Tuesday 31 January 2012

Sad News

Today marks the loss of one of our long time friends.  Wee Jamie Bunsell has died far too early at the age of thirty-six.  The world will be a quieter, sadder place without him. He has been part of the landscape of our lives for over 20 years, life in the SCA will never be the same.

And now to Melbourne

Well, Geelong is still Geelong.  Nice place to visit.........
We spent the weekend doing absolutely nothing, except replacing the camera and buying a new toy for David - cute little roll-up blue ray keyboard. My nephew Fraser described it as bubble wrap........

Gran is now more Facebook literate and her computer has been cleaned up, defragged and Skype removed.  She also has instructions not to reload Skype until a new computer has been purchased, one that can actually run more than one thing at a time.  Just having skype idle in the background made her computer impossibly slow - something I'm well aware of with my little Del netbook (or postie's bike as Bart so aptly describes it).

Quality time was had with Gran and Pa, Andrew and Debbie and young Jordon accompanied by his young girlfriend Sky. Far, far too much time was spent watching the tennis.  David and I managed to watch more tennis in this last week than we have in our entire married life.  The things you do for quality time with your family.

Pa and Gran Hunt

Andrew and Debi Hunt



We arrived at Liz's place in Ashburton to an empty house (with the exception of the new stomach support system Murphy) and proceeded to take outrageous advantage of the quiet.  David sprawled and I knitted; all the while paying proper attention to Murphy.  We hadn't seen Liz's new floor and I approve wholeheartedly with her selection

Murphy, for whom any movement means a cat is going to be fed.


Lounging on leather gazing out over the new floor, the revamped deck into the back yard.  Gosh our family does good back yard (If you want to see the view from the back of the Hunt's you need to look at davids-dribblings.blogspot.com.au he's been playing with the new camera) .

We're still waiting.  The new contract has been signed and sent, so there should be movement at some point.  Neither of us are very good at the waiting game and both of us don't quite believe that the whole thing is real.  It's hard to settle to learn some Arabic or work on the T-thing in this sort of limbo.  Well, it's good for our moral fibre they say.  It will happen when it happens and hey, being taken out of your comfort-zone is an adventure isn't it?

Friday 27 January 2012

From Wonthaggi to Geelong


Today we left mum and dad's place after a lovely couple of very restful days not doing very much apart from sitting on their back patio and gazing out over the rather beautiful back garden.


Looking straight down the yard.


Looking across to the right.

 The garden is looking the driest I've seen it for a long time, but the flowers are astounding and prolific.  My photo really doesn't do it justice.

The four of us Dad, me Mum and a little bit of David
We've arrived in Geelong.  A town that was (according to my diminutive great Aunty Annie Bartrop 40 odd years ago, who, by the way, once shoved her hand down a large german shepherd's throat while it was choking on a whole heart - she was looking after it and hadn't cut the heart up...) named when two blokes were arguing about it and decided to name the town after the first person who came along.  That person was a bullocky shouting at his team.  "Gee-a-long!"  Aunty Annie remarked that it was lucky he wasn't saying what bullockys normally yelled at their teams.  Urban myth of course but fun.

Wednesday 25 January 2012

Canberra is now behind us.  Goodness, gracious me.

After not taking the car to the dealer yesterday and having a lovely dinner with Michelle, Brooke, John and Sharon, we took off for Wonthaggi around 9:00am. A quick stop in Cooma for coffee let us stop just outside Cann River for a picnic lunch in the coastal rain forest.  That was when the fellow who didn't buy our car a week ago rang and said he still wanted it. He might have wanted it, but he didn't make it worth our while turning around and coming back to Canberra.


Driving from Cann River was a lesson in post fire regeneration.  I can't remember when the last fire went through there, but the trees were all tall poles of charcoal, dressed in green foliage.   



I couldn't resist stopping at Stratford on the Avon River and buying some local wine and cheese for later this evening.  Last time we came through we had lunch in this beautiful wine garden.


South Gippsland is so very, very verdant.  There are so many different greens to be seen - gum trees, ferns, you name it.  The rolling hills around Leongatha and Korrumburra were beautiful to behold. 

On the road to Leongatha
The rolling hills






Tuesday 24 January 2012

Last Day Blues

Today is our last day in Canberra. Tomorrow we are heading down to Victoria to say farewell to family before flying out.  We still don't have a departure date.

Today was also my last day at Fernwood Belconnen.  Emily almost made me throw up, but not quite.  Ha!  I think that the camaraderie of the gym is one of the things I'm going to miss most.  The group of ladies I have been training with for the last couple of years are a beautiful, beautiful bunch.  Hot and sweaty, cool and collected, and always, always fun.  They have made hard physical work a joy.  I don't like my chances of finding that again in a hurry.  Of course the programs that Emily has written for me may kill me in the mean time.  Of course if I was vaguely sensible I would have taken a photo of everyone.  Darn, I'm not very good at this finality thing.

Sunday 22 January 2012

One of the very scary things about leaving the country is leaving behind family, especially my parents.  Luckily we had already planned to have most of my family for Christmas.  It was a lovely time full of food, drink, exhibitions and fun.  As usual I managed to take almost no photographs, but here is a particularly nice one of my parents and my sister Judy.


