Severe, Massive, Near-Crippling

The words in the title of this post are the same ones used in the weather forecast for the past weekend. They describe the size and scope of the snow storm that we had. 5cms per hour fell starting early Sunday morning and continued into the afternoon. We went out to a dinner for breakfast in the middle of the storm which was good fun, and a little hairy at the same time. It's hard to tell exactly how much we had because the wind was up and it blows snow into drifts so in some places there's very little snow and in others it's very deep. Unfortunately for the kids it happened on the weekend so no snow-day for them, school was back on a normal Monday with all the roads cleared by the plows well in time for the buses. We had well over 18 inches anyway, about the same size as the largest dump we had last year. They, and I mean the guys who get paid to predict the weather, are saying that this will be a classic Canadian winter, nothing like the previous 10 years, so we might be in for a real treat snow-wise.

On that note it's looking more and more like we'll have our first white Christmas, the first two delivering some snow in early December an it all disappearing before Santa rolled up. It all started at the begining of the month while I was on a boys trip to Ann Arbour in Michigan, about 60k's from Detroit. Jay, AJ and I headed down through the starting snow fall to Windsor, then over the border, skipped around Detroit and ended up at a hotel on the campus of Michigan University, home of the Wolverines. Michigan has a huge rivalry with Ohio State (the Buckeyes) and we had tickets for the college hockey on both Friday and Saturday nights. The freezing rain fell on Saturday evening and we walked the streets with ice in our hair. The hockey was good, although the Wolverine lost on the first night and we had our Saturday tickets stolen while having a drink after the game. No matter, we spent Saturday recovering from a big Friday, driving out to get some food and passing all the frat and sorority houses with their greek demononations writ large (just like Lamda Lamda Lamda (you remember the tri-lams don't you? :-)). We drank Guiness and watched college football at a sports bar before demolishing a nice steak dinner with some aussie red. Then we hit a bar, played pool and had some fun with a hens night who were pub crawling through the neighbourhood. AJ and I were thrown out of a night club by an over-anxious, juiced-up bouncer and Jay bundled us into a cab with orders to the driver not to take us anywhere except the hotel, no matter where we told him to take us instead. My head hurt a little in the morning but nothing a giant vat of StarBucks couldn't fix.

I got home to find that Jo had cleared the driveway of snow herself, I should go away on snowy weekends more often, but don't tell her I said that okay? Alright so what else? Hmmm, here's some random bits that will be easier to cover as bullet-points rather than well formed, organised paragraphs -

• The girls have started music lessons at School of Rock, Jazz is learning acoustic guitar and Abs keyboard. The nice thing about the school is that they get one-on-one sessions and when they can play a song the kids are put into groups, with a guitarist, drummer, keyboardist etc and play like a band. Jazz is learning Smoke of the Water, I think everyone does, rock on.
• Still on the kids they all did very well in their first term at school, Abs has really impressed us and it must have a lot to do with her teacher this year. Last years was a disaster so it's great to see Abs with a really good one this year. She appears to get much more home-work then Jasmine which hardly seems fair, but she keeps at it and hardly ever complains.
  
• Winter coming early this year has caught me on the hop, I haven't got any lights up on the house and now it's covered with ice. We did put up a nice tree though and most of the shopping is done, just waiting for the fat bugger now. We'll have Christmas day at Jo's cousins about 40 minutes away. Bobbie and Warren are terrific and we've had a few nice evenings together, it's awesome that their two girls are the same age as ours and the kids get on like a house on fire. Should be a hoot.
• I haven;t related my Vegas trip, and it's not because I have too much stuff that I can't talk about, we were pretty good for a bunch of blokes in Sin City. It was just a massive party from which my liver will never recover. The three top nightclubs in Vegas are Tao, Pure and Moon, and they were awesome! The drinks there are triples, which they'd want to be for $15 a pop and it costs you $50 each just to bribe the bouncer so you can skip to the head of the line for the priviledge of paying another $50 door-charge to get in. The Playboy Club was actually pretty boring in comparision to the mega-clubs and I'll never forgto Jesse and his girl-friend from Minneapolis who bought a bottle of Patrone tequila for $400 and poured us triple shot after triple shot. The others just made it to the washroom in time, I on the other hand swallowed mine, but not before it tried to escape a few times. The less said the better actually.
• We had a leaving party at our house for the IBM project manager, Srini, in August and during the party a few of the guys started playing touch football in the backyard. Well actually it was full-contact football and they were taking it pretty seriously. We all ajourned across the road to the baseball diamond and setup a two teams to slide around on the wet turf. It was so much fun that we started playing after work on Fridays, IBM verses Bell Canada. When the weather got too cold we organised indoor sports like ball hockey and soccer, but the alure of football was too much to resist and we went out again last Friday to play in the snow. The soccer field where we play is pretty uneven and as we played we had to constantly watch out for hidden ice lying just below a surface covering of now. One step you'd have grip, the next you'd be fighting to stay upright while sliding across a big slab of several inch thick solid ice. Loads of fun for all the family. The game was four days ago and I'm still sore, not muscular pain, impact injuries. I scored one touchdown on a run by falling over three seperate times, smashing into the ice, getting up again and keeping on trucking, man that hurt :-). Apparently we're doing it again this Wednesday... we're clearly idiots.
  
• We have a trip booked for Feb, 3 days skiing at Mt Tremblanc in Quebec. We'd better get some lessons in for the younger kids and me before we go, hopefully we can do this between Christmas and NY. Other than that we don't have any plans, at least until we know when we're coming home. No news on that front at this stage although it is being sorted out. We'd like to stay a little longer but Immigration Canada wont extend our work permits, we've hit the duration limit. So we're working through some options at the moment, all of which allow us to come back to Australia and don't involve me leaving IBM Aus and emmigrating here, that's not an option we're currently considering.
• I pre-ordered Rock Band for the 360 and it was supposed to come today but didn't. It's an incredibly popular game that keep selling out in the US so I just hope we can get it before Christmas, the kids and I are dying to play it.

Well that's it I think, nothing much else to report. We're missing the warm/hot weather but the smell of pine through the house, the glow from the gas-log fire and the white view out the windows is a pretty cool substitute.

Andy, out.

Don't adjust your sets

You'd be forgiven for thinking that we've been really quiet and boring the last month or so. No blog post, very few photos, nothing going on. Exactly the opposite of course, we've been incredibly busy and I've been totally slack and not updated anything. Maybe the thrill of doing this has worn off, time will tell. In my last post I was ready to cruise down the QEW past Niagara Falls and on to Buffalo to see the Bills play the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL (grid-iron for the aussies).

The weather in Buffalo is usually much worse than Toronto, despite it being over an hours drive south towards what is mostly warmer temps. Something about the great lakes, and Buffalo's position on them, makes Buffalo's weather totally different from Toronto. Everyone, especially the locals, complain about the grey winters with no sunlight for weeks at a time, and Buffalo gets 2 to 3 times more snow than Toronto. All this is thanks to the 'lake effect'. Situated on the Niagara river, right where the waters of Lake Erie leave the lake for their fairly short journey downhill and over those famous falls, Buffalo is a small city, I think Darwin is bigger. The local NFL football team, naturally called the Buffalo Bills, are just one of three NFL teams in New York state, the other two are in New York City and of course have a lot more cash. The Bills where famous, or infamous, in the 90's for making it to 4 Super Bowls in a row and losing all of them. It's a blue-collar town and they have a blue collar team, but there's not much blue-collar about Ralph L. Wilson the team owner, he has loads of cash. Sport in North America is not like Australia, it's all about the cash here, teams are owned by individuals, or are at least beholden to stock-holders. Ralph owns the Bills, built the stadium with his own money when the city refused and then named the venue after himself. My buddy Albert and I set off for Ralph Wilson Stadium around 8am on a sunny Sunday morning, hoping to beat the rush/bottleneck at the border and make it with plenty of time for the 1pm kick off.
Sun on Toronto doesn't mean sun in Buffalo, I already mentioned the lake-effect right? But on this day the football gods must have been happy because Buffalo was bathed in sunshine and we could leave our jackets in the car. We had to stop at the border so I could get my visa-waiver and I had a slightly nervous moment when the official asked me to go to another building, one I'd not been asked to go to before. Images of cavity searches dancing in my head I was relieved to find that it was simply an 'over-flow' area used when they get busy, we scooted through pretty quickly and hit up the duty-free for some beers. The stadium is in the middle of no-where, sorta Waverley Park style, no public transport etc. You drive up a fairly normal two way, single lane street lined with houses, all the local home-owners use game-day as an opportunity to make some cash by charging for parking on their front lawns. The closer you are to the actual stadium car park the more it costs until you're almost paying the $25 they charge there. Everyone is tail-gating in the car park, some people were there over night, and they fire up the charcoal grill, tap a keg and settle in for some attitude adjustment. By 1pm everyone is pretty happy, but it's american beer so no ones too totaled. I picked up a Bills jersey and a cap and I'm glad that I didn't buy them at the duty free, they're surprisingly much cheaper to buy at the ground.

The game was pretty cool, we had great seats about 10 rows back from the 'fence' and on the 22 yard line (in the scoring zone). The crowd was pretty good natured, some young guys from Baltimore sat in front of us and the local Bills fans flicked pennies at their heads and gave them plenty of trash talk, but it didn't look like anyone was going to get beaten up. At half time they stop serving beer which tends to make everyone a little easier to handle when the game ends, although it was a bit of a bummer for Albert and I, we hadn't tail-gated all morning and were still thirsty. The Bills won the game pretty handily and the cheer leaders won a place in my memory, sweet.That's enough for today, man I can rattle on. I'll give you the news on Vegas and our plans for the next few months in another post RSN (real soon now).

