Dreamy Times

Ok, ok, so I have been remarkably amiss in posting a blog entry… can I claim extreme busyness? Anyway, you can all stop nagging me now!!!

Its getting closer and closer now on the house front. Less than two weeks to go til we get our clammy little hands on the keys. Naturally, that’ll just be the start of the fun, as we’re wanting to decorate throughout, new kitchen, extra sockets, stuff like that before we move in. Our rent is paid on the rental til the beginning of October, and I don’t want to have to pay anymore if I can help it.. and we’ll need to give them time to find new tenants, so that gives us a tentative time frame of the beginning-ish of September for moving… which isn’t too bad, and will mean we’re well settled before Christmas. I am extremely excited

It will be so good to be able to put pictures up where we want them, rather than where there’s already picture hooks. For Himself to put up his surround system. To have the walls a practical colour. Not to panic every time a child (or dog) brushes against a wall. This has been my first experience of proper renting, and I haven’t enjoyed the stress, or the worry of being off the housing ladder. Oh well, its not for much longer

Other events.. I’ve been for a job interview! Its at Himself’s work place, but there’s some issues about us working in close proximity to each other, so hey ho, we’ll just have to wait and see. It’ll just be part time, then full time covering for maternity leave.. then part time when she comes back. And it’ll just be for the life of the project, so til next Feb/March at the absolute latest.. but it’ll get me some Aussie work experience, and the extra money now we’re almost morgage bound again will be good.

Middlechild, the one with hair down to his knees, has had a traumatic time. He went to a mate’s house for a party/sleepover.. got drunk :shock:, passed out :lightweight: and had half his hair cut and half of one eyebrow shaved off. This meant I was forced to cut all of it.. so its now more ‘Take That’ than ‘Black Sabbath’. He looks so much better with it short, almost human in fact, but he’s resistant to having the experience repeated. He’s got a girlfriend now though, so who knows, he may find she has some opinions on what looks best on him.

We went to see the latest Batman film last weekend, and it was really good. I’m not sure about Christian Bale as Batman.. he doesn’t quite gel in the role for me.. but Heath Ledger was absolutely excellent as the Joker. I wondered if he’d live up to the Jack Nicholson version and he definitely does - he plays it much more darker and manically, rather than just Lunatically Off His Head, which Nicholson excels at.. and it was extremely watchable and enjoyable. It was on for hours, but the time flew past. Me and Himself want to go see Mamma Mia too.. doubt I’ll be able to drag the kids along to that :-D.. but others we want to see are the Bank Jobby one with Jason Statham and the new Mummy film. I also fancy Wanted.. so it looks like we’ll be spending an arm and a leg at the pictures soon!

Now, I’ve managed to work out how to link individual pictures from my flickr site (yes, yes, I finally succumbed and read the instructions rather than going off blind intuition) - so here are some of my faves

Our New House

Right, I need to go eat.. so hopefully this mammoth post will stop me getting my ear nagged off

…so.. we decided that we’d sort of have a look at what’s up for sale in the area. Not a proper look, because the lease on the rental runs through to the middle of next January, but just a casual look, to see how much the property prices have fallen.

Yes.. because the interest rates of hiked up quite excessively since we arrived here, property has stopped flying off the market as soon as its put up for sale, and its definitely a buyers market - which is good news for us in two respects - the high interest rates has been great for our savings, and as stated above, it puts us in a much stronger position when we come to buy.

Ideally, we wanted to buy something on Bribie - but its still expensive on there, and plot sizes are relatively small. Unless you’ve got a million+ dollars to spend. We’ve been doing searches on the main real estate site since we first had the idea about coming to Australia, so we widened our search area a little. About 5 minutes inland from Bribie you get an awful lot more for your money, bigger houses, bigger plots, bigger everything. Both me and Himself found a highset building (ie two storey.. most houses here are bungalows..er, I mean lowrise dwellings) and were intrigued enough to go and try and find it. Unfortunately, the address wasn’t listed apart from its general location, but that didn’t stop us traipsing out. In the dark. With just a memory of a photograph to help us find it.

