Holiday house and trains

Well Tom and I have just returned from the holiday house, it was totally fantastic weather for it. We took the train on Friday evening and got there at about 8:30pm, it was a very dark arrival. Before I get into all of that. on Friday afternoon Jan, Aurah, Saxon and I went to the Portia Geach Gallery to see the annual portrait competition. The competition is for female artists only as Portia Geach was a suffragette and activist for womens rights. It was really good and had quite a range of painting styles. Before we viewed the art we had lunch in the restaurant. What is really neat is that the building that houses all of this was Jan's old high school, it had about 600 students and before becoming a school house was a war time hospital. Also is was built by convicts and Jan told me when she went to school there it still had the huge metal loops that the convicts were chained to while they built it. It's downtown, right on the edge of where all the skyscrapers start and in The Rocks, which is one of the oldest parts of Sydney, and one of the original settlements.

The area with the bay window is the gallery. 

 

 This is the restaurant and Jan's old history class. It was really lovely inside, very bright and lots of yummy food. Including freshly squeezed oranges.

So at the end of an art filled day there's nothing better than escaping to a tiny lake-side town. Which is what Tom and I did.
I've been plotting and putting together some ideas for a video I'll sending out. It's going to be of places I love here and want to show in more detail and moving. So since we were there Tom and I started filming with the holiday house. Here are some production photos.

It was a really windy day when we decided to film, so I'm not talking much. But there will be voice overs. :)

I've discovered that the holiday house is the perfect place to get and eat a coconut. A large part of this is the handy dandy concrete slab under the porch. I read a few tips on the internet about what the best way to open and remove the coconut meat is. I had full intentions of trying them out until I couldn't find the key to open the garage and was suddenly nail and hammerless. So out of curiosity I threw the coconut on to the concrete hoping that it would at least give me a crack to open it with. Inside it totally exploded and caused a lot of the hard thick shell to come off in a way that allowed me to pry it off. Which meant for the first time in my life I was able to get lots of chunks of coconut to snack on. They lasted long enough that we had some on the train home. Mmmm some much coconut.

When we were at the grocery store I found the biggest avocados I have ever seen. There reed avocados and just for comparison here's mine next to my coconut. Huge!

This is a tiny boat we found on our way back from filming.

The thing that totally made the visit for me was the discovery of a minor bird nest. It's looked to me like there were three baby birds. And the whole time I spied on them from the deck the parent bird kept a very close watch on me. I did get some awesome footage of it feeding them.

 The little yellow thing coming out of the nest is one of the baby's beaks. They were so cute and noisy, in a cute way. Like a certain kitty, but nicer sounding. We woke up to them and I had to check on them both days that they were there. It was particularly neat when the parent made a quick call to them, right around when I showed up and they went totally silent. Definitely a signal.

Here are a few things I love about the trains. The ticket booth. It has every name of every station that you can get to on the two types of lines. Which means lots of time is spent trying to find your destination. 

To Sydney.

The bridge. That clock covered a good 45minutes in the 15 that we actually spent there. And I think it was going backwards too. But I never saw it move. Freaky. 

This is a building I've been meaning to get photos of because it is so beautiful inside. It's the Queen Victoria Building and it's a shopping center, the most expensive and high stuff is upstairs from the cheaper stuff. This is the underground area that connects to the trains. One of the features that I love about is the tiled floors everywhere. It also has spiral stairs and an old fashioned elevator. 

This is the upstairs. 

 In other news, the results of the vampire contest came out. I didn't make the top ten, but I did pick up some followers on the site which is great. And today I received the test swatch in the mail and since I like how the colours look I'm now selling it through the site. Yay! In the next week I should have tests of all my fabric and I can figure out which ones I want to sell. I got each test swatch in a different fabric so that I can see what they all feel like. I have a couple I'd like to get for myself when I decide what it is that I want to do with them.