The Big Rich Blog

Catching up

2007-11-04T02:15:00.000-08:00

I've let the blog slip a bit over the last six months and as you can see I've only just loaded the pictures from two events that happened in April. I was half thinking that I could use the blog for Movember updates for anyone that has sponsored me. But in order to do that here's a few odd photo's I've got lying about. They'll include photo's from this weekends trip to watch Sydney FC play the Jets. I've been up in Newcastle which is about two hours north of Sydney for my first away game of the season. There's also photo's of last weekends 25km walk around Sydney Harbour (The Seven Bridges Walk.) There's also Surry Hills Festival, BBQ and Poker over in Surry Hills and of course various photo's from my sun room of the Harbour Bridge!!

Below isn't a great pic but I feel it's important to document the fact that I cleaned up at the poker. Hard to tell if Brando is in awe of my pile of chips or fancy shuffling technique.

Here's the start of the seven bridges walk and lets face it there's no better Bridge to start. If you've seen this blog before you'll be fairly bored with pictures of this bridge. However I believe this is the first photo taken from West of the bridge... there you go then!

Now this one's taken walking across the Harbour Bridge looking over to my house. I'm restraining myself from pointing it out for the umpteenth time.

Kind of ruins the view a tiny bit but due to the amount of suicide attempts they need to put these high fences up on the walk way of the harbour bridge.

First glimpse of Bridge number 3 - The Anzac Bridge

3rd of November - Trip up the Coast to Newcastle

A weekend in Newcastle hey. Fishy on a dishy it was most certainly not though. There was no Tyne, there was no fog on it... and if there was it wasn't all mine. There were some similarities though, for example, the women wore very little, the guys loved fighting and everyone loved getting trolleyed. It's the first place I've been to that has banned the drinking of shots. The best we managed the entire weekend was a Sambuca on the Rocks

Steve and I have a quick game of pool before the drinking starts... ironically we both admitted that we play a lot better after a few drinks.

So here's Energy Australia Stadium. The home of the Newcastle Jets and also the home of Andrew 'Joey' Johns. Potentially the greatest rugby league player of our time and as more recently reported.... a bit of a pillhead! Anyway people take the mickey out of Oxfords three sided ground but to be honest that's two more than Newcastle. Either end of the pitch has a grassy hill which I'd attribute as one of the reasons there isn't as much violence at Aussie sporting games.. I mean it's quite tricky to get all wound up about the game when your sat on a picnic blanket in the sunshine with a glass of white in one hand and a meat pie in the other!

After the game we went out on the town, the place is a little on the rough and ready side and you're not missing much if I don't show you the photo's. Here's a couple from the following days walk along the sea front to try and shake off the hangovers. It's all pretty close to the towns most famous story of late. Unfortunately the Pasha Bulka isn't there anymore. I reckon it would have made a good casino.

Here's how the Pasha looked whilst it was grounded off the Newcastle:

As promised some random pictures taken from my sunroom.... couldn't resist it!

My 30th - A Pirate cruise around Sydney Harbour

2007-09-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

Adelaide Rugby 7's

2007-05-27T05:11:00.000-07:00

Got some catching up to do on the old blog. This all happened back in April and to be honest it's all a bit of a blur. These photos were taken over two days and are a little mixed up but each day followed a pretty similar timetable. Get up, crack open a beer, fry up, head off to the rugby, drink...

Don't the all look smart in there freshly ironed Scotland tops....predictably it's all down hill from here though.

Here we are on top of the hill at the stadium. Already oblivious to the fact the rugby has already started.

First casualty of the day.

Scott met Jesus in the toilets.

Margot Protects Greg and Scott's beer snake

Greg and Scott annoy one of the Scottish players.

Whilst most of the group had been tucking into the bottles of whiskey they'd hidden in pringle tubes to get in Les and I had stuck to beer. As Les points out below. The group had been play fighting on the hill for about an hour so Les and I decided to go over and join the Kenyan fans who were by far the most vocal and seemed to be having the most fun.

Les seemed happy enough...

meanwhile I do my bit for international relations....

Tonga..

