Central Coast

We are back from a house-hunting week-end on the Central Coast, alas without success.

Already on the way up there on Friday afternoon we had second thoughts due to the horrible traffic conditions. However once there we cheered up a bit. Our hotel was called The Clan and it was situated right on the beach in Terrigal. The receptionist saw that I had a wonky knee and proposed a change of room. We were allocated a comfortable family room on the ground floor with access to the beach with no additional cost. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant and it was top notch, plus hubby could have some wine and not worry about driving afterwards which is normally the case.

The next day was a flurry of visiting different houses and in fact we saw one in particular that we both liked but realised that we couldn't even contemplate.  It would have meant spending three hours one way to go to work for hubby and that would just not be possible. Still we had fun up there and enjoyed seeing all the beautiful beaches - Umina beach, Pearl Beach, Ocean Beach, and a few others.

The weather was also very nice over the week-end, not like last week when it actually got up to +38 ° C. Many people spent the whole day in the shopping mall, even going to the beach was too hot.

Can you see the young boy jumping from the bridge? Well it happened when hubby was walking on the bridge to take some photos and approaching these three young boys, the youngest probably just eight and the oldest maybe twelve, one of the boys asked hubby if he had come to jump. When hubby laughed and said "No", the boy said, "Come on, there is still some life left in you. You are not at the end of your days yet". It was such a challenge and hubby might have done it but he had his camera and wallet so he couldn't do it or so he says!

Another challenge that we (hubby) would like to take up is SUP and they even say that you haven't been to Sydney if you haven't tried it.

Have a nice week dear friends!

The week that was

You know the little joke that goes "What is worse than finding a worm when you bite into your apple?" and you answer, "No, what?" and the person telling the joke says, "Finding half a worm".

Well, I came to think about that when I had lunch with my friend A in Glebe the other day. We had a great meal in a very small Thai place and afterwards we just wanted to use the bathroom before leaving. It meant going through the kitchen area and I felt happy that I had not seen it before eating. It was pretty grotty. While waiting for A, I stepped outside into the little alley way and this is what I found there just outside the kitchen.

Maybe being a vegetarian isn't such a
bad thing.

Anyway, other than that we have had the usual intensive house search going on every weekend and we have managed to narrow it down now both concerning the area that we both prefer and other criteria.

The weather has been very hot and sometimes very windy. Just this morning I heard that a friend of our son lost her property out in the bush in the bushfire. She had made it into a real little paradise far from civilisation, way out in the wilderness. I hope she has the courage to build it up again.

Australia Day is coming up and as always there is a bit of controversy about it. Indigenous people are not happy with celebrating the day that their country was invaded and their children taken from them and that is totally understandable. I am including a calendar of significant aboriginal events in the year.

My home country, Sweden, also has a fairly large group of indigenous people in the north. I am a little ashamed to admit that I know very little about them. However, I watched the Swedish annual film festival this year and there was a movie there that I would love to see called "Sameblod". It was nominated in eight categories and won the Guldbagge (the prize in the form of a large chafer) for best script.

Sweden is a relatively small country but very long, so for people like me from the south west it is a very different land up north and also not so common for people of my generation to have visited. However I would like to visit during the time of the Northern Lights.

Another thing I would like to visit is the big Sapmi market in Jokkmokk.

 

I have to leave you now and get some chores done. It doesn't look so good when hubby comes home from work in the evening and the bed isn't made and I am still in my night gown.

Have a good rest of the week!!!!

Pantry moths

Hubby has an on-going fight with pantry moths. Every morning I hear him cursing and opening doors and hitting the walls with a newspaper to kill them. We don't have tons of them but enough that it is annoying. He read on the web that when you buy new products you should put them in the freezer for a week or so to kill the eggs that might come with the packaging, so now we do that. There is no room in the freezer for anything else though. We also have everything else in sealed glass jars so I think we will soon be moth free.

Yesterday was very hot and today should get up to the +36°C they have forecast. It is even worse for Melbourne where it was up to +40°C yesterday and I think it will be the same or even hotter there today. It is a little bit too hot for me; I prefer a nice 25-27° with a slight breeze.

The house we sort of fell for in our house search yesterday has a pool and is also a short stroll from the beach. There are a few negative aspects though, so we are weighing up the pros and cons before maybe putting in an offer.  I'll let you know how it pans out.

