Play days

It's getting cooler, no longer the balmy weather of the past few weeks, and swimming from now on will require effort and fortitude.
Poured rain this morning, so in an attempt to avert the inevitable TV watching I took ickle one to Playdays. Excellent! They're under new management, and the floor has been resurfaced. We got a free pass in the mail, so why not use it on a rainy day. Many ball pits, swings, wendy houses, cars and slides later it was time to go home. She was having such a good time, but my goodness, what a tantrum.
She literally screamed all the way home and then cried for about 20 minutes. I cooked a magnificent chicken dish with olives, tomato and mash and she ate heaps. Hungry and tired. She fell asleep in my arms around 1pm. Still sleeping at half four.
DJ slept in today while we were away, so he's happy happy. Me, I'm slugging through the marking. I should get it all done, but what a chore!

And I've still the lunch dishes to do. Wind's picked up. Going to be a blowy night methinks.

April and no fool in sight....

Two days in a row! Well it must be the holidays. We went swimming at the pool again today. The weather is just gorgeous, just perfect. Not too hot so I get fried, not too cold.
I got Kate to swim 50 metres today, she's doing well. I also only blew her floaties up to half mast. Didn't even phase her. She still needs to get the arm action going, but overall she's making good progress. DJ says we need to get her floating without floaties, but she freaks out at that. We keep trying.
I feel quite the negligent mother at the moment. All the other kids seem to be going to preschool or having swimming lessons. We go swimming, but DJ says we should be able to teach her ourselves. THe preschools are all oversubscribed in this part of the woods. Very hard that. No-one told me you have to put their names down AT BIRTH! Maybe missed that due to being out of the country.
Taking ickle one horse riding tomorrow, hope she doesn't freak out. Should be fun anyways.

Easter chocolate frenzy!

Well, not exactly. Although we did do a lovely Easter Egg hunt in the garden with the little ones.
The good news is I have a couple of weeks off work. Bad news, marking. Just when I think I have two seconds to rub together. Also housework. Why is it that the amount of housework you have to do expands to fit the time available? It's one of those universal laws. Something like the amount of money you expend always expands to fill the amount of money you have. Or why one sock always goes missing...?
Things are really good at the moment. Loving teaching, the new courses appear to be doing well. Having fun with Kate with less stress than before, now the pressure of phd is off for a bit.
My friend Larina kindly finished off the last study for part1 of phd this week, so now I need to get a few bits and bobs done and then we can get the thing evaluated. Hurrah!
Weather's getting cooler. We're off to Canberra on Wednesday, hopefully taking Kate on her first horse ride! She should love it, I hope.
Other than that, life is good. Loving it. We're off to Algeria at the end of June. Woot! Adventures! We'll get to see the new house and shops and where all our funds have gone over the past few years. I really think we've done the right thing getting the house built for the family, even though we'll never live in it. Something about the Karma of doing the right thing.
We've started a design business. Well, we've registered a business, got the paperwork done and the website up. Now if we ever get a client, I'll die of shock!
Mind you, it's the right thing to do. Nothing like starting a little business in a recession...

Bushfires

It's been quite a horrible week here in Australia. Last weekend there was 48 degree heat and winds from hell in Victoria, and of course half the state went up in flames. The upshot is that firstly 108 and now 181 people are confirmed dead in the fires, the worst in our nation's history.
Today is valentine's day. Today I found out that one of my best friends, Mandy has lost not only her sister, but her husband and their three children in the fires. I didn't even know they were in Victoria, last I heard they were living elsewhere.
So now it's shock, being gutted and remembering that gorgeous little blonde headed moppet and the woman she became. Dead at 30. Her youngest child was the same age as Kate, 3 years old. I can't imagine what the family is going through.

Papers and animations

Last week was mad. I mean really mad.
Really really busy marking all of my students animations and in between times preparing for my paper at the ICEL conference here in Sydney.
The conference was a mixed bag, more so than usual. A combination of touchy feely with a decent education bent. I never knew what type of session I would end up at.
My paper was good, Lucila said it was the best one I've given. I tried to make it simple and she said the lack of technical language made for a better paper.
I was up till all hours all last week getting it all done. That on top of a frenetic last week of work.
I found out Lucila is off to Brazil over Xmas for a month. I think we're both exhausted and a bit lost with Andy being away and all.
Oh well.

It's been a while between blogs...

So, my computer at home finally gave up the ghost. It was about time I updated, the poor old thing was 8 years old. It creaked everytime I turned it on.
So I enlisted a geek to make me a shiney new quad core 4GB ram box. I kept my 1 year old monitor and reused a new dvd drive. Get me with the geeky open up old computer and install stuff grrl.
I amaze even myself sometimes.

It's getting toward the end of semester and my study is going well, albeit with massive amounts of dropouts, but people have their own lives and you can't hold it against them. I can't say it's been a success, but it's going, and I'll get into evaluation mode over January (I live in hope).

Kate turned 3 last week. She is gorgeous and DJ and I are still very very happy together. Smmooothly does it.

Xmas next, we're off for a week in Jervis, which will be resplendent with not very much but very pretty, methinks. Maybe a spot of fishing.

Mid winter blues

It appears that I have not only been suffering from a nasty bout of the flu, but I have also had a massive infection which led to the lymph nodes in my neck expanding to walnut size.
Rather scarey as the doctors usually freak at such an occurrence and I've been in for all sorts of scans and the like.
It was funny, I felt ok, but I looked like death warmed when it happened and I couldn't stop sleeping.
The flu hit about a week later, so I've been quite ill. Coughing blood is quite scarey too. God I hate winter.
So it warmed up a bit and I spent a little time the in the garden with Kate, and she promptly gets bitten by a spider. Off to the doctor who thinks its ok.
People are saying that the bout of illnesses that have hit Sydney has been a result of the visit by the Pilgrims for the Pope's visit. I wouldn't be surprised.
The Olympics are over, thank goodness. It's all quite crazy, all those people jumping around doing things that are no good to anyone, except themselves. Good luck to them. I'm dying to see the Aussie guys gold medal 10m dive. Maybe on Youtube.