Fiji..

Saudi Arabia..

Wonderland...

Anyway we're well into the evening now and the rugby is over so we've moved to a bar in the city. You still with us David?

David??

Taxi for David!

Now it's just after the below was taken that we were asked to leave the pub. It seemed that they were happy enough for Greg to ride the bull but when Greg actually tried to mate with the bull we were shown the door.

Then there was the Casino followed by Karaoke. Harmonious it was not.

and finally after all of the others had gone back home to sleep I showed real staying power and headed off to a nightclub.

Storm

2007-04-27T19:29:00.000-07:00

2007-04-19T01:21:00.000-07:00

This one probably needs a bit of narrative. It was a Saturday morning and I woke up with the normal fuzzy head. I needed some fresh air so dragged myself from bed and headed to the sun room to pull the blinds up and open a window. This was a few weeks back now as I write this so it's hard to remember the exact detail but I think I was aware from the noise outside that something was going on.

As I pulled up the blinds my eyes met the eyes of eight blokes in boat on the harbour not 10 metres away starring back at me. I couldn't be sure they were looking exactly at me as they were all wearing dark sunglasses but they were definitely looking in my general direction. I'll admit it was a bit of a shock. There I was in my underwear, unshaven, yawning and stretching being starred at by eight guys in sunglasses, crash helmets, military jumpsuits all tooled up with a fairly decent amount of weaponry on board!

I slowly started to take in more of my surroundings and realised these guys were not alone. Another rib was full of police divers a few metres away and a further four larger police boats were all within 50 metres of my window. There was also a row of buoys stretching from the piece of land under the north side of the harbour bridge all the way past my window and round the corner. Whenever a public boat would stray to close to the buoys one of the police boats would scream into action and tell them in no uncertain terms that they shouldn't be there.

Unfortunately it's by no means uncommon to have fatalities on the harbour. I was on a booze cruise myself with two hundred work colleagues a few years ago that ended with the death of a guy who fell out of the boat as we came into dock. Therefore it was this dark scenario that formed my immediate conclusion. I went straight to the lounge to turn on the TV and check the news. The news hadn't got hold of the story yet as none of the channels showed anything about a body missing in the harbour.

I decided to walk down by the water and ask a couple of the police officers I could see standing on the wharf what was going on. I thought nothing of it at the time but in hindsight I should have noticed something odd about the two blokes I passed on the way down to the wharf.
Stood 30 metres apart, both wearing chino's, short sleeved shirts one with slicked back hair and the other sported a wet look perm kind of affair. They weren't from round here that was for sure but obviously that's not unusual on the foreshore of Sydney Harbour opposite the Opera House.

By the time I got to the wharf I could see it was about 10 coppers stood there not just a couple and they all looked rather more intimidating now so I decided better of it and headed up the hill to get my bacon and eggs. there was however an obstacle in my way. He was about 6 foot 4 and built like a boxer. Black suit, white shirt, black shades, crew cut... 'morning mate' I said in my least intimidated voice. 'Hi' he replied with a smirk. I asked him what was going on for which the reply I received was.....'nothing.' To be honest the penny had probably dropped before this moment. 'Hang on' I said 'This hasn't got anything to do with The U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney visiting John Howard has it?' In the broadest American Accent you can imagine 'Well Son, I don't really know about that' replied the FBI agent.

I'll pick the pace up here cause I'm conscious I've taken a long time to say not a lot! I headed up the hill to the Deli spotting policemen with binoculars in trees. 30 of them hidden in a residential underground carpark. Police bikes had diverted roads. There was even an FBI agent in the deli. Not sure if he was after a sandwich or looking out for Al Qaeda but made for eventful trip to get the breaky ingredients. By the time I returned home I was like a school kid. Guns, Speedboats, FBI undercover agents, roadblocks and Bacon & Eggs. How good was this.

