Dear all,
Back to Real life. After our trip to Canada I was straight back to work next morning. Jessica did not have much time to recover; after just three days to adjust back to the time zone she had to fly to Sydney by herself. Jessie is not great at navigation and has previously got lost finding her way to places in Brisbane city centre, so we were a bit worried about her getting to her destination in Sydney. We had given her printed instructions covering every step of the way including Google map images of what she should be able to see. Fortunately she made it to Darling Harbour with time to spare. Jessie was meeting a group there at the tall ship South Passage and then heading off on an 8-day Brisbane-to-Sydney Sailing Adventure. Jessie is working through the Gold Duke of Edinburgh Award, which is a huge commitment, and this was her Adventurous Journey. All of the students were around the same age and all doing one of their Duke of Edinburgh Awards.
On 12 January we had a casual dinner at home with our friends the Tods. It was nice to catch up and find out about our respective summer holidays. The next day I picked up my new car. The Ford Mondeo that I had brought over from the UK has become increasingly annoying as parts had to be imported from the UK whenever it needed any work done. It was getting more and more expensive to keep it running and it also needed new tyres, new brakes and $1000 worth of parts plus labour. I decided it was time to get rid of it, but no car dealers wanted it either, so in the end I sold it at the wreckers. It was actually still quite a good car and they will have been able to fix it up and sell it on for a good profit (despite all its problems). Anyway on Saturday I picked up a new dark grey Mazda 3. It is a smallish car but is a top-of-the-range model and is lovely to drive!
That week Matthew bought himself a new laptop using the money he had got for Christmas and his birthday. For the past two years he has managed with the heavy and clunky tablet computer that he had at high school which was like a brick. He is delighted with his new light and slim notebook computer.
On Wednesday 18 January Jessie made it back to Brisbane after her sailing adventure. I took the afternoon off and Katie and I drove out to Manly Marina and had a lovely long lunch whilst waiting for her ship to come in on a beautiful sunny afternoon. South Passage arrived with great ceremony at around 3pm. She is a huge tall ship which sleeps 18 students and 10 staff members. They were a little late arriving and a huge crowd had arrived to cheer her in as she pulled up to the pier. Jessie had a really fantastic time and made lots of new friends. The students had been in three groups taking turns to be on “watch” 24-hours a day, so she was pretty tired. She has obviously learned a lot and it sounded like a really fun experience.
A few days later we went to see the Mamma Mia Musical at QPAC. It had been a Christmas present to us all from Katie. We had dinner at the theatre beforehand and had a really good night. Mamma Mia is going to be the theme of one of the STAGE dance routines for the year so it was great to see the show and it gave Jessie lots of ideas for costuming and choreography.
The next morning Jessie was back at school for the start of Term One. The first day was only the school prefects, Captain and Vice-Captain for a leadership day and she felt a bit hard done by having to go in early. She has had very little time at home these school holidays.
It was Australia Day on Friday 26 January and we went to our friends the Brodies for their annual BBQ and cricket on the banks of the river. It is always a fun party. This year Gary had decided the cricket match should be Youngsters vs Oldies. There were quite a few boys there from the BBC cricket team, so we oldies got badly thrashed. I don’t think he should arrange the team like that again! We went home for a little rest and then we went to our friends the Biddles for another evening barbeque. A nice day.
On Sunday it was the STAGE Dance auditions. Jessica is one of the 2018 STAGE Captains so she did not have to audition this time but she and Gemma had to create and teach the Audition Routine and then auditioned all the other dancers. All went well and they are very excited about the dance year ahead. A few days later Katie and I went to the Senior Leaders’ Induction Ceremony at St Aidan’s. Jessica was so pleased to be a Prefect. She will have a busy year with all these new roles. The ceremony was nice but WAY too long. They could have cut out at least three hymns to get it down to a reasonable length!
The following week was the Welcome to STAGE Evening for all the dance parents. Usually I run the bar and then clean up while the proceedings go on, but this year, as it is Jessica’s last year we roped someone else in to run the bar and I just attended as a guest. Jessica and Katie gave speeches for a large portion of the proceedings as STAGE Captain and Support Group President. I didn’t really need a welcome to stage and knew pretty much everything but it was nice seeing them speak and I managed to get in a bit of heckling during Katie’s speech which amused her greatly.
On Saturday 17 February Katie went to a long lunch to celebrate our friend Leona’s 50th birthday. She left at 11:30am and didn’t make it home until 10pm. I spent most of the weekend repairing our front fence. It was built about 30 years ago and one of the fence posts had fallen over the previous week. It had totally rotted in the ground and both of the bolts had corroded. I had to jackhammer out the concrete around the old post before I could replace it. It was about 80cm deep and it took me four hours of jackhammering to break up. It was very, very hard work but I did manage to get it done.
Matthew started his new job as a Para-legal at King & Wood Mallesons (http://www.kwm.com/en). He had been for an interview in early January and was delighted to be offered a position for one day per week. The company is very big in China and we think his Chinese language skills really helped getting the job. He caught the train into the city just like all the other wage slaves and felt quite grown up.
The next week Katie went out for dinner with all her girlfriends for Lisa Sugg’s birthday. They went into the city to a restaurant in the casino. It was a school night and I had gone to bed before she got home. When she arrived home, she tripped up the stairs, stood on the dog, switched the lights on and off like a disco and dropped her shoes noisily before asking if I was awake or not. She had a lot of gossip to pass on so ended up talking at me until well after midnight. I think the girls had a good night but we both had a slow day at work the next day.
We went to the St Aidan’s P&F Cocktail Party on 24 February. There are an inordinate number of events at the start of every school year. It was a fundraising event (as they all are) in a new building. It was a very pleasant evening, lots of nice food and drinks and a fantastic opera singer. There was an unusual fundraising art collection for sale. It was so unusual that they didn’t seem to sell very much. We had a nice time chatting to all the year 12 parents.
