We poked holes in the top of the @longpaddockcheese Driftwood, splashed on some white wine, stuck in bits of slivered garlic, and baked until it was warm and gooey. Now dunking crusty bread and day-drinking like damn hell ass kings. 🧀 🥖 🍷

Mr. Snook was also busy today… making his best ever slow roast pork belly. 🤤❤️ #crackling

Doing patchwork for the first time in YEARS. I blame @georgisews and @randomknits for inspiring me. (And of course @rdrkt and @jamie.sydneyau for having a baby!) ❤️🧵🪡

I finished my modified Helga blouse! It’s a little more cropped than I’d normally do, but I pretty much used every bit of the wool. (Definitely earned that yarn chicken merit badge!) Just needs a wash and a block… ❤️🧶🐓 @hobbii_yarn

“Interesting crowd here. I didn’t really know cheese appealed to the Gen Z.” 🧀🍷

Only in Sydney would you pay $40 to attend a CHEESE festival, and then spend more money to buy the cheese you’ve just tasted. 😂 On the upside, having it be ticketed meant there weren’t ridiculous queues for everything. We tasted many different cheeses along with butter, olives, pates, salamis, a couple different wines, whiskeys, a “whey liqueur” 😵‍💫, and gelato. And yeah, a bunch of it came home with us.

Guess who just won pub trivia?! 🏆 (And yes, I did get the Kylie question correct. #padam 💃)

Decisions decisions… 🤔

Yesterday was the 5-year anniversary of when I started at AWS, so today I picked up my Orange badge. I never really expected to hit this milestone, so thank you to all the colleagues, mentors, and friends who’ve helped me along the way. ❤️

We’re home! Fairly empty flight from Tokyo today. Back to winter… 🥶

Updated to add: I’m very happy to report that I had no difficulty getting back into Australia with my recovered passport! 😅

A short but memorable day in Kyoto, the cultural capital of Japan! We visited the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine and walked through some of the hundreds of beautiful gates. Then we headed to the Imperial Palace to see where the emperor used to live. Lastly we trekked out to the Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, where we hiked through a forest of towering bamboo to a river gorge overlook. Beautiful way to end this trip. Time to go home! ⛩️🦊🎋