I ended up walking back to the shops but thought I'd go to the Kirribilli Avenue way as that's the road that links mine with the Prime ministers house to see what was going on. Police were stood at five metre intervals all the way up the road. When I got to the end I told one of the coppers I was just popping to the shop to get something and would I have any problems getting back down the road considering the police presence? He told me I wouldn't be able to get down this road for at least an hour and I shouldn't be on it now. At that moment this hugely over the top motorcade headed towards us. Police motorbikes, Saloons with blacked out windows, police cars, Limousines, Armoured Cars, Ambulances went on for ages. I used this time to get to the best spot I could to take the below photos of Johnny and Dick and there mates getting onto the boat for a bit of a jolly round the harbour. The white building in the top middle of the picture is where I live you can see my sun room window on the first floor.

Queen Mary II and the QEII pop by

2007-04-16T16:51:00.000-07:00

Good Vibrations 2007

2007-04-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

Late Summer Sun Set

2007-04-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

2007-04-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

England V Aussies 1 Day Series Final

2007-04-16T15:34:00.000-07:00

Australia Day 26th of January 2007

2007-02-02T17:23:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures from our first Australia Day living in Kirribilli. All the pictures were taken from my sun room. We obviously had a great view of all the activities out on the harbour. Even when I pulled the blind back at 9am I was greeted with the sight of two hundred people paddling across the harbour on surfboards!

Above are the surfers dodging sharks as they cross the harbour

A couple of stragglers in the tall ships race.Here he's been caught red handed but even at the time I knew it wasn't actually the dolphin waving at me
His and hers matching flags

This boat's owned by Kerry Packer I'm told

Above are the cast and crew of Priscilla Queen of the desert!
Here's Kirby and Carol catching up. Carol had popped over to Australia for a couple of weeks holiday. I see her more often than my family!

Twenty Twenty at the SCG - 9th of Jan 2007

2007-02-01T16:58:00.004-08:00

Poms v Aussies. One of my favorite sporting venues in the world. I nice summers evening. Surely all the ingrediants for a great evenings entertainment. Well not for me! Anyone who may have seen me there will know that I couldn't have taken these photo's.... Because of the Sydney Cricket Grounds strict policy on pommy tourists they only sold wine and low alcohol beer at the ground. I was wise to this though as I had been to the third day of the test a few weeks back. I therefore decided to get my six hours of alcohol in during the hour and a half we spent in the pub prior to the game. At the game I decided to forget about that low alcohol beer stuff and go straight for the white wine. No one really knows what happened after that. Half time was the last time I was spotted. I missed work through hangover the following day was coered in cuts and bruses. No idea why I'm documenting such a sorry episode on here but there we go!

Freddie!

Lucy, Neil, and Jimbo
Jimbo and Steve
Steve and the Police!

NYE 07 here's some more

2007-02-01T03:28:00.000-08:00

More pics from NYE. There arn't mine though. Taken from our place by Damo Staley

New Years Eve 2006

2007-01-27T06:50:00.000-08:00

For no other reason than....

2007-01-23T21:00:00.000-08:00

So here is my second post. Starting by stating the blindingly obvious isn't great but as I said before, I'm not much of a writer. The reason for this update is even less purposeful than my last. I't just that seeing My First Post at the top of the screen was starting to annoy me so I thought I'd knock it down the order a bit by wacking this one up there. Nothing of Any note to add.... oh apart from this story

Bocca

My 1st Update

2007-01-22T04:16:00.002-08:00

I shouldn't really be spoiling this page by writing on it. So far I'm quite impressed to be honest. I've got that Picture I took from Taronga Zoo in the top right. You can see a Mountain Goat in the foreground and The Harbour Bridge in the background next to the Opera House. Looks quite cool I reckon. Then you've got my links (which to be honest is the reason I've set this page up). They allows me to access all my favorite webistes from one page as well as having a feed from the BBC football website giving me the five newest stories. I also want to set the page up so it has hyperlinks to all my favorite pictures.

So I'll set it as my home page and have easy access to everything I need. Genius. In that case as I'm the only one using the blog I'm now writing to myself. Well I suppose others may see it if I use this as a link to photo's but the main purpose of the writing is just to fill the big gap on the page where the blog should be. You never know I could get into and start giving myself regular updates. Never really been one for making stories sound good in writing though so we'll see.