Now You See Me, Now You Don't

So much for me breathing life back into this blog over the past week. Oh well. Most of the blogs I pay attention to are pretty much defunct recently, so at least I'm keeping this thing afloat. Which reminds me, when I get some time after our trip, I'll be editing my sidebar pretty extensively and getting rid of the links to blogs that nobody updates, as well as editing some links that have changed over the past few months.

Tokyo was a beer drenched karaoke orgy. I love visiting my friends back there because they are, basically, insane. I should have taken far more pictures, but I was rightfully wary of taking my camera to the 11 p.m.-6 a.m. all you can drink/sing fiesta. Next time I will have to bring the point and shoot with me because, if nothing else, the sight of 10 people with varying levels of drunkenness eating breakfast at Denny's at 5:30 in the morning must be documented. For the record, that might have been the most disappointing bacon I've ever had.

We got back here on Monday and have been scrambling around getting things done in the run up to our trip to Australia. We leave on Saturday afternoon. Our trip is starting to come together, at least to the extent that we want it to.

We arrive on Sunday and will have that week to explore Sydney. We'll be staying with my friend Carlisle who came to visit last summer and single-handedly took 2 months off of my life. During the week at some point we're planning on heading up to the Hunter Valley, famous for it's wine vineyards and yummy food. We're hoping to spend a night there so we can fully take in it's prized assets, but haven't looked at accommodation yet.

On Friday we're heading to some place called the Kangaroo Valley that Carlisle has organized. They have a golf course and I'm assuming some kangaroos, both of which one would infer are in a valley. It's about a 2 hour drive from Sydney.

We'll spend the weekend there and head back to Sydney on Sunday. On Monday afternoon we're flying 1 1/2 hours up the coast to Byron Bay. This is supposedly a pretty chill town with lots of nice beaches and some cool stuff a bit further inland. Thinking we'll rent a car one day to explore, and spend the rest of the time chilling out in the beach not getting eaten by sharks. We'll fly back to Sydney on Thursday evening. Still haven't figured out where we'll stay there either

That'll leave us with a final 3 days to make up for lost time in Sydney. So, pretty busy but not too bad. It seems like we'll be in some pretty laid back places with options to increase the excitement factor if we so desire.

Tomorrow's major operation is to clean this house from head to toe, since it's fallen into a bit of sloppy disrepair of late, and I can't stand coming home to a messy place after traveling. Packing shouldn't be a major deal since we're going pretty light. I want to spend some time downloading podcasts to listen to, and I'm debating renting some movies off of itunes as well. The low budget airline we're using, Jet Star, doesn't provide entertainment. They rent entertainment systems, but I read what was on offer for movies and sitcoms and was not impressed, so I'll be taking care of myself.

Moving on, winter is a dead, smelly corpse on the side of the road at this point. How disappointing a winter was this? I've moved on though and am fully welcoming spring to come on in, and there are already signs that it'll be here soon.

One thing I've noticed over the past few weeks is that there are tons of crows (or ravens I guess...big bastards) rooting around in the rice fields. I've been wanting to get a picture of them and today, while taking a post-lunch stroll, I had my chance. There weren't that many, and they didn't seem too concerned with me.




I've also been admiring the fuzzy greenness of this particular rice paddy. It's actually been green for quite a while, and I dig the way these drainage channels look covered in green.





And in our own yard, spring is springing in the form of our tulips starting to sprout up. Actually they've also been peaking out for a couple of weeks now too. When we get back from Australia it'll probably be time to start getting the garden into working order. I'll have to spend some time on some gardening forums I think to figure out how exactly a garden grows. Doesn't seem like rocket science though.



And there you go, my life, in a blog post. I hate to say it but you'd better enjoy this one because I won't be doing anything on here until we get back from Australia in two weeks. But one would hope, at the point, that I'll have some cool pictures and stories to share.

I going pod-cast hunting now, and perhaps a little accommodation seeking. There's a slight chance that I'll fire off another post before we head out on Saturday, but no promises. So have a nice two weeks and I'll catch you on the other side. I'm sure this thing is full of mistakes--that's a disclaimer.