Perth Festival of Arts and Blah

So here I am avoiding having to watch Janice's favourite reality show "Show you think you can dance" and thought why not use the time to tell you about our art experience last night. The Perth Festival of Arts is on at the moment and we looked at the various productions going on and thought one looked interesting, called "Seven boards of skill" (or something similar). It was based on a chinese board game and featured 12 ish chinese acrobats performing around these giant (2-6m) high blocks and shifting them all over the stage. It was interesting, at first.... then got a bit "operatic arty" and you can only watch so people stand looking meaningful and run around the stage doing the same thing 3 times, for so long ;o) And not as acrobatic as we imagined, except for some half decent kung-fu and tai chi they threw in now and again. About an hour would have done for me, so not quite into the last 20 mins or so.... Hey ho, you have to try these things, don't ya!

On a completely different note for those of you that know Aled (Blah), he has just bought a house out in Wellington which looks very nice from the photos, you can see for yourself on his blog too: http://www.aled-evans.com/. Pretty jealous as we are just starting to look into the house buying scenario seriously, so have all that fun to go!

Finally, a boat dive

After a few false starts and several good shore dives I managed to book onto a dive charter out of Mindarie marina about 30 mins north of Scarborough beach. It was just a small boat (10m) run by Mindarie Dive but was considerably cheaper than other charters and good value for the money. The swell and wind weren't co-operating too well so we didn't head out to the outer reefs and started out at Burns Rocks and then the second dive at Honeycomb reef (or the Archers). Good buddies which always helps and we had long and fun dives in the surge, just wish the viz was a bit better.

Some good life and interesting swim throughs, a few schools of buffalo bream (not good eating, so lots of them around). Several good western nudibranch's and a cool yellow one I haven't identified yet as it's not in any of my books...

So keen to get out again and dive the outer reefs and then will have to get to Rotto for some dives as well. Glad I got my tank and nice having a small alli tank as I don't need that much weight with my 5mm or 7mm suit and as most the dives are on average 5m and shallower can still easily get an hour from the tank without worrying about it.

Where did January go?

So just been out celebrating Glynn's birthday tonight and realised that Janaury had flown by without any blogging at all! In my defense it has been busy with family and friends over as we had Bob and Louise over for about 2 weeks and Andy and Sharon for a quick weekend hit in the middle of it. Was a fun time as we got out to Rottnest and did a Winery in the Swan valley (my first one I was surprised to realise, although I had done all the breweries a few months earlier....) Then had a great time down around Margaret River for 5 days, cruising round the beaches and rock pools, as well as seeing our first real surf waves, they were big.... must have been 12ft or more. I was happy to watch them from afar :o)

And then after everyone left it was back to work and reality with a bang, especially after several weeks off over Christmas as well. So busily back into things with a presentation to do at the SharePoint Saturday conference this saturday, should be an interesting day.

Then only a few weeks and Mum and David get here :)