Another year almost done…

Geez louise! It has almost been a year since we last wrote on this blog!

What’s  been happening…

House Hunting = Well, we are still in the same flat, waiting patiently to hear whether we have a new house or not. We signed a contract on Friday night to buy a great place in Rozelle, and went out for champagne to celebrate this long, long, long awaited and wanted house. An hour into the celebrations we get a call to say the owner won’t sign! What a beeearch! She apparently needs more time to think about it (something she could’ve said before we got our hopes up and signed the contract!) and will let us know on Monday night…fingers crossed!

 

Tandem = We bought a tandem bike! It is awesome! A blue, 21 speed, mountain-bike styled tandem bike. We’ve been for a couple of rides now to Watsons Bay and around Bondi – so much fun!!!

Surftober Fest = Simon founded ‘Surftober Fest’ – a month of surfing everyday to raise money for Samoa’s tragic tsunami victims. And he and Nick G almost surfed everyday! Well done boys!

Weddings = Pete married the gorgeous Nicole (my newest bestie) in March at the Pilu restaurant in Freshwater. It was an amazing wedding and loads of fun (the food was delicious!).

Jon Swimming-Pool married Sarah at the end of October at the Jonah’s restaurant in Whale Beach – another beautiful wedding with food to die for. They have since moved over to Sydney and will be joining us in the Bondi Beach haven. We have Jon to thank for introducing us to our Bondi Besties, Colin and Hatty. We will forever be indebted.

Janine’s getting married to Tony in 6 weeks time! How very exciting! I will be blogging about this event no doubt – pictures-a-plenty!

Work = Simon got a promotion a few weeks ago. Now the boss of a team of 5. Working very hard and appears very stressed-out, but seems to enjoy what he is doing.

I’m still at Grammar and loving it. I teach a Year 1 class this year. They are cute and so funny! I come home with some funny as stories! Should write a book.

Timo’s eyebrow scare = Tim had to get a mole removed after tests confirmed it was malignant. It gave us all a mighty scare and we had many sleepless nights as we waited to hear whether it had spread. Thank goodness the docs got it all, and he has had a number of checkups since and been given the all clear each time. Whew! He has a neat scar now where his left eyebrow once was, but he is still as handsome as ever (not as handsome as you babe). We love you Tim!

Wales = We had a wonderful trip to Wales with the Smiths. We stayed in a beautiful, quaint town called Solva, in this huge, stone, barn-like house. It was flash as. We ate lots of nice food, swam at a nearby beach, drank lots of beer, competed in the local Trivia Night contest, went shopping in the cute little shops, went for long coastal walks and played a bit of beach cricket and touch. What a choice time we had…

Camping = Simon, Pete, Nicole and I went camping at Norah Head. It was such a gorgeous place! We stayed in a really nice camping ground and used our wedding present tent for the first time (thanks John and Neisha). Nicole and I had to put up the tents while Simon and Pete skateboarded around the camping ground. How old are those two anyway? The campground was within a short walks distance to pristine, white-sand beaches (like Bondi but without the thousands of people!), so we spent a bit of time there. We went out for drinks (Nic and I had some tasty cocktails for $8! As opposed to $18 in Sydney!) and dinner at the RSL next door. They had a meat raffle and we won! True Aussie/Kiwi style. We chose a breakfast pack and cooked it all up in the morning.We’ll definitely be going back there real soon.

Wow it’s been a while

In case you missed it…

Countdown

12 days to go! Tim, Mum and Dad are here in Sydney, Olo flew into Auckland this afternoon and various other people are elsewhere in Aus, NZ or in the air… Stace and I had our Sydney hens and stag on Saturday and are just about recovered. Pete organised mine – drinks in Bondi, then water taxi to Balmain for more pubs and lawn bowls, then more pubs round Balmain afterwards. Balmain is just to the west of the city, on the water, and it’s a very attractive suburb, made all the more so by my get-up of g-string and tight yellow sparkly blouse. The sun shone and it was a really enjoyable afternoon where I don’t think I stopped laughing (apart from when I had to ask random girls whether they were from Jamaica cos Jamaican me crazy).

Stace went to a hat restaurant in Kings Cross where they all had to wear silly hats and there was a shaven gentleman whom I don’t want to hear anything more about, and then out dancing, coming home in the early hours to find me passed out in front of England’s abysmal game against Scotland.  Yesterday was a write-off but there’s more to come next weekend in NZ! See you there!

Summer in NZ

Well, I’m back in Bondi after spending 4 brilliant weeks in NZ with my friends and family. Christmas was fantastic, as usual, with far too much yummy food!

I was also really spoiled with lots of pressies from the family and from Simon. He surprised me with a treasure hunt which lead to a youtube clip displaying a new guitar he bought me! It was awesome!

