Started with a roam around civic.

Friday arvo drinks at Uni House, gave dink to the Wig & Pen, followed by The Phoenix. My body didn't make it home intact...

Jon was kind enough to pull together a picnic by Old Parliament House. Then he poisoned me. What I remember was fantastic!!

And what better place to stash some more images from Tuesday night....

So, quite under the weather from the day before, I decided to partake in an adventure to Wee Jasper with Jon. His briefing was somewhat lacking in detail; he neglected to mention the 17km hike we would attempt to the top of Mt Wee Jasper, which with it came the need for food, water and suitable walking shoes..........never the less, the walk was spectacular.

We almost made it to the top before my body began to shut down. We headed back down the mountain while Bell fought on. Ice-creams at the pub.......

......then of course Jon tried to drown me on the way home.....

What better way to feel alive, such a great day in hindsight!! Finished off with steak and veg on the BBQ, thanks man.

Picked up a bargain price Kona Humu humunuku nuku apua'a the other day from a lovely young lady who needed some cash for overseas travel. I thought of modifying it, making it fixed, adding bling etc, but it is damn perfect exactly the way it is! With 68cm wide bars, sprung saddle, 2.3" tyres, moto levers and Vs. Dirt or street I love it.

Rode to work via dirt yesterday, then headed in to town with Jon for a beer or two. It rained, a lot.

But with Lykke Li loud in my headphones the ride home was the best ever.

I'm guessing there's a few of them. So it seems the thing to do when in such a predicament is to make the most awesome fridge-magnet-finger-puppets!! Here's my selection, made by the Unemployed Philosophers Guild

History FYI: More recently, revisionist historians have pinpointed the birth of the Guild to the time it was still cool to live in New York City’s Lower East Side.  Two brothers turned their inner creativity and love of paying rent towards fulfilling the people’s needs for finger puppets, warm slippers, coffee cups, and cracking up at stuff. Check it here.

The weather looked like it'd be crap so some guests cancelled, other guests fell sick; but Rach and I soldiered on, to the best weekend I've had on the coast in a long time.

We ventured through the muddy mountains to get there, better than fighting the hoards on the highway, and  could see the menacing weather in the distance........

........luckily it held off and within minutes of reaching the coast we were swim-suited up (or 'bathered' up because we're from Adelaide) and in the water.

Apologies for the inundation of happy snaps, but I just bought an Olympus Tough waterproof camera; now one of my favourite toys!! (Of course I may be biased as I seem to have taken a super-swimsuit-model with me.....)

The waves started taking their toll on our bodies so we headed to the hostel for a relax, then a walk around town before dinner. (Black & Whitey film goodness still to come...) Oh, and by the way, never go to The Marlin Hotel......

Next day it was breaky at the beach........

........some exploring along the coast on our way south......

_......before jumping back in the water at my favourite old haunt, MacKenzies Beach south of Batemans bay.

And of course I love my iPhone randoms, so here's a few.

We departed the coast after what felt like a long weekend at the beach and had dinner with my favourite god-daughter; life doesn't get much better.

As promised, some average, grainy B&Wness.

I'm moving back the the 'ville over Christmas break, I like to think of it as my third home after Adelaide and Canberra. Headed up there for a couple of days to do my handover last week. Wow, my photography style has changed in the three years since I lived there last. I was overwhelmed with the amount of photographs I wanted to take that I never would have thought to take in the five years (in two separate installments) I have already spent there. I felt naked without the Leica, what was i thinking leaving it at home! Oh well, in a month and a half I'll be back, resuming the position at the bar.

I'm no stranger at all to 24hr mountain bike racing but I never thought I'd paddle on the water for 24 hours, last October I didn't even know what a paddle board was!

The race was run by the Burley Griffin Canoe Club and was open to a range of classes of floating things, from sea kayaks, to skis, to paddle boards. My crew put forward three teams, two serious teams of four that paddled through the night and one more casual team of eight. I was in the 14 foot Hobie team, a board that I so want to own now, mmmmm, 14 foot carbon goodness.

So I turned up for the 10am start and the wind started building, reaching up to around 30km/h in patches through the day but thankfully calming at night. We set up quite a HQ and readied the boards, before the action began.

Shaggy and Mr Miyagi opened for their teams, deep in the pack of sit downs, followed close behind by Pebbles.