Obviously, we had no chance, but I did almost run over a kangaroo that was standing in the middle of the road. It gave me a filthy look and hopped (slowly) out of the way. So I’m definitely roo’d up now. Even though the search was unproductive, it did show us a huge amount that we wouldn’t ordinarily have seen. Its amazing how many neighbourhoods there are tucked away down little roads that can’t be seen from the main road. We decided we’d be happy to live in any of these areas, and contacted the agent for the house to get an idea of its location.

No reply from the agent, so Himself rang the next day, and rang me to tell me where it was. I drove straight out and had a look - it was great. Queenslander style (but with living accommodation downstairs too), 4 bedrooms, pool, 3/4 acre of land.. fabby. We made an appointment to go and view, and just fell in love with it. We rang the bank to find out how much money they would lend us (a scary amount, actually, fortuanetly we don’t need loads and we can get a loan based on just Himself’s salary, so I don’t have to faff about with my pension)… and decided to make a formal offer.

Now, its not like England when you make an offer. Your offer is legally binding and you have to include any ’subject to’ conditions in it. So, as we’re still temporary residents, we have to make it subject to FIRB (government body for foreign investment) approval, as well as subject to finance, pest/building inspections, etc. The agent draws up the offer contract, we sign it, and only then is the vendor given the details. They can either accept, reject, or counter offer. Our vendor is a little old lady of 90, who unfortunately is in hospital at the moment. This meant it took a while for our offer to be given, and then for the negotiation phase.. but.. its all been agreed, and we’re now on track to complete in about 45 days!

We’re a tad excited to say the least. So much for waiting til later in the year.. but I think when you see a house which you know is just perfect, you feel it in every part of you, and there’s not a lot of point in hanging around and waiting. Yes, we still have the rental lease, but that gives us time to decorate the house and put a new kitchen in, etc, and then give notice to quit here. The rental market is incredibly bouyant, so I can’t see it being a problem to get a new tenant in.

Now, for some reason my flickr doesn’t want to upload piccies, so will try something else..

 Hmm.. no, still doesn’t want to work.. you’ll all have to go look at my flickr site to see piccies of the house (I’d like to point out I stole all the pictures from the agents sites. I’ll take some of my own when I get chance)

Its my birthday in a couple of months, and unfortunately, this year will be one of the ’special’ ones. Now, I was all for just curling up in a ball with a couple of bottles of wine and perhaps a bag of crisps and a good book, but Himself has other plans.

Our friends, who live in NSW, have encouraged him to book a romantic weekend away for the pair of us in Sydney. Now, we had been planning on having a weekend away there sometime, but I’m not remotely thinking that he’s just killing two birds with one stone :-D  As its a secret surprise, I wasn’t involved in the process at all - well.. I had to say whether a particular hotel was appropriate for a 40th (one with a spectacular view of the harbour, as it turns out), and what time flight we wanted down there, and what time we were coming home.. but other than that the whole thing will be a complete surprise for me

Our friends will hopefully be able to meet up with us on the Saturday night, and get me steamingly drunk.. if not, I’m pretty sure Himself will be up to the job.

Its a weird thing, this getting older malarky. Youngest was telling one of Middlechild’s friends (the Kiwi) what was happening. His response ? .. ‘I thought you were the same age as my mum!’.. ‘and how old is she?’ .. ‘oh you know.. 48 or 49….’ .. he’ll get a suitable punishment when I’ve thought of one. I’m sure that its just because you assume as a kid that your friends mothers are the same age as yours, and nothing to do with his next response .. ‘I guess that having matt as a son is pretty much responsible for you looking so old’… little git!

Right.. a quick warning. MyFriendJames, who very kindly hosts my blog site, has had some security issues which affected his blog. As a result, mine may go offline temporarily while he does some fiddling.. but it will be back

I can finally report a successful outcome on the Great Roo Hunt.

Yes, it is true, I have now seen not just one kangaroo in the wild but bleeding dozens of them. Naturally, I was without my camera (ain’t that just the way) but I did have witnesses to the event, lol.

