Looking for some great fiction to read? Get on out there and get yourself a copy of The Bollywood Beauty, written by Shalini Akhil. It’s only just been released, so you can be the first person in your apartment block (or street) to read it! As a measure of its quality, The Bollywood Beauty was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2004.

And if that’s not enough for you, Shalini was also the person who beat Peter Malkin in the Raw Comedy finals a few years back . Those of you in Melbourne can also catch Shalini doing some readings at The Age Melbourne Writers’ Festival later this month.

Shell spent much of yesterday with her mum (while I worked on my research proposal – such fun!); they headed into the Rocks for lunch/afternoon tea, and wandered around the Rocks Markets.

We did all have a nice dinner together though, at Basil’s Seafood restaurant last night. Basil’s is incredibly close to home, yet we’ve never actually eaten there (well, Shell has with work, but I’ve never set foot inside). When we first moved up here to Sydney, we used to think it was a mafia hang-out, since there seemed so little activity and we never saw any evidence of people actually dining there. It turns out that it’s actually a very well known, highly regarded and award-winning seafood restaurant that’s been around for many years. Suffice to say, we had a lovely dinner togther, and the food and service were both excellent – a very enjoyable evening .

Back to the grindstone today, trying to nut out exactly what it is I’m going to do over the next 5 or 6 months for my research project …

So Shell and I had our first paddle on the Hawkesbury River this morning. Got up reasonably early to join in a familiarization paddle organised by the Windsor Canoe club. They were a very friendly bunch of people, but it’s fair to say that we were amongst the most recreational of the kayakers there – there were a lot of very serious people with fancy, light-weight boats who seemed to think a 24km paddle was a nice warm-up before breakfast! Our Dagger Trinidad seemed rather wide and bulky compared to the racing lines of many other kayaks.

The paddle was from Brooklyn to Spencer and back, although we did actually turn around just before Spencer, making the total distance somewhere around 24-26km. Thankfully, the weather was fantastic – sunny and cool with very little wind. The trip was also organised to have the tide on our side for the return trip, which no doubt helped, although I can’t say I noticed too much assistance!

There were just under 50 boats taking part, and after crowded start, the boats stretched out, and we found our pace in the back third of the group. We were quite happy to make the 12-13km mark in around 75 minutes. The trip back was probably slightly slower, at around 80 minutes. To put that into perspective for us Cooinda folks, that equates to paddling from Banksia Peninsula to Wally’s farm on the Nicholson River in around 2 and a half hours. With canoes, gears and kids, that’s normally the best part of a whole day’s paddle!

We were very pleased (and tired) as we came off the water around just after 12pm. I’m sure my muscles will be reminding me of the paddle tomorrow!

Back in January this year, we hired a 4wd (a brand new Mitsubishi Pajero) for a trip to Barrington Tops National Park. After a few days of awesome 4-wheel-driving and camping, we had to unfortunately return the Pajero to the hire car company, which happened to be on the eastern fringes of the Sydney CBD. After dropping the car off early on a Saturday morning, Shell and I wandered through sleepy Sydney up to the Rocks, and had a wonderful breaky and coffee. On a whim, we had a look at the Rocks Market which was just coming alive after we finished breakfast.

We happened to wander past a stall with a bunch of original paintings, one of which happened to catch our eye. On a complete whim, we ended up purchasing two of Ronnie’s paintings. Both are musically themed – one has a piano with sheet music, and the second has a cello and a saxophone – and are painted in rich earthy tones that match our colour scheme really well. Ronnie delivered them to us about a week later (in mid-January), and ever since, they have been propped against the wall in our lounge room, still wrapped in bubble-wrap. And now to the point of this trip down memory-lane: we have finally hung our pictures! This also means that I have now used our excellent Makita hammer-drill (along with one of our tungsten-carbide tipped drill bits) to drill into our lovely red lounge room wall in order to install the hooks for the paintings, but most importantly we *finally* have our two paintings hanging on our loungeroom wall, nicely lit up by halogen spot-lights. They look fantastic

Made sure we had another short paddle on the Lane Cove River this morning. We intended to paddle as far as we could upstream; unfortunately, this was trivially easy, since we couldn’t get any further than the Steakhouse at Fullers Bridge due to the Parramatta Epping to Chatswood Rail Link tunnel works, which have blocked the river. Bugger.

