Dear all,
The next day we took Julia to see the Outback Spectacular at the Gold Coast. It’s a three-dimensional show with immersive technology and vast video projections which take people on a journey to the heartland of Australia. There were horse and dog acts and a spectacular helicopter “flying” across the arena, telling the story of life in the Australian outback and the unforgiving life on the land. There was also a singer performing Aussie classics in the “outback bar”, a steak dinner and lots of great soundtracks. We’ve seen the Outback Spectacular a couple of times before and unfortunately this was the weakest show of the three, but it gave a flavour of life in the Australian outback. Julia left on the Monday, heading on to Newcastle, Sydney and Melbourne to visit family, and hopefully she’ll visit again one day.
MARCH We went to see Force of Nature on 2nd March with our friends Gavin and Rebecca in the Graceville movie theatre. It is great to have a movie theatre we can walk to. The movie was good but not as good at the first one, The Dry, which was set in the outback. Gavin said this one really should have been titled The Wet as it was set in the rainforest and raining constantly.
On 6th March we caught up with some more of our UK friends Vanessa, Mick and Phoebe Horner when they came for dinner. They are on a three-week tour of Australia before all going on to New Zealand where their son lives. Vanessa was Matt and Jessie’s Year One teacher at Bowdon Church School in Manchester, and Phoebe was in Matt’s class all the way through primary school and one of his best friends. We had a BBQ on the veranda and had a great night finding out all their news. Matt was in Melbourne but met up with Phoebe another night she was in Brisbane and took her to Howard Smith Wharves.
On 10th March there was a street garden party to farewell our neighbour Beulah. She has lived in our street for 74 years and is moving to Tasmania to be closer to her son, who bred our puppy Pippa when he was living there last year. Whenever Pippa spots an open gate she makes a beeline for her birth house and runs around Beulah’s yard and sometimes into the house. We will have to explain the story to the new owners. Most of the street neighbours turned out for Sunday afternoon drinks to wish Beulah well in her new life.
We had a 1980s-style progressive dinner on the following Saturday. We started at Kylie’s house for champagne and entrees (oysters and stracciatella), moved on to Leona & Jeremy’s two streets over (roast lamb and veggies), and then ended up at ours one street on for dessert (chocolate torte with berry coulis) and port. There were ten of us altogether and the people who weren’t hosting provided the wines. We had a really fun evening, but it ran over schedule as it was hard to get people to move on at the appropriate time.
We had a lovely few days in Noosa for the Easter long weekend. We booked a cute little 2-bedroom Airbnb cottage with a pool and a garden for four nights, mainly because we could take the dogs, but also big enough in case the kids turned up. They had both said they wouldn’t come, but did both turn up for a couple of nights in the end. We had a couple of lovely nights just the two of us, with one dinner in Noosa Junction with the dogs and one night in with a BBQ seafood dinner. During the days we spent quite a bit of time at the nearby dog beach; Pippa had such a ball playing with the other dogs for hours on end and was absolutely exhausted at the end of each day. Molly had a fun time too but is mostly a spectator now. When the kids arrived, we walked into Hastings Street for shopping, had lunch out, and went for a couple of lovely dinners in Noosa Junction. A great little mini-break on the last weekend of Summer.
APRIL On 14th April we had a family Sunday lunch at our house with Mum and Dad and my sister’s family. We were celebrating Mum and Dad’s birthdays – now 83 and 85. It was had a BBQ next to the pool and was a nice family day. The following weekend was our Winosaurs wine tasting for everyone in the street. I had found a cool black t-shirt with a T-rex drinking red wine and the word Winosaur printed on it. I didn’t mention it to anyone. One lady immediately noticed I was wearing it, but it took a few hours before everyone else noticed. Amazing how un-observant people can be. The t-shirt was a big hit though.
We went to Burleigh Heads the next weekend to stay with our friends Angela and Gavin who have an apartment there in a perfect beachfront location. We had a lovely first night in their apartment, chatting and watching the moon over the surf. Next morning was an early morning hike up to the headland national park, a quick shower and then lunch of lobster rolls and champagne at Rick Shores Café on the beach. Yum. Katie and Angela hit the shops hard in the afternoon and that night we had a takeaway and watched the Reds rugby. The next morning after an early morning swim (the water was still warm) and then back to Brisbane.
MAY On the 4th May we went to Sunnybank to Trevor Hart’s 85th birthday. Trevor is our Hong Kong friend Paul Hart’s father. We had met Trevor many times on his trips to Hong Kong over the years, and there were many Hong Kong people at the party along with Paul & Diane and their kids Caitlin and Jack. It was nice to catch up on all the Hong Kong gossip (Paul still splits time between Hong Kong and Sydney). All the older guests wandered off for an afternoon nap, so we retired to the Casino bar for the afternoon.