Naturally we had to have our weekly oyster lunch and this time we drove up to Mount Kembla and had lunch in the only pub there which we had always wanted to try. It was a little gem. So if any of you readers come to visit we will take you there. The only thing was that the cicadas were so loud that we had to sit inside, otherwise you couldn't keep up a conversation. It was truly deafening.

Otherwise it has been a nice peaceful week brightened up by a lunch date with our daughter on Friday. We had tapas in Glebe. In this one street we could have had Japanese, Vietnamese, Mexican, vegan, French, and much more, you name it. It is incredible how the food scene has changed since I came to Australia the first time in the early eighties. I would go shopping with my mother in law in the High Street and we might lash out and have a cuppa (Australian for a cup of tea) and a sandwich.

Speaking of the eighties or more the nineties, I received this photo from my friend in Sweden who lived in Grenoble when we did. Their son and ours played together all the time and we saw lot of each other, lunches, dinners, picnics etc.  As always, when you look back, it is with a little melancholia and longing for the times gone by. Anyway here it is!

From the right, me and my father in law and mother in law and my friend M. Behind is hubby.
Stretched out on the grass is our elder daughter and then our son and our younger daughter, and
then barely visible A, my friend M's son, who now is a father of two himself. Life is wonderful!

I have to leave you now. Wishing you health and happiness.

2018

Hello everybody, I told you I'll be back in 2018 and it is already three days into it.

We saw some fireworks on New Year's Eve from our front balcony but the most impressive ones we saw were on TV from Sydney harbour.  They always put on a good show.

Not my photo

We had a lovely time over Christmas down in a place called Dalmeny on the South coast five hours from Sydney. Hubby's sister and her husband and their two adult sons came up from Melbourne and our two Sydney-based children with three friends came too.

Glasshouse rocks in Narooma

The first day when the "kids" went down to have a swim they didn't dare to go in because of all the sting-rays swimming around. After that they found some other beaches that were more accessible for "humans".

Growing up on the west coast of Sweden we didn't have any problems with stingrays but certain summers we had great problems with orange jelly fish. I mean, sometimes it was to the point that you just couldn't get in. This didn't stop our swimmings instructors from persevering with the swimming lessons though. So the bigger kids had to stay in the water and try to sweep away the jellyfish and make a 'free zone" for the younger kids. Unfortunately jelly fish leave burning strings in the water so we had to rush up after our lesson and have cold showers.

.                                         

Actually when I go swimming here in Australia I prefer to go to beaches that have rock pools i.e. saltwater pools on the beach where water flows in from the ocean constantly but there is no surf or rip tide or sharks or box jelly fish. I guess I am not a very adventurous swimmer even though I love being in water as you can see by the photo below.

This was taken in NZ a few years ago.

Next week-end will be taken up with house hunting. In fact every week-end will be until we find something suitable. Spacious, but not too big, with a small garden with a pool. Nice big garage with a workshop, two bathrooms, three bedrooms and also preferably a nice view over the ocean, near a train station. Oh, and not too expensive. Do you think we will find something like that? Well, wish us luck. I will keep you posted.

Have a nice week!

Almost over

Greetings dear readers, 

It's that crazy time again just before Christmas. Traffic is appalling, shopping is a disaster, parking aggressive, people are stressed out, I am sure you get my drift.

We have had a few very hot days, up around +35°, but right now it looks like it is going to rain.

Even Santa (aka known as hubby) needs a beer.

Yesterday,  at hubby's end-of-year work party the weather didn't look very promising at first but then it turned out ok. It was held at the picnic grounds at Woronora Dam, a hidden little treasure.

Fun with balloons.

The couple near hubby had lived six years in Sweden so we had
 a little chat in Swedish

Let's think, what else have we been up to. Well, there was the end of the year lunch with my painting group which was held in a golf club and was very nice.

I have left my painting gear at my art teacher's studio so I won't be tempted to do any painting now when we so desperately need to look for another house. One of the girls at the bbq yesterday told me that they looked at 20 houses a week before they found the one they finally bought. Real-estate prices here in Sydney are ridiculous so we are looking outside the city, to the south mainly.

Another lovely outing was with my friend A. She introduced me to the the Boat house restaurant, across the water from the Sydney fish market. It was a lovely fish restaurant though quite pricey. I think we'll keep it for special occasions.

We were also invited to a dinner cruise in Sydney Harbour on the Sydney Showboats. It was sponsored in part by ANSTO where hubby works. The speeches were kept to a minimum, the food was good and drinks abundant. The show wasn't too bad either so, all in all, a nice evening out. 

