Skye's birthday

Yesterday, she joined me in our thirties :) I'm not sure if I still feel hungover from saturday night in Bowral (today's wednesday!!) or whether we relaxed so much yesterday on North Stradbroke Island that I'm still feeling slowed down today.

This has been a big birthday for Skye, because it's the first for 7 years or so that she's been able to spend it with family. So, last weekend we went to the Southern Highlands and enjoyed lunch with the family at the pub in Burrawang. In the evening, we met up with friends and drank The Grand in Bowral dry (well, nearly...) and have been chuckling at the flashes of recollection ever since :)

For her actual birthday yesterday, I had a surprise trip to North Stradbroke Island lined up. We put the car on the ferry and spent the day enjoying the peace and quiet of the place. Day trips on weekdays are highly recommended! We swam in a lake, paddled in the sea, watched whales, dolphins and turtles while we ate our sandwiches on a rocky headland, spotted a wallaby and 3 koalas (first time either of us had seen them in the wild) and even had a possum run under my chair while we ate dinner. Lovely. To top it all off, I surprised her with having arranged for Nat and Al to meet us for dinner in the evening.

The only downside to taking a day trip on a tuesday is getting back into the office on the wednesday :/ Not only were we lucky with the wildlife we spotted, we were also very lucky with the weather. There's a very welcome interlude to the drought here at the moment, but luckily it held off for the entire day and left us with very comfortable temperatures and clouds to shelter us from the sun - perfect for bushwalking and swimming, and lovely conditions for late afternoon photos.
(these photos are just taken on my mobile phone - there are plenty of much better ones that I'll be posting on fatcat soon!)

Photos posted from surfing at Currumbin alley

The photos are here - the new polarising filter really made a difference, the pictures now show the colour of the water so much closer to how it actually looks. Unfortunately, I screwed the polariser onto the existing UV filter, so on the wide-angle shots there's very noticeable vignetting at the corners. Live and learn...

Ekka

Working in a state-wide company, I'd been a little peeved when people in Rockhampton, or Mackay, or Cairns had told me that they had a day off for their town's agricultural show. I was rather less peeved when I discovered what all the advertising around Brisbane for the "Ekka" was - Brisbane's agricultural show, complete with it's own regional public holiday :) So this week, everyone (in Brissy) had Wednesday off work - hooray!

We didn't go to the Ekka, we instead spent the day on the Gold Coast, having a surf and cruising around getting familiar with some of the towns either side of Currumbin. The surf was great, which was a relief after the poor conditions last time we were there, but my board officially sucks. Paddling the damn thing anywhere is quite literally a drag, which makes catching anything even more difficult. Nat was catching everything he paddled for on his longboard, so after a while we swapped - and we both caught the next waves that came through. The time has come to start shopping around for a longboard for me :)

We bought a polarising filter for the camera, and Skye put it to good use at Currumbin taking photos of us surfing, and then some great sunset shots from Kirra hill. Once they're sorted through, I'll post them on fatcat. In the meantime, there are a few shots from a couple of weekends ago surfing at Moffat's Beach, Caloundra.

(I've also started uploading and organising all the photos from our backpacking trip on fatcat - should all be done in a few more days)

The other big news of the week is that after an intense couple of weeks studying for the CCNP switching exam, I passed it. In fact, I got a really good score, which I found surprising as I thought it went really badly and was resigned to failing. Altogether a fairly unpleasant experience, but one that I'm going to have to repeat another 3 times to get the CCNP.