Easter Eggs and Pony Rides

It's been a funny couple of weeks one way or another down here in the land of plenty. Over Easter there were the usual national holidays and then the following week it was ANZAC day. Work-wise I wasn't sure if every day felt like Monday or Friday...

For Easter we did the usual shopping for furniture thing with mixed results but also managed to escape the city on the Saturday for an afternoon up at Lake Macquarie. Very nice it was too. A leisurely drive north out of Sydney and an afternoon pottering around small towns and villages along the lake side. We even made good use of our esky and had plenty of padkos to keep us going :-) One thing I have noticed about Australia so far is that typically, you can actually drive your car on the road and get to where you're going in a time which relates to the speed limits. If it's a 60kmh limit and your journey is 60ks then it's not uncommon for you to arrive in one hour. Exactly. A novel concept that after living in London...

Sunday saw us round at the Rowlinson household again for a huge BBQ spread and good natter over some cold ones. Unfortunately a stomach bug kept half the family away (and bed-ridden) so we had to make up for the lack of numbers :-) The kids did the traditional Easter Egg hunt round the garden and surpisingly some of the eggs hadn't actually gone molten in the sun.

For ANZAC day we went to the St.Ives showground to check out a local fair which had been put on by the churches in the area. Lots of things like pony rides, bouncy castles, clowns, kids climbing on fire engines etc. Dylan liked to look at the ponies but definately wasn't too keen about sitting on one bless 'im. Mind you, the doggie balloon from the nice clown man put a big smile on his face. Excellent fun and a certain little boy was absolutely bushed afterwards... (p.s. Names for Dylan so far include: Sir Sleep-a-lot, Fidgety Small, Little Lord Farty Pants, Bumpus and obviously, Mr.D)

On the "putting our lives together" front, we've moved on a bit. We now own a bed, some garden furniture, we're getting cable broadband in on Monday and Mr.D is signed up for daycare two days a week starting in May. The daycare should be good for both Dylan and Isy as, while they are obviously best mates and have a lot of fun together, they both could do with people their own age to talk to now and again. Also, Isy is going to start job hunting soon and see if 'stralia has a COBOL programmer shortage or not... We've also had a gardener round at our place recently and, now that it's been recovered from the undergrowth, our brick BBQ looks like it might have potential!! Just need a grill and some coals and we may well be looking at our first Aussie cook-off soon!

Work for me is going well. For those interested I'm currently working on getting a web-site tuned so it'll scale up a lot better (more users). Lots of work from the nitty gritty to full scale re-working of the architecture which is pretty nice...

Anyway, that sees us just about up to date. Hopefully we'll be plugged into the grid at home next week and can put some more pics etc. up. Keep the comments coming and don't forget to drop us an email now and again from your corner of the globe...

Apologies for the break in service

The ol' blog has been a tad difficult to keep up to date recently
folks due to a number of reasons but the main ones being: no internet
connection at home yet, busy at work, Easter weekend and a wonderful
24 hour bug which I'll spare you the details of...

Needless to say we're still here, putting it all together and having
fun exploring and what-not when we can! Dylan is rapidly turning into
a little toddler and can say more words than I can. count. :-) His
favourite trick at the moment is to bring you a book to read. Ah. Then
another one. And another, until you've read them all. Not-so-Ah I can
tell you.

Anyway, it's getting late. We should be getting our home internet on
1st May when we will really have some fun. Until then, I'm going to
see if I can beam this in an instant from my phone into your office,
living room, bedroom or net café. (They'd have burnt you at the stake
for that not so long ago...)

Speak soon and don't touch that dial...

Monkeys at the zoo

As requested by some of our most fervent readers, here are some pics of young Dylan up to his usual antics.

Last weekend was spent the afternoon at Sydney's Taronga zoo and had loads of fun. Mr.D was sent into a flat spin at seeing so many funny looking animals which, up until then, he thought only existed in his bedtime story book. His reaction to seeing monkeys for the first time was a sort of laugh-choke-splutter-o-my-god-what-are-they kind of explosive reaction!!!


Much time was spent being his now ever-so-independent self walking about in the park and pic-nic areas making lots of friends and attracting more than one or two of the local papparazzi. A group of japanese girls were particularly taken with him... although I'm afraid the feeling wasn't mutual. Such a showbiz luvvie....




I think that Isy and I have come to realise that when you're only 16 months old, running up and down on a bit of grass is definately a favourite activity. Things like where the path meets the grass can keep a little guy fascinated for, oh, minutes! And never forget that no matter how much stuff is going on around you, there's nearly always an aeroplane going overhead. Not that you have to look at it however, just pointing it to everyone out is fine...


Phew!! All that running around can make a you pretty thirsty I can tell ya....



Not to mention a bit sleepy.....



...one monkey...two monkeys...three monkeys....zzz