February
2014
Letter No. 216
Dear all,
BACK TO SCHOOL The kids started school the last
week of January. I had to go to Darwin that week and was there all week so I
missed Jessica’s first day at her new high school -- St Aidan’s Anglican Girls’
School. I was not popular missing that but I managed to say good luck to Jessie
very early before leaving for the airport. That night we talked on Facetime and
she told me all about it. Matthew also started Year 11 and his day was also
quite significant as he went straight after school to the Orthodontist to have
his braces put on. He had a difficult first few days as his braces were
uncomfortable and he couldn’t eat properly so was a bit grumpy. Jessie found
her first few days at school challenging, as she struggled to work her locker
key, find her way around the school and work out which books she needed for
each class. She came home in tears one day as she’d been told off for being
late, when she couldn’t actually find the classroom. It was probably a good
thing I was away as I managed to avoid all the angst at home...
Meanwhile in Darwin I was doing final
inspections of steelwork for buildings on two different Defence bases to allow
them to start sheeting the roof. Most inspections are done by Darwin staff but
for critical ones, someone comes up from Brisbane. One base was in Darwin and
one in Katherine. Unfortunately it was
bucketing down rain all week so I ended up getting very wet!
FEBRUARY 2014 On Saturday 1st February
we went to “Ritzy Fish” for dinner with our friends the Grahams and the Tods.
It is the local fish and chips shop but a little posher than your average chippie,
with a nice BYO seating area outside the shop. Everyone wandered back around to
our house for port afterwards, while the kids did a lot of running around the
garden screaming and bouncing on the trampoline.
The next day (Sunday) Jessica had her audition
for the St Aidan’s dance troupe which is called STAGE. She was very nervous as
they are a tough group with a very high standard and only accept 34 girls from
the whole school. It was a two-hour audition to see how quickly the girls could
pick up a new dance routine. On Monday she found out that she had been accepted
and she was delighted! In the end the group only took 28 girls as the standard
of the other applicants was not high enough. The training is twice a week before
school at 6:45am! This will be a big shock to Jessie’s system.
I went to a music festival on Sunday 2nd
February at Mt Cotton on the outskirts of Brisbane. It was called “A Day on the
Green” and was held in a lovely green field at the Sirromet Winery. The bands
playing were British India, Something for Kate, You Am I with the Hunters &
Collectors headlining. The last time I saw the Hunters & Collectors was in
1992 with Craig and Kirsten Wiley – 22 years previously! This time I went with
John Haughton and the audience was mainly in their 40’s. It was all quite
civilised, with the winery selling wine by the bottle, which was going down
quite quickly in the warm afternoon sun. We had a really great time and it brought
back find memories of my youth!
Poor Molly had her annual vaccination on 7th
February. She thought she was going for a fun trip out but about half way down
the path to the Vet she realised where she was going and turned tail and tried
to scarper. Katie said she had never seen a dog quiver as much as she did on
the table. She was judged healthy and perfect weight for a dog her size.
The kids and I went to White Water World that
weekend. We had a nice day on the waterslides but I must have picked up a virus
or something, as I felt very poorly by the time I got home and had to have the
next two days off sick in bed with a cough and headache.
On 15th February we went to a 40th
Birthday party for an ex-AECOM employee Nathan Groenhaut. It was a wine tasting
party and he had a professional wine company there, doing tasting for six
different wines. They didn’t start until after we had been there for quite a
while, so everyone was quite merry and perhaps didn’t pay as much attention to
the wines as we should have. There was a lovely BBQ and heaps of canapés
including to-die-for oysters. There were lots of people we knew there from
AECOM and we had a really good night and slightly sore heads the next morning.
Katie had organised a big event at BBC which took
place the following week on Tuesday 18 February. It was a Speaker Event with Dr
Michael Carr-Gregg, who is one of Australia’s leading psychologists and appears
regularly on TV and in other media to talk about parenting adolescents. The
Parent Connections committee & Katie had done all the work for the event,
organising the contract with his agency, booking Michael’s travel & hotel,
arranging a full day’s schedule with talks to the boys, staff and the parents,
and then working with BBC’s two sister schools to support the event. Michael
was a very entertaining and professional speaker, very slick and funny but also
very informative. He was a big hit with the students – and it takes a lot to
impress a room full of 15-year-olds. At the evening presentation, Katie had to
open the evening, making the introduction to an assembled audience of over 400
parents. The next day she received a large bouquet of flowers from BBC as a thank
you for her efforts.