Andy, out.

This Party Aint Big Enough for the Two of Us

As far as birthdays go we've gone pretty hard and full-on at them this year. Jasmines was probably the least effort with most of it coming in a box (Nancy Drew game) but we still managed to put together a detective game down the trail and decorate the many 'scenes' through-out the house appropriately. The study still has signs saying 'leet haxors' and 'Join the World of Warcraft ladder' on the walls from being the setting for a CyberCafe. Abbies was more involved as she wanted a mystery party like Jazz, but obviously we couldn't just recycle Nancy. So Jo and I put together a kidnapping, Jazz went to Lara's house and we set up email clues and SMS messages for the kids to sort through. It's a lot of work but the kids do love it and we've had a few invites for the kids to go to 'Survivor' parties and other fairly involved affairs. That didn't happen much the first year. Mostly the kids got invited to attraction-style do's, like skating, laser-tag or play-centers. We suspect that the kids are really enjoying the home-made themes and are pestering their parents for more of the same... If that's thsa case then we're really sorry. We really didn't intend to make your lives the living hell that we signed up for by doing our own parties.

With the girls out of the way we rolled up our sleeves and set about executing our sons vision for a cowboy party. The three main games were a round-up, shoot-out and a scavenger hunt. If you saw the last post on the Blog then you saw the shot of the shooting range that we made. A huge piece of cardboard used as packing for our recent sofa purchase was turned into a western scene complete with over 20 drop-down targets. It was a decent hit but the problem with 6-yo's... they don't line up, they don't take turns, they don't wait around for their turn, they don't stand still for more than 5 seconds. So my read on the party was that it was a partial success, the games just didn't go how I expected. I think, however, that my opinion is irrelevant, to the dozen or so 6-yo's it appeared to be great fun. They went crazy, all had guns and shot each other, ate handfuls of zero-nutrition crap (the best kind) and went home with cowboy hats and sheriff's badges. Jo made a chocolate-ice cream-jelly cake shaped like a cactus that was almost completely demolished. And Cam scored pretty big in the pressie stakes with Lego, superheros, Bionicals and cars. Good times, our boy is officially 6.
So what else is up? It's pretty busy here actually. Jo is still playing heaps of tennis and I'm still loving looking at her in those little skirts [nice!]. The kids are enjoying school and getting lots of homework. Jasmine just completed a book report that was delivered as a video. She interviewed herself on camera and I editted the result together for her, she's hoping for a great mark. I'm driving down the QEW (Queen Elizabeth Way freeway) to Buffalo on the weekend with a local mate to see my first live NFL game, the Buffalo Bills vs the Baltimore Ravens. In two weeks I'm off to Las Vegas with three buddies to party hard, shoot some guns and gamble in my typical low-key way (ie. not much). Halloween is not far off, Oct 31st, and the kids have their costumes almost together. We've thought about dressing up the house a bit more this year as it might be our last, so expect photos of a bizarre front-door in the next few weeks.

On the subject of coming home... well as usual we're just not sure. My current gig will be up by end of January and then it's one of two outcomes - we come home for good, or I get another engagement and we stay a bit longer. At this stage there is another project brewing that IBM Canada appear to want me to run. Only snag is that it's in Montreal so we'd have to move. But the deal isn't finalised so we haven't considered it any further and these things have a way of taking time to resolve (remember when we waited for 4 months before coming over here in the first place? I expect more of the same). If the project does start then we're inclined to stay which might be another year. Hopefully if that happens we can come home for another flying visit in the New Year. Anyway, nothing locked in yet so no plans.

The weather is much cooler, it's nearly lunchtime and the fog is still at ground level. Temps in the mid-to-high teens and lots of leaves on the ground, hockey has started, baseball is well into the play offs... here's hoping we get a white Christmas this year.

Andy, out.

Not dead, just busy

Man, that's almost a record... over a month since our last update. It's not cos we're not doing anything, in fact it's the opposite, we're busy as hell. We survived the girls birthday parties, they were decent hits actually, and for the last few weeks we've been planning Cam's event. But before all that here's a quick summary of the last month or so...

• Jo and I played together in the Bronte Tennis Club Mixed Doubles tournament. We played first on Friday night and won, although it was more of a struggle than we expected, 6-2 7-6 (tie-break). This put us into the main round and we had to play against the 2nd seeds at the club the next day. We were creamed 6-0, 6-1, and we think they were going easy on us, they ended up in the semi's, but they were 2nd seeds so given that they beat us they should have won... quitters.
• Jo has signed up for the winter season tennis... and no... they don't play in the snow. The courts that the kids had lesson at a year ago are covered with an inflatable roof in the winter so Jo can continue her intense tennis odyssey into the cooler weather. Frankly I'm a tennis widower, she's been playing most days during the daylight and then often in the evening too. I'm stoked though, she's getting a nice little tennis chick body to go with the racket and cute skirt.
• The kids appear to all have great teachers this year. A major improvement for Abs who has a teacher who actually cares about her performance and is prepared to discuss any issue with us. Compared to last years complete loss, Miss Whatever was a complete idiot, this is a revelation for us and great for Abs too.
• Halloween is coming and we have some costumes sorted out. Jo is also being pushed, by the rest of us, to kit the house out a bit more this year, just in case it's our last here. So we're eyeing off giant spiders, zombies for the lawn and a witch to attach splatter-style to the front bumper of the car (like we ran her over).
• It's Autumn and football is back in full swing. I watched the AFL Granie at a mates place, it started at midnight on Friday here. Was a crap game but glad that Geelong won one or a change, always had a soft spot for them, dunno why. NFL is on and after 5 games my Patriots are 5-0 and my wanna-bees, the Tennessee Titans, are doing better than expected at 3-1 (they've had a by). I have tickets with a friend to go see a Buffalo Bills game (vs Baltimore Ravens) in a few weeks so that should be cool. Grid-iron is the shit, I love this game now. I always had an instant dislike for the game before coming here. I think that enjoying any type of game without having grown up on it is pretty much impossible. What makes a game interesting is not just knowing the rules, that's just the technical part of it and not much fun, but it lies in understanding the back-stories. For example it's much more interesting watching a game when you know the opposition quarter-back is coping some heat for poor passing and everyone thinks he's over paid... or that the key wide-receiver is under a drug cloud... or you watched one of the line backers win the college equivalent of the Brownlowe last season and now he plays for your team, is he gunna handle the hype? I guess what I'm saying is something sports fans already know, that the game itself is only part of the end-to-end experience. Once you're soaked in the news, daily topics, stats and line-ups you get a lot more out of it than you might have expected. Understanding the rules, and how the teams execute on game-day is only a small part of the enjoyment. The human factor is far more interesting. No small wonder I almost exclusively listen to sports radio in the car now...
• I love North America, here I can set of model rockets to 1000 feet from the baseball diamond across the street and buy guns for my kids that actually shot stuff, albeit Nerf bullets. We shot off 6 rockets last weekend and filmed it with the new video camera in super-slow-mo, the vids are pretty cool, I'll post em soon. The Nerf gun is a 1.2 meter monster sniper rifle that shoots foam darts very accurately over 30 feet. It comes with two magazines for loading the ammo, full on clips, a scope and and has a cocking action that rivals an M-60. This stuff rocks.
• I'm going to Las Vegas with 3 of my work buddies. Jo has agreed to cut the leash for 4 days and as of Nov 1st I'm down and dirty in the adult Disney that is the capital of Nevada. We're staying at the Venetian and planning on some shooting and stretch-Hummer-limo action before hitting the tables in an effort to take it all.

More later, we have more to prepare for Cam's birthday and after we execute I expect we'll have another post with some more pics. Above is the giant mural we painted for one of the party games. Various parts of the mural are targets and fall down when you shot them with a Nerf gun, like the stage coach wheels, jail bars and water tank. Should be a hoot.

Andy, out.

A Very Freaky Birthday

Abbie waited a while for her parents to finally get their act together. About 2 months actually, her birthday being 4th of June, her party finally executed and it's almost September. Anyway all good things take time, that's our excuse and we're sticking to it. We had something special in mind and Jasmines 'Nancy Drew' party had given us some ideas. So the stage was set with Abbie thinking she was to have a movie party and sleep over. Five close friends arrived, including Aaron the lone bloke, I had my eye on him I can tell you. The lights were dimmed, the movie started, the kids settled in. And then something strange happened... the movie hitched and jerked, static burst of the speakers, the picture jumped and switched... and there was Jazz, on screen, breaking into the movie... 'Guys, I hope you can get this message. I've been kidnapped and I need your help.' And so the real party began, Abbie and her friends had to solve the mystery and work out a way to get Jasmine back.Jo and I had arranged a series of puzzle games, including finding the password to Jasmines email, reading the message, finding clues in the basement, solving a jigsaw puzzle with a solution on the back and sending a coded SMS message to the 'kidnappers' (Jasmines friend Lara's mum, who actually had Jazz at her house) so Jazz would be released. This all went pretty well, Jacqui kept telling me that she was freaked out by Jasmine interrupting the movie and wondered how she did it :-). Then they settled in for burgers, ice-cream cake and plenty of popcorn to accompany the real movie. As is usually the case the sleeping arrangements caused the most hassle, everyone wanting to sleep together, including the now released Jasmine and her friend Lara. But they were lights out before midnight and were probably asleep before 1am. Deed done, parents having redeemed themselves, at least a little, and the planning for Cam's party now in our minds.Today I had promised Cam that we would launch his model rocket again. The weather is key because if the wind is up then it's pot luck where the thing will land. The bigger 'C' sized motors push the rocket up to around 900+ feet I would guess. When the rocket motor finishes it's burn it then burns smoke to allow you to track it for another 50 or so metres. After that the motors final duty is to fire a mild burst in the opposite direction and push out the nose cone and parachute. The body and nose cone fall seperately, the nose cone without any chute so it's a soft, 'nerf'-like thing. Also in the nose is an accelerometer that records the rockets max speed during flight and displays it on a LCD. We set off 3 engines today, one had an 'Err' on the display so I don't know it's speed, another I forgot to turn the darn switch on so it didn't record but one gave us a reading of 92.5kph. Not too bad.I need to buy some more engines and in scanning the Toys'R'Us website I saw another rocket that's 3 feet high and has 2 stages... mmmmm.....

