Happy Days at Happy Days

Albany, our new favourite place. And our campsite "Happy Days" on the banks of the King river just outside of the town was a great place to relax and explore the area.

• The weather was a balmy 25, a pleasant change from the 38-40 in Perth!
• The beaches and bays were superb. Great for exploring and rockpools
• I got a few dives in one morning too, with a special appearance from a sealion and weedy seadragon
• A hard slog up a mountain (big hill) in the Stirling ranges. Was tough going but worth it for the views :)

Christmas at 40 degrees

Another Christmas and another tree we went to chop down from the field. Tis fun wandering round the field choosing a tree, even if it was a bit wonky :)

So Christmas day was a fun affair with all the crew around at our house although being a tad warm, we had to do an interesting furniture arrangement to get the garden table into the lounge, as that is the only room with the air con in!

A pleasant meal of Turkey (of course), ham, roasties, sprouts and "pigs in blankets", although we forgot the sweet potato on the BBQ until afterwards....

The only slight disaster was when Ollie decided to head butt our chimnea while testing out the new pogo stick (only to be expected!). But he was fine and managed to recover enough to go running through the sprinklers on our "christmas walk" down to the park around the corner.

Me with my mini Tardis (thanks Glynn!)

Back in Perth, so let's go to the Zoo

No posts for a month! Although in my defense I was with my main blog audience for 2 weeks of that :) So after a great trip back to the UK it was straight back into life back in Perth with work full tilt and trying to organise the last bits for the kitchen (which has been dragging on too long).

But the week went by very quickly and I had a week away over east planned through work. So before that J and I wanted to get out somewhere different and realised we still hadn't been to the Zoo here in Perth. We had heard some good reports and the weather was a balmy 25 on the sunday, so off we popped to see the animals. It was a fun afternoon and we seemed to be very lucky with all the exhibits and see all the animals doing their thing with our favourites being the Orangutan and Tazzy devil - see my picasa albums for all the photos :)

Can you guess which is my foot or my hand...

Jacobs Ladder

So Janice had a good idea to start doing Jacobs Ladder with Erin and I decided to join them one time. The first time seemed a good idea as I did it about 7 times and felt a bit sore, but it wasn't until the next day and the next day that my calf muscles reminded me that I hadn't done that kind of exercise for a while....

But a couple of weeks in, more goes at it and running the hill besides it is a good workout, especially when I don't get a chance to get on my bike due to too many client meetings!

Twas the night of the Evil Jester and the Mad Hatter

We were invited to Erins for a Halloween party and so decided to try and get a decent costume and I saw the Evil Jester one on a website, which as you know dressing up as a jester has been a theme for me off and on over the years, so thought it was a good fit. So I actually bought my first costume ever, as it was about the same price as hiring it and I'm sure I'll get to use it again.

And getting close to the day Janice wasn't sure what to wear so went out on a hunt around the second-hand shops and found a hat! So the hat grew into a full blown outfit of the mad hatter, of course!

Then add my mask as the final touch and you have a deadly duo......

Meet Oink!

Oink, the pig, who of course is a money(Piggy) bank! Well what else did you expect us to have as the first "decorative" purchase in a kitchen....And before you think I've finally lost the plot, it was actually Janice who got it and proud of the fact.

And yes this does mean that the kitchen is mostly complete :) Just the tiles to go now, which we believe we have chosen, a green and white checked pattern?! But that could change by the time we actually get to it.

So I have updated the picasa site with more pictures. But here is a "nearly complete" one!

How NOT to design your kitchen

Don't use drawers, unless you have thought about it VERY carefully! If you take nothing else away from this post, that's the key bit.

Especially after we thought we had been so careful in planning what cupboards (and drawers) to go in the right spots and had the Ikea designers out to review it with us, we discovered that the drawers at the end wouldn't open as the door frame was in the way, Doh! Then the drawer under the sink was a big choozer to store the bins in which covered the hole that the waste pipe from the sink was going to go in, double Doh! Good job Ikea kitchens are very modular and we could take back the drawer bits and change them for cupboard doors and shelves :)

Don't ask about the different colour white(off white) cover panels for the side of the cupboards that no-one noticed even as they installed them, that one and the some wonky handles mean that we're waiting for the Ikea supervisor to call us to get those changed.

AND, after the counter top was delivered (different company) and it was about 1.5cm too short %#$%##^#$, you can imagine I nearly lost the plot right then ;o) But that was fixed up very well and as of today we have some very nice counter tops on and it's starting to look like a real kitchen again, hurrah!!!!

A trip 'over east'

So here I am in Sydney after a few days over in Melbourne and then here last night. Discovered that arriving late at the hotel can be a good thing as I got upgraded to a three room suite, sweet! Means I had different rooms to iron my shirts in and then go to sleep.... oh party on is what I really meant!

After all the hard work I'm now sitting here in the pub enjoying a beer testing out blogging from my iPhone, looking forward to my third flight in three days, not!

But, apparently I will get home to mostly constructed kitchen as the cupboards are getting fitted today.

Anyway, gotta go as my food is ready. Salt and pepper squid, yum yum.

What happens when you get Janice, Ollie and a Lump Hammer together?

A lot of old kitchen cupboards getting SMASHED! Which is handy as we were ripping the whole thing out, which actually turned out to be easier than we thought and got it all out in a few hours.

Then thanks to Glynn and his trailer we were able to get all the old applicances and cupboards in one trip to the tip (which turned out to be Ollie's favourite part of the day :)



Its all about safety

 And just in case we didn't have enough to do we took a trailer full of mushroom mulch to spread around the garden, including the new vege patch (which will be another post).

The Kitchen is in the house!

After a 5 hour marathon in Ikea on thursday night (with a break for meatballs, of course) we managed to load the 3 trolley loads (Yes 3) of boxes into the two cars (good job they have fold down seats). Then the last haul to get them all into the spare bedroom, nobody welcome to stay over right now...unless you enjoy sleeping on boxes!

Thank god I'm not putting all THAT LOT together :)