Of course, as with all 24hr races it was time for the team to resume the waiting position, each lap taking 30-40 minutes it was a pleasant break before you next hit out. Worlds apart from mountain bike racing there was absolutely no need for warm ups and cool down, so even the 'one lap on, one lap off' regime we undertook at night was easily undertaken; unheard of in the MTB world, where it's double or nothing at night!

Then the inevitable happened, the sun started going down. No worry though, it was balmy and calm, a dream meteorological circumstance. Glow sticks mounted to the boards we fought through. I had an absolute ball paddling at night, not a pain or frustration and well lit by the surrounding street lights.

I was also lucky enough to score my favourite 24 lap, the dawn lap where you depart transition in complete darkness and arrive back in full light, a new day.

I ended up paddling 45km in the 24 hrs (4.5km a lap x 10) and both teams finished closely. We took out every cup but most importantly, that of the highest donation count, we managed to raise almost $1500 for The Cure foundation!

As more info comes to hand I'll edit this post, now it's time for sleep.

Of course there's no way to replicate Melbourne's alleyways, but Canberra holds a few surprises, after all, the Sydney and Melbourne buildings are nearly 100 years old, gasp!!!

So I met up with Adam and Tabitha at The Phoenix where I first had a play with some of Adam's stereograph images. He really has wet my appetite to find a Holmes Viewer and get going on making some of my own. He pointed out that a pair of 6x7 images (uncut) are of the correct dimensions to do such. The cogs have started spinning.

Then it was time to load the Rolleiflexs and for me to bring out the mammoth Koni-Omegaflex before we hit the streets. The Koni with the M6 around my neck was the perfect combo for MF, 35mm and shared metering. I had a ball before we headed inside for Japanese!.

So how did the Koni go? Well the lens seems nice and sharp as reported. It seems foolproof, apart from my obvious focus issues. It's really heavy (especially when carting it around on the tredly). All good really, except, is my head bent? It seems almost all of the images are tilted slightly to the right........?!?!?!?

I dare say it'll be another couple of rolls before I'm confident all is good with this one.

Home.

Wow, what a week! Seemingly not a minute to myself. Between muddy mountain bike racing and beer drinking exploits it's been quite memorable.

I suppose there's no real reason to start the post with an image of the Facebook User* apart from the fact that I love the photo and I think it captures the good times with her in a nutshell somehow, I suppose that's why I like photography . It was her birthday breakfast and my first visit to Urban Food. Freakin' yum.

Of course there was a series of races during the week, at which I got quite muddy, but come Friday all was dry and good once again. I made the most of it all by riding, more. One of those moments of clarity occurred on Friday arvo while weaving through the quasi rainforest of Majura pines; a lot has to be said for being out there by yourself...

Beer League IV was held on Friday night, 11/11/11, the honorary birthday of Canberra One Gear Society (COGS). Started innocently enough with vego grub and a six pack each at Ainslie before we headed for Dairy Flat Road for an 11:11pm race start. Under the gaze of a full moon the idea was to conduct a relay race, approximately 1km in length each leg. The clincher was the fact that you had to devour a beer at the end of each of the four legs and that no lights were allowed. My career has been punctuated by many a drinking game, a 'culture of drinking' exists in my line of work, so I did have an inside line on the need to expel as much gas from your stomach as possible after each hefty guzzle (for me it was a finger down the throat while riding between ends, not dignified in anyway; must have sounded like a charging wildebeest to the untrained eye). It was a fierce battle, with my main competitor being Marty the Canadian, who had avoided the pre-race drinking but seemed unable to hold his dinner down, he finished behind me, bike and body covered in his own vomit. The alcohol hit me roughly ten minutes after race finish, kind of a double up on the conventional race finish high.

Saturday Eddy invited me out on an expedition to the old CSIRO buildings in Yarralumla. Surprising and mysterious place.

Rach and I devoured a few reds on Saturday night and visited quite possibly the worst pub in Canberra. Don't go to Sirens, ever.

Luckily Sunday was another perfect day and time for me to teach Eddy to paddleboard. Okay, he fell off a few time but his determination rewarded him with a new experience that I think he's quite keen to try again!

Then of course Bike Polo on Sunday arvo. Pretty much more of the same awesome fun whacking a ball around the court, with one exception.......

Eddy took a big fall! Ended up at a hospital, lots of blood, and some kind of immensely swollen thumb. Verdict to come.

And to top it off, a random image of Nick's DIY tilt shift lens, brilliant!!