We went to see Indiana Jones yesterday - a jolly jape and thoroughly enjoyable. On the way back, it was about 4pm, so heading towards dusk (not that they really have a dusk here, the light tends to get switched on and off very abruptly) We had to drive past where Himself works, so he suggested it was a good time to go check out the aerodrome field, see if any of the kangaroos were out. And they were! There was probably about 30 of the critters, merrily munching away on the grass (there’s a thought, perhaps I could have a tame one and not need to mow the lawn?) It was lovely to see them, I just need to go about the same sort of time with my camera to make the experience complete. At least I can stop banging on about it now!

We had a pretty good weekend - the pictures as mentioned above, and we were also invited to our first barbeque. One of Himself’s colleagues is a Brit who came out here just after we did, and they live about 30 mins drive away, so we toddled off there on Sunday. Was really lovely, and I’ll be going out for a coffee with his wife sometime soon. They’re also in a rental at the moment, so we may be doing some scoping out of areas together lol. Where they are now, is the area we thought we’d be living - and its really nice round there. Not that I’d want to live anywhere far from where we are now though! But its good to know we had good instincts about the place all the way on the other side of the world.

We’ve also had a great deal of rain over the last week and a half. Not that I’m complaining too much, we did need it, and I don’t need to worry about getting the pool filled up now! In fact, the pool did reach critical overflow point, but there wasn’t any danger of the house flooding so it didn’t bother me too much. The pool man made his monthly visit last week, and he said they’d spent last weekend rushing out to various pools to drain them down to a safer level.. one customer was extremely pissed off, having just had their pool filled the weekend before.. ooops. We’ve left our pool level as it is, as he said we probably wouldn’t get much (if any) rain between now and November. He obviously didn’t expect the extra rain we had this weekend too!

But of course it rained this weekend, as its been a holiday weekend. For, of all things, the Queen’s birthday. Friends here can’t believe that we didn’t get that as a holiday in the UK, and I can’t believe they get it here, lol, especially with all the talk of the moment of becoming a Republic. I bet they hold onto that holiday if it ever happens! (even if they rename it…..)

I have been in a state of extreme trauma since Friday afternoon!

Although the roo hunt isn’t proceeding too well, and I am still kangaless, I have finally had my first encounter with a giant spider.

Middlechild is on the footy (sorry, refuse to call it soccer) team, and this Friday it was my turn to drive him and two of his team mates off upto Noosa (more about that in a moment) Its about a 90minute drive, so it was still daylight when we got in  the car to set off. I settled into the driving seat, and thought I’d better let Himself know we were off (he was still at work, having abandoned me to suffer the match alone). As I chatted away, I became away of the two teenagers in the back saying the word ’spider’… more specifically, the words ‘you’ve got a spider on your bag, Nick’…

Those who know and love me will be surprised by the speed and athleticism displayed by yours truly. I veritably leaped from the car (fortunately remembering to open the door first) and legged it to the end of the driveway. The other teenager declared.. ‘its okay, it won’t kill you, its only a huntsman!’  Now, Huntsman spiders certainly aren’t poisonous.. however they are ginormous - leg span is greater than the size of a hand. I am terrified of spiders. I gently explained to boys that although it may not be deadly, if they didn’t get it out of the car, and it went anywhere near me when I was driving, then we would probably all die.

The spider, scared by the shouting (and possibly by the general smell of three teenage boys) had crawled underneath my driver’s seat, and was on the front edge of it (where your legs go). I crept close enough to get a photo on my phone.. unfortunately not close enough for it to be any good, lol, so I am unable to share with you the terrible sight. The boys hatched a plan to flick the spider from the seat with a shin pad. Now these bleeding spiders, as well as being huge, are fast too. As soon as they got within flicking distance, it was off, back under the seat (MY SEAT!!!) and it wasn’t going to moved. It was a funny sight, really.. two Brits, two Kiwis, trying to deal with something that wasn’t a general occurence in either of their homelands. A broom was brought out, with the intention of wiggling it under the seat to encourage the spider out. Absolutely no sign of it. Eventually, with night falling, we had to resort to chemical warfare, and emptied half a can of spray under the seat.

