My Daily Photo Project

New Blog

2009-06-24T12:38:00.002+10:00

I've moved!
Check out my new blog here!

Postscript

2009-04-23T22:09:00.003+10:00

I started this project on April 24th last year so strictly speaking I should have finished it today but somewhere along the line my numbering must have got a bit garbled! Oh well... what's a couple of days between friends.
It's been a challenge, it's been fun, it's been inspiring. I took photographs I wouldn't ordinarily have thought of taking. I certainly became more prolific than I was before, which isn't necessarily a good thing (quantity doesn't always equate quality!). But practice is always good and I would like to thank those of you who have visited here and left feedback, in one form or another.

365/365 Easter Show

2009-04-21T22:44:00.002+10:00

364/365 Sammi

2009-04-20T21:19:00.002+10:00

363/365 Rain

2009-04-19T22:04:00.002+10:00

362/365 Red Flower

2009-04-18T17:24:00.001+10:00

Well... I don't know what else to call it!

361/365 Pumpkins in Malta

2009-04-17T22:18:00.002+10:00

(from the archives)

360/365 Bondi Beach

2009-04-16T21:18:00.000+10:00

359/365 Another gorgous sunset

2009-04-15T20:07:00.002+10:00

358/365 Peony

2009-04-14T20:43:00.002+10:00

I have to apologise about my infatuation with flowers at the moment but they are all so stunning, up close!

357/365 Hibiscus

2009-04-13T11:38:00.003+10:00

356/365 Golden Crown

2009-04-12T19:24:00.002+10:00

355/365 Early Signs of Decay

2009-04-11T23:06:00.003+10:00

354/365 Like Fish Hooks, Out To Get You!

2009-04-10T19:28:00.003+10:00

(Tibouchina flower)

353/365 Love Thursday

2009-04-09T19:58:00.003+10:00

352/365 The Sky Tonight

2009-04-08T22:53:00.002+10:00

351/365 Pink Flowers

2009-04-07T21:04:00.003+10:00

I think I might have to buy myself an Australian wildflower book - I tried googling these, but no luck.

350/365 No idea what sort of flower this is...

2009-04-06T21:05:00.004+10:00

349/365 Beautiful Symmetry

2009-04-05T21:38:00.003+10:00

348/365 Autumn Is Nearly Here

2009-04-04T22:23:00.004+11:00

We put our clocks back an hour tonight and it's beginning to get decidedly cooler. Autumn is on its way...

347/365 Red Gum

2009-04-03T22:41:00.004+11:00

346/365 Love Thursday

2009-04-02T20:59:00.003+11:00

Lake Matheson, NZ.

345/365 Wallabies

2009-04-01T18:16:00.004+11:00

(Seen at Bobbin Head yesterday).

344/365 What a washout!

2009-03-31T16:41:00.002+11:00

Oh dear - I spoke too soon about the beautiful weather! Today it was quite the opposite! I accompanied my son's class on an excursion to Bobbin Head National Park and it just bucketed down all day. We were all soaked to the skin - SATURATED! AND some of the kids got leeches on their legs. But we all had a fun time... and learnt a few things too (like remembering to carry salt in the First Aid Kit for bushwalks on rainy days...).

343/365 Monochrome Monday: Manly

2009-03-30T14:00:00.005+11:00

Had to go to my dentist in Manly this morning... what stunning weather we're having!

342/365 Big Man, Little Man

2009-03-29T14:56:00.004+11:00

Dee Why, 11 AM today.

341/365 Camouflage

2009-03-28T22:55:00.003+11:00

340/365 Lily Pads

2009-03-27T21:53:00.003+11:00

339/365 Love Thursday

2009-03-26T21:05:00.003+11:00

Lake Matheson, NZ

338/365 Window Shopping

2009-03-25T10:01:00.005+11:00

In all my time living in Sydney, I had never been to Crow's Nest so yesterday I decided to go and explore the area. There were some beautiful homeware stores and lots of great restaurants and cafes. And then I reached the end of Willoughby Road where it joins the Pacific Highway and all of a sudden everywhere looked familiar again. I find the Pacific Highway is a bit like a jigsaw sometimes - I know bits and pieces of it in isolation and sometimes it all comes together when I find the missing piece!

