A glimpse of Northern Ireland

Well guys, I didn't see any mad gunmen wearing balaclavas, but I did see a stunning coastline, a smooth line and some great savings on food and beer! Welcome to Northern Ireland! Many from the south would never venture up there... bad memories... but it is lovely! Check out Giant's Causeway - this really cool step-like coast formation!
There's also a picture of us with a memorial to Yeats the Irish poet, remember him from English guys?

hunter valley...

Hey guys

Sorry, started posting on Friday but got halfway through it and firefox died :P So will have another go. Yes, I did finally figure out my login!

Just spent a *great* birthday wkend in the hunter valley, as a present from mark. We were in this little cabin that opened out onto a patio that led straight out onto a little stand of gum trees, with a vineyard on the other side, out on an estate away from any towns (but not any wineries ;). We spent the entire weekend eating, drinking, swimming in the pool and chilling out, it was fabbo. This is the place we went to.

Danno, I did see An Inconvenient Truth a few weeks back on DVD, and you're right, it's humbling. What have you guys done after seeing it? We have a pretty small footprint since we're in such a small apartment here, and we were pretty conscious beforehand of things like avoiding as much packaging and plastic as possible, not driving if we didn't need to, not leaving lights or appliances on etc, but there are a few other things we're doing now as well. I've got a little mini-compost bin that you can use in apartments to reuse our kitchen waste as soil for pot plants, and we swapped over our light bulbs to the energy efficient ones, but the thing that suprised me is how much power appliances use when they're in 'standby' mode, like the TV/DVD/stereo. It can cost hundreds of dollars a year in power! So we switch all that stuff off now too when we're not using it - the only thing you lose is the clock setting, but I don't really think you need 5 clocks around the house anyway! There's also this type of stuff, where you can calculate your household's carbon emissions for a year and pay for an equivalent number of trees to be planted to offset it, which is pretty cool.