Well, it’s the end of 2008 – all in all, a pretty good year for team ian and jenni.
Thanks to everyone who helped us out across the year – the biggest adventure of our lives so far 🙂
As I raise a glass (of chilled sangria) to you all, can I just say – slainte mathe!
My legs!
I am going around like an eighty year old woman at the moment.
We were taken 4×4 off roading, which was fun and enjoyable, we went along the beach at Preston Beach, and then around a reservoir further inland. Up rocky roads that the 207 would get swallowed up in. We also rescued another 4×4 that was up to its wheel arches in mud, it was surprisingly easy to do.
See that white 4×4 in the picture (if you click on the picture it will show you it bigger), thats not us, but thats what we were doing.
It is fun, but its damn difficult on the spine. My back is killing me now!
We also did some kayaking on the reservoir.
The kayaks are pretty stable in the water, and it was also fun. Me and my clumsiness however meant that when I was trying to get out, I fell over, skinning my knees on the gravelly ground, and bruising my leg on the edge of the kayak.
The reservoir was also pretty bad with flies
This is apparently “no flies”. There are “no flies” this year. Given that we spent the entire time doing the aussie wave to keep the flies out of our faces I have to say I am mighty glad there are “no flies” this year. I did get mozzie bites on the leg that wasn’t kayaked. This time though, they are looking worse than before, with the red itchy bit spreading and being damn itchy. The flies seemed to like it too. Blearg.
There were also (I think) march flies. When mosquitoes bite, you don’t feel it till usually the next day, certainly it takes a while to appear. A march fly bite you feel. It hurts. And I got a march fly bite on the back of the bruised leg. It stung like buggery. It took a few hours to surface and now half of the back of my right calf is red and sore to the touch.
On the same leg, one of the dogs, Minnie (who looks very like Misty), launched herself at me to try and bite one of the march flies, leaving me with another bruise!
So, in the space of two hours, I ended up with a sore back, mozzie bites, a march fly bite, two separate lots of bruises and a skint knee.
*sigh*
This was a couple of days ago now, so I am starting to heal. In time for the new year 🙂
With New Year on its way, and visitors starting to arrive in less than six weeks, we reckoned it was time to stock up.
The national pasttime here in Oz is drinking. Its taken so seriously that when other shops are forced by legislation to close (usually) at 5pm, and corner shops at 8pm, the offies are allowed to open anything up till 9pm, and given that they open at 8:30am, thats some going. I nipped out at 8:30ish yesterday morning to get some croissants for breakfast from the local bakery and the Bottle-O bottle shop thats beside it was hoaching. At 8:30 in the morning.
Most of the shops sell chilled crates of beer or pre-mixed drinks like breezers, some have large walk-in fridges for this.
They have drive in bottle shops as well. We had heard about this before we came over, but couldnt quite get our heads round this idea. They are popular. I will get a piccie and put it up here so you can see.
Anyway, we wanted to stock up our booze. So, we went to one of the many giant liquor shops (They often have great names like Thirsty Camel or, my favourite, Liquor Barons), these places are huge warehouses filled to bursting with beer, wine and spirits.
booze
Heh. We still had whisky, port, wine, beer, cider and peach schnapps in the house, this is just the new stuff.
But, thanks to Dan Murphys, we now have more 😀
Any requests from our visitors as to what they fancy while they are here?
I should point out that the WKD is already gone. It didnt last through dinner….
See that picture I posted yesterday, of me standing in less than three feet of water, about 5-6 metres from the shore? That’s quite a thing for me, being a bit of a woos when it comes to sharks – that’s the second time in Australia that I have actually set foot in the ocean.
This fear of nature is something that causes great hilarity for the aussies – and I have taken an almighty ribbing about it. I purposely don’t say that I have a phobia about sharks (that’s selacophobia, btw) because, as far as I am concerned, there’s nothing irrational in the slightest about having a fear of what is essentially a self propelled mouth filled with razor sharp teeth. I think that’s a quite healthy fear to have actually.
on this morning’s news, this took on a more serious note, when some poor bugger was ‘taken’ by what is believed to be a 4 metre long pointer shark off the beach at port kennedy. that’s here:
We were staying down at Preston Beach, 40km down the coast (and will be again for hogmanay), Perth is about 80km to the north. The beach is closed, and they are out hunting for his body.