Andy, out.

Fun in the Sun

It's come to my attention that we haven't expanded on the kids summer vacation. And considering they have an astronomical amount of time off school they have been up to quite a bit besides cottaging.

Watch out Karate Kid, Cam now knows all your secret moves after spending a week at, you guessed it, "Karate" camp. Along with his friend Oliver, Cam came home every day pretty exhausted, which is the point. Cam had some mixed emotions about his time there, we had a few separation anxieties when it was my turn to drop off the boys. I even committed the sin of taking him back home with me to put him in bed for extra sleep. All in all, by Friday PM pick up I am pleased to report that he had liked his action packed week; although the Thai Chi was a little boring.

We then had a few slow weeks where we bummed around the house and caught up with some friends. We had a walk in the ravine with Angela and her girls one Thursday and got caught in a huge downpour, only to be caught again in another huge downpour that night at Abbie's soccer. Wouldn't you know it, it was our turn to coach and once the rain stopped our wet Blue Jets wouldn't move and lost pretty badly. That was the Thursday before the tournament and if you have been keeping up to date know that they did actually win and have the bling to prove it:)

As we had a messy June with our renting situation, Andy and I were in no mood to be planning birthday parties. So poor old Jas and Abs had to wait and Abbie is still waiting. I had bought Jasmine a Nancy Drew mystery CD game at a bargain price of $5 at Walmart thinking it would pump up her pressies. It was only when she opened it that we realised that it was a host-a-mystery party game, so viola! We had a party plan. So date set, out went the invitations and we have a Nancy Drew/Dinner party/movie/sleep-over. We first sent off the mini detectives on a training exercise, armed with photos of sections of the ravine where there were hidden balloons with numbers on them. They then had to add them all up to get the magic number being our phone number(yes you can use math everyday).As we have never been involved with a mystery game it was hard to know how it would go down. Luckily it all turned out fine. We had set up several rooms, one for the crime scene, Nancy's room, a Cyber Cafe, a mystics room and police station. We had 9 kids running from room to room, going onto the Nancy Drew's website for clues, they even had to ring a phone number for a secret message. Eventually the mystery was solved and everyone could sit down for dinner. After watching a movie I took the girls on a midnight walk (at 11pm!) through the ravine which freaked a few kids out but no one was lost. I think everyone pretty much went to sleep by about 12.30am so it wasn't too bad. Although the kids weren't too pleased to see their parents in the morning i can assure you Andy and I made them feel wanted:) So one party down two more to go.

We were a little late getting our pool up this summer. With a few dramas on the way, such as a family of mice chomping on the old pool, we eventually got there. They are so much fun, even Andy and I go for a swim around and around as that's all you can really do. It's definately great entertainment and all the neighbours know when we are home. I think that our pool has had more use than some of the bigger in-ground pools around us.

Abbie was at a summer sizzlers camp last week with her friend Amber. These camps are run by the Parks and Rec centres, and a bunch of teens try their hand at amusing the kids with heaps of activities. Abbie really enjoyed the art side of things and came home with a painted bird house and other stuff.This week Jasmine and Abbie are attending a Theatre camp. Out of all the camps this is a big hit. After only one day i've had an earful of everything they have been doing. This is right up their alley, and at the end of the week Andy and I get to watch them in action as they will both be preforming a play. You'll never guess it, but Jasmine is one of the main characters, she's pretty chuffed.

While the girls are away it's the last time Cam and I will spend alone before the new school year starts. You may be thinking that I may get teary and maybe I will; but my future of free time is looking pretty good right now. It means getting to the gym regularly and more tennis until they bring down the nets. Until then Cam and I have this little time together, although at the moment he is at a friend's house and he had a friend over yesterday and I'm not sure how tomorrow will pan out; but I'm sure we'll spend some time together :).

Jo, out.

Muskoka Madness

We're just back from our second lake cottage get-away of the season, this time thanks to the outstanding hospitality of the Emersons and the awesome Lake Muskoka. It's the Toorak of cottage country and it's not hard to see why with the multi-million dollar cottages, all much grander and lavish than our home in Oakville. Kent and Aleyks have rented the same place for the last several years and it's not hard to see why. The owners have built themselves quite a compound with 3 'cottages' (aka mansions) four docks, two boat houses and two floating rafts mored just off shore. A natural spring trickles clear, cold water down the rocky shoreline into the lake. Pretty hard to take, check out the panorama I took from a boathouse upper deck.We left after the peak hour traffic on Thursday morning and took the 2 hour drive through Gravenhurst to the small town of Torrance on the south shores of Lake Muskoka. Kent had picked up a 175hp jet boat the day before and we wasted no time getting the kids into a fantastic 'biscuit' and towing them around the lake at a high clip. I also got back on water skis and tried a little too hard to improve on my last outing, mostly resulting in high speed wipe-outs, a headache and my balls as earrings at one point. I was pretty happy to get straight back up though so that was good and I wasn't as sore as last time, but that's relative, I was really sore last time. Jo also had a go and did get up although only briefly, the photos on Flickr show her out of the water nicely. I then took Kent for a spin and succeeded in putting him down really hard by driving the boat far too fast, poor guy. I hope he's forgiven me, I think the spray from his stack is still raining down on the lake right now.But despite that he got right back up, kicked off onto a single ski (no mean feat at 25 knots) and showed us how it's done with some outstanding slalom skiing. We spent heaps of time in the boat, which could hold everyone at once. The kids loved the water which was a great temp and spent time swimming between the rafts and scooting around in the kayak and canoe. We dropped the kids off at a small island in the middle of the lake, Exile Island as it became known as. Stocked with some water and snacks we left them there for an adventure and they hollered to us back on shore when they'd had enough (actually Cam fell into the water without his life jacket and they had to 'rescue' him which dampened their spirits a little). At night we had a fire and toasted marshmallows and wieners and were pleasantly surprised to not be bothered by mossies at all. The kids spotted a large turtle in the main boathouse which was pretty cool and we saw several loons diving for fish in the lake. Friday was the better day weather-wise with blue skies and a cool breeze. We headed out into a larger part of the lake to Ship Island, a small rocky bird reserve populated by lots of cranes. We stopped about 50 meters off shore and all enjoyed the warm lake water by diving off the boat.We drank Corona's, margaritas and Caesars, ate like kings, swam, boated, watched a float-plane land in the lake and got heaps of sun. The kids were awesome together and all us parents enjoyed ourselves at least as much. Today we're back home and all a little 'done', back to work tomorrow for a rest [grin].

Andy, out.

Goal! Goal! Gooooooaaaal!

Total soccer weekend. Abbies team this season, the Blue Jets, has looked like it's struggling. No regular coach was offered and the alternative to having each set of parents volunteering to coach a week each was... well no team. So all the parents pitch in. They're a team of relative new comers too, I don't think any of them have played much soccer before. So right away they're behind the 8 ball and it's tough work, sometimes it doesn't look like their hearts are in it and I don't blamed them. On Thursday night it was up to Jo and I for the first time and it was hard work, as soon as the game started it began to pour with rain. I think our girls went into shock... I mean when it's raining mum tells us to get inside, don't get those clothes wet... we don't stay out here... The other team looked like they'd played in bad weather before and made quick work of our girls who walked around shivering and a bit stunned really. Now don't get me wrong, we have some good players, and every girl has given something to the team, but it appeared as though the odds were against them this year, a bunch of newbies without any consistent help, on the outer.


There's no ladder, scores aren't officially kept in division 3C, in mid-summer there's a tournament, 6 teams play off and 2 get into the final for medals. Our girls don't have much of a chance but we're not missing out on the action. Two games on Saturday, both against the same team due to two teams dropping out, the dreaded White team who have already beaten us earlier in the season. Some of the parents, especially me, are a bit annoyed that the opposition coach has kept his best player, the dreaded No.4, on for every minute with no sub to try to force the win. She circles back from the main play, cherry picks the lose ball and is deadly accurate in front of goal. We rotate all our girls evenly to give them a fair go. The Whites bring on the trash talk too... our girls fight but lose. History repeats, our girls go down 2-0.

The re-match is at 16:15 and our coach Chris, Sarah's Dad, puts a plan into action to shut down the oppositions star player, White No.4 will have no impact on the game this time around if we can help it. The girls from the Blue Jets play out of their skins, they demolish the White team 7-2, not so much trash talk now. Sarah is a wall at center defence, nothing gets past her, the two Nadia's dazzle us with fancy footwork and spirited running, Melissa has morphed into a sniper-like striker, Abbie is fearless and strips the ball from dazed opponents... where did these girls learn to play? The chant that our Jazz introduced to the team is sung with real feeling -

We're Blue,
We're White
We're Dyn-a-Mite!
We've got the fever!
We're hot!
We can't be Stopped!
Gooooo, Blue Jets!

