The dog's favorite food is, officially: cheese.

Geek alert. I made an interesting discovery recently. The building next door to my work is the State Library of Victoria. And, they have an entire room dedicated to chess. So, a couple of times over the past few week, I've started grabbing a quick lunch and running over to get in a quick game against random strangers. How geeky is that? Geeky enough to not even mention it to my coworkers yet.

Very sad about Hunter S. Thompson. I wonder if he was sick. He doesn't seem the sort to go quietly, know what I mean?

For future visitors, I highly recommend the grape grazing festival, or even just a tour of the wineries if your not here in February. The Yarra Valley wineries we saw were lovely, and the people we went with were a very fun lot. And Sunday wasn't too painful considering we spent all day Saturday drinking. Best of all, we found three different people willing to dog-sit Laika in the future when we want to venture forth without her. Excellent.

Laika nearly dug her way out of the backyard yesterday while we were at the wine festival, as we were gone for thirteen hours. So today we took her with us when we went to breakfast at an outdoor cafe.

A bird pooped on her head.

Afterwards, we took her to the dog park.

A bird pooped on her head.

What are the odds?

Maybe we'll rename her after Steve Martin's dog in The Jerk.

Fruits of the vine. Yesterday we boarded a bus with a dozen or so of my cow orkers and headed out to the yearly Grape Grazing festival. We hit the first winery by 10:30 am. By the fourth winery, there was a lot less swishing and swirling; the Grape Grazing festival had become more of a Wine Swilling festival. Twice we ended up behind another bus full of women exhibitionists.

The festival was hosted by Honda, who recommend a nice Cabernet Sauvignon before getting behind the wheel.

We had a fantastic time.