The guy was snorkelling for crabs with his 24 year old son when there was a ‘violent disturbance in the water’ and lots of blood.
I think that, on the whole, I am going to maintain my healthy fear of the coastline, and not adopt the more relaxed attitude that the aussies have. Statistically, you may well be more likely to be hit by lightning than eaten by a shark, but I’m not about to start playing golf in thunderstorms either…
Coz it can’t be christmas, can it?
For days now, we have been doing double takes when driving past houses – christmas trees look sooooo weird in the middle of summer!!
My boss Rudy and his wife very kindly invited us down to their beach house in Preston Beach (we have been down a few times) and we have had a relaxed fun couple of days so far. It’s been pretty awesome.
First night down, we had a giant tapas style feast – we brought a frittata, some devilled sausage and some patatas bravas – but the star of the show was Mel’s paella. To say this was a big paella pan was a bit of an understatement…
After spending christmas morning at the beach house with Rudy’s parents, we headed off to Mel’s folks – an absolutley gorgeous place by the murray river (well, ‘a’ murray river, rather than ‘the’ murray river – that’s over east where they are having the big drought). incredible. They have their own jetty and a couple of boats.
Mel’s folks (also called Ian and Jenny!!) made us very welcome for dinner, and Ian took us all upstream on the river
The guys had upgraded their net connection to make sure we had the bandwidth to do skype video, so we spoke to Jens family (asides from Robert who refused to get out of bed). Diana did a nice little rendition of We Wish You a Merry Christmas on the xylophone, and Adam ran around like a maddy.
We have recorded a wee christmas video message, but youtube is being a bit odd, so it may be a day or so before that appears.
Today, we went down to the beach, where the aussies insisted that it was too windy (!) seriously, the best beach we have seen outside of the carribean, and it’s too cold… check this out:
My Birthday was nearly two weeks ago, so I didn’t really expect to be finding anything in the post waiting for me.. but tonight, there was a fairly bulky parcel in the postbox.
I expected it to be for the landlord (he gets a lot of mail, which stacks up until we get bored and drop it off at the letting agent’s office), but no, it was addressed to me (and I have to admit to being a little excited)
Rush into the house like a kid, and attack the package with scissors to find out it’s a parcel in birthday wrapping paper – all the way from Falkirk 😀
Alan and Penny, you guys rock – thanks for the card, and also for the T-shirt:
For anyone who hasn’t come across the atheist bus campaign, it’s a humorous antidote to those tedious alpha and ‘real meaning of christmas’ adverts that pop up all over the place at this time of the year – and an indication of just how many people really would just rather get on with their lives in peace, thanks all the same!!
I think in all honesty, that I won’t be wearing this one at the office, but I will be wearing it at the next Perth Atheist/Humanist meetup – I’m sure it will go down a storm!!
We had a FANTASTIC day on Saturday.
Absolutely brilliant.
I woke up and went through to our gym (OK, the extra bedroom we dont know what to do with, so we put the exercise bike in it and got a weights bench, so its now a gym 🙂 ). Did a good upper body workout – I am increasing my bench press again to a far less embarrassing weight 🙂 – and then 20 minute interval training on the exercise bike. ROAR!
After a nice long shower, we decided to go into Perth to get some breakfast. I fancied taking Ian to Pranz – a cafe in west perth just up the road from my work. They do amazing paninis. I have only had the veggie ones, because they are fab, but the rest also look good. Cept west perth appears to be shut at the weekend. So, we took a drive to east perth to see what it had to offer. And apparently, east perth has only marginally more than west perth at the weekend! Ah well, we skipped breakfast and went straight for lunch. So, we went for sushi! There are two great sushi bars with conveyor belts here, and from a conveyor belt is the very best way to eat sushi.
Once sushi-sated, we took a wander along Hay St and stopped off for ice-cream. Yay! It was oh so very tasty. Hay St was full of people, vibrant, sunny, shops were open, buskers were performing. Goths were gathering on steps in front of buildings. It was all good.
The sky was beautiful and clear, it was around 30C. And I got the aforementioned sunburn. We had the roof down on the car, it was just great.
