hobart from a high place

This week I am guest tweeting from the @WeTasmania account on Twitter. This is an account where a different person tweets each week about their experiences, thoughts and life in Tasmania.

There are lots of these types of accounts from different places on Twitter - @WeAreAustralia, WeMelbourne, @Sweden, @PeopleofCanada, @Netherlanders, @CuratorsMexico  to name just a few.

My first day was yesterday, and I spent some time walking around town and tweeting photos of some of the things I saw.

Today I took some photos in Hobart which I didn't have a chance to tweet during the day, so I decided to put them all on here rather than quickfire tweet them at the end of the day.

So without further ado, here is Hobart from a high place.

Looking towards Murray St - St David's Cathedral on the right

Mt Wellington

Large cruise ship on the left, MONA ferry departing on the right

Princes Wharf and Castray Esplanade

Looking towards Sandy Bay. You can just make out the casino

Sunday Selections - Mount Wellington

It's time for Sunday Selections with Kim at frogpondsrock.

The idea is to publish some previously unseen photos that have been sitting around on your computer forever, but I seem to spend so much time on my recent photos that I never have time to look through old ones.

That's the case this week. My photos are from Mount Wellington in Hobart. Our friend's father was in town for the day, so we took him for a drive up the Mountain. I think the last time I was there was with Slabs in 1996.

I was expecting a freezing, windy day where we'd get out of the car, take a couple of photos and get back in the car again before we froze. But the weather was quite pleasant and not windy at all.

Here are the photos.

This rock formation caught my eye.
Here I played around with the Clarity filter in Camera+

The same rock formation from a different angle.
Top: phone camrea. Bottom: camera.

Next time I'm going to look at this close-up.

Same view, this time from the Pinnacle lookout window

Juniordwarf climbing the rocks

Hobart from the Mountain

Similar view of Hobart

I love the rocks up here

How to deal with a child who won't have his photo taken.

Now I've been up there, this is another place I'm itching to go back to with my camera and explore more.

Week in review

So I’m not doing a photo and a post a day, but I still need to keep track of what’s been happening so that I can keep up to date with my 2012 Project Life album and don’t get five months behind like I did in 2011. The main point of me doing that project is so I can remember what all the photos I take are of, and why I took them.

Having said that, one thing I want to do this year is put the camera away sometimes. I think know there have been times when I’ve been so focused on taking the perfect photo of something that I’ve missed out on fully experiencing the moment at the time.

That seems a little ridiculous – if the moment is that fantastic it will live on in my memory without a photo (or at least without the perfect photo, and certainly without 10 or 20 photos), and what point is the photo if I didn’t really experience the event?*

So . . . I need to give myself permission to not capture everything and to not feel guilty about not doing it. I don’t need a picture of every little thing Juniordwarf does, I don’t need to record everything I do. I need to do it.

The photo a day concept is great, and it provides a time capsule of what my life was like over a relatively short time, which I think will be cool to look back on in years to come. But it is incredibly time consuming – even with the simple approach in Project Life – and I don’t want to spend my whole life catching up on recording things, rather than actually doing things.

One of my friends suggested a weekly approach, rather than a daily approach, might work well for this year.

I’m going to give that a go and just do one post with highlights of the week. That doesn’t mean I won’t post at other times during the week on other things, like Project Life or my struggle to beat my demons (because we all know that you love reading that stuff), but for the stuff that caught my eye during the week, I’m going to try and stick to one post.

So, here’s a selection of photos for the week:

(Monday) We went to Russell Falls.

This will make good topic for Sunday Selections on Sunday. (I think Kim is still running it. I haven't done one of those posts for a while.)

(Tuesday) Juniordwarf made a person out of his salad – cucumber slices for the body and head, carrot sticks for the arms, legs and ears, and lettuce for the hair. He then ate the person piece by piece, from the bottom up, and every time he picked up a piece, he said ‘looking at the person now!’

I lied. There isn’t a photo for this moment.

(Wednesday) I went back to work. I was dreading it because the previous two days had been really hot and I don’t own any hot weather work clothing. Fortunately a cool change came through and I didn’t need it. There was a stunning rainbow over the mountain on my first day back.

(Thursday) The bus got stuck in roadworks at Granton. This is the scene from the window.