Eight girls are grinning and there's a look of confidence we haven't seen before... is a Cinderella-story brewing?

Today, Sunday and it's warmer than yesterday. A game at mid-day and a ticket to the final is on offer for the winner. The Blue Jets are against the Greens who haven't won a game this weekend, beaten by the Reds twice the day before. It looks like an easy assignment but no one looks comfortable, parents who expected nothing are now just a little excited, much more stressed than the kids, can our girls do it? It's a hard won game, Green gives it everything, in the end it's our Blue Jets 1-0, kids and parents are over the moon. On the neighbouring field we see that the Whites have beaten the Reds (our rainy day conquerors) so we'll be meeting them in the final at 15:00... destiny beckons.

The air temp is actually pretty good, maybe around 25 degrees, but in the sun reflected off the dry and parched brown pitch it feels like 35 with a northerly wind off the desert. Everyone has slapped on the sunscreen, has plenty of water handy and has freezies and ice in a cooler. We worry about the goalies who are forced to actually wear the silver long-sleeved jerseys rather than tie them around their waists, it's too hot for long sleeves. Add to that the fact that in the final the halves will be a full 30 minutes each and they're playing on a much larger field than normal... it's hot work with only one on the bench. Our goalies had been penalised in an earlier match as the ref was a stickler for the rules, giving the opposition two free kicks in front of goal for our goalie touching the ball with her hands while inches outside the goal box... a rule that the girls didn't even know existed... the weekly field aren't even marked with a box... Still they saved the penalty both times and are now much wiser. The tournament play has been a real step up, are we proud that they made the final? Damn right we are. Do we want them to win it? What a stupid question.

The first half is tension packed, White No.4 circles the pack looking for easy pickings, Sarah shuts her down. Melissa, Nadia and Cassidy threaten the goal but can't convert. The ball is in our attacking half most of the time but the girls can't capitalise, will they pay the price? At half time the feeling is up beat, the team chant goes off like a rocket, the girls try to cool down, the parents call for paramedics, this is too tense.

At last the dead lock is broken, Nadia scores a goal and we go one up, all parents go berserk. We clearly have the better of the Whites but we can't put them away, they get a few chances at goal on break aways and No.4 looks the goods. Abbie is goalie for the second half, she stops a sure goal with a fantastic effort. On her kick out she finds an opposition player, it looks like a certain goal and our hearts sink... our Blue Jets recover and clear the ball, it comes back in and Abbie stops it again. Surely Abbie will have learnt from her mistake, she'll kick to a Blue shirt this time.. the kick is strong but she's mis-queued it a little [heck!], again the Whites pounce... this time it's in the back of the net, we're 1-1 with less than 10 minutes to go and it looks like we'll be into overtime. But our girls have something left, they know they can win now, they have some faith, they have roles and some understanding of where they need to be, where their friends will be when they need them. Down the field they drive, Cassidy is a tiny dynamo, Melissa gutsy, Nadia's footwork dazzling, Maddy has her game-face on. We watch, they run, they score! We spend the next 5 minutes saying 'only one more minute to go'... the Whites threaten again! The Blues shut them down. They keep coming, their parents urge them on too, everyones hearts are bleeding, everyone keeps it clean, no one 'goes postal', I don't know how.

The Blue Jets Win! From zeros to heroes. If you got this far, thanks for putting up with my bullshit. I'm stoked.Andy, out.

It's Raining Video

Man, it don't rain, it pours. I must have a lot of time on my hands (well until 2am anyway). I've cut together most of our clips since last fall and with Jo's excellent musical taste have put them to the Silversun Pickups awesome tune Lazy Eye. There's something for everyone in this one from Cam's pirate birthday party to skating and snow and our trip to the lake cottage.

Our Washington Video

I've finally put together an edit of our trip to Washington DC. The quality on YouTube isn't great and I'll put up a higher qual version shortly for those that care. For some reason YouTube has changed the widescreen format into 4x3 so forgive the slightly squished look, I'll try to fix it in the next day or so. [Updated] fixed the aspect ratio problem, it's now in widescreen so our heads aren't as skinny :-)We've had a fairly busy week, the kids are making sure that they have as many pool parties, sleep overs and play-dates that they can. Summer weather has cooled down some in the last few weeks and we've had mostly cloudy days with only patches of blue. Jo and I are finally organising the girls birthdays, very late but better than never, Abs party is shaping up nicely. I took Cam to see Transformers on the weekend, even his assessment was only 'good' rather than the normal 'awesome!' and I have to agree. Effects were great, story/script was wack, even for a cartoon/toy adaption.

Jo and I have bought new tennis racquets and my game improved slightly on Friday night, until the last match when clearly my racquet let me down [grin]. I'm a little sore and sorry after face/knee planting the fence while attempting a tough shot (Leyton Hewitt hustle-style, sans talent). We are off ten-pin bowling tonight courtesy of a free voucher that I won during an IBM social night. We can take another 12 people with us for 2 hours of bowling and snacks at Lucky Strike, it's a pretty cool place with bar service to the lanes and a DJ spinning tracks. We have our friends Mark and Sue, from South Africa, and Garry and Laura coming with all their kids so we'll have a good time for sure.

I am working on transitioning my work to some other IBM'ers here in preparation for us coming home, so a date is somewhere on the horizon, before Xmas for sure now. But we'll be making the most of our last few months here; hopefully one last Halloween for the kids, maybe one more road-trip and Kent and Aleyx are returning the favour by inviting us to their cottage on Lake Muskoka in August, maybe we'll do some more water skiing. Then we'll be looking forward to returning home to Aus for a second summer, save some water for us willya?

Andy, out.

Summer Holiday

In Australia summer holidays are usually a time for the beach, sun and surf. Sometimes we're lucky enough to have parents who own a beach house, or know someone who has one, or we even rent one for a week or two. We get tans, salt bleached blonde hair, drag sand into everything we own and spend the next month getting it out. Canadians have a similar summer pilgrimage, but there's no surf and mostly no sand, certainly no salt (except on your french fries). Once the warm weather hits and the days get long people like to head north into 'cottage country' for their summer break.If you're lucky, just like back home, your parents own a cottage and you free-load, or if you're like us you rent one. Cottage country is a big area but generally what you're looking for is a lake surrounded by dense pine forest populated by bears, moose and beaver. Of course, again just like back home, cottages have become very popular over the last 10 years, property values have soared and cottages are sprung up everywhere. Most lakes have lots of properties on them so we're hardly talking about a quiet lifestyle, it can get busy on the water I'm sure. But you are a lot closer to nature, even if the bears, moose and beavers like a quieter life and tend to stay away from the humans. The images I had in my head, mostly from movies, were pretty much on the money.

We left Oakville around 7:30am Monday last week and drove about 250 k's north to a little town called Burk's Falls and from there another 15 minutes to a work colleagues cottage on Lake Cecebe. Terry and his wife Doris have had the place for about 9 years so he bought at the right time. He rents it out through the summer months but also has a small attached unit for his family so I guess he can continue to make some use of weekends with his family even if it's rented out, it's a good deal. The cottage is not much to look at as you arrive down the lengthy gravel driveway, it's when you step inside and see the lake through the picture windows that you see what's it's all about. Terry's place is about 30 feet from the water, a little sandy beach to the left and a floating dock to the right where the jet boat is tethered. The view straight across the lake, actually a large, enclosed bay off the main lake, looks amazing and the water is only around 12 feet deep so it was really warm.We might have been in the boonies but we weren't without the mod-cons, satellite TV, gas-log fire, hot tub, pool table and heaps of stuff for the kids to play with, both inside and outside. By far the biggest hit were the two kayaks and the pedal boat. At any given point through the week the three kids could be found out on the water paddling around. Both Jo and I thought that they'd find the kayaks difficult but they all took to them really quickly, even Cam, and on the last day went about 1 km of shore (life jackets were mandatory). Terry was good enough to take us all out on the lake in his jet boat on the first day and the kids and I enjoyed hammering around in his 'biscuit' being towed behind the boat at about 40 knots. On the way we saw a lot of the lake and spied how the rich people live, some with floating 'car-ports' for their float planes (sheesh!). I don't know why you'd need a boat house with room for four boats, like a floating four car garage. Clearly I don't have the imagination or the cash to answer that one.

The weather was mostly grey to start each day but after 2pm it would clear up and give us some sunshine. It certainly wasn't what we were expecting as our summer so far as been hot and often short on clouds. But it wasn't too hot either and that made things more comfortable than it might have been. Wednesday was our only really rainy day and we spent a lot of time indoors playing games and finishing some Tomb Raider levels on the 360. We made our way into the local town of Magnetawan (say that 10 times fast) and checked out the lock that allows boats to travel between Lake Cecebe and the next lake down stream. Most lakes in Ontario are actually connected by streams or rivers, they're really more like just wider parts to a long river, so it's possible in some cases to travel by boat from lake to lake through locks all the way into Georgian Bay, part of Lake Huron. The towns up there are all pretty small and I think rely almost completely on tourism. Most of them were booming earlier last century with the lumber trade (I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok) but now they're small and many shops are empty as people have moved on, a little sad really.

