Goldfish Bowl

Deep Sea Fishin', NSW, Australia

Originally penned for some time waaay back in July - well that seems like a long time ago now anyways; the long awaited deep sea fishing trip finally rolled around. A car full of 5 guys departed Randwick not long after 6am, and after an all too grisly toilet stop for one of the fishermen, it was time to scoot on over to Cronulla where our grand voyage would depart.

We boarded our vessel and were shown the ropes; or the rods, reels, hooks, lines and sinkers - not to mention some bait. After a bacon roll and a cuppa; we were cruising out across glassy bay seas. As we left the bay, the ocean started to roll the boat around a little before we dropped anchor and set about casting out our lines. It wasn't too long before the first fish were being yoinked in. Red Rock Cod & Sweeps seemed to be pretty popular this morning. From diving experience, I got the feeling we were shooting fish in a barrel at first light.

Soon however, the fishes stopped biting, I'm guessing they'd had their feed for Brekkie and were off doing whatever else it is that fish do when they're not getting hoisted up out of their natural world to potentially end up in a large plastic bucket, only hours later, to be stripped of their scales, stuck to some lemon skin, peppered and then thrown in a 180degree oven and served up as a feast.

The highlights for my lucky morning was pulling out a 6 spiked Leather Jacket Fish which turned out to be the biggest catch of the day, and then I pulled out an ugly yellow eel - which as fun as it was, then broke the line with its struggling as I tried to get a picture. I have a feeling he wouldn't have last long in the depths with a large metal weight now bolted firmly through his lip.

We moved to a few alternate spots and a few more small catches were pulled... some of the boys managed to pull a couple of fish out with the hook landed directly thru our squirmy friends eyeballs... all in, with the beers flowing, and the sun shining down with some strength for the first time this Summer - it was a great day, capped off with the feast of fish later on that night.

That's Entertainment

Paul Weller, The Enmore Theatre, NSW, Australia

Just a normal Tuesday I thought.

I head to work, get on with my day. I work on my projects, I do my maintenance.

Then Kev emails me the most recent Paul Weller setlist, in preparation for the gig I've been looking forward to seeing for months, it suddenly dawns on me, it's tonight.

Now I've been pretty bad with updating the blog recently (a line I'm sure gets written in just about every blog at some stage), but for now, I wanted to write and give a bang up to date report from the life of Luke... as this was something just a bit special.

The setlist contains a long list of songs documenting playlists since I first heard "Sunflower" back in the mid nineties on a teenaged Lukes, "Now, that's what I call music" album. Since then I've listened to a fair bit of Wellers earlier works from "The Jam" and a little "Style Council" stuff too.

Paul also fronted one of my earlier gig experiences back in Southend, Essex in '97... and then littered my social calendar through the last 11 years, seeing him a t various festivals and other live shows. He hadn't toured Australia for about 20years, so this was a gig to truly get excited about.

I'd also been trying to get special permission to take my camera to the pit to get some really up close and personal shots of the act, but no bosy at the Enmore, or at Wellers management wanted to reply to my emails... so I brought it upon myself to smuggle in my camera. After getting it in at the Fratellis by the skin of my teeth with a little lense, I was gonna have to work harder this time. I strapped a lensless camera under my jacket, and carried in a 15cm long 100mm lense in my pocket so there were no huge lumps to be spotted by the doormen... Success, and as soon as the lights went down I whacked it all together and set about blasting through 2GBs of memory card space... I wish I'd brought a 4GB!

Enough of camera stuff now, you can see the images I got for yourself here. The set. Oh my. First off it really helped that the soundman was somewhere near the top of his game. Second, there was actually some kind of lightshow, and instead of watching the usual Sydney - dimley lit affair (few gigs excluded), But it all came down to the talent on stage, Weller and Craddock simply amazed me with their new takes on old classics, they managed to get to the opening line of one of Wellers most popular songs before anyone realised what it was... there was some serious fore-thought into this set of songs.