Friday 20 January 2012

Officially Homeless and Unemployed

Limbo is interesting.  I just spent the morning lounging around, taking my time to get up, slowly pottering - on the outside that is. The habits of a life-time are completely inescapable after only a few hours and I can't sit still.  It is nice to do not very much though.

We're both now immunised against HEP A & B and Typhoid.  That was another expensive little surprise when David's cut finger and extracted tooth looked like they were turning gangrenous yesterday. This led me to realise that our health insurance was about to be suspended.  A quick dash to Medibank Private revealed that I had gone in just in time and then I crashed their system.  Oh well, they were very nice about it and we do have cover for the next two weeks.

Back to doing nothing.......

Thursday 19 January 2012

Leaving the house day

Today is our last day in the house.  I guess we could say that the adventure is starting.  There are only a couple of things still hanging............tickets, car..........

Last night the beautiful Brooke cooked us dinner.  Because we will not have ready access to bacon for the next few years she very kindly cooked a very bacon, bacon meal.  Unfortunately it tasted.........good!!!  Much, much too good.  I didn't quite throw up at training this morning, but by golly I felt like it.

First a delicate little entrĂ©e of egg and bacon cups: gluten free, dairy free, nut free and cupfree.  



Then a main course of chickenbreast topped with cheese and bacon, accompanied by a warm bacon salad.



All topped off with  vanilla icecream with maple syrup, liberally sprinkled with.... you guessed it - bacon.

Delicious.  A little filling, perhaps a little high in.....something.  I couldn't lie on my stomach at all last night.  On  the up side, when I confessed to my trainer, she confessed to eating a pizza last night.  All is right with the world.

Tuesday 17 January 2012

T minus n days

n, apparently, is a random number of days decided by dice roll.  The size dice we will be using is also random and divided by David's age (if my tongue is out) or my age (if David's tongue is out). What our tongues are doing is dependant on which star went supernova 1,000,000,000 years ago in the northern quadrant of the western hemisphere.  sigh.

The good news is that we have had contact with Oman (yay), the interesting news is that they have been doing their usual non organisation and are all pottering off for site visits for two weeks.  I'll be over it soon, just as long as we can get some flights booked at some point in the near future.

Michelle as come to the rescue (yet again) and we will be camping at her place for a little while.  I think it's time to hit to the Phd.

T minus 2 (or 3) days!!!

Well, are we going or aren't we going?  Still no word from Oman.  Panicky?  Me?  Surely not.  It's going to be very odd if we're still sitting here on Friday.

More exciting news.  BJ is not in the slightest bit eligible for Youth Allowance (sigh) even with his parents upping stakes and leaving.  After a long conversation with CentreLink it transpires that he can apply for Newstart when he turns 21 in April.  Of course no-one mentioned this to him when they sent him off home with a form for us to fill in for Youth Allowance (sigh).  Luckily he has been applying for jobs all over the place and has a trial at Kingsley's today..........belay that, it turns out that the communication of Kingsley's is as good as anywhere else.  He had an interview (finger's crossed).

David is off at his farewell lunch.  I'd really like to crawl into a corner and have a weep.  Instead I'll pop over to Libby's house and play with the loom - but first some more packing.

Monday 16 January 2012

T minus 4 days - Still no tickets!!!!

I'm still getting used to the whole blogging thing, but I'm sure once the insanity reduces all will be well.


I've finished, and posted, Rufus' new hat - seen here modelled by David.  Unfortunately you can't see the AMAZING pompom!  I've never actually made a pom pom before! You can see the thrums made of raw curly fleece though.  I hope he likes it.  



I'm feeling far more relaxed today after being whisked off by the lovely Michelle for a girlie underwear adventure.  I've bought enough bonds undies to last quite a long time.  Yay! The retail therapy was closely followed by a manicure and pedicure from Danni (check out her facebook page at Terme Della Dea for  her great opening specials) and I am now the proud owner of fabulously purple toenails.

The day has started in an interesting way with David racing off to the dentist for an extraction.  Luckily the dentist (who was booked out until March!) had a cancellation for half an hour after David called.  Phew.  I've put more things into suitcases and am praying that Oman gets their act together and books the rotten tickets - specifically the business class ticket - so that we can climb on the plane under the baggage allowance.

Anyhoo, time to welcome the house valuers!

Friday 13 January 2012

In the beginning - T minus 7 days

Today was a day for a little bit of rest, a farewell lunch, packing up of the last of the fabric, recovering from last nights open house and the realisation that yes, we are going to Oman.  Of course it's not really going to happen until it happens, but the day is creeping closer.

The boxes that had half filled the lounge room are now safely stowed away in the storage room and the first of the furniture has gone in.  The house is looking less like a bomb zone and more like a house that doesn't really belong to us.  Three of the four tenants coming into the house have already moved in along with an extra dog and cat.

All that is within our control is under control.  Unfortunately alot of things aren't under our control and neither of us are coping very well with that.