(Thursday) Juniordwarf had been asking for a Harry Potter book for ages and he was really expecting to get one for Xmas. I suggested it might be better to get it from the library so he could see if he really wanted it before he went out and bought it. It arrived at the library and he was so excited about it he couldn't wait until Slabs came back to the car to start reading it. 

Slabs and I started reading it to him but he didn’t want to hear it. When I put him to bed he said he’d read the book to his teddy after I turned out the light. It seems like he tried to do exactly that.

(Thursday) Slabs and Juniordwarf picked me up from the bus stop and we went down to the Esplanade so they could go fishing and we could have dinner outside. It’s a shame the weather wasn’t particularly pleasant (what a change earlier in the week), but still it was a lovely thought from Slabs for us to do something a bit different, and it was a really nice way to spend the rest of the afternoon.

(Today) We went for a drive on a road we’ve never been on before.

* This the point where the camera addict acknowledges that her husband has said this to her on more than one occasion.

P365 - Day 364 - the Taste (and year in review 11/12) (30/12/2011)

Today we went to the Taste Festival in Hobart.

Juniordwarf enjoyed the cups & saucers ride

More cups and saucers

Entry to the Taste

Inside the main hall

Outside the Brasserie. Nice & shady.

Ice cream

Enjoying an ale

Two Metre Tall Ale in a plastic cup?  What a crime against Ale!

Wheelie Bin Orchestra performing "We Will Rock You"
These guys were great!

Juniordwarf enjoyed the Wheelie Bins

The Winery

Year in Review (11/12)

Since my Project 365 is rapidly coming to an end, I’m going post a link to my favourite post from each month this year over the last 12 days of the year.

November: eleven

My contribution to the 11eleven Project.

P365 - Day 363 - fun afternoon (and year in review 10/12)

For today’s ‘let’s get out of the house’ trip, we ventured a little further afield and went to Alpenrail in Claremont. 

It’s a model Swiss Railway, which has been operating since 1985, and apparently is one of the biggest in the world.

Juniordwarf had already been there with his Grandmother and was very keen for a return visit, but neither Slabs nor I had been.

It’s rather cool to watch the show and see the trains running around the track, and the amount of work that has obviously gone into the model is phenomenal. It took seven years to build, plus ongoing work sine then.

There are also some smaller models that visitors can operate themselves, as well as the most beautiful faery garden, which I would have loved to have taken the time to explore, but which Juniordwarf rushed through at his standard pace.

After that we went to the Montrose Foreshore Community Park, where there is a huge climbing rope structure in a great kids playground. Every time we drive past the park, Juniordwarf tells us how he climbed to the top of the climbing frame the day he went there with his class.

When we got there I appreciated exactly how tall it was, and thought that Juniordwarf meant he’d climbed to the top platform.

But no, he meant to the actual top – as high as you can go.

I was terrified watching him. Even though his climbing skills have improved dramatically in recent months, I thought that this was a bit much of a challenge for him.

As I watched him go higher and higher, past the platform, I was preparing myself to have to get in there as quickly as I could in case he fell off. I was fully expecting him to.

Oh mother of little faith.

He had no fear, was completely sensible about the whole thing, navigated the route that suited him best, made it to the top and then all the way down without a hitch.

It was all I could do to stop myself saying, ‘be careful’, but I bit my tongue. He knew what he was doing, he’d done it before and I had to let him know I believed in him.

Once he’d made it safely back to earth, we tried out the exercise equipment, and then set off on the recently opened Boardwalk, which is part of the Glenorchy Arts and Sculpture Park (GASP). 

I have a photo of the boardwalk in development from back in April.

As the boardwalk was being build, Juniordwarf had been fascinated by it as we drove past each morning. He’d say, ‘I like all the blue-y bits. I like all the orange-y bits.’ And so on until the end.

This was my second (and Juniordwar’fs third) walk along it. I think it looks a lot better when you’re actually on it than it does from a distance. The different colours are fascinating and I love how the main colours blend from one to the next.

I wonder what the walk is like from Juniorwarf’s perspective, as he’s not quite tall enough to see over the top. I get the impression he’d get the feeling that he was basically walking through a giant liquorice allsort.

It was a fun afternoon.

