Surry Hills Festival

Saturday was a beautiful day. And it happened to be the day of the Surry Hills Festival. So lucky me headed off to walk around Surry Hills!

The festival was spread out along different parks and open spaces. I headed up to the Farmers Market that was coordinated with the festival to start out.

Then it was on to the main part of the neighborhood, where cafes and shops were having sales and specials for the festival. Everything was decorated up for springtime too.

There was live music on in the main park area, as well as all the usual food stalls and vendors. The Surry Hills library had set up a temporary outdoor library space where you could hang out and read or take a book with you.

The neighborhood came out to enjoy the day too. There were lots of people just hanging out on their stoop, or dressed up in costume just for fun. I passed this mini marching band on the sidewalk.

Even the Surry Hills dogs were chilling out.

 

I walked around for a few hours, enjoying the beautiful spring day and the happy community feeling. It was a great day!

 

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BEAMS art festival

Saturday night we found ourselves heading out to a hipster little neighborhood for a cute nighttime art festival. It reminded me of a mini Vivid, with the addition of some very obscure art.

The neighbornood of Chippendale had blocked off a few streets for the festival. The streets were mainly residential, so people had contributed their yards, garages, and other free space to be used to display art.

There was a good mix of light installations....

 

...And art exhibited along the streets.

T also came with me. I'm not sure how much he enjoyed the festival itself, but he was a trooper and definitely was OK with the sweet potato chips we bought from a food truck!

 

 

 

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Snapshot of the week

I arrived back in Sydney on Tuesday morning, just in time to go into the office. I made it at work until 4:30 and I stayed awake until 8 PM. Not bad if I do say so myself!

There were a few things happening this week. Of course, the new iPhone came out, so there were people camping out on the street by the store, just a block down from the office. Crazy people!

The make-your-own Magnum pop-up store is back, so I had ice cream for lunch one day! My creation was a dark chocolate shell with vanilla beads, chocolate cookie crumbs, and raspberry chips. I am thinking I should maybe be an ice cream designer in my next career!

 

On Friday, there was a party to celebrate Art & About at Martin Place. The theme was neighborhood block party, so it was all set up with things you might see at a neighborhood barbie - complete with a camper!

There were also some performances happening in the evening, and I got to see one of them practicing. It was a ballet/dance done with shopping carts (trolleys here). Even though it sounded weird, it was actually surprisingly cool! It was mostly synchronized dancing with the carts, but there were also a couple flips off the carts laid upside down.

I didn't do a good enough job selling T on the grocery cart dancing and neighborhood party, so the real event on Friday night was voted down. Normally I might have gone by myself, but as a nod to being more aware of security during an unsettled week, I stayed home. We had our own party with pizza and a movie - and who could complain about that?! =)

 

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Guest Post: Toby takes on Oz Comic-Con

One of the many thoughtful *cough*th birthday presents I received from Christine was a pair of tickets to my first ever Comic-Con. This particular brand of Comic-Com is, of course, the Oz variety, which means the accents are a bit cooler and the crowds slightly more laid back and less pushy. Otherwise, it looks about the same to my amateur eyes.

Turned out Christine couldn't make the trip to the con with me--she had a San Fran trip pop up--so you don't get her usual play-by-play of this activity. Instead, you get mine.

In all, it was a fantastic experience. I scored some exclusive purchases, saw some great costumes, spotted a celeb or two, had my picture taken more times than I can count, and even met some nice people (yes, I talked to people, offered to take pictures for them, even helped one first-time con attendee get her bearings...I'm a totally different person in uniform).

Oh yeah, uniform. Did I mention that? I wouldn't be caught dead in a con out of costume. But you don't get to see the pics here. For that you have to go over to my blog. Don't worry; it's not far. Click this link to make the trek. Ha! Trek. Get it? You will.

Fun in the California sun!

After the conference in San Jose, I decided I would take a couple days to visit my family in San Diego. So I caught a late flight on Thursday and headed up to one of the loveliest cities in California.