Later on that night, after dinner, we went back out for a run in the car – we are considering East Perth to stay in once the lease is up on this place and wanted to see it at night. So, once again through East Perth, it was so warm we put the roof down again 🙂 Happy to report that East Perth is quiet at night, while being in walking distance of a couple of pubs and restaurants.
We have come to an understanding as to why things feel a bit weird here.
Basically, we arrived in Autumn, the leaves were falling from the trees, well, from the trees that lose their leaves in the Autumn. We mentioned way back, a lot of the trees here dont lose their leaves, they lose their bark.
During winter, there continued to be a steady stream of trees losing their leaves.
And through spring. When the trees that had held on to their leaves grew new ones and ditched the old ones.
And now its summer, there are still leaves on the ground.
I took these pictures this morning.
You can see the green all around in the background of the second, but the leaves are on the ground.
Add to this that the latest the sun goes down is 8:30. Tonight sundown was 8:17pm, and it gets dark pretty fast – no hour long twilights here. (and thats only this year, they are most likely to refuse Daylight Savings in a referendum next year and wont change the clocks, so it will be dark at 7:30pm at the height of summer)
So….. it gets dark fairly early, and there are leaves on the ground.
It feels like the longest autumn EVER! It feels like a seven month autumn with some really cold and wet days and some really dry and warm days.
Its all a bit strange!
It was a great weekend, we will post all about that later, but for today, by request … Sean, you are a bad man…..
My sunburn. I had on Factor 25. So, you can see where we had missed bits. Turned out we missed a LOT of bits.
Ouch. And this is it fading slightly…
And at the joondalup craggy island funfair, they had a band doing this…
All they needed was the leek.
(bet you follow the link now…)
This is Joondalups Sunset Market …
http://www.joondalup.wa.gov.au/cms/templates/coj2_business_grp.asp?id=498
Yeah.
I had wanted to go see the Sunset Markets since we arrived in Joondalup and I googled what this place has to offer.
I bugged Ian for the last few weeks about this. Between one thing and another we hadn’t made it down to look at it. So… tonight … as we are watching Back! To The Future! and I am skimming through the Joondalup Times I spotted a Sunset Markets photie from last week. So, with all haste we paused the movie, and went to sample Joondalups Kulcha.
Yeah.
So, it was kinda like 8 stalls at the Barras. Of which 4 were selling donuts and hot dogs. And one selling what they called “scottish tablet (fudge)” so, we got two slabs. And its definitely tablet 😀 So, thats the high point of Joondalups cultural events for the year. Condensed milk and sugar. Not complaining about the tablet. Just the marketing of the tablet ….
I am quite careful not to say too much about my work on the blog (even though I know that a few of the readers are co-workers). It’s just professional not to say anything in such a public forum that might cause people to look at the company as if I spoke for them (on anything more than techy things) or, conversely, that I was somehow responsible for them.
But then, sometimes things are so cool you have to say *something* So, without giving too much away…
I have been in Melbourne, working on a huge government tender – how huge? well, the solution has over 340 Tb of storage space, over a hundred servers, and costs more than any of us are likely to see in a lifetime (barring a big lottery win). absolutley exilirating, to even be involved in this is cool, but to be playing a key role… it’s incredible… and off the back of that one, I’m now involved as the solution owner on another big tender. I am one happy, happy bunny right now.
So much so, that I didn’t even mind that much spending my birthday in Melbourne whilst jen was stuck back in Perth. We tried not to think about it.. but here’s the thing. Australia is so big that Jen and I were further apart than we have ever been before in our entire lives, even before we met.
I took this from the top of the Rialto tower:
The rialto is one of the ‘great towers of the world’ – and was the tallest in the southern hemisphere until recently. Being in Melbourne was pretty cool – it reminded me of being in a vibrant city again. I have considered myself glaswegian ever since I went to University (hell, you gotta do something to lose the stigma of lanarkshire, right Scott? 😉 ) but even more so now. Glasgow is one of the great cities of the world, and I don’t think I’ll ever look at it in the same jaded way again…
What this did do though was through Perth into sharp contrast – so I have a new video too:
that’s all for now, I need to sleep – I have work in the morning, and I can’t wait.
