specific time and could only do that. So next time am down there will check out the rest of the museum like a normal person. The King Tut exhibit, while totally awesome, was really regimented and organized, they lined us up like cattle and left us standing for ages before we were allowed in in groups (crowd control I guess). And under no circumstance were you allowed to take pictures - you shoulda seen the size of some of those roving security dudes! Far be it for me to toe rules when they had multiple Hulks guarding their goods. So I had to settle for the book (sponsored by National Geographic, so of course it's good), the CD of the music they played while you looked at everything and an alabaster cat statue. I guess I went a little crazy but now I can die without ever having to buy another King Tut thing ever again.And Sunday we just ran a lot of errands around town. So now we're pretty savvy with the main part of the downtown area. I dropped my ailing ear-bud headphones into the Bose shop for repair (turns out they don't bother repairing them, they just charge you $
78.50 for a brand-new pair - which is sweeeeeeeeeet because they retail around $150!). Oh yeah, and we hit the Queen Victoria Market. It's HUGE. In a HUGE set of warehouses with some of it spilling to stalls outside. It was a little like an indoor swap meet, only this was filled with basically cheap crap from China. The same sort of market stuff you'd find in any city on the planet. Well, most cities. At least in Western cities...... Ehhhh, while it had a really good fruit and veggie market (almost 50% of the whole of the market, according to the website), the rest of it I could probably live without seeing again. Y'know, it's good for stuff like cheap cheese graters, wooden lighthouses, c
heap leather jackets, hats, scarves, toys, that kinda thing. Ehhhh. We liked the Rose St. Market much better. Now, if we were in the need for fresh produce, definitely hit the Queen Vic Market. Otherwise....... And then that evening we ate a fanceeee pants steakhouse called Rockpool (inside the Crown Casino on the fancy pants end, with all the fancy pants shops and restaurants. Far from the gambling peasants). It was niiiice. But the food took ages and ages to come. But when it finally came, oh la la, the steaks were SO good. And we wanted to order a bottle of wine to go with dinner but there was absolutely nothing on the wine list under $100. They were charging $250 for a bottle of wine that we knew for a fact sold for $30 in the real world. I don't know who designed and priced their wine list, but it was clearly someone with no concept of reality. Aliens maybe. Aliens that like steak. And wine. And big framed pictures of cows. Everywhere. Lucky the steaks were so good........And then Monday we went to Melbourne Zoo! It was really good! It's
never fair for us to compare any zoo to the San Diego Zoo, so you have to remember to take it on its own. And it was pretty good. Big, with not as much as the size warrants, but what they had was fine. 
Lions and tigers and even a bear! They even had a really neat butterfly house (nice and warm). Even got to see the lions being fed (bits of meat, can't say if it was bits of Christians - harhrhar), which while neat, was a little unnerving to hear the crunchcrunchcrunch of bones. So it was a pretty full 3 or so hours. And then it was off to the airport to get me on a plane back to Brissy!Whew! It was a fun and busy trip. And always sooooo happy to catch
up with Emily and Jeff and now Tami. We always cram a lot into a few days even if we have no real plan to begin with. We just have such a good time and a good laugh. I'll be happy when they're here for longer stretches at a time. Be nice to have "family" so close!And that brings us to this weekend.
Quiet. Dull. Chores. Went out to dinner with Kim at Kookaburra Cafe (I can't tell you how much I love that place), dinner of which was awesome, as always. Otherwise it was the usual quiet weekend as I lay low to let the bank account recover until the next Adventure. And the next one is the plane ride out to Lake Eyre and back on the 10th of July. That'll be so cooooool. I need to read up on it a bit more before we go, just so I know what all I'm looking at!And so there you have it! All's well down here. Happy that we've passed the winter solstice mark
and that the days will start getting longer again. Am sick of waking up in the dark and only being home from work for about half an hour before it's dark. But hey, I know, it could well be worse - it could be NYC in the wintertime! Gahhhh! Otherwise, all's well here, the weather seems to have stabilized so it's a perfect time to come for a visit...... hinthinthint......... Qantas has tickets to Brisbane on sale.... am just sayin'...... So I hope you're all well up there! Drop a line and tell me what's happening all the way up there!BYE!
J!
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