I don't have a very good feeling about this trip - got a feeling that it's not going to happen, even though my tooth does seem to be improving, so while I hope I'll be leaving the country on 7 Feb, I'm not counting on it. The fallback plan is for a week in Tasmania, where at least they have a decent climate - unlike here in sweltering Sydney!

But I figure that potential disappointment on the Euro-front shouldn't mean I neglect learning how to use my new digital camera, so I went for a roam around the neighbourhood this evening, playing round with exposure bracketing and closeup flash on poor defenceless flowers which just happened to be on bushes at the side of the road (when I get a bit better at this, perhaps I'll start cultivating the art of harrassing complete strangers to take their photos rather than just sticking to landscapes and vegetation). Fun - although the results aren't going to win any awards, I know - adding them in here in the hopes that in future I'll be able to improve and then I can look back and be really really really embarrassed.

Inner West twilight. 29-Jan-2005.

Flash flower. 29-Jan-2005.

I've been reading round the internet a bit about blogging recently and reading through some blogs to get a bit of a feel for what's out there - amazing the variety. Found a great food blog tonight - Chocolate and Zucchini - which looks like one to watch for the cooking-obsessed. This week's chocolate-dipped apricots are really making me regret that my source of fabulous dried apricots here has dried (hah!) up - I used to be able to get fantastic ones (Australian, of course) - now I only seem to be able to find the Turkish variety which are far too sugary and not nearly apricotty enough.

The other site relates to my new-found interest in digital photography. It's classed as a meme apparently. It's basically a weekly photo competition - every week PhotoFriday posts a theme and anyone can enter the competition for free simply by sending in the permanent URL of their photographic entry - a good lead-up to competing in competitions run by sites like Worth1000.

A fitting image for Australia Day - crowds on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. 26-Jan-2005

While the image is from walking around town today, this post has nothing to do with Australia Day - aren't you relieved? :-) A friend reminded me this evening about a new type of carillon which has been set up in Melbourne - a field of bells where the music consists of MIDI files which control the bells. There are samples of each bell to download so that you can write new music for the instrument using a sequencer. Sounds a lot of fun - will have to give this one a go!

This trip really seems doomed. Yup, it's had to be scuttled, but the good news is, only for a couple of weeks - the dentist says he can have me fixed up and pain- and worry-free, ready to see the world by early February so I've tentatively reserved a seat on a plane to London on the 7th of Feb. Now we just have to hope the dental work goes smoothly & no more problems are found - cross everything!

Oh boy. Just what I needed - my dentist tells me I need a root canal done when I get back. He's capped off the nerve and put in a filling for the trip, but it's still twingeing when he said it should be fine by today... Crossing everything and sending notes to the Man Upstairs that the whole trip won't have to be scuttled for the fourth time...

"Itinerary". 22-Jan-2005

Heading into the final days of preparation now, but it finally all seems to be coming together. I've just set up my web journal on blogger.com so I can maintain it remotely if I like (previously it's just been manually updated HTML pages which then need to be manually archived, so it wasn't really a simple matter to update from afar), and have been playing round with my new camera - hence the attempt to post an image. Crossing fingers it works.

The camera seems to be doing something strange though - the button to skip backwards through photos already taken seems to be taking on some of the functions of the button above it. I'm hoping this is just because I'm maybe not pressing it the right way or something - really don't want to have to take it back to the shop!

Happy New Year! I know I'm having a very happy new year so far - I'm off to Europe next week! This will be my first trip travelling alone and my first to continental Europe barring 1 week in Paris 7 years ago. I'll be visiting London, Malmö (in Sweden, very briefly), Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges and Brussels, then coming home by way of Kuala Lumpur where I'll be visiting an old friend for a few days. I can't wait.

I finished booking tickets today and bought myself a digital camera, which has put a bit of a hole in the spending money, but will make the trip a lot more pleasant than lugging about my marvellous but extremely weighty Canon SLR. Hoping I get a chance to make use of "snow mode" :-)

My itinerary really worked out extremely well - I've planned it around free concerts! So next Sunday will be choral evensong at St-Martin-in-the-Fields, Monday a clarinet concert, also at St Martin's. There's a free concert on at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam while I'm there, and a carillon recital the day I'm planning to be in Bruges. My mother gave me a tiny Sony microphone for Christmas to go with my MiniDisc walkman so I can record the sounds of Belgium and church bells and so on. Should be a really interesting way to experience a foreign country and I'm really looking forward to it.

But enough of a rant. I should go & peruse my list of things to do and then start to do some of them!