On Thursday we had some friends, the Emersons, Kent, Aleyx, Melanie and Jacquie (Abs closest friend here), coming up from TO to join us for a few nights but since they weren't due until later in the day we set out for Algonquin Provincial Park, the largest in Ontario, for a day trip and some hiking. Algonquin is the quintessential Canadian great ourdoors, populated with moose, bears and beaver. Sadly the wildlife we saw was limited to mosquitos and a few chipmunks but we did stay pretty close to the main road and the delights of the park need dedication, canoes, tents and serious camping. In any event it's a pretty place but the mossies turned us off a bit so we headed back on our 1 hour return trip to the cottage to receive our guests and crack the first of many beers and caesars. For the unitiated, and that means everyone except Canadians, a caesar is similar to a pre-mixed bloody mary. However while it is made with vodka and spices the tomato juice is substituted for Clamato juice. Clamato juice is tomato juice mixed with clam juice.... I'm not having you on. In fact Jo had until recently just thought that it was a brand name and had being buying/drinking it as a type of V8 juice. I can confirm that despite how awful this combination might sound the actual taste is great and if I hadn't mentioned it you'd have no idea. Like clam chowder it's slightly sweet, which works with tomato juice anyway. Jo was herself put off when she learned of the Clamatos true origin, but she got over it pretty quickly :-).On Friday I had booked a powerboat and we planned to hit the lake and tow around the biscuit so the kids could have some fun. I got the third-degree from the local marina owner on staying out of shallow water (I mentioned that the whole bay wasn't more than 12 feet deep right?) and to mind the rocks. We took it easy for a while when passing through the tighter sections as the warning bouys weren't completely obvious to us (ie. which side of them to stay on). But after an hour or so we pretty much knew where we could go in safety and started hammering around at a decent clip. Kent has a bit of water skiing experience in his past and he suggested that we give it a go, the boat came with a rope and skis so we had everything we needed, now we had an experienced skipper to drive the boat and were in business. I took the first try and after maybe 6-7 attempts got up on my skis and we went for a cruise around the lake. I hit the deck pretty hard on one attempt after I got out very wide on a turn, slingshoted and started to get up a lot of speed. After that I handed over to Jo who gave it a go but couldn't get up sadly. Later in the day we went out again and I had about 5-6 more runs, getting up first time for every one of them, it's like riding a bike. Kent drove straight for the beach and turned hard, the object being for me to sling shot, let go of the rope and free ski into the beach. I didn't get quite enough speed but my last runs had me travelling maybe 20 meters or so without the boat, pretty fun stuff. Kent and Aleyx often get a cottage later in the season and might give us an invite for a weekend so maybe we'll get to try skiing again soon. Mind you I was sore across the shoulders for the next two days, man it was harsh on my old bod :-).

That's pretty much it, now I'm back at work, it's 40 degrees outside and Jo has taken the girls to Jacquies house for a swim in their pool. Summer rolls on.

Andy, out.

It's hot, damn hot

Ontario at this time of year is pretty warm and it's warmer earlier this year than the locals remember. Over 40 today when you include the humidity, or the humidex rating (the opposite of the wind chill rating in winter. The ambient air temp was actually around 33 today but the humidity was giving a Queensland summer a run for it's money so it felt more like 41. The central air-con has been on for the last 36 hours or so and we wont be thinking of turning it off until mid-day tomorrow when a storm is due through and temps should drop to low 20's.

We think that our rental situation will be resolved in a day or so. IBM has been great and will come to the party to increase our rent allowance so we can stay where we are and the kids can continue to go to the same school. 'The Donald', our landlord, had better not show his face around here again, I'm not sure what either of us will do if we get a face-to-face with that scum bag. Anyways, stress on that front should decrease and we can enjoy our summer.

The kids are madly anticipating their summer break, Cam only has tomorrow to go and he's a kinder kid no more, straight into Grade 1 in September. North American school has two years of kinder, junior and senior or JK and SK for short. So while it looks like he's moving from kinder he's really finished Prep and ready for Grade 1. When all the kdis come back they are likely to be 6 months ahead of home in the school year but I'm sure that the levels of achievement are pretty similar between Aus and Canada so no major transitional dramas are likely.

Canada Day is this weekend and, like Australia Day, is a big holiday weekend here, it usually marks the start of summer holidays. We will be traveling to the lake cottage we've rented on Monday and should miss most of the traffic as people return from their weekend away and we head into a week with the bugs. Before that though we have a big weekend planned, soccer of course, then a barbie with our good friends the Andrews on Saturday night (they're good people to get bent out of shape with), then Sunday is a round-robin and BBQ at the Bronte Tennis Club followed by an evening with another great set of friends the Doe's and hopefully some fireworks to celebrate the countries big day. We have a wad of explosives which we bought for the last major holiday but didn't get around to letting off so we should be lighting up the night on Sunday. Sadly there are no rockets, looks like the powers-that-be are discouraging them, perhaps due to tar roofs being set on fire. So all our fireworks are ground-based but hopefully still decent.

Speaking of rockets we finally set of Cam's model rocket last weekend and it was a hoot. The first engine we used was the small one, a B4, short burn and not much power. But there was some wind so I wanted to see what the thing could do before we popped a bigger engine in the tail pipe. The B4 was a good first shot, with the gantry angled slightly into the wind the rocket perhaps made it 250 feet up before blowing it's nose-cone, popping it's parachute and floating back down within 20 meters down wind of the launch pad. Feeling pretty good about ourselves Garry and I loaded up the C6 motor, a much bigger unit, and without waiting for a proper countdown Cam hit the big red button sending the projectile out of sight, well over 500 feet up and several streets into the wind, down range.

The nose-cone doesn't have a parachute, just a red streamer and a spongy rubber nose. The main body, supported by the parachute dropped quite a bit further away than the first shot, maybe 50 meters up wind. Finding the body was easy but we figured that we had lost the nose-cone, including it's cute digital accelerometer which tells you the rockets maximum speed in both miles and k's per hour when you retrieve it. As luck would have it we found the little bugger in some mugs front yard, several houses and at least two back yards away. Silly me had forgotten to turn the switch on so we don't know how fast the little bugger went. Luckily we have 3 more C6 motors... I love the smell of rockets in the morning.

Andy, out.

Back from the Tomb

Man, what the heck have we been doing? Not posting here that's for sure. The last 4 weeks have been pretty full on. Summer has started, officially today at 2:06pm, they do it here using the correct celestial time, not like us back home by the first day of the month. The days have been really warm, much warmer than normal the locals say and it has been pretty hot and humid on a number of days. Cam and Abs are well into their soccer and both had their first wins this week which is pretty cool. Cam already has about half a dozen goals to his name and Abs is one of the more attacking players on her team which is awesome, neither of them have played competitive sport before so the concept is pretty new to them. We spend our time as parents teaching the kids to play nicely with the other kids, share and take care. Now we're trying to undo some of those lessons, 'get in there and attack', 'be in front, push if you have to', 'don't worry if one of the opposition falls down, keep going'. We have taught our kids well, these lessons in competitiveness are proving difficult to teach :-).

Our rental situation is not resolved but we have irons in the fire and we're not afraid to use em. An update and likely resolution in the next week I suspect.

We have a cottage booked for the first week in July. It's a great Canadian summer thing to do, hit a cottage on a lake far north of Toronto when the weather warms up. The place is right on a nice lake with a sandy beach and shallow entry for the kids, plus some human powered boats if they get adventurous. We just have the Monday to Saturday but we're looking forward to a break and relaxing time, our first non-touring holiday since we got here (although I'm sure we'll go to Algonquin National Park while we're in the neighborhood).

The whole family is playing tennis on Friday nights down at Bronte. The kids get a clinic and then Jo and I play mixed adhoc matches from 7pm til after 9:30. Jo's also hitting the courts during the week and is actually out at the moment (it's after 11:30pm atm) hitting the green balls. It's a lot of fun and we're all improving our games, the kids are enjoying it so we might have to keep it up when we get back.

Work is very busy at the mo' and I'll be glad when the next week is done as we'll be finished all our testing and be into a slight more mellow state of mind. It looks like we'll be here for this release and the next two so home before Xmas is a possibility, March 2008 is a hard stop, definitely home before then.

So we're enjoying our summer, remember that we went from winter in Aus to winter here so if we do come back by Xmas we'll get our payback with two summers in a row, that'll be pretty good. All our girls have their birthdays this month and we haven't organised a single party yet. Last year Jo and I went all out and conjured up 3 pretty awesome gigs, this year we're busy and thinking of other things, the poor kids are wondering whether they'll get parties. I'm sure we'll get our acts together soon enough.

Anyways, enough from me, I need another G&T (off the beer and lowering the carbs, fooling myself).

Andy, out.

Lawyered up

So a brief update on our rental grief, it appears that our landlords lawyer didn't know about his clients bizarre tactics, the whole thing was news. As far as we can tell this sorry tale has been a poorly executed grab for cash with the assumption that we wouldn't understand our rights or take steps to defend them. I'm not sure whether to feel insulted or relieved :-). One thing I definitely am is pissed-off.

It's far from over but it looks like we'll be continuing on at 374 River Glen until we come home, sometime before March 2008. The two lawyers will draw something up by mid-week and we should know where we stand. Sadly the whole episode has been a little stressful for the family, but at the moment it looks like all is well.

Some other quick snippets -

• Jo went with Cam on a school excursion to a farm today, so it was noisy kids and the smell of 20 types of poo today.
  
• Abs had her EQA test (the standard government test for all grade 3's) and says that she felt fairly comfortable with her effort.
• Using our $20 rackets has been increasingly difficult at tennis on Friday nights. Now that Jo has found another local girlfriend who's also a member of the club she's off playing in the womans comp on Tuesday mornings. So will the number of hours of tennis per week shooting up it's about time for some decent equipment. Jo got a couple of demo tennis rackets and at around $200 plus stringing they might be a little more than I had in mind :-), oh well Jo never complains about my toys so it's time for me to shut up.
  