337/365 My Two Favourite Colours!

2009-03-24T21:27:00.004+11:00

336/365 Family Jewels

2009-03-23T22:04:00.003+11:00

Oxford Street, Paddington.

335/365 My Favourite Bookstore

2009-03-22T21:37:00.003+11:00

Ariel Bookstore, Oxford Street, Paddington.

334/365 Kings Cross, 22.20 tonight

2009-03-21T23:11:00.004+11:00

333/365 Willoughby Cafe

2009-03-20T23:05:00.003+11:00

332/365 Love Thursday

2009-03-19T10:40:00.003+11:00

331/365 Tranquillity

2009-03-18T10:00:00.002+11:00

330/365 Happy St Patrick's Day!

2009-03-17T11:04:00.002+11:00

329/365 Proteus

2009-03-16T10:01:00.001+11:00

328/365 Early Morning Walk 2

2009-03-15T21:17:00.001+11:00

327/365 Early Morning Walk

2009-03-14T09:05:00.000+11:00

326/365 No Idea What This Is...

2009-03-13T10:56:00.003+11:00

325/365 Love Thursday

2009-03-12T19:21:00.003+11:00

324/365 Blue Berries

2009-03-11T19:54:00.003+11:00

316 - 323/365 New Zealand Trip - Part Two

2009-03-10T13:38:00.005+11:00

It's been a while... still having connection problems!
But to continue... Queenstown is, of course, home to the world's first commercial bungy jump. Pioneered by AJ Hackett, the original site is based at a disused (but still in excellent condition) wooden bridge over the Kawarau River. It's a few kilometres outside Queenstown, so we drove out to have a look, not necessarily to jump!

It costs $160 to jump (unless you'e over 65 - or in the nude!! - in which case it is free). We watched a few jumps from the viewing platform. All I can say is that at 43m high, it's a hell of a drop!

So no... I wasn't even remotely tempted! And as if that isn't a high enough drop, there's another bungy site a little further north that is about THREE TIMES as high above the water. Some people are totally fearless! We watched a few people jump while we were there.

There's a lot of attention to safety, I must say. But not for me, thank you! Too faint-hearted!

One other thing that we did do, in this Adventure Capital of the World, was take a trip on the Shotover Jet. These are special jet boats that have impellers, as opposed to propellors, enabling them to navigate the shallow waters of this region (in fact they were invented here by a local engineer). Again, a lot of attention to safety as we tore along the narrow canyons.

And then, at the signal, our driver would spin the boat 360 degrees while we gripped fast to the seat in front of us. All very adrenaline-pumping and really quite safe.

Did I say safe? The day after we left Queenstown we heard that there had been a boating accident involving a tourist (not a Shotover Jet, I hasten to add) but while I was googling the incident, I discovered that just a few months back a speedboat similar to ours had flipped and a passenger had got killed. Anyway, we survived to tell the tale and I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting a bit of action on the water...

After Queenstown, we made our way slowly back to Christchurch, stopping en route at Lake Tekapo, which is supposed to have stunning blue waters (rock powder, again) but which we saw in the pouring rain, so it wasn't as breath-taking:

Christchurch is very English. In fact, I was reminded of being back in Oxford or Cambridge when we went punting on the river (yes, I know, a very touristy thing to do!!).

And then, to finish off our trip, we visited the International Antarctic Centre near the airport. Christchurch is the "Gateway to the Antarctic" and houses a huge complex built for the administration of the NZ, US and Italian Antarctic programmes. It was very informative and good fun, too. They even have a special 'Antarctic Storm' chamber in which you can experience first-hand what it feels like to be in a snow storm with temperatures of -18 degrees.

And then, all too soon, we were flying home...