New Year’s was also great; we sat on the deck around the table with my family and ate and drank a great deal. We sang songs to the guitar and then after midnight we all walked down to the stream (Vicky had a bit of difficulty as she was smashed) and stood on the bridge to see the pretty lights Dad had placed along the stream. We also checked out the glow-worms along the bank and the star-filled sky. The stars were like nothing you’ve ever seen! Amazing.

Simon and I made a quick trip to Whakatane to see the cuzzie bros and Nan and Pop. Karen and Mark’s baby boy Caleb is gorgeous!!! Check him out!

So awesome to catch up with everyone. We ate fresh oysters Karen andMark had gathered that afternoon, met Mark’s palimino horse Dusty and Simon managed to fit in a round of golf too with Mark and Uncle Alan. Karen took Simon for a run and she caned him! What was he thinking trying to run with one of NZ’s top runners? He was tired for days afterwards. Poor thing.

We then headed to Pukehina Beach where my mate Aimee’s parents have a bach. There were 12 of my good mates staying there too. We ate beautiful food including bbq’d Tua Tua shellfish we got at low tide, drank Pimms and sat around a camp fire on the beach. We saw a couple of small sharks 5 metres out from the shore, so Simon waited until the morning to go surfing with Skip. They were out for 3 hours though and were the only ones out there for miles! He said it was like surfing in your back garden – we were all on the deck of the bach eating breakfast as the guys surfed right below us.

The rest of the time was spent doing loads of wedding planning and wedding consultations (only 10 weeks to go!!!), hanging out with the kids, swimming in the waterhole with Jess and her whanau, weeding and pruning the garden with Mum (we must have filled more than 4 trailer loads), working on the land with Dad (digging, shovelling, driving the digger), eating xmas cake and going shopping.

The weather was fantastic pretty much the whole time (which is very unusual for NZ weather) and I arrived back in Bondi on Friday where it has been raining off and on since!

I had such a great time! My holiday is not over yet though! I don’t go back to work until 29th Jan and Vick, Mo, Jamie and Matt are coming to stay on Friday for a week! Choice! Work is for losers! xxx

Me and my new guitar (I’m not naked, I just have a strapless dress on!)

Dutch moustache

It’s been a strange week – I flew to London for the weekend then Amsterdam for 3 days with work, leaving Sydney at 5pm on the Friday after only confirming about 6hrs before that I was going. Surprised Mum and Oliver which was fun. Ran the line for Timo’s football and caught the end of Oliver’s rugby match in Winchester before having a couple of drinks with J Dan and Ryan down there. Did a poo in the woods. Went for an early morning run through the red light district in Amsterdam and nearly fell in the canal after being frightened by a cross-eyed man lurching out of a doorway. Didn’t have any strange looks due to my moustache (it’s Movember again), probably as it’s normal to mo & flow over there. Speaking of which if you’d like to sponsor me please click here.

30th

This is the house Colin & I celebrated our 30ths in last weekend, about 1.5hr north of Sydney on the Central Coast. In appropriately 30 degree heat we spent a couple of days eating, drinking, surfing, pooling and jacuzzing and apparently breaking a $450 pond pump, which we dispute was our fault…

The weekend before Mark & Collette came up from Melbourne (they’ve just moved there from Vancouver & you may remember their hilarious blog ) and we had an epic day on the 14th (day before my actual bday) which started at 5am in the Bondi Hotel to watch England beat France… unbelievable. The pub was packed at that time & there must have been 200 French to about 50 English. What a sweet, sweet victory – I won’t forget chanting ‘au revoir, au revoir, au revoir’ to the rapidly departing French contingent as all the English went mental when the final whistle blew. Even Stace nearly joined in! As far as the RWC went it was nearly as good as beating the Wallabies the week before, which we watched in Notting Hill just prior to flying back from our trip home.

Lesson 1: How not to behave at our wedding (else we’ll set Dion & Jamie on you)

We eat the dinner

Yesterday we went to Tetsuya’s for dinner with work for an end of project celebration.  We had an 11 course tasting menu with nine different wines to match. The food was good, mostly involving raw fish, but the wine was better. Nine different wines came in nine different shaped glasses and that nearly made for a delightful glass rim symphony from Stace but she chickened out!

England & Channel Ten can s my bs

We haven’t touched the blog for months, sorry. However, I did get up at 4.30am today to watch England get smashed by SA and it made me want to throw a cup of tea at the TV because of all the adverts on Channel Ten whenever there’s the smallest break in play. So in summary, we are well and apart from the rugby, happy, and we’re both tired becuz Stace woke up with me to watch it, and our dedication to blog writing is no better than the Smith family trip to Florida (not the one in matching Lucozade shellsuits) when Mum tried to make us write diaries and we just glued leaflets and tickets in an exercise book to make it look as though we were.

The last four months in 4000 words

Dear Blog, sorry for not writing in you for the last four months. We have been very busy. Here is a picture to illustrate just what we’ve been up to:

Let’s make a start in February. Since then I’ve been on 7 trips to Melbourne and one to Perth with work. I’ve started to get complacent and