• Cam wants to do Ju Jitsu with a mate on Thursdays, so that's being setup, looks like he'll have a busy summer (soccor, tennis and beating me up).
• I went to Niagara Falls with the boys from work over the weekend. Played up quite a bit, stayed at the Sheraton and then played the John Daly golf course Saturday morning. AJ won $600 playing blackjack, I was the oldest and tucked into bed before 3am, Ram had one hours sleep and still hit under 90, bastard.
  

Mini Socceroos

Abs and Cam have had their first soccer games of the season and I can confidently say that a) they look awesome in their kits and b) they both showed some decent skills (especially for kids with no prior experience).Cam's games are on Saturday morning and the first team he and his mates played obviously had a season already under their belts. One of the opposition 5-yo's was heard to say 'we're gunna smoke you guys' just before the commencement of hostilities, nice trash talk for a little leaguer. Cam displayed plenty of determination and some skill, he certainly isn't afraid to get in amongst it which is awesome considering he's not played any competitive sport before. At one point he was on with two fairly timid team mates (they play 4 a side, 3 plus a goalie) and while he was head down and totally in the fray his buddies were distinctly MIA. As he battled with the 3 opponents we clearly heard him yell out 'so I guess I'll do this by myself then guys!', no word of a lie.

He had a great time and we enjoyed sitting on the sloping sideline and cheering the mighty 'sky blues' on. Fact is though that they got thumped, around 9-3, which considering that none of his team looked like they had played before and the opposition was clearly superior (ie. they consistently passed to each other) was a good result. Cam also made some good saves while 'in net' as goalie, however it's clear that 5-yo's place more credence in style while throwing ones self to the ground than actually stopping the ball, if there were points for style he would have earned a solid 8 or 9, but it did result in a goal or two to the 'smokers'. Cam did a fair bit of passing himself which was great to see, I guess having older sisters helps you to develop sharing skills :-).

Jo took Ab's to her match, which are nicely timed always at 19:00 on Thursday evenings. Since I haven't seen her form I can't say too much but Jo was pretty pleased with the way she got on with it. Both the kids haven't played a team sport before, Ab's previous experience is really the 4+ years of ballet before coming over here. Hopefully they will have a good summer and enjoy themselves. Speaking of which it's 38 degrees today (that's a humidex temp, like with wind-chill it's a 'feels like' temp taking the humidity into account). So summer is here and the kids are clamoring for the pool to be set up in the back yard.

Had an interesting conversation today with our landlord. He's apparently got someone who wants to rent our house for about 50% more than we pay and is prepared to sign a 2 year lease. Now the way that rentals work over here is that usually you sign a 12 month lease and then after that it goes to 'month-to-month'. This means that if we want to move out we have to give 60 days notice and if the landlord wants to increase the rent (CPI only) or wants to move back into the house himself, he has to give us 60 days notice. Now apparently since he doesn't plan to move back in himself he can't simply give us 60 days notice and put someone else in who's willing to pay more, so that's a good thing. I suspect that he's trying to get more money out of us, so when he drops around tonight we'll have a little chat about our rights. Hopefully all goes well.

Andy, out.

Jasmine Spielberg

Here's Jasmines first effort at taking a full video and editing it on the PC.

Kid City

Our good friends the Ballesty's came up from Pennsylvania late last week. Dan and Joyce had a weekend in Ottawa planned putting Jo and I on duty with a house full of 7 kids. We had a great time and we're pretty sure all the kids did too but it was a lot of work. I don't know how Joyce and Dan handled our brood when they had them for 4 days last year. The weather was really nice which allowed us to make the most of outside activities, foremost of which was a long walk along 16 Mile Creek not far from our house. With one car, 7 kids and 2 adults everything was going to be a local affair. Now that I have bought a new video camera I've told Jazz that she can use the old camera. She's expressed a real interest in taking shots and editing them on the PC so she and the other kids took turns taking video and still shots throughout our walk. When we got back I transfered the data to the computer and Jazz edited the footage together, she did a decent job for her first attempt and I only helped her a bit with some minor cleanups and timing changes. I'll put it up on YouTube later this week so you can all see for yourself, it's a bit of fun and nice that it's all footage from a single 3 hour walk.I had promised the kids that we would set off Cam's model rocket but unfortunately both Saturday and Sunday proved too windy. Since the rocket is supposed to go higher than 500 feet I didn't want to risk it coming down on someones roof, or even worse the major highway a few hundred metres away. So instead we took advantage of the wind and flew a couple of kites while the other kids and I played some baseball and threw a gridiron ball around. The park across the road is getting really busy now that the weather is good and the sun is up much longer, the baseball diamond is in use a lot and the basketball court is being pounded until after the sun goes down. Anyway is was a busy but very enjoyable weekend, the Ballesty kids are good people and get along with our mob like a house on fire. We love seeing them and having kids going mad all over the place. The only downer was Abs got quite sick on the Sunday morning after a party/sleep-over the night before and ended up spending the day in bed after barfing all over the carpet upstairs. Luckily is was just a 24hr thing so she's back to her best today.Last year everyone in Jazz's class had to write a speak and deliver it to the class. The best 3 speeches, as adjudged by the teacher and popular vote by the kids, would then be delivered to all the grades in a number of rounds as they whittled down the contenders and arrived at a winner. Jazz had done very well last year, even considering she was competing out of her age group and some of the other kids had obviously had a lot of help from others. Jazz's chosen subject was mythical creatures whereas some of the other kids had gone for more serious topics like bullying. Anyway it's on again this year and Jazz is once again a strong starter out of the blocks. She received a 92/100, the highest in her class, for her first run through and is delivering her speech to all the grade 5 classes today to see if she can progress further. I'm so proud of her, she seems to have a real knack for both the writing and deliver aspects of it. Her first draft, on the subject of TV violence and it's impact on young kids, was fun, interesting and well researched. I can't believe that she's doing this in grade 5... go Jazzy, give em hell.

Andy, out.

DC photos up

Hi all, the new PC is pretty much up and running nicely. Email is back online too, sorry we haven't replied to your messages since late last week, I had major problems installing my email client. Anyway it's all working now and I've even uploaded the photos from Washington DC. You can see them all by either clicking on one of the two photos below or by clicking on the animated Flickr 'badge' on the right of the page. You can enjoy a choice shot of my helmet-hair below...There's a heap of video too, I just have to find the time to get onto it. The new Xbox360 is okay, got some major problems with using it as a media player though, it's just totally crippled. Hopefully the Spring Update that's due in the next week will address some of my issues, but I'll still have to re-encode most of my video as it wont support some of the common formats [sigh]. Sadly I couldn't find Guitar Hero 2 either, apparently the guitar controllers have been recalled due to a fault, no 3-chord rockin' goodness for me yet.

Still on the games console subject our friends the Andrews bought a Wii and dropped around for a play on our big screen. It was a total hoot, everyone from Cam to Jo had a great time playing tennis, baseball and ten-pin bowls while throwing themselves around the room. It's a cool little console, we might have to get one at some point.Later this week we have our friends the Ballesty's arriving from Pennsylvania for a visit. We still owe Dan and Joyce a weekend without kids from when Jo and I went to NY last year so this weekend we should be kid-central while their parents have some quality time on their own. It's a good thing we still have the van although I don't think we can fit 7 kids in it :-). So I guess local stuff is on the cards and the weather is looking better so that's a good thing. We had a fantastic Sunday with blue skies and 20+ degrees, cool enough to lull me into a false sense of security regarding sunscreen and getting me a little burnt on my arms after a day in the back yard mellowing out. With the better weather Jo is working out a lot, gym, running, walking and cycling. The kids are starting to ride to school again which they really enjoy. And I'm getting to play a bit of golf, although I have to say I've been very inconsistent in my 4 or so rounds so far, pars and triple bogies [sigh]. I also need to start running again, my mate Garry has been injured and as a result I've found an excuse not to run myself, gotta get back to it this week, Jo's making me look bad.

Andy, out.

Offline...brb

Hey everyone. No photos from Washington uploaded yet, I did get them of the cameras but then my new motherboard arrived and I decided to put my upgraded system together. It's up and humming but I haven't put everything back on it yet, like Outlook and our photo archive. So bear with us, no email replies from us for another day or so.

One of the main reasons for the upgrade was the switch to 1080i video, I couldn't even edit it with my old Gfx card as it had only 128MB of RAM. My new card has 768MB, nice! It has 192 time more memory than my first 386 computer had total. I just got Studio reinstalled last night and man does it cook on the new hardware.

Quick summary for the geeks, an E6600 o'clocked from 2.4 to 3.4Ghz (nice and stable with just air cooling, sweet), 2GB of PC8500 (1066Mhz) DDR2, a screaming new Geforce 8800 GTX and lastly 1.1TB (yeah a terabyte) of usable storage in RAID5. I don't think I'll be upgrading again for a few years :-). My 3DMark2006 is just a hair over 12000, more than 15 times faster than my old hardware, and I haven't o'clocked the Geforce yet.

Our new Xbox 360 arrives tomorrow, another eBay buy, and that will replace our old Xbox as the home media hub. Again it's needed for HD, the old Xbox just doesn't have the grunt to decode HD video. Although, to be honest, I'm more looking forward to getting Guitar Hero 2 and playing that over the weekend, rock on!

Andy, out.

Ticket to Ride

It's been a really nice day. The weather has improved daily and today was a beautiful cloudless 22 or so degrees. It's so nice to see some warm weather after a long and late northern hemisphere winter, especially since being back in Aus for a week or so and having great weather there. We walked half a dozen blocks down to the Federal Triangle, home to the dreaded IRS (the US Tax Dept) where we picked up our web-booked cycle tour. Cam rode shotgun with me on a tag-along and the girls all had their own transport. It was the perfect day for riding around the Washington Mall and visiting all the buildings and monuments. Our guide was a friendly enough bloke and we had a mixed bunch of tourists including a fellow ANZAC in town from the land of the long white cloud for a conference. Straight off a trans-Pacific flight and onto a bike, better her than me.

