My wife and I usually go out for dinner on Friday nights. Tonight we went to El Karim, our favourite Lebanese restaurant. These are the felafels. Delicious as usual! You can see (most of) the rest of the dinner if you wish. (That one omits the fried halloumi, which we’d polished off already.)
Lazy today, so I just took a macro of some tomatoes that were sitting in our fruit bowl. (I was going to type “vegetable bowl”, but then I remembered the pedantry of the Internet… We actually have a fruit bowl for apples, bananas, peaches, apricots, etc., and an adjacent tomato bowl, since we always have tomatoes.)
Often while walking to the station to catch the train to work I can hear rainbow lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus) in the trees of the park. Usually they are well hidden by the foliage, but today I got a decent look at them, and snapped this photo. These are the most common parrots around my place, but we also get sulphur-crested cockatoos, galahs, and I’ve seen king parrots a few times too.
I thought this tunnel under the railway station would make an interesting juxtaposition next to yesterday’s photo. I walk through this tunnel on the way home from work every day.
I was walking home today looking for something to photograph and I spotted this pedestrian island in the middle of the street. I thought the view through the open squares would make a nice frame, and it lined up nicely with the old railway bridge at the top of the street. And as I knelt down to take the shot, a train passed over the bridge.
Grocery shopping day, and I took a camera along. While collecting some breakfast cereal, I was inspired to take a panorama of six stitched photos along the full length of the breakfast cereal aisle. This is every pre-boxed breakfast cereal in my local supermarket, except for the mueslis, which are in a different aisle, near the “health food” section. You might want to view this one big or very big.
Notice the cereals start with the unhealthy, sugary stuff on the left – Milo, Froot Loops, Coco Pops, Frosties (and the fact that Nutri Grain is leftmost just goes to show how it’s not the “healthy” cereal it’s marketed as) – progressing through the ever-popular whole wheat cereals – Vita Brits, Weet Bix, etc – on to the “muesli-light” style cereals with grains and dried fruits, and finally on to the cereals loaded with bran on the far right.
I also notice that this looks a hell of a lot healthier than the over-the-top sugar-laden marshmallow/chocolate breakfast cereal I’ve seen in American supermarkets. I honestly couldn’t believe my eyes the first time I went into an American supermarket and looked at the breakfast cereals there. Frosties and the aforementioned Nutri Grain are probably the worst offenders in Australian supermarkets.
Today I donated blood plasma, my 5th plasma donation and my 48th blood donation overall (the others were whole blood). I took this photo myself with my right arm outstretched.
Every workday morning I arrive at Macquarie Park railway station and take the long escalator up to street level. The sun was blazing outside this morning, and the impression rising out of the relatively dim underground station is of ascending to a blinding heaven.
I took a detour on the way home today, getting off the train a stop early and walking home via the Gore Hill Cemetery. This is one of the oldest cemeteries remaining in Sydney, established in 1868. Most of the burials were in the first decades of the 20th century, and the last was in 1974. Since then the cemetery has been allowed to become overgrown, but still receives some minimal maintenance. It is located right next door to the Royal North Shore Hospital, one of the biggest hospitals in Sydney. I suppose many of the rooms have views overlooking the graves…
It was back to work today after the Christmas/New Year break. This time of year many businesses are still closed. Normally we have a wide selection of places within walking distance of work to buy lunch, but today only about half of them were open. I went to Go-Hun Thai, where they cook yummy Thai food to order. Here are some of the cooks, making my lunch!
