Stromlo Soggies

soggying up

Ourimbah in prep for the scott24.  Mental note - this place takes a while to drain.

 Pump track more like a big bowl of laksa, albeit far less appealing

the bike with 9 lives

Update...with a new rear hanger and derailleur it is still grooving, in fact better than ever!

A few things melbourne has that we don't

Had a quick trip to Melbourne recently.  They seem to be way ahead of us northerners in several respects.  In no partciular order;

Public space art (my current reference being "poo on sticks" at Kings Cross)
Kick-arse synchrotron (although one does have to go to Monash to use it)
Way more progressive cycling culture/infrastructure
Brunetti's fine coffee emporium - what the Paragon is to Goulburn, but on a Melbourne scale!

 For some reason this beast really appealed

Bikes for hire, and helmets only $5 a pop. They were actually not bad.  At that price I should have bought half a dozen to subsidize all the ob-stacle related incidents that no doubt await - this coming weekend even - Scott24, where the Soggy-Bottom brigade have a proud history to uphold. 

 Some synchrotron action at the microfocus beamline where I collected data on the smallest crystals i've ever shot - see them littering the mesh below

 ...which yielded another structure - this one with 10 molecules in the asymmetric unit (a record for me).  Crystal packing shown below.

 But Melbourne doesn't have the blueies on the doorstep.  The mudge and I recently tackled the classic corner climb "Firebug" (17), which has an olde-fashioned first pitch (= desperate thrutching grovel), followed by two awesome pitches with good gear, albeit not including the classic "knot" protection displayed below.

 View between my legs midway up the fantastic hanging 3rd pitch

 And completely unrelated, the dismantling of an Australian icon at E's new digs

 Another engineer in the works