Cam did wine a little about the duration but for the most part the kids enjoyed cycling around the mall and stopping every couple of hundred meters or so for a quick spruke from our guide on the character of the figure described by this statue or the funny story behind that building. It was a fairly entertaining ride. Being on bikes though meant that we didn't spend much time at each monument, and there's a lot to see. We didn't get more than 200m from the Capitol and I would have liked to have had time to walk up the steps and see all 19 feet of the statue of Lincoln, another time perhaps. But there's no doubting that we couldn't have seen the sites in a better way, the kids pretty much occupied by the riding and the day designed for being out on a treadly. I shudder to think of how we might have managed had I suggested that we walk it... the ride was over 4.5 miles, that's around 7klms to you and me Rusty. Nope, walking would not have worked at all.

In the end we made our way back to the hotel and the kids were, once again, in the pool around 2pm. I worked out how to get some beer and G&T's up to the pool, a generous tip at the restaurant bar made some plastic cups appear, and we watched the kids play for a few hours. We have reservations at Ruth's Chris Steak House for dinner and plan to do it early. Tomorrow we have a 9 hour drive back to TO.

Washington is a great town, there's just so much to see and it's all pretty impressive. Walking back from our cycling we strolled passed the J. Edgar Hoover building and saw a few gents wearing FBI badges, sights from Hollywood movies abound... We saw the south side of the White House, the 'ID4 view' across the lawn. But for me the single thing that brought Washington home was sitting by the pool yesterday and seeing two Sea King helicopters fly away from the White House in different directions. When Dubya leaves town for the weekend they send 3 choppers in 3 directions, 2 decoys and only one containing the fool. I wonder whether I saw the one he was in... I couldn't sense the foolishness from that distance. DC has been great, I wish we'd had more time here but a long drive awaits tomorrow and a steak has my name on it in about an hour. Cheers.

Andy, out.

GPS saves Lives

Well maybe not lives, but marriages for sure. Washington is a hive, the basic layout of the main grid is sensational, streets running east-west are Lettered (A-W) and streets running north-south are numbered (1-22), plus there are many diagonal streets named for states of the union, like Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New York Avenues. But the rest of the pace is a maze of one-way streets, curving expressways and cryptic exits that go in unexpected directions. GPS is a MUST.

The Mall is the central focus of the city and it's bordered by Constitution and Independence Avenues of course. It's bookended by the Capitol at one end and the Lincoln Memorial at the other with the Washington Monument in the middle. The Malls patchy early-Spring grass is lined with the various Smithsonian Institutes, museums to die for, Natural History, Art, American History and of course the famous Air and Space Museum. James Smithson, a Brit and scientist, bequeathed his wealth in 1826 to the USA and no one really knows why, but his money was placed in trust by the US government and used to build a mighty repository of the worlds knowledge in the US capital.

The most amazing stuff is in the Smithsonian, the original Wright Bros flier, Dorothy's actual Ruby Slippers, the hat Honest Abe Lincoln was wearing the night he was assassinated, the actual Apollo 11 command module and the space suits Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon in, the original Kermit the Frog muppet, the gloves Ali used against Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle, the X1 rocket plane that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in... man the list is endless, a wish-list of awesome 20th century bric-a-brac. We were very lucky today... we saw all of the above. My plan was to simply go to the Air and Space Museum, a goal from early childhood, and lo-and-behold they're also showing a best of American history on the upper level. So we rubbed shoulders with Chuck, Gus and Buzz in the main halls and then got to see Judy's shoes, an R2 unit and his nerdy friend 3PO (who's the nerd?-Ed), Ali's jaw breakers... and the list goes on. It was a cool day.

Actually I'm getting a little ahead of myself, can you tell I'm a little giddy? Might be the beer... the day started in great style, no clouds, 20 degrees and short sleeves. The plan was to 'museum' today as it's Friday and hopefully there would be smaller crowds, then tomorrow we would stalk the various monuments in the open. Jumped in the car and headed west over the Potomac trying to find the Iwo Jima monument. I couldn't work out how to ask the GPS for directions and so screwed up our approach, to be fair I only made one wrong turn and I was flying pretty blind. Jo worked out the Magellan and got us on the right track, fate delivering us the perfect parking space within walking distance of a classic WW2 image.

From the monument to US Marines we walked to Arlington National Cemetary, also known as the Field of Stone. The cherry blossoms have just bloomed so the gardens are particularly pretty, but the stones just went on forever, no photos or movies can ever do it justice... The tulips were also out at the Netherlands Clarion, a present from the Dutch to the US after WW2, and the kids enjoyed some mucking around in the gardens. From there we tried to hit the Pentagon and only succeeded in skirting the car park, man this place is a fricken maze, damn the political labyrinth it's actually hard to find you're way around.

Anyway, we had lunch at the Spy Cafe and had MI-5 and Langley dogs before returning to our hotel and hitting the pool. Tomorrow we're booked on a bike tour of the DC sites, hopefully the kids can hack the 3 hour ride we have in store. No photos uploaded yet, far to tired to be bothered sorry.

Andy, out.

By George, what a surprise!

Another nine hours in a car, why the heck does the rest of my family put up with my hair brained ideas? We left Oakville at 5:20am this morning and headed south, over the border at Fort Erie and with our 90 day green cards still in effect from our Aussie trip we stormed through (at 5 miles per hour) with no delays. Our route then took us south-west towards our Pennsylvainian friends in Wattsburg, but sadly we had no time for a lay-over as we blew through Erie and then punched south towards Pittsburgh, home to the Superbowl champs of 2006. The interstate skirted PA's big steel town and soon we were headed back east and into Maryland. The route really surprised Jo and I, we hadn't expected it to be so hilly, especially after 18 months in Ontario, which is thanks to the grinding glaciers of the last ice-age, as flat as a pool table. The Appalachians however are sorta interesting, not peaks per-say, more like the high country back home. So I-70 took us right through the mountains, at one point literally as we took a multi-Klm tunnel, and we started to see evidence of spring having sprung at bloody last. The buds are out, officially in Maryland at least, even if Canada is still in denial.

So where are we? Are you following this on Google? WTF right? District of Columbia baby, Washington. A few days and nights in perhaps the most powerful city on the planet, and one with a very high murder rate. Important Safety Tip : Stay off the streets at night apparently. We're straying at the Embassy Suites about 3 blocks from the White House so hopefully we'll be safe enough.

Leaving in the early hours has it's own dangers. For example packing the kids into the car still in their PJ's, talking their clothes and forgetting to bring their shoes... I thought you were bringing them... backatchya babe, bugger. Quick stop at an outlet mall along the way and the kids have shoes then back on the turnpike before Jo's itchy credit card finger starts twitchin'.

The drive into Washington DC was a little disarming. I'd expected the standard expressway and buildings and crap everywhere, not so. The drive along the George Washington Parkway was awesome, the cherry blossoms have just started to come out and the parkway is a beautiful stretch of road that weaves it's way through a forest before depositing you on the banks of the Potomac River and presenting you with a view of the Washington Monument (the obelisk thingy) and the Capitol in the distance. We drove through Georgetown (much here named for the revolutionary general of course), a great uni suburb and promptly had problems with our GPS. Not really it's fault but we had some issues with lane choice in a town with lots of traffic and more one-way streets than Sydney (if that's possible). Despite our best efforts to remain completely lost for the rest of the day we somehow managed to make it to our hotel just in time for the kids to fall into the pool. While there my eyes to developed a fantastic sting from the chlorine while simply reading at the pool side (thank god I didn't go in the water, prolly would have dissolved completely). Anyway that's for the best, it was completely full of kids so the standard ratio applies - 2 parts water, 1 part urine, throw in some more chlorine, too much is barely enough.

The hotel provides a free breakfast (hot thank goodness) and a managers 'reception' each evening, which is basically happy hour without having to get your wallet out. So here I sit, dear reader, a couple of beers on my way to a good nights rest, waiting on room-service sushi and a Sam Adams chaser. Tomorrow the plan is for the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and perhaps the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery (Fields of Stone, JFK's grave and the Iwo Jima memorial). Stay tuned...

Andy, out.

Désolé, je ne parle pas français

Yep, I don't speak French, well not much, certainly not enough to order a french donut (croissant) in Quebec City. However it didn't stop us thoroughly enjoying ourselves in Quebec last year and I've finally cut together the video. It actually includes the end of our summer with a visit to a beach on Lake Huron (fresh water beaches are weird) and the school cross-country where Abs came in first for her school out of 200 or so kids (Olympics 2016 here we come). Hope you enjoy it.Andy, out.

Shopping Marathon

I dropped Anth, Shane and Josh at the airport on Tuesday morning, they're off to San Fransisco for a few days before returning back down under. It was fantastic to have them with us, even if only for a few days and I think that they had a great time here. In ten days they toured Toronto, went to Ottawa, Montreal and the fabulous Quebec City, then stayed at the Sheraton Niagara with a view of the falls from their 17th floor room.