The following weekend was ridiculously busy. On the Saturday night we went to the LiteHaus Gala Ball at Cloudland. LiteHaus is a small grassroots charity which sources second-hand laptops from large companies that change their computers regularly, refurbishes them and then sets up computer labs in remote villages in outback Australia, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and other pacific islands. They have built 367 school computer labs across Asia-Pacific, providing digital learning opportunities to over 238,242 students. Our friend Nathan Groenhout is Chairman, so we arranged a table to support him. It was black tie, so was great to get out our formal wear. The “sell” for the charity went on too long, but the drinks, dinner and dancing were great. We got home well after midnight.
The next night (Sunday) Matthew had his annual Eurovision party at our house. He had around 20 people and they all came dressed as a European country in some very bonkers costumes. Katie and I spent the evening chatting with his friends during pre-Eurovision cocktails and canapes. When the show started they all settled down in the studio and Katie and I heated and served (and ate) various European style dishes, all with little flags stuck in them. As usual Katie had to judge the Best Dressed costume; the winner came dressed as a pint of Guinness in a very clever costume. They left by 11:30pm so it was a fun evening but a very tiring weekend.
On Saturday 18th May I went to the Corporate Games. I had been in asked to participate in the Quiz. A sport for the not-so-sporty, although I was by far the youngest and / or fittest in the room. The event was at UQ, and there were 20 teams of five. When we arrived, the room was unbearably hot. We had a mechanical engineer on our team; he found the out-of-hours override switch for the air conditioning and the instant relief was amazing when it came on. I asked the quiz master if we could have an extra point for getting the aircon going and he agreed. We were pleased to be instantly in first place with one point, but then discovered that each question was worth +/- 1000 points. You got +1000 points for a correct answer and -1000 points for an incorrect answer. The longer we took to answer the question, the fewer points we got. It was quite clever. There were four rounds with an interval halfway. At the interval we were in fifth place, but then we discovered that the café downstairs sold beer, so we stocked up for the second half. This strategy worked well as we were leading by the third round; however, the wheels fell off in the fourth round and we ended up coming third.
That evening we invited our friends Leona & Jeremy over for dinner with their new 10-week old puppy Olive. Olive had not met other dogs before and was already just bigger than Pippa. The two puppies spent more than two hours play fighting in the garden and lounge room floor while Molly looked on. We had a nice dinner while both dogs wore themselves out. Pippa fell asleep within seconds after they left.
The next day we had Katie’s Barrettes and partners over for Sunday lunch. The girls do Barre Pilates together every Saturday (Katie has been going since 2018) and often do outings to the ballet or theatre together. We had a lovely long lunch on a very warm autumn day. The following weekend Matt took me out for a Gin Evening. It was his present for Christmas 2022 but had taken us a while to organise. We met for after-work drinks at a lovely gin bar in the city and then had dinner afterwards. It was nice to have some one-on-one time with Matthew and we had a great evening. Definitely worth the wait.
JUNE On Sunday 15th June we had a dinner for our neighbours and their daughter and husband who had recently bought the house directly across the street. Katie got a bit over-excited when they won the auction and insisted on inviting them over to “welcome” them to the street, despite Emma having grown up in the house next door and has lived in the street longer than we have. They have two little girls aged 6 and 9 years who LOVED Pippa and chased her around all evening. We had clearly forgotten how much work (and how loud) little children could be, and it was quite a relief when they left early for their bedtime. Pippa had spent the last part of the evening hiding under a chair so was also quite relived! The oldies stayed on for quite some time though.
Jessie had organised a Picnic in the Park on 16th June for her charity Girl Up and Katie had invited a few of her University friends along. Jessie is the President of the Brisbane branch of Girl Up, which is a United Nations affiliated organisation, whose mission is to provide inclusive, accessible opportunities for grassroots collective action championing women's rights and liberties. So far this year the group has raised money for the Mater Chicks in Pink Foundation (therapeutic and medical support to people experiencing breast cancer) and secured bags of donations for the Zig Zag Young Women’s Resource Shelter (supporting women and gender diverse victim-survivors of sexual assault and people experiencing or at-risk of homelessness). The group also promotes public education on behalf of feminist causes. They had a good turnout for the picnic. It was a tad too girly for me, so I stayed at home and mowed the lawn.
The next weekend our Hong Kong friends, Ian Whitton and Liz Redfern came to stay. They arrived on Thursday afternoon and we had a BBQ on the deck with Jessie. The next day we sent them off to try out my newly created Walking Tour of Brisbane, which takes in Brisbane’s highlights plus a few interesting engineering sites. They managed most of the inaugural tour, apart from one early misstep, but I may need to make some minor refinements. That night we went to Mr Percival’s under the Story Bridge for cocktails again -- luckily no suicide attempts on this occasion – followed by dinner at Stanleys, a Cantonese restaurant where Matt joined us and then a nightcap Yat for the Doh (one for the road in Cantonese) at Fiume. On Saturday morning we went for a hike up Mt Coot-tha with the dogs and had brunch at the café at the top. Astonishingly we saw a koala in a tree right at the top of the path! Such a rare sight. It was lots of fun catching up with Liz and Ian and so nice to reminisce about our Hong Kong days.
Cheers from Derek, Katie, Matt, Jessie, Molly & Pippa
No comments:
Post a Comment