The next weekend Jessica went to her first high
school dance at St Aidan’s. She went with a gaggle of her friends, all wearing
matching outfits. I had to pick four of them up afterwards and drop them off
for a sleepover at a friend’s house. I was amazed the difference between boys and
girls when picking them up. Matthew had gone to the same dances a few years
previously and when asked about the evening the best you could get was one word
answers with no information at all. When I picked up the girls, they never
stopped talking! They burbled on for the whole trip home and I drove extra slow
to get more details from them. Apparently they were all OUTRAGED at the older
boys and girls who were actually KISSING in the dark corners (Yay), the one boy
who showed up drunk and got thrown out and that someone had pinched Jessica’s
bum! She was very indignant about this and reported the boy to a teacher and
got him thrown out as well (Yay again). It was really very amusing.
The next day Ian and Carmen Muir came over from
afternoon tea. They were back from Hong Kong to set Carmen up for going to University.
It hardly seems like yesterday when they brought her home and she is already a
uni student! Ian had to come and help set her up with a place to live (with her
grandmother) and then sort out bank accounts, tax file number, driver’s
licence, car, university stuff and all the other life essentials. John Haughton
also called in. It was nice to catch up.
On 27th February it was the BBC
Parents and Friend’s (P&F) Welcome Party. Once again Katie was organising
this event, as the President of Parent Connections. I had been roped into
running the bar yet again and arrived early to sort out the drinks and ice
while Katie was running around pointing, as she does, getting people to fix up
the sound system, lighting, catering etc and her team were stringing up fairy
lights and sticking up green, black and white pompoms. Luckily there was lots
of help this year so I managed to slope off and enjoy myself a little, rather
than working all evening. There were tours around the new Middle School
Building which had just opened that school year. AECOM had done the design work
for the project so I went for a tour to see the completed building. The last
time I had been to see it was when they were casting the reinforced concrete
floors. It was a pretty impressive building when it was all fitted out. Each
class room had five 42-inch TV screens so each group of six boys could work
interactively on a different topic. Five classrooms had moveable walls, which
could be removed to create a huge space over one entire floor plate. It was
very wow. It was a nice evening and included background music by the boys, a
mini art exhibition, plus several speeches by the School Captain, Headmaster
etc. Katie was presented with flowers (again) for her organisation of the event
and we both stayed until the bitter end cleaning up the bar. I am looking
forward to next year when I can hopefully discharge all responsibilities and
not work at the event at all! We had a fun evening all the same.
MARCH 2014 We had a BBQ at our house on 1st
March with a group a Graceville State School parents. I guess now that Jessica
is not going to school with any of the children we will slowly drift apart but
we owed them all a dinner. Some of them
are planning to do an overland 4WD trip through the Simpson Desert at Easter
and tried to talk us into going with them. We were interested but decided we are
not well equipped enough to tackle such a serious desert yet.
We were invited to a Tennis afternoon and Sausage
Sizzle at Jeremy and Leona’s house the next weekend. Sadly we failed to ply our
opponents with Pimms and Lemonade before our first doubles game this time and subsequently
lost! Katie and I both had another game with other tennis partners and had a
very pleasant evening. The kids all played tennis together after we had
finished and then we all had a nice BBQ as the sun went down.
Wednesday 12 March was the BBC Twilight Concert.
Matt is in mostly Senior bands this year so he was performing in it for the
first time. The Twilight Concert is a great concert as it is shorter than some
of the others and features the highest level ensembles with some really lovely
music.
The next weekend we had my sister Lisa and
family over for afternoon tea and a BBQ. The kids are always complaining that
they never see their cousins enough so they were pleased to spend the afternoon
together. Poor Andrew had to leave midway through the afternoon to go home and
put their sheep and other animals to bed before coming back to our place for
dinner. We had a nice relaxing afternoon.
