Burn baby burn

As we are both partial to some open fires and to look appropriate for our new house, we just acquired a "chimnea"! Now if you're like me and haven't been to Mexico you may not know what that is, so here you go.....

A big terracotta chimney like pot, that gets nice and warm, which we thought would be a great idea for this time of the year. Obviously excited about burning stuff we had a go tonight, but have realised why it recommends some sand and tiles in the bottom to raise the fire level up a bit, so you can get to it more easily and it heats the top section more quickly.

So just need to go scavenging for wood from everywhere now :)

Day trip out to Mundaring and York

The view of Mundaring reservoir from the Dam wall! As much as I'd like to claim this one for myself, Janice took it.... With my excellent teaching of course!!

The rest of them are on the picasa site with some of York, as we went exploring round there after Mundaring. It was a good day to get out of Perth for a day and test out the new car (called Frank....thought Kath would want to know) on the open road.

House warming party

Before we had been in the house too long we wanted to have a house warming party, so organised it for saturday afternoon. We thought the afternoon would be better as we could use outside, because it's getting cold as the sun goes down.

We had a good turn out with the crew coming, Phil our old next door neighbour, quite a few from my work and one person from J's as most of them were already booked up. But we hadn't made it clear enough that we wanted to cater for everyone, so most had eaten or had to go onto other things that evening, so we had loads of food left over and I won't need to visit the bottleshop for a few months :)

Really nice to have people over and the fact that we could actually have the party for our first home!!!

The 4 hour guide to a business meeting in Karratha

A meeting today in Karratha, so we flew out at 7.30am arrived at 9.30, had toured round the "town" and seen all the sites by the time we started the meeting at 11. Then the meeting ran a bit shorter than expected, so finished by 12.30 and rather than wait around (great exploring as a tourist or going out on a boat, but not in your business clothes) we managed to get back to the airport and change to the 1.30pm flight, so back in Perth by 3.15.... Got to be the quickest return flight to somewhere I've ever done :)

It was good to get some sun and heat for a few hours though!

This time prawns were on the menu

So after convincing Marc to come diving this week with encouraging words like "dark, freezing and you'll be attacked by weird looking critters" (divers are a strange lot.....). We took to the water with the "big" torch working as expected :) and my new wetsuit top with integrated hood, toasty!

We headed straight out to the area where we hoped we would find a mix of prawns(as I had a prawn net this time) and crabs(thicker 5mm gloves on). The prawns were definitely harder to catch as they are small and fast, then even when you think you've snagged one on the bottom, they burrow into the silt and vanish! I managed to grab one good size crab for Marc and then he got another, but unfortunately while helping me with the "savage" prawns the catch bag came open and his crabs scuttled off... If you want to know how much you can hear people when they are laughing underwater, it's a lot!

All in all, we wouldn't survive long in the stone age as hunters gatherers (three prawns and one crab), but it was fun and warmer this time too.

Apparently there are some seahorses to spot when you're not scrambling round chasing critters for the catch bag, so we might take the more leisurely route next time to check them out. Will let you know!

The proof is in the pudding (if crabs were made of pudding)

So after last nights dive for a feast, we wanted to try out the crabs while they were fresh after being stored overnight in the fridge. And of course, the longer they were there, the more creeped out Janice would get!

So Janice cooked up a lovely red wine and shitake mushroom risotto and I got the "big pan" out with some water boiling for the crabs. With a quick peruse of the internet for some cooking tips, we decided to go with the same basic plan as the lobster and just boil them for about 8 minutes.

Popped them in looking all blue and they turned out all fresh and cooked, like so....

 And it was worth the cold, pain and effort as they were yummy indeed!! Just like a sweet version of crayfish, maybe even better..... And after the battles with crayfish and eating them this was a lot simpler now we have a system and easier to get rid of all the leftovers too.

They are planning some more dives for the coming weeks, so might do it again I think. With thicker gloves and go after the REAL BIG ones this time, ha ha! Well sounds like a plan anyway.

They call them "blue swimmer crabs"

That's because they swim bloody fast! Well, when I'm diving in the swan river as I was tonight, trying to catch them, they did dart about avoiding me and the other two divers. Especially as you lose them once they are out of the beam of the torches, which in my case wasn't very much at all as I was using my backup smaller torch at the time :)

It seemed a good suggestion at the time to try and catch some prawns and crabs in the river. Except for it being COLD..... although my dive computer told me it was still 16 degrees (that's about 60 in old money), I didn't believe it for a minute.....brrrrrrr!

But was fun and would do it again, as long as I had another layer on and make sure my main torch is working properly! And caught three good size ones, so crab for dinner tomorrow night.

Do you know who I am?

I'm finally an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional)! What does that mean? you may ask. Well, it means that I have actually got round to doing some microsoft exams, specifically architecting and configuring SharePoint.

Now I know I've been doing this for many years and probably should done the exams a long time ago, but you all know how much I love studying and didn't have any real drivers to do it earlier. It does get registered against me so I have this as a recognised certification, but also importantly is that it goes towards the company maintaining the microsoft gold partner status.

And like most of these things the studying and practise exams were harder than the actual exam, so will have to be a bit more pro-active in the future in doing the new versions of the exams as they are relased.

Am I more proud of my MCP than my MSDT (Master Scuba Diver Trainer) certification....I'll let you decide ;o)

Is it a Dualis or a Quashqai?

Depends upon where you live, it seems...

So, we have just bought a new car, a nissan Dualis (also called a Quashqai in the UK, and I thought Dualis was a weird name!) It is a raised hatch type thing with AWD (that's 4 wheel drive for part-timers) so we can get along some tracks and on the odd beach.

It's black, which is different to all the other white cars, but apparently in WA not the best idea as it absorbs the heat on the hot days, but with air con being much better nowadays we hope that won't be a real problem. Time will tell :)

So will have to get out and about on some trips soon to test it out, just not let Glynn and Marc get involved or they'll have me off down some crazy tracks to "test it out"....

We've become a 2 car family

Tried to avoid getting another car but it's difficult here in Perth and now that we are living a bit further inland, which makes the commute further for me. Got a deal through work for a car allowance which makes it a better deal so started looking seriously and after many deliberations, that nearly made the house choice seem easy we went for a test drive of a Nissan Dualis we decided that was the model we wanted. Good timing gave us access to an ex-demo model with very few kms on the clock, so was too good a deal to pass up.

Excited to pick it up tomorrow and go cruising around in the new motor :)