Anth and I played golf with my mate Shyam on Saturday morning and we were the first to play the course this season according to the marshall. As if to prove this fact we came home with about 25 more balls than we started with. When the snow melts and the fall leaves blow away it's amazing how many lost golf balls appear, they really stand out. My bag is bursting with balls... hmmm that didn't come out quite right. Moving on...On Sunday we planned to satisfy Shane's shopping fix by cruising across the border into New York state and hitting an outlet mall just past Rochester. It took just less than 3 hours to drive there and we arrived in perfect shopping weather, it was pouring. How we managed to shop for around 5 hours with the kids in tow I'll never know, they were great. We came away with heaps of stuff and I was probably the winner with new shoes, pants, sports/golf gear, casual stuff and close to the buy of the day, a leather jacket marked at $160 and charged at $20.99. Now that's a discount. No vinyl either baby, soft cow hide all the way. I say 'close to the best buy' because when you get stuff free it's hard to beat, a pair of jeans for Cam cost $0, a mistake, they should have been $15, oh well. So the outlet shopping in the States is pretty awesome, you just have to be ready to drive to get a good deal. The other thing you have to worry about is crossing the border back into Canada as the limit for duty free is very low when you've only been across the border on a day-trip. It helps to err on the low side when asked 'And whats the value of the goods you plan to bring into Canada?' by the customs official, and then hope they don't ask to look in the trunk (sorry, boot for you Aussies).

That's not the only shopping bargain we've found recently, our wheeling-and-dealing on eBay continues. During our Aussie trip our poor old JVC digital video camera finally gave up the ghost. It's taken so much video in the five years we've had it and been through a lot. Now it simply wont record or play tapes and likes to pull the tape out of the cassette more often than not. I might be able to get it fixed, but seriously what a great excuse to by a new toy, I'm not passing that up. Mmmmm, shiny! I had started pricing a new camera even before our trip back home, I guess the JVC knew that I was being unfaithful (I was reading the menu and planning to buy after all) and perhaps it died of a broken heart. Anyways I knew what I wanted and what I might pay and ended up with a brand new Sony HC5 for about 65% of the RRP. The HC5 is a pretty awesome camera, smaller than the JVC and high-def (1080i) too, I can't wait to start getting some real footage happening.Speaking of which I have a surprise trip planned for the family in a few weeks. They don't know where we're going and I'm not gunna tell them, they'll just have to work it out as we drive there. The only hint I've given is that it's about 8-9 hours drive away and we'll be staying there 3 nights in a hotel (and yes kids, it does have a pool, the eternal question answered). You can find out when they do, I'll post from the hotel when we arrive.

It snowed last night, just a cm or so and Easter is a or so day away, winter is refusing to release it's tenacious kung-fu grip. I get the Friday off but not the Monday and we have a very busy schedule at work at the moment so things are not very holiday-like. The Easter treats are not as over-the-top here as they are back home. Less chocolate and more 'fake' eggs to hide in egg hunts. I assume that this is because the North American 'candy' holiday is Halloween, so Easter takes a more low key approach here. Back in Aus Easter is the only treat-style holiday so it's no surprise that the eggs are in the stores in January and seem to come out earlier every year. We did bring some Easter treats from Aus with us so I'm sure the kids will be pleased.

Enough already. One other piece of info, I've loaded a selection of our older Canadian photos into Flickr, probably more interesting to our family than our other dear readers, but there you have it. Check for the new sets like 'Canada in 2005' etc. Oh and of course if we saw you when we were back in Aus it's likely there's a photo of you in the 'Aussie Family and Friends' set, enjoy.

Andy, out.

Welcome [bleh] to [huck] Canada!

It's great to have visitors from home, lucky for them they didn't 'get any on them' when our whole family (me excluded) started puking everywhere. Seriously, Jasmine got a stomach bug on Thursday and had Friday home from school. Then over the weekend Jo, Abbie and Cam picked up where Jazz left off.

On Friday the boys from work and I took an early day and headed off down to North York where a pub was showing the India Sri Lanka world cup match live. After the game, and Shyam almost getting beaten up by some irate Indian fans (well maybe not, they were pretty drunk, would have been lucky to hit the ground), I headed off to the airport to pick up the Reeves (Anth, Shane and 18 mo Josh) who were arriving from Melbourne to stay with us. Overnight Jo caught the bug and by lunchtime Abs had copped a dose herself. Our guests had picked a great time to roll up, by the evening Cam was down for the count too.

This was a pretty nasty one, really opening up the sluice gates at both ends [insert appropriate mental image]. Lucky for me my afternoon diet of beer, while watching Australia vs South Africa, appeared to keep the nasty bug at bay and I spent the day running the healthy kids to birthday parties and chuck-bowls to the rest of the family. Sunday had Jo and the kids if not out for the count then certainly still down so I drove Anth, Shane and Josh into Toronto and we hit the Eaton Center for some shopping. Sadly the poor weather prevented them from seeing the CN Tower, it's main deck hidden in the thick low cloud.

Yesterday our guests departed for a jaunt 'up the lake' to Ottawa, Montreal and perhaps Quebec City (dependent on how Josh likes/hates the 1600km round trip). At least they're away from our house of doom and don't appear to have caught anything from us while they were here. We'll see them at the end of the week, hopefully play some golf on the weekend and head over the border to the US for some bargain shopping at a massive factory outlet complex in New York state.

As I write this the Aussies have finished their innings against the West Indies and have posted a very nice 323/6 (Hayden slogging 158 with an SR of 110). I'm hoping to gte outa work shortly, get home and watch the 2nd innings, go aussies.

Andy, out.

From a Land Down Under

I think we're almost over our jet lag. It's pretty tough to fly half way around the world twice in two weeks and my old brain has been making me suffer. In addition to the normal time difference we came back to Toronto with daylight-savings having started, so all our clocks had to change as well. The time change was slightly in our favour jet-lag-wise so I guess we should be thankful.

I've had so many conflicting emotions over the last few weeks. It's taken me a few days to get my head back together before I could start posting anything coherent here. You can be the judge of how well I succeed.We left Toronto just before 7pm on a Wednesday, flew 5 hrs to LA and waited a couple of hours in the gate lounge for our Qantas flight to Melbourne. It was a trippy to hear all the aussie accents around us, far more aussies in one place than we'd experienced in 18 months. We chatted to various people, some returning from holidays, others in similar circumstances to ourselves and finally returning home after a long stay in North America. Our flight left on time with only one hitch, the in-flight entertainment system was on the blink meaning 15.5 hours in a confined space with little to do. In the end we had 5 seats and 4 working screens so we were better off than most. We left the kids to have working screens and Jo and I tag-teamed reading/sleeping with the other working screen. In all I think that we got an hour of so's sleep, the kids fared a little better getting several hours of kip. The sun chased us over the Pacific and won the race very slowly, dawn taking about an hour to fully break as we pushed 1,000 kph westwards. We landed in Melbourne around 9:30am Friday, having completely skipped Thursday due to the date-line, and immediately Jo and I commented on a slightly different smell in the air, not unpleasant at all, just the smell of home. Maybe it was simply due to the warm weather, we're not used to smelling too much in sub-zero temps.Customs was a hoot, I had insisted on bringing about 30+ cans of Canadian beer home with us to share with my aussie mates. Of course this was way more than the duty-free limit so I had to declare it. I knew that this was going to happen, what I didn't know was that one can had burst in the luggage and soaked some of the gifts. As soon as you declare anything you're up for a full quarantine inspection too, so every bag was x-rayed and hand searched. The kids wanted the bathroom and couldn't leave, Jo was steaming ever-so-slightly at my burst beer can and the officials were surprised to find yet another 6 pack of beer after I thought that they had everything (resulting in the need to re-calc the duty I had to pay), I was glad they believed me when I said I forgot how much beer I had and wasn't trying to get one past them.

So it was almost 11am by the time we got out of the airport and met up with my sister Trish, bro-in-law Kean and our favourite niece Ciara. The kids were really happy to see each other and we met our newest nephew Liam fore the first time, he being born while we were away. He's a sensation, just grinning away at us like he knew instinctively we were family.

I hadn't posted anything on the blog regarding our trip home and that might have left some of you wondering why. Jo's school girlfriends had organised a weekend away down at Ocean Grove and we thought it would be nice to surprise them by having Jo simply turn up unannounced. There were heaps of emails over the last several months that Jo received and had to reply 'Wish I could be there, have a glass of red for me', all the while knowing that she was going to turn up for that glass in person. So we headed for Burwood and Jo's parents where we'd quickly visit Stan and Barb, then leave Jo to be picked up by Fran (the only girlfriend who knew she was coming). The kids and I then headed back home to Monbulk and Jo scooted off down the coast for a few nights.Coming home was going to be pretty weird not matter what, the garden was looking great despite the drought, but everything had grown a lot. Inside looked more familiar but naturally Bill and Jess had some of their own stuff so it wasn't completely familiar, leaving me feeling a bit bewildered to mix with my exhaustion. Our good friends the van den Bergs dropped in to see us and Trish, Ciara and Liam turned up with the rest of our luggage. A few beers, fish and chips and an interupted nights sleep closed out the first day.

Now I'm not going to relate the entire 10 or so days, that's going to bore you to death, I think it's enough to say that our trip was in no way a holiday. There were so many people to catch up with, so many things to try to get done. In the end we still didn't get to see everyone we would have liked to, so if we didn't get to see you we're really sorry, there was only so much we could fit into a short trip. It was barbie after barbie, we made it to the beach once which was nice. In all I'd say that we arrived back in Toronto both sad to have left our home and glad to be back at home simultaneously (I told you it was a weird feeling). The cold weather is coming to an end, albeit slowly, and summer is on the horizon.

We don't know how much longer we'll be in Canada, but whether it's a month or another year we do know one thing for sure. It's something that I think everyone who travels for an extended period would agree with, this trip has made us fall in love with Canada and only made us love Australia more.

Andy, out.