The following weekend was the St Aidan’s Open Day. Katie was running the STAGE Dance Stall as usual and Jessica and the girls were dancing for the first time this year. I went along ostensibly to support them but mainly for the bacon rolls.
It was our friend Leona Tod’s 50th birthday party on Sat 10 March (another event in the Festival of Leona). I went around to help Jeremy set up fairy lights in the afternoon. Loads of our friends were invited so we had a big night. They live in the next street from us and when we went home at 2am, we could still hear loud music from our house. It was surprising the police didn’t shut them down. The following weekend we didn’t have anything on, so we went to Eat Street Markets. We had a really nice night getting a delicious selection of food from the street market stalls and wandering around watching the different bands. Eat Street is really well designed with stalls in metal containers, a Kombi Alley and lots of light strings; it is very cool.
I had to go to Kununurra on 20th March. One of my team members had been booked to go there the day before via Darwin but there was a cyclone in Darwin and his flight got cancelled. It is a three-day trip and he could not shuffle forward one day so I had to go instead. Unfortunately it was impossible to get flights through Darwin the next day as there were so many emergency workers going to help with the cyclone clean-up so the only possibly route was Brisbane – Sydney – Perth – Kununurra. It took 21 hours to get there. It was a long way to go just for two hours of work (inspecting an aircraft hangar in Wyndham). When we got to our hotel in Kununurra, there was no power. An 8-year-old aboriginal boy had stolen a car the night before and rolled it into their electricity switchboard and it was still being repaired. I got sent to three different rooms, each without power, before I gave up and went to the pub for dinner. When I got back I was given another room, which still only had power to the power sockets but not the lights. I went to bed but at least I could watch TV. I got up at 3:30am the next day and went for a run around the town. It was a little scary as the only other things around were barky dogs roaming the streets and aborigines sleeping in parks, many obviously drunk. I went to the roadhouse for breakfast as the promised hotel continental breakfast had not been delivered to my room. It was a little ordinary. We set off for Wyndham at 6:00am and arrived by 7:00am. We were inspecting the aircraft hangar at the airport. It was sooo hot, about 37 degrees and was a real sweat box in the hangar. I was in there for two hours and by the time I finished all my clothes were dripping in sweat. It was very unpleasant. I drank 3 litres of water in those two hours.
Our next flight out wasn’t until the afternoon, so we went sightseeing in Wyndham. It was a bit of a dump actually. Smashed up houses, no shops, no industry and closed factories. On the way back to Kununurra we stopped at lovely waterhole. It was a short walk down a spectacular cliff. I was still so sweaty I decided to go for a swim. It was a bit weird skinny dipping with work colleagues but what the heck. We arrived back in Kununurra for lunch and flew on to Darwin in the afternoon. We had a leisurely dinner in Smith Street and a few drinks before bed. Our flight back to Brisbane wasn’t until the afternoon the next day so I worked in the hotel. I went for a run before breakfast along the park next to the Esplanade. It was distressing to see how many lovely old trees had been uprooted by the cyclone. The city was a real mess. I made it home by 7pm that night having totally circumnavigated Australia in three days for just two hours of work!
The next night we went to Tocco in Tenerife. It is the sister restaurant to the one Matthew works at in Graceville. It has a Michelin Star chef and the food was fantastic. We went with our friends Gary & Helen Brodie and other friends Gary and Shelly. The food was fantastic. Gary and Shelly had recently downsized to an apartment in Tenerife when their kids moved out. It is a really cool apartment block in a trendy area. Some of the kids have now moved back in so it has become a bit cramped!! Kids!
That Sunday we had Matthew’s friend Candice over for dinner. She was a Chinese exchange student who went to St Aidan’s and was in her second year at University. She came over a bit early and helped Matthew with one of his Chinese assignments. It was nice to see her again. She is a lovely girl.
On Wednesday 28 March Jessie went to the St Aidan’s Formal with her date Bryce who is a BBC Y12 student. The Formal is a huge deal and there had been much discussion amongst her group about partners and seating arrangements. Jessie looked stunning in a long deep red off the shoulder dress and the boys all wore suits. They all looked incredibly grown up. We hosted a Pre-formal Drinks party at our house for her group of friends and their parents, from 4pm to 6pm. We had organised a photographer to take photos of the kids while the adults had nibbles and drinks. There were 15 kids and about 30 adults so it was a humming little party. At 6pm an enormous white stretch Hummer arrived. The kids lined up for photos in front of the hummer which totally blocked the street and then we waved them off. All the adults went to a restaurant in St Lucia while the kids were at the formal at the Sofitel in the City.
After the formal Jessie, a girlfriend and their dates were all driven to the Post in Brookfield by one of the other Dads, where they had a wild and wonderful party and all let their hair down. I had to pick up in Brookfield at 2am and they all fell asleep in the car on the way home. I had to get up at 6am for work so it was a slow day. Luckily I had a sleep before 2am.
Thankfully it was the end of Term One. Jessie was feeling a bit under the weather, the result of an extremely busy term culminating in a huge late night at the Formal. A couple of days later on Easter Day we had a family lunch to celebrate Mum and Dad’s birthdays as well as Easter. We did a barbeque lunch followed by an Easter Egg hunt in the garden for the little kids. By this time Jessie was really quite unwell so I rushed her to the doctor and she was diagnosed with a nasty case of tonsillitis and larynxgitis. We knew that she was really quite poorly as she couldn’t eat her Easter chocolate. So unlike her. Luckily she had a few quiet days ahead to lie on the sofa.
Love from Derek, Katie, Matt, Jessie & Molly
South Passage
Katie waiting for South Passage.