I was hugely reassured by one of the boys saying ‘hmm.. spider that size will probably take a couple of hours to die’… really not what I wanted to hear when I had a 3 hour return journey ahead of me. I was close to tears by this point, so Middlechild went back into the house and brought out two towels - one to stuff under the seat at the front, and one for the back. Eventually, I felt safe enough to get in the car, but all the way there I could ‘feel’ it crawling up my legs.

We made it to Noosa only a few minutes late for the warm up session - Matt had rung his coach to let her know we would be late. I’d taken a book and had intended sitting in the car reading until the game began, but obviously that idea was now out of the window. In the excitement of SpiderGate, I’d also forgotten my handbag so had no money with me, and couldn’t even buy a bottle of water. The home supporters had no such problems though…

OH MY GOD. I went to sit in the stands and ended up right in the middle of them. They had crates of beer, and pre-mixed rum drinks (these sort of drinks are really popular out here), and one bloke kept being sent back to get more, and boxes of pies. They were all bundled up in wooly hats and thick coats (I was sat in a thin shirt, a pair of jeans and my sandals) and constantly moaned about how cold it was, lol. I kept waiting to hear banjo music playing, and also for them to share round the one tooth … it just had that sort of hillbilly yokel feel to it. I need to point out here that we weren’t in Noosa itself, but in an outlying town.. I’m sure Noosa is perfectly lovely. When the match started, they constantly jeered the other team, the ref, the linesmen.. it was worse even than going to watch Leeds play. It was truly horrible.. much much more traumatic than the spider incident! It didn’t help that our team got stuffed (we always do, the kids haven’t been playing together long enough to have a team mentality, and they’re also playing kids a couple of years older) - it was all just food to fuel the crowd. Finally, the game ended, and we made our way back to the car.

The kids had to get in first and do a thorough visual check for the spider - no sign, so I got in and took them back home. The towels are still in the car though, I’m too scared to get them out, lol.. but at least I can finally say I’ve seen a big spider. Perhaps one not quite as up close and personal would have been a gentler introduction..

On Sunday, it was Mother’s Day here in Oz. A couple of weeks ago, the kids asked me if there was anything I wanted… I asked for: No arguing, no dissension, a settee to lounge on, not having to raise a finger and a card. To be honest, I didn’t think I had much chance of the settee bit - almost 4 months since we’d left the UK and our furniture was still trapped in the Port of Brisbane.. however, last Tuesday, we had a phonecall, saying it had been released and they could deliver it on Wednesday!!!! Hurray!!!!! In fact, Hurray doesn’t even come close to the sense of relief and jubilation. We now have furniture! We now have a settee! The dogs can have the beanbags! The kids will have their own pcs and won’t pester to get on mine! I have books and cds! Fan-flipping-tastic.

So, things were on track for my Mother’s Day treat. Sunday morning, Littl’un woke me up with a bacon and egg muffin (not a McDonald’s one, a much healthier, tastier homemade version), a cup of tea, a card and a box of Dairy Milk. I’d been feeling rough for a couple of days - sickness and diarrhea on Friday, and then a stinking headcold and extremely sore throat since, so I was glad of an excuse to slob about. (Shut up Saus). I wandered through to the living room, dossed on the settee, watched Number 23 (ok, so perhaps not the ideal Mothers Day film, but I enjoyed it) The plan was for James to make breakfast, Matt to make lunch and Ben to make dinner. Lunch time came around.. and the rot started to set in. Matt was happy to make my lunch, but point blank refused to make it for anyone else. In the end, to stop the bitching that was going on, I made everyone else beans on toast.. and settled back down in front of the telly. Ben made us meatballs and spaghetti with a spicy tomato sauce for dinner, and then we had chocolate mudpie and cream for pudding. Apart from the ’slight’ bickering over lunch, and feeling like I was about to die, it was a really good day

About a month ago, while watching Middlechild’s footie (refuse to call it soccer) team get beat (again), I was chatting to one of the other mums. She asked me if I thought the bats were creepy. ‘Which bats?’ I asked. She looked at me with amused astonishment, and asked if I’d never noticed the thousands of bats roosting in the trees down by the nearby grocery store.