293 - 315/365 New Zealand Trip - Part One

2009-03-02T11:46:00.008+11:00

Well, just as my PC is about to be taken to the PC hospital, it has decided to call a truce and is now connecting to the internet at lightning speed! So here are some of the photos I took in New Zealand, which should bring me up to date! Fasten your seatbelts, sit back and ENJOY!

OK - the first surprise for me about New Zealand (and we only went to the South Island) was how sparsely populated it is. Apart from the couple of cities and small townships, there is not a lot in between. Oh, apart from sheep and cattle - lots of them!

We did a LOT of driving in the couple of weeks we were away. Most of the time, the roads were like this:

(My husband, like most men, seems to have been hard-wired to be incapable of relaxing at driving if there is a car or cars ahead of him. Consequently, we did a lot of hair-raising overtaking (hair-raising for me, that is!) and hence were at the forefront most of the time!).

I was also surprised at the lack of Maori presence among the people we saw. I later found out that only 5 per cent of the Maori population live on the South Island and that the early Maori settlers mainly travelled to the South Island to hunt the flightless bird the Moa (now extinct), which formed part of their staple diet. In fact, most of the forests of the South Island were burnt to the ground by the early Maori settlers in their attempt to drive out the Moa.

There were quite a lot of these quaint one-lane bridges crossing various streams and rivers:

The glacial landscape was all new to me, too. Wide, flat river beds covered in tiny boulders which had been carried down there by glaciers in years gone by...

One of the highlights of our trip - perhaps THE highlight! - was taking a helicopter flight up onto Fox Glacier and actually walking around on the snow at the top.

I was a little nervous about feeling queasy but it was absolutely fine and I couldn't help letting out a little scream when our pilot rounded a corner and showed us this:

Absolutely stunning!

And then we were allowed to get out and explore for a bit. It was vast and quiet and beautiful, up there above the clouds:

And since it was Valentine's Day, the pilot had even brought up a bottle of bubbly on ice for all of us to share!

Back down on land, we went for a drive to the Fox Glacier terminal face (the part of the glacier that is constantly moving forward as it slowly melts - this one has been moving forward at the rate of around a metre a week). It is a fairly accessible glacier - you can get pretty close to it by car and then have to walk a few hundred metres along rubble.

This is the same glacier where two Australian tourists (brothers in their twenties, travelling with their parents) were killed last January. Contrary to what I first thought, they weren't climbing up dangerous glacier faces or doing anything particularly daredevil, but they had ignored the warning signs leading up to the terminal face and had gone that little bit closer in order to take photographs when an ice shelf broke off the top of the glacier and crushed them both instantly. Needless to say, we kept our distance!

An amazing thing about the glacial ice is that it is a gorgeous blue colour. (And no, I didn't get this close - this was taken with a zoom lens!).

And so are some of the glacial lakes we passed on our travels. Apparently the characteristic blue colour of the lakes is due to the presence of "rock flour", which is very fine dust caused by the glacier as it moves downwards, grinding rocks as it goes.

And this is what is called "morain" - big boulders (some of them HUGE) on what was once the bed of the glacier, carried down from the tops of the mountains:

The whole scenery was just stunningly beautiful at times. You'd be driving along, round a corner and come across something like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or even this...

Milford Sound, towards the south of "Fiordland", was pretty spectacular, too, and well worth a visit. I had expected it to be a bit touristy but it was very pristine and unspoilt:

Queenstown is a major tourist destination, mainly in the wintertime for the skiing. I certainly hadn't expected it to be as beautiful as it was. This, for example, was the view from our hotel!

In fact, if anything, my only complaint about Queenstown is that there are way too many temptations to spend our money, so it was perhaps a good thing that we were only there for a couple of days! But I would definitely go back there and spend longer. P did a tandem paraglide for the first time. Check out the scenery!

So now we're back home, a little lighter in the pocket but all the richer for our experiences! Twelve days weren't nearly enough. I have more photos, which I shall post when I can. So come back again soon!