Year in Review (10/12)

Since my Project 365 is rapidly coming to an end, I’m going post a link to my favourite post from each month this year over the last 12 days of the year.

October: Yeah! Cookies!

I loved so many of my October posts. It was impossible to pick a favourite, so I settled on this one, because who doesn’t like choc-chip cookies?

P365 - Day 354 - on the bus (and the year in review 1/12)

Juniordwarf doesn’t travel on buses very often, so he gets very excited whenever he gets the chance for a bus trip.

The first few times, he sat right up the front in the seat behind the bus driver. If you haven’t sat in that set before, let me tell you that there is not much leg room for anyone bigger than, well, a school kid.

After that wore off, he decided that sitting down the back was more fun, as was having an entire seat to himself and moving between seats during the trip.

Today we decided to go into town to do some shopping and meet Santa. Last year, rather than park in town, we went on Hobart Council’s shopper shuttle service where you can park at the Regatta Ground and catch a free shuttle bus into the city. Even though it was only a five minute ride, Juniordwarf loved the fact that we went on the bus.

He was very keen to do it again this year, so we did.

On the way in, he sat up the back.

On the way back he sat on one of the side-facing seats, which he was particularly taken with, because we were ‘going sideways’. So that was a bit different. (He’d also been fascinated, on his class visit to the Transport Museum recently, how some people sit facing backwards in a train.)

We saw Santa, he had an ice cream and we got some shopping done.

I think he enjoyed himself.

And now for something completely different. This:

2011 in review: Month 1/12

Since my Project 365 is rapidly coming to an end - there are 12 days left - I'm going post a link to my favourite post from each month since the start of the year over those 12 days.

Today, we return to January, and one of my very first blog posts. 

It’s about an event that I was terrified of attending, and very nearly didn’t, but was so glad I did because it helped me to believe in myself and my ability to go out and talk to people. I think that going set me up for a lot of the changes I’ve made over the course of the year.

http://sleepydwarf.blogspot.com/2011/01/p365-day-8-tweetup-812011.html

Tomorrow: February

P365 - Day 336 - up in the sky

This afternoon, just after lunch, we were treated to an aerobatic display by the Air Force Roulettes,  which are in town for the celebrations of the 200th Anniversary of the Anglesea Barracks. 

It was spectacular to watch and we got a great view, especially when they were passing over the top of us.

It was, as you might expect, very hard to take any decent pictures of the display on my phone camera due to the distance and the fact that I can’t actually see what I’m taking a picture of when I point the phone at planes flying overhead. So I just clicked away and hoped that the planes were in the shot, then cropped and edited them afterwards.

And afterwards . . .

We went to the Farm Bar  at Two Metre Tall. This was Andrew Marshall’s  debut for the Farm Bar season. After his nifty dancing last time, Juniordwarf was looking forward to seeing Andrew perform.

Given his new fascination with guitars, Juniordwarf was very interested in watching Andrew set up his equipment, and he was fascinated by the didgeridoo and the sounds it made.

It was a lovely relaxing way to spend what turned out to be a very nice summer evening. I think we can look forward to spending more time there over the next few months.

P365 - Day 319 - train park

Today Juniordwarf and I did something different. We spent the day in Hobart.

He was very interested in the fountain at Franklin Square.

The purpose of our trip was to go to the train park.

Juniordwarf had a great time. We took his scooter, which he rode around the track.

The first time he drove the train, he wanted to charge me $25 for the trip, to sit up the front with him. After lunch, he'd reduced the fare to $5, but I had to sit right at the back.

Two nori rolls are usually a decent amount for a meal for me. Juniordwarf also manages to eat that at lunch time.

The park has a fantastic slide.

When Juniordwarf was on the swings he spotted a woman with a dog, and immediately had to go over to the dog. After me telling him (again) the "strange dog safety message", the dog's owner told him it was ok for him to pat the dog. While he was doing that he started telling the woman all about the different budgies I (and we) have owned and what had happened to all of them. I'm not sure what she made of it all (especially the bit about me leaving the cage door open and losing the unfortunate bird), but she nodded politely and said "oh yes", a couple of times. This is at least the second stranger he's gone up to and told all about the budgies in recent weeks. It's obviously one of his favourite stories.

It was a fun day and a welcome change from our usual routine.