After one of the busiest, most overwhelming and stressful summers I've ever known, I took a 2-week, mostly-unplanned road trip around Arizona and New Mexico in early Nov. 2010.    It was wonderful, full, and adventourous, while being totally relaxing in the ways that I needed - Stress over needed new tires or a new transmission?? nah... thats the small stuff.

Too many stories to type here now, maybe later, or maybe not (you know how often I post here) you might have to talk w/ me directly to get the stories.

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Wow - first post in a while - I haven't even posted recent beer recipes. Heck I haven't even updated my Facebook status in a long time. But - here ya go!  Just letting folks know that I just changed internet providers and now have much faster inbound and outbound service. So as long as your inbound connection is faster than my ~2Mbps outbound service, you'll see substantially faster load-times when you look at pages at The Den, especially when looking at the photo gallery.

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You might have noticed a couple of beer recipes being posted lately! Among the changes made during recent upgrades to my server, I've created a pretty simple way to store beer recipes for all the batches I brew.  While I've been brewing for about 16 years now, I don't think I'll post all the recipes from all the way back.

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After three fun but too-short days in Adelaide, it was off to Brisbane to meet up with my friend Oliver.

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After a couple of very fun weeks with the family in Belgrave, I headed off to Adelaide to visit my friends Aurelia and Brian, and their 18mo old son Orlando. I used to work with Aurelia at Reed, but a couple years after I moved to the Bay Area, they moved back to Aurelia's home town of Brighton (or as Brian calls it, Bri-Town :-) ) a beach suburb just south of Adelaide.

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I've had all the photos from my trip to Australia posted for a while, but of course the holidays have been upon us and I suck at keeping this thing up to date - so I'm finally announcing it.  You'll find them at http://notlost.org/gallery/v/chris/travels/Oz08/ where there's one album for each city I visited.

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The Healesville Sanctuary is a branch of the Melbourne Zoo, out in the hills to the east. There one can find plenty of Australian fauna and flora without having to head out into the bush to find it. We headed up there on Sunday of my first weekend in Belgrave, a week after I'd arrived in Australia. I've got a decent selection of photos from there in the gallery, so have a look. The highlight of that day would have to have been one of the snakes that we saw.

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My time in Belgrave has included two full weekends, and some of the family activities I've been partaking in have included a trip to the Healesville Sanctuary (more on that later), an couple of visits to local parks, and a morning at Grant's Picnic Ground, just a half-mile or so up the road.

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G'day again from down undah! Yes indeed I've been in Australia for 15 days now, mostly here in Belgrave, about 25 miles east of downtown Melbourne at the end of one of the public-transit train lines.  I've been visiting Larkin, one of my sisters from my New Zealand host-family of 25 yrs ago, and her partner Andrea, and their three-year-old twins Finn & Poppy.

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Well, hello there, from here, which is far away.

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