292/365 Narrabeen Boardwalk

2009-02-08T22:23:00.003+11:00

I have a bit of a mutiny on my hands: my PC won't talk to the Internet and when it does, it is for a perfunctory few minutes at a time before storming off in a huff. I am going to take a bit of a break here because it is all getting too difficult to do a daily post, transferring photos from a moody PC to one that does work. We are going away to New Zealand this week for two weeks (during which I will celebrate my birthday) and as soon as I talk some sense into my PC and get it to reconcile with the Internet (if it ever does!), I will resume my daily posts. In fact, I will post a backlog of posts because I anticipate taking LOTS of photographs while I am away. And although I probably will have access to the Internet during our trip, I am going to stay away from it and get back to some time-honoured leisure pursuits such as reading and writing, walking and people-watching. So check in towards the end of February for some more photos. Bye for now!

291/365 Sunset over Chatswood

2009-02-07T23:11:00.000+11:00

290/365 Clontarf Beachfront Property

2009-02-06T22:19:00.002+11:00

If you look carefully, you will see a 'For Sale' sign on the house with the palm trees growing out the front. I wonder how many MILLIONS they want for it, given that another house further up in the same street is for sale for "in excess of $4.5 million"? Sigh... what's a girl got to do to get that kind of money???
This was Clontarf Beach late this afternoon - the only place to keep cool in the middle of a heatwave. It's supposed to be getting even hotter this weekend.

289/365 Love Thursday

2009-02-05T22:52:00.002+11:00

288/365 Gumnuts

2009-02-04T12:27:00.002+11:00

287/365 Long Reef 2

2009-02-03T18:07:00.002+11:00

286/365 Kate

2009-02-02T23:35:00.000+11:00

285/365 Long Reef

2009-02-01T22:26:00.003+11:00

Another beautiful Summer's day and we went to Long Reef for a couple of hours in the morning, leaving when the sun was at its hottest. We made the mistake of leaving our footwear behind in the car and had to walk back on the burning hot sand, which was just a little TOO hot for me and the two young boys who were with us. In the end, P had to walk ahead to the car and get our shoes while we nursed our scalded soles... we won't be making THAT mistake again!

284/365 Wind!

2009-01-31T22:13:00.002+11:00

283/365 Play Me, I'm Yours

2009-01-30T22:39:00.000+11:00

We made the long train trip to Parramatta today, to see an absolutely FANTASTIC show put on by the Flying Fruit Fly Circus. And whilst walking to the venue, we came across three of these 'street pianos', an initiative of the Sydney Festival being held this month. C thought it was hilarious to be playing in the middle of the street!

On a more sober note, my computer seems to be in dire need of a reformat, which means that I am going to have to back up every single thing that's on it... What a nightmare!

282/365 Love Thursday

2009-01-29T23:15:00.002+11:00

Lilies from my man... can you spot the heart/s?

281/365 Fern

2009-01-28T18:38:00.002+11:00

Sort of like a spiral staircase, winding around the stem...

280/365 Australia Day Part Two

2009-01-27T19:36:00.002+11:00

To mark the last day of my mother's visit, we booked a Harbour cruise for the evening of Australia Day so that we could see the Darling Harbour fireworks up close. Well, the weather had other plans! It started to drizzle in the afternoon and visibility on the Harbour was reduced to a few hundred metres. We ended up having to stay inside the cruising boat all night (no views!) and when the fireworks started up and we braved the elements and went up on deck, all we could hear were the bangs! Not a firework in sight!

279/365 Happy Australia Day!

2009-01-26T22:27:00.002+11:00

278/365 Grass

2009-01-25T16:28:00.002+11:00

277/365 Low Tide at Freshwater Beach

2009-01-24T21:41:00.002+11:00

Another beautiful day in Paradise...