No, this isn't a black and white photo, it was just
quite dark

Next time I'll be writing here will probably be in 2018. Time is just going so quickly. Do you remember the end of 1999 when we where fretting over what would happen when we turned the page to 2000?

Take care now and have fun with family and friends. That's what it is all about, isn't it!

Back from Perth

We got back this morning on the red-eye flight from Perth. It is excruciating trying to stay awake in order to get back to Sydney time. Sydney is three hours ahead of Perth in the summer. 

My shopping bag came in handy as usual when hubby
realised he had left his hat at home

It was my first visit to WA and it was really nice, even though you feel very removed from the rest of Australia. Hubby had a few days of work meetings and then on Saturday and Sunday we did some sightseeing. The days while I was on my own I spent riding the free buses around the city and discovering Perth. Here is one thing I found.

This hotel/restaurant is called Miss Maud and was founded by a
Swedish lady about forty years ago. It was past lunch time and
too early for dinner so I just had some tea and Princess cake.

On Saturday we went to the The Pinnacles Desert in Nambung National Park. It was amazing. We also had a delicious seafood lunch in a fishing village called Cervantes famous for its lobsters.

There are hundreds of these pinnacles in different sizes.

On the way to the Nambung National park we got a little side tracked to the town of Lancelin by a sign that said "The best beer garden in Australia". It was beer o'clock so we decided to stop and see for ourselves. It was truly magnificent, placed right on the Indian Ocean and as luck would have it we arrived right on the 11^th day of the 11^th month at 11 o'clock so we partook of the short ceremony for which the local football team was there to celebrate in honour of their war veterans.

The sea is beautifully turquoise.

Hubby was called on to take everybody's photo with each
person's camera so this took a little while.

Sunday we checked out of the hotel after having waited in vain to use the dryer for our laundry. It was a little bit my fault. I thought that it would be nice to arrive back home and not immediately have to do laundry. Instead we arrived here with a whole bunch of wet clothes that probably have to be washed again.

Hubby wanted to visit the Railway Museums in Bassendean and Midland which he did and after that we hit the Swan Valley wine district which is very close to Perth. We didn't really have time to drive all the way down to the Margaret River wine area. It was very nice and even though we were flying home hubby insisted on buying a few bottles.

The day was finished off with a quick trip to Fremantle to see the sun go down in the Indian ocean. It was magic and a beautiful end to a wonderful mini break.

Home is where the heart is

At least that's what they say, but I am not so sure. We have recently had to move house since our landlord wanted his house back, and we picked this house that we are in, in a bit of a panic moment. My heart is not at all in it, in fact I don't really like it at all. Luckily we have just signed the lease for six months and we intend to unpack only the bare minimum.  That means that we have two bedrooms for storage and the whole garage. I cook with one frying pan and one pot so no exquisite dishes at the moment. We are going to give ourselves that time to try to find a place to buy even if we don't sell the house in France simultaneously. So wish us luck.

Hubby has recently discovered the charm of shopping at Aldis. You always hear stories of people popping in for some groceries and coming out with a lawnmower and a TV bench or something else unexpected. Yesterday it happened to us as well. Hubby was just going in to get some drinks and I waited in the car. He came out looking just a bit sheepish with a big package. It was an outdoor shower that he intends to bring to the cottage in Sweden??!!?? As luggage!! Well, I am glad he didn't get the trampoline that was also for sale this week. I guess we are in for many more of these little surprises now that he has seen what they sell. He did mutter about some sliding mitre saw that seemed to be absolutely essential in a home-owners life.

So you can imagine that this move has taken up pretty much all our our time since I got back from Europe in September. We have however had a few nice meals out. One was a vegetarian lunch buffet in a Buddhist retreat down south somewhere. There was also a market and traditional music and dancing.

We were also invited to our dear friends that we got to know in Grenoble and who now lives here. We had a raclette of all things, first time since I came to Australia and it was a real treat. Apparently you can order raclette cheese from somewhere in Queensland.

I must go now and get dressed before the meter guy comes to read our electricity meter.

I gave hubby a little shopping list for things to get on his way home from work. I hope he doesn't succumb to the temptation to get the 3-D printer or the lawn mower that he was also ogling last time. We are supposed to down size for goodness sake not buy more stuff.

Have a nice rest of the week, dear readers!

PS The jacaranda trees are in full bloom and they are gorgeous.