As part of the Ange Birthday/One year celebration We spent yesterday out at Werribee enjoying the Harvest Picnic. The two of us stayed at Werribee Mansion the previous night, but negated that advantage by driving the car around to the picnic entrance, rather than walk it. We arrived at 10:30am to a the place alive with a large crowd of people alternately resting on blankets and roaming from stall to stall. Over the next few hours we moved clockwise through the stalls ourselves, sampling everything from wine to avocado to mushrooms to spices to buffalo sausage.

Having spent a few hours grazing through the food stalls we weren't that hungry and opted for something small to pick at while we lounged on a picnic rug we'd set up in the middle of the still growing crowd. I grabbed a tub of chicken and seafood paella and a wheat beer, while Ange grabbed a chicken salad. We cooled down with small tubs of chocolate icecream and mango icecream and took large swigs from a water bottle in a attempt to stave off dehydration.

Before we left I paid a quick visit to the stalls of three wineries I was really impressed with and picked up four bottles of wine. Those coupled with the three I picked up at Shadowfax have made my not-so-impressive wine rack look fairly decent again.

Once back at Ange's place we were both overcome with exhaustion from the day's activities. The hot sun had taken it's toll on the both of us. As I type this Ange is at home recovering from mild heat stroke, while my face is burnt to a nice shade of red. I can't fault the Harvest Picnic for that though. It was one of the best run festivals I've been to. I'll definitely be going again next year, I'll just have to remember to pack the the sunscreen.

Most nights after I finish work I'm content to sit at the computer playing games, or lounge around on the couch watching TV or reading a book until I wander off to bed around 10:30.

Last night after dinner I was feeling mighty restless, so I decided to burn that energy off with a bit of a run.

I strapped my running shoes on, jogged out of the house and headed east. I hung a left and after about 300 metres was struck down with a stitch in my left side. I walked that out over 200 metres then ran for another 100 metres before I began to realise that I was a tad optimistic about my current level of fitness. I walked another 800 metres or so before deciding to head back towards home.

Making another left, I jogged for roughly 150 metres before my legs began to shake. I walked the other 150 metres to my street, took another left and ran 300 metres until my legs began to give out again. I walked the rest of the way home, save for a short burst of enthusiastic running as I neared the house.

All up I managed to shift my sorry carcass about 2.4 kms. Something I'm especially proud of given my recent lack of excercise. It may have been the post-excercise deliurium affecting my brain, but after the run I decided to do it every night. I'll be happy when I can run it non-stop.

Since moving to Coburg I've noticed that I'm getting better and better at using my hands. One theory I'm playing with is that since moving to the north, I'm far from the people I relied on to get the more physical things done.

This year I've started mowing lawns, performed mechanical repairs on my car, and now installed speakers in my car. Sunday afternoon I teamed up with the husband of one of Ange's friends to install four speakers in my car, after the last set had apparently blown up. It took us roughly 5 hours, but we got there in the end. I still need to clean up the parcel shelf and one wire needs to be hidden better, but for all intents and purposes it's done.

It's great to finally have music filtering through the car again and it means a lot more to me that I actually helped to get it set up. Like a character from a bad children's movie I'm discovering that the magic was inside me all along.

Ange and I hit a very important milestone today.
Exactly one year ago today (after months of wearing her down) we went on our first date. We first hit Bearbrass for a shared pizza and side order of fries and then moved on to the Crown cinemas to see Corpse Bride.

Ange has been a great source of change and inspiration in my life. Soon after we got together, I broke the mystical '$30 for a meal' barrier; I moved to a different region of Melbourne; and I've picked up the beginnings of a second language, namely Italian.

It's often said that opposites attract, and this is never more true than in our case. I'm a night person, she's a morning person. I'm a borderline alcoholic, she's a Cadbury.
It's very cliche, but while our differences can sometimes create friction, they're balanced out by our shared aspects.

Being able to teach and learn from someone for a full year has been fun as well. I'm a much better cook than I ever was and Ange is now, in her own words, "a giant nerd" thanks to me.

I wasn't feeling very productive at work today, so I flipped up the metaphorical hood of this old site and started tinkering with the CSS.

The most visible changes are those made to the header. I've reversed the colouring, making the text blue and background white, and shifted the text off-center to the bottom right of the header area. Lesser changes include widening the text area, pulling images inline with text and generally tidying up the site's look.

One thing did have me stumped for most of the day. While I could get the text area to increase, the header would not stretch with it. It took me all day, but I finally figured out why this was happening. The changes I'd made to the CSS were fine, I just hadn't noticed that code had been entered into the HTML to overwrite it. Once I'd fixed that up I was left with the site you see before you.