Sometimes I think I get a reputation as an activity-crazy person. But my cousin Megan has got nothing on me! For the two days I was there we:

• Went hiking at Torrey Pines
• Had lunch by the ocean
• Went snorkeling with leopard sharks
• Had a cookout complete with s'mores and cornhole
• Went paddle boarding
• Went to an outdoor movie theatre and watched an Alfred Hitchcock classic

 

And in between all of that, we found time for fun food out (including Mexican!), shopping, and getting some dog time in!

It was a beautiful 2 days and really hot! I wasn't ready for summer weather so the heat really hit me. But I didn't mind - it felt amazing after the rainy winter days of Sydney.

It was so nice to be with family for a couple days, all the fun events notwithstanding! Thank you, Humbers, for such a wonderful couple of days!

 

 

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A quick visit in San Jose

Somewhat short notice, I ended up going to our company's annual customer conference in sunny San Jose! I flew out of Sydney on Monday afternoon and traveled back in time to arrive in San Jose on Monday morning. Then it was three full days of conference, customers, nerdy talk, and very little sleep!

My co-worker and I were there at the conference to talk about how we use one of our partner's plugins. The plugin company is based in Germany, so even though we talk to them all the time, we've only met a couple of the guys in person one time. They turned out to be super nice and funny in person, which made the 10 hours of standing on our feet and talking about software and processes really fun.

So many people excited to talk about nerdy software!

My co-worker's 15 minutes of fame

No Atlassian gathering is complete without a party, and there was an epic one on Wednesday night. Called Summit Bash, it was a full-on party at a tech museum rented out for the night. The museum was open for all the nerds to explore and there were different types of food in different rooms of each floor of the museum. There was also a dance floor and DJ, which was pretty fun!

The party museum

 

Besides all the conference goings on, it was also just fun to be out in the lovely California weather and enjoy the city!

The biggest permanent Monopoly board in the world

The War Memorial

And just by the time I was starting to beat my jet lag, I headed off for another adventure!

 

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Macbeth

We had a very sophisticated date night this Friday - we scored tickets to see Hugo Weaving in Macbeth at the Sydney Theatre! We were pretty excited about this because tickets had been sold out for a while, but we got lucky and managed to get some that were released through the box office. Not only that, but they happened to be front row tickets!

 

Interestingly, this was an activity picked by Toby. He really likes Hugo Weaving, so he was soooo excited to get to see him on his home turf!

The theatre is down by old wharves on the harbour. We went for dinner in a fun Italian place before the show started.

The show itself was amazing. They had switched the stage back to front so that the audience sat on what is normally the backstage. They'd built up temporary bleachers to fit everyone and the normal seating was used as part of the staging. It was really cool to get to see all the lighting and catwalks that you don't normally get to see in a show! And even though it was 2 hours long without a break, it was so much fun!

 

 

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Bats, bats, bats!

On Sunday we headed out to Centennial Park for something called the Batwatchers Breakfast. I learned about this program a few weeks ago and bought tickets. It's put on by the park to raise awareness about the flying foxes in Sydney (some people don't like them, apparently!) and to give people a chance to see them as they rest for the day. Oh and you also get breakfast!

We met at the learning center to hear about the bats living at Centennial Park. The last time they did a count, there were around 5,000!

However, the best part of the learning center lecture was that it coincided with training for wildlife carer volunteers. All of these people (mainly middle-aged women) were there with cages with various animals in them. So we took a few extra minutes to meet some of the rehabilitating animals! There were a couple baby bushtail possums, which were sooo cute!

And of course some bats!

You can really tell how big the bats are in these pictures. It was fascinating how friendly they where and they really liked interacting with their carers! We learned that they're one of the smartest animals - some scientists think they are almost as smart as primates. One of the women told us that she had to start putting a padlock on the bat cage because they had learned how to open the door. So amazing!

After we hung out with the animals inside, it was time to go check them out in the wild! We headed out into the park and into a swamp. It was super muddy because of all the rain we've been having, but it was also very cool to be in the middle of a swamp in the middle of the city!

The bats were all camped out in the tops of the trees hanging out in the sun. There were hundreds of them! It was amazing!!!

All of these clumps are bats hanging out

Before we left the park, we got our breakky from a food truck and then had a nice stroll back through the park to the car.

I just loved seeing the bats. And next time I'm taking my real camera!

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