It was the BBC Volleyball breakup dinner on 22nd
March. It is our favourite BBC sports event. It is a nice informal event held
outdoors at the school amphitheatre with a simple BBQ and minimal speeches. It
is very different to the Basketball dinner, where the speeches go on and on and
on. It was a lovely warm afternoon and we had a nice chat with the other
parents.
I went to see another big 1980s band, the
Sunnyboys, on 28th March with my mate John again. I went straight
after work and we had a quick dinner at a pub near work. The lead singer had developed
schizophrenia at the height of their fame and ended up drinking heavily and
going a bit off the rails. There were about 3000 people at the concert, most in
their 40s. The lead singer was grossly overweight and all the band members were
bald or grey, but when I closed my eyes I could have been 16 again. They
sounded exactly the same as when I saw them last in 1983 – 31 years ago! I had
such a good time.
Now that Katie had finished doing school events
(for a while at least), she has been on a mission to get the household jobs up
to date. Through the past month she has had the dryer serviced, the house alarm
system checked, the oven cleaned, the pest spray done, had a major service done
on her car, bought a new chair and made a few trips to the garden centre. She
has even booked in some expensive tree trimming work, to be done later this
year. It has been an expensive few weeks.
Matt finished school on 3rd April
and Jessie finished on the 4th. This term has really flown. Jessica
had a really terrible last day. Her school had the annual cross country run in
the morning, and afterwards some girls were mucking around throwing water in
the bathrooms while they were getting changed. Somehow Jessie’s i-phone got
wet. She dried it off but it didn’t seem to be working very well. That
afternoon a big group of girls all went to Indooroopilly Shopping Town after
school to hang out as an end-of-term treat. Jessie had planned to catch the
train home from there. She had never caught the train from Indooroopilly to
Graceville before and didn’t know that there are Express trains which sometimes
stop at that station! She hopped on the next train without even thinking about
it and was quite distraught when the train sailed straight past our stop and
carried on all the way to Darra, about five stops down the line!
Jessie tried to ring Katie, but by this time
her phone had almost stopped working, and she couldn’t hear anything that Katie
was saying although Katie could hear her. A nice lady helped her find the
platform for the slow Stopping-All-Stations train back to Graceville. There is
quite a different social dynamic in Darra. By the time she got back onto the
train, Jessie had learned a few of the differences between Graceville and Darra.
According to her, almost everyone had tattoos and several people were rolling
cigarettes on the train. One of them even stuck the cigarette behind his ear,
which Jessie found quite shocking. There was only one free seat on the train next
to a rough young boy with body piercings who used lots of swear words and said
something rude about private school girls, so she moved down to the other end
of the carriage. When she finally made it back to Graceville, Katie was
standing on the platform to meet her and Jessie promptly burst into tears. I’m
sure she won’t make that mistake again! Just to really ruin her day, Jessie’s
i-phone had died completely by the evening, despite desperate attempts to dry
it out with the hairdryer or a bowl of rice, so she is now saving up for a new
phone. Not a great end to the first school term. It can only get better.
Matthew was invited to attend the “Brisbane
Boys College Day of Excellence” on 4th April. It was a simulation
day for prospective students. There were about 30 boys selected by the
Headmaster to assist on the day. Matthew was pleased to be asked as he thinks
that the boys who were selected will be chosen as prefects when he is in Year
12 next year. They spent the day with prospective student buddies and went to
pretend lessons all day. He said it was quite fun.
We went to a 50th birthday party on
5th April for one of Katie’s friends Fiona Cheyne. Fiona is one of
the Parent Connections ladies and helps out at all of the events. The party was
a nice mix of BBC parents and her family and she had done a bumper load of
canapés which kept coming all night. They have a really unusual block where
there is a street at the front of the house and also at the back of the house.
I have never seen streets like that before. The party was nice but we didn’t stay
too late as the next day my family was coming for a BBQ lunch.
We were up early in the morning. I ran back and
got the car from the party while Katie prepared lunch. Mum and Dad were coming
over for their combined birthday party and Lisa and Andrew and the kids came as
well. We had an early Easter Egg Hunt for the kids after lunch to combine three
celebrations into one. It had been a lovely day and the kids were all swimming
but it started to rain just as the final Easter eggs were devoured.
That’s all for this month. Cheers,
Derek, Katie, Matthew, Jessica & Molly
Molly being a dog!
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