Well, as seems to be the trend at the moment, a lot of stuff has happened since I last posted.

There was a trip to Adelaide in there somewhere ( :) ), with a lot of visiting of wineries, and quite a number of cases bought between the five of us who went. Here’s an important lesson for those planning something similar in the future: If it’s 38 degrees plus, you really need to be drinking a lot of the free water, and not only the free wine.

Valentine’s day was very nice. Trang and I bought a selection of gourmet foods from DJ’s food hall, and proceeded to Coogee to have a lovely picnic. We weren’t the only ones with this idea – when we moved from our original spot close to dark so that we could sit on the rocks at south Coogee, there were couples everywhere! There was even one couple who had brought a foldup table and chairs and were having what looked to be a lovely dinner. Normally I’m against the ‘one day of the year’ kind of thing, but it is nice to have one day of the year be the day that you make a lot of extra effort. After seeing the table couple, I just know I’m going to have to figure out some way to beat that next year!

Trang and I ventured out to Westmead children’s hospital to see my niece Phoebe, who’s in hospital after an operation on Tuesday. She’s doing amazingly well – the nurses have apparently been bringing people down to introduce to her as she’s such a good patient.

Some links now:

For those of you who haven’t heard already, Star Wars is coming to DVD soon! Special Editions only apparently – the Word from George is that they were the editions he always intended to make, so they’re the only editions that will get a release. Looks like it will also be a boxset similar to Indy, with an extras DVD. Yay!

For those of you who wonder about what the hell people are going on about with all this supervitamin this and magnetic therapy that, there’s Quackwatch, a compendium of info (from the skeptical point of view) about alternative therapies etc.

For the obligatory world-affairs link, today we have this piece from the New York Review of Books entitled ‘Now They Tell Us”, which looks at some of the reasons behind the US media’s reluctance to question just why a war in Iraq was so necessary. It’s a good, if long, piece.