I’ve lived around here for 20 plus years and have never been to the Avalon Bowling Club, until today. Walking in was like stepping back in time, probably circa 1970′s, country town style time. Nothing wrong with that, in fact, we sat by the window drinking beer and we talked and enjoyed watching a game. It felt like we were back on the road with our motorbikes. Like we’d just stepped out of our gear after a long day riding. We were in a new country town. The day was ending and we were talking and thinking about steak and chips and beer and some friendly animated conversations with the locals. Strange, but kinda nice!

I’ve lived around here for 20 plus years and have never been to the Avalon Bowling Club, until today. Walking in was like stepping back in time, probably circa 1970′s, country town style time. Nothing wrong with that, in fact, we sat by the window drinking beer and we talked and enjoyed watching a game. It felt like we were back on the road with our motorbikes. Like we’d just stepped out of our gear after a long day riding. We were in a new country town. The day was ending and we were talking and thinking about steak and chips and beer and some friendly animated conversations with the locals. Strange, but kinda nice!

The new photo enlargement effects you see around on the Net on photoblogs began interesting me a while back so recently I set out to find out how I could incorporate something like it on my blog. A friend spurred me on as he also wanted to do something similar. What he found was a script developed called FancyZoom by Cabel’s Blog that was converted into a WordPress Plugin by WP Elements. It worked well and so I implemented it yesterday on my Palm Grove Park post.

Once you start on a journey you never know what you’ll find. Today I also found Lightbox2 — another piece of java script that enlarges images on the current page. It was a snap to setup and worked well, first time. Then, I found a Lightbox2 plugin for WordPress and that was even sweeter.

I decided to install the FancyZoom plugin and have adjusted a few of my old posts to take advantage. It’s a slick piece of code and (in my opinion anyway) simply rocks! I liked Lightbox2 but it was causing me issues in IE7 with this theme. Lucky we have so many choices with WordPress. I know these things have been around forever and they are probably old-tech to some but I just found ‘em and I’m having fun.

We go to the Art Gallery of NSW three or four times a year but always in April to see the Archibald’s. These shots were taken April 2006 while we sat on the deck enjoying a wondrous day and drinking a traditional (for us) glass of Champagne.