To be honest, I’d never spotted them, so we had a drive down that way to check them out. There really are thousands.. and they’re not the little cute things that you hardly ever saw in the UK - these are bleeding giant monsters. I must wander down that way with my camera through the day and take a picture.. and then another one just as night as falling when they all launch themselves into the air and take off for God knows where. Of course, now I know they’re there, I’m very aware of them - not that they scare me, lol, but it is rather freaky to see that batty silhouette (and lots of them) flying overhead.

Last night was Eldest’s karate night, and on the way to the dojo it was just on getting dark. We have to drive down near the shop to get to the island, and the bats had just set off for the evening. Eldest was adamant that it was a flock of birds following the car… but no, they had bat wings. I was all for letting him out to walk the rest of the way himself, but he clung to the door too firmly, and in the end I had to give up and carry on. (I’m not *really* that evil)

There’s quite a lot in the evening skies to distract my attention. If it’s not giant bats stalking the car, its spectacular lightning storms just off the coast. These storms are purely sky based - no thunder, no earthing of forks - just the lightning flashing up the clouds, and they can go on for hours. Incredibly beautiful and dramatic to watch too.

Last Friday, the phone rang. Now, its not a particularly common occurence - family contacts us via skype, and the only calls we get are usually from call centres (who get a very polite - ’sorry, we’re not interested, thanks for the call’ :hangs up:) I answered, ready to refuse all offers, and instead discover its Youngest’s Learning Community head. (They don’t have ‘houses’ here at the school, they’re divided into 4 learning communities. These act the same as ‘houses’ in the UK.. but they also have all their school lessons within that particular community)

She wanted to discuss Youngest’s behaviour and attitude, and also comment on how he was settling into school.

On Saturday, I finally remembered to bring it up with Youngest. ‘Youngest’, I said, ‘I had a phone call from the head of your LC yesterday. She wanted to discuss your attitude and behaviour!’

Youngest looked terrified and aghast.

‘She also felt the need to tell me about how you’re settling in…..’

Much guilty shuffling of feet…

‘Fortunately for you, your behaviour is impeccable, your attitude is wonderful, your school work is exemplary and she thinks you are an absolute delight to teach, a lovely, polite, helpful, charming young man.’

Now.. that wasn’t evil at all

  Last weekend we ventured out and had a wander around Australia Zoo, the one made famous by the sadly missed Steve Irwin. Its about 50km or so up the road, and was absolutely packed when we got there.

We had a great day though - it looked huge on the map, but it was a manageable distance to walk around. We kept nearly standing on hordes of roaming lizards (one of them pictured below) but they were pretty enough to take a photo of

 You can see all of my zoo pics by clicking on the flickr link to the right of the page, and choosing ‘australia zoo’ set, but I’ll include some of faves here.

.. but we’ve just come back from ‘pocket money’ (and my ‘me’ money) spending and this is what we’ve bought:

Books:
Vampirates vol 1 and 2 (previously mistakenly bought vol 3, so James wanted to see how the story began, lol)
Marian Keyes - This Charming Man
Robert Rankin - Knees Up Mother Earth
Erica Kennedy - Bling, the novel
Ed McBain - The Frumious Bandersnatch
Philip Pullman - The Subtle Knife (Ben already has these, but claims he hasn’t read it for ages and needs to read it again)

DVD:
Resident Evil: Extinction

Music cds:
Monty Python Sings (the kids are weird)
Weird Al Yankovic - Straight Outta Lynwood (did I mention the kids are weird?)
Top Gear Anthems (I’m sure I’ve already got this, in a container somewhere in Brisbane, but I’m desperate for some sing along music)
Newton Faulkner - hand built by robots (only just out in Oz!)
Seether - Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces (I’ve only heard one song from them, fake it, but I love it so bought the album. They’re very Nickelbackish)

I’m looking forward to reading/watching/listening to them all. Except perhaps Weird Al…