276/365 Tiffany, 14

2009-01-23T20:21:00.004+11:00

275/365 Love Thursday

2009-01-22T12:31:00.000+11:00

274/365 Boogie Boarding at Freshwater Beach

2009-01-21T21:08:00.003+11:00

273/365 Reeds

2009-01-20T16:46:00.002+11:00

272/365 Monochrome Monday

2009-01-19T22:52:00.002+11:00

271/365 Ava

2009-01-18T07:44:00.002+11:00

270/365 Narrabeen Shores

2009-01-17T23:07:00.002+11:00

This could be some oasis in the middle of Arabia. Instead, it's a humble campsite in Narrabeen where my boys spent the weekend camping. Amazing, some of the hidden jewels that exist in this wonderful part of the world!

269/365 Outdoor Chess in the City

2009-01-16T15:55:00.002+11:00

268/365 Love Thursday

2009-01-15T14:54:00.002+11:00

267/365 Splash!

2009-01-14T20:58:00.000+11:00

Today was a scorching hot day in Sydney and the best place to survive the heat was the beach, where we went for a couple of hours in the late afternoon.

266/365 Frangipani

2009-01-13T22:23:00.003+11:00

We have watched our little twig of a Frangipani tree put out buds and leaves and... finally this week it has started to flower. Yay!

265/365 Peekaboo!

2009-01-12T21:09:00.002+11:00

264/365 Back Yard Pond

2009-01-11T22:06:00.002+11:00

263/365 This is the life!

2009-01-10T12:11:00.000+11:00

262/365 Eternity Puzzle

2009-01-09T21:59:00.002+11:00

Guaranteed to infuriate... but strangely compelling nonetheless!

261/365 Love Thursday

2009-01-08T09:40:00.002+11:00

(Yes, Love Thursday is back!)

260/365 Molten Sky

2009-01-07T09:39:00.001+11:00

259/365 Wildflower

2009-01-06T21:58:00.002+11:00

258/365 Fun at the beach with Nanna Maureen

2009-01-05T22:00:00.002+11:00

Nanna Maureen is visiting for a month from Europe.

257/365 Alexander and Edward

2009-01-04T17:47:00.002+11:00

Snapperman Beach, 01.01.09

256/365 Fishing with dad

2009-01-03T13:57:00.002+11:00

An activity we all have to try at least once: fishing with dad! This is a spectacular location, just under the Roseville Bridge at Davidson Park.

255/365 Grass

2009-01-02T22:32:00.002+11:00

I thought these were kind of pretty!

254/365 Afternoon Kayaking at Snapperman Beach

2009-01-01T22:59:00.000+11:00

253/365 Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T23:47:00.000+11:00

Watching the 9PM fireworks at Manly Beach (harbourside) with other families. A beautiful, balmy evening and great atmosphere.

252/365 Rummy Night At Our Place

2008-12-30T23:49:00.000+11:00

251/365 Untitled...

2008-12-29T21:48:00.002+11:00

... because I just couldn't think of an adequate caption! How about 'Not now, darling, let me finish my tiramisu'? Any suggestions?

250/365 Yum! Now for dessert...

2008-12-28T20:36:00.002+11:00

249/365 Tiny Little Wildflowers

2008-12-27T21:39:00.003+11:00

Dianella caerulea (Blue Flax Lily)

248/365 I've eaten WAY too much!

2008-12-26T22:43:00.002+11:00

(But it's all so yummy!)

247/365 Wiishing You All A Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T23:56:00.002+11:00

246/365 One More Sleep...

2008-12-24T23:53:00.000+11:00

245/365 Water Fountains Are Fun!

2008-12-23T19:03:00.002+11:00

242/365 Manly Water Works

2008-12-22T21:50:00.002+11:00

First day of the school holidays today. I took C and a friend to Manly Water Works and they had an absolute ball on the water slides!

241/365 Ava

2008-12-21T20:48:00.002+11:00

(One of my nieces, Big Sister to Kate)

240/365 I saw an Angel on Oxford Street today!

2008-12-20T22:47:00.002+11:00

239/365 Go Kate, Go!!!

2008-12-19T22:54:00.002+11:00

238/365 Love Thursday

2008-12-18T14:21:00.002+11:00

237/365 Making A Splash In This World!

2008-12-17T14:10:00.002+11:00