So we ended up paddling up and back between Fullers Bridge and Magdala Park. We both felt pretty sluggish this morning, so we only paddled for about an hour. It rained for much of the paddle, but that didn’t make it any less enjoyable. In fact the sound of the rain on the river was quite soothing.

Have been trying to focus on writing my dynamic time warping speech/speaker recognizer in R this afternoon. Hrm… it’s turning out to be trickier than I thought, but that’s largely because I don’t know R as well as I should. I know exactly what I want to do conceptually – it’s just a matter of working out a smart way to do it in R (like finding out how kmeans clustering works, to avoid having to reinvent the wheel). Back to the grind-stone now. Wish me luck!

Just got back (ok it was actually a few hours ago!) from 2 hours of solid paddling on the Lane Cove River. We had a nice tail-wind for most of the paddle from Chatswood/North Ryde through to Riverview, from where we had an unexpectedly great view of the Harbour Bridge and city skyline. Of course, given the downstream tail-wind, we had a monster head-wind paddling back upstream, but surprisingly we managed to make the return trip in almost exactly the same time as the downstream journey. I think at least part of that was because we refrained from stopping to often, due to the fact that we started drifting backwards every time that we did stop paddling to rest.

I’m not sure exactly how far the paddle was, but a quick guesstimate would be something like 12-15km for the whole trip. Not bad for a Sunday morning! Fear our tanky kayaking muscles!!

We finally found time to test our new Dagger Trinidad sea-kayak on the Lane Cove River yesterday afternoon (pictures are not of us, but give you an idea of the scenery). That, of course, was after working out how to fit a 5.5 metre long boat on the roof racks of our Subaru, which is substantially shorter than that We need to buy some more of our very cool kayak straps to make things a bit simpler in the future (for attaching the kayak to the roof bars, tow hooks at the front, and tow-ball tongue at the rear).

Anyway, we found a great launching spot on the Lane Cove River, only a short distance from our house, thanks to the Lane Cove River Kayakers, who publish their meeting location on their website. It’s a perfect spot to launch from – lots of open space, plenty of parking, and as I mentioned, quite close to home. That should remove some of the inertia from getting out on the water regularly, as we’ll have to do if we have any chance of finishing the Hawkesbury River Classic!

We had a great paddle for an hour and half or so, paddling down-stream towards the harbour past Lane Cove, and then back upstream again. Our kayak is great! Very comfortable seats, feels very stable in the water, and has very easily adjustable foot pedals in the rear, and foot braces in the front. The only downside is that it’s a bit heavy to maneuver when it’s out of the water. I guess that’s the disadvantage of plastic boats. Still, lifting it on and off the roof racks will be good for our muscles

Finally managed to dissect the truly horrible Hawkesbury River Classic website and extract some information about the event. This involved reading raw javascript and HTML to reassemble the intended links – I hate crufty webpages that have been abandoned! The paddle sounds like a loooong way – 111km . Lots of training to do before October!

Still have to find time to show mum our kayak while she’s here visiting!

Guess who just had a 2 person Dagger Trinidad sea kayak delivered this morning?! It looks awesome, but it’s sooo long (5 and a half metres!) that it barely fits in the garage! It’s got 3 waterproof storage holds, deck lines, carry handles, a metal rudder and carries more than 250 litres of gear (plus two people, and whatever you can strap on top). Colour is marbled orange and yellow – not originally what we intended, but at least it’s nice and bright . Now we just have to work out how to strap it to the roof of our Subaru, and make an excuse to get out on the water. Plenty of training to do before October!

Yay!