As I juggled my time between taking pictures, clapping & singing along and sipping beer, I realised I was watching what would now be remembered as one of my top 5 gigs of all time... just.

Nobody Lost, Nobody found.

Birthday weekend, Sydney, NSW

So another of these annual dates rolls around again, and this one, seems just a little bit of a non-event... late 20's (no hiding from it!), but a year off the big one. That said, I had a great weekend celebrating it.

I arrived home from work on Friday evening to find a large manilla envelope stuffed in the mailbox. I opened it up and found 2 sealed copies of "What Digital Camera" magazine. I instantly new what this meant, and I hurriedly pulled the plastic wrapping and began flicking through. As I reached page 74, there it was, my first photograph in a magazine! Okay, so the contents of the manilla envelope are all I got in return for this, but it's a nice achievement never the less :)

So to the big day, which for obvious reasons is always a day of reflection, but with the fact that today heralded my 3rd Sydney City 2 Surf race - it was even more sentiment to the anniversary. After running it last year, this year I decided to crawl it; via the pubs en route.

I headed in to the city with the boys, as all those thousands of people that I was part of last year, line up and psyche up for Australias biggest 'fun' run. 14kms ain't really ever fun. This time however, we stood by and watched the masses pound the tarmac up through to Kings Cross. Once the people we knew had made fleeting appearances, we headed into the pub and started on our first beers of the day, before 10am :)

The plan was to pub-crawl the route. But with hardly any pubs open at this time of day, it was looking a little tricky. So we headed to the Sheaf in Double Bay, had more beers, played some group pool and then jumped in cabs to the Bondi Beach Road Hotel... the rest played out a little like the past 2years before it. I took a few calls from around the world today, to which I was overjoyed that people had remembered me all the way around the other side of the globe. Thankyou.

A week followed where I would finish dinner excitedly, looking forward to my leftover ice-cream birthday cake.

Pink on White Walls

Perisher, NSW, Australia
With a few days till the weekend, myself and Lauren decide to hit the mountains for the weekend. After booking accomodation on Tuesday, I had a couple of days to get excited about the best Australian snow season since I've been here.

I managed to make an early dash from work, and by around 4.30pm, we were headed out of Sydney, and by 10pm we'd reached the country town of Cooma, NSW. Up early, and - we made the hours drive to the Perisher valley behind many other snow-sportsman and woman with similar plans to ours. The last time I came here, there was no snow visible until the actual slopes, and all that was man-made. This time, there was heaps of the stuff from miles before the first lift came into sight. Today however, would not be about the search for powder stashes and hot lines, but about someone elses first turns on snow. So together, I did my best to teach Lauren to ride snowboard. Sadly, some kind of virus took its toll on me and we had to call it off fairly early - though we'd enjoyed a few fun runs on the Perisher front valley, we had decided it was a little too busy for comfort.

A night back in Cooma, and I think the extra rest sorted me out, and maybe a little help from the snow Gods, who'd been kind throughout Saturday afternoon and left some nice fresh surfaces to play on, on Sunday. This time, we hit up Smiggins and Laurens boarding came a long way. She was putting in turns both ways, along with some ancient falling leaf, and some 'ever funny, stacks'. While Loz took time outs, I would jump on the T-Bar and head to the summit for some speed. I was also fortunate enough to spot a short hike to a nice 5-6ft drop off cornice. I was content hitting this up several times for the day and cutting my way back through some fresh before hitting the groomers at great speed back to the car parks.

By my reckoning, it was about 2 o clock, when Lauren made her most significant breakthru yet... she stayed upright off a ski-lift!

After 3, we called it a weekend and packed the car for the loooooong ride back to Sydney. I do however, love this part of New South Wales, possibly the most of any part I've visted so far, and took many timeouts to jump from the car to take some photographs as the sun painted a watercolour sky behind weathered gum trees. Lovely. The 5hr drive home as usual, sucked.