Four Housewarmings and a Fortieth!

We are on the verge of throwing a third housewarming as we are moving house next weekend to another house down the road and will no doubt have housewarming drinks within a few weeks!

We will only be there for 5 months, so come September we will be moving again so in a 10 month period, we will have excuses for having had four house warming’s.... can you believe it?!

The owners of this house have split up and are arguing about it, so we can't stay. We have to say goodbye to the pool and the rainforest and say hello to another lovely house down the road with a pond and stream (and only 3 doors along from our friend Caroline or staggering distance) and still with room for people to visit (phew!). It is nearer the school and only one road to cross which is the school crossing, so it's safe for the kids to walk themselves and home again. The gardens are lovely with banana's and macadamia nut trees, lemon, lime and orange trees and pumpkins growing which we can use. It has a huge open space so you can see the stars, which I am really looking forward to enjoying. The house is older, over three floors and the living area is lovely with a wood burner which will be great for the winter evenings. I looked up average weather in June/July here, which is winter. During the day it's about 21 degrees, but the evening drops to about 9 degrees!! Brrrr. I might just have to put a cardigan on!!

Alex's birthday went really well. He worked on his birthday and came home to friends who had arrived from Sydney and he opened lots of pressies. We had some local barramundi for a birthday supper and went to bed about midnight after a few glasses of wine! We woke about 4.30 as I had a birthday surprise for him so we drove down off the mountain range to Beerwah and met a couple of fellas with a van and trailer at about 5.15 in the morning. Alex only knew what he was doing when he saw the basket on the back of the trailer and realised he was going up in a hot air balloon. It was stunning. We went right over the Glass House Mountains, which you can see at the top of this page. There was another couple in the basket with us plus the pilot who was a lovely chap called Andy. After the flight, we landed with quite a bump and as the rain clouds headed our way, we realised how lucky we were as we had enjoyed a dry clear patch before it bucketed down later on.

We enjoyed a cooked breakfast with champagne and heard about the history of ballooning and were 'christened' with a bubbly dunked cork as pronounced 'balloonatics'! We made our way home where Iain and Anne had got the kids off to school in our absence. We took them for a drive and went to show them the mountains we flew over and then stopped off at the Cheese Factory at Maleny, just 15 minutes from here. It was, by this time, pee-ing down, so you couldn't really see very far but it was still nice to get out. We went for lunch at The Spirit House which is a fairly famous Thai restaurant. I emailed Sherri, at the Mistley Thorn the link to the website when I discovered it was just up the road. She already knew about it and uses their recipes sometimes at the Thorn! Small World eh? The food was divine and we had iguana's coming up to the table just in case we dropped anything. We will certainly go back there soon.

On Saturday, Alex picked up his friend Jeff from Melbourne who flew up to our little Sunshine Coast Airport to see us. Three of Alex's friends from Hassell also came up with their wives and so Alex, Iain, Jeff, Fraser, Mac and Matias all went on a pub crawl for the afternoon, leaving me and the wives here with a friend of mine who is a beautician. She massaged us, painted toe nails, tinted eyelashes and waxed whilst the boys all enjoyed a tour of the area and pints in about 4 pubs. When we met up again about 7pm, it wasn't long before lots of other people joined us for the evening and of course food and drinks were served. I made my Javanese chicken and coconut curry prawns with rice and salads friends brought, which all went down really well. Apart from overdoing the rice, everything else went which was great. There must have been about 30 people here with kids, so there was a fair crowd.

As the evening got going, after everyone had eaten, I did my song for Alex. I changed the words to Kid Rocks All Summer Long and if I can download the video to you tube, I can hopefully put a link on this page to it for anyone who feels the urge to see it. We continued doing singstar until 3.30am, then fell into bed after an exhausting 48 hours!

Sunday after a cooked breakfast and a hangover cure of a dip in the pool, we took Iain and Anne to the airport then took Jeff to Mooloolaba for some lunch and showed him the cosmopolitan part of the area. On Monday he went down to Brisbane with Alex as he had a meeting and then flew home from Brisbane that afternoon. So all in all, it was an excellent weekend and now back to reality with a big thump!

This week, I have mostly been packing boxes. We are keeping the cost of moving down, so I am packing the boxes myself. Harvey is working regularly at the pizzeria washing up and doing the pizza orders, taking the orders, taking the pizzas out of the oven, cutting them up, making boxes, dough, all sorts really. He is enjoying it, though sometimes it is just plain old washing up! But he gets paid well so he is chuffed. At the moment he is earning more than me as with an impending house move, I haven't promoted 'Paddle' as if I got anything; I wouldn't be able to give it time until after we are settled and unpacked.

I will email everyone with our new address and luckily our telephone number remains the same. It's Easter the week after we move and the kids are off school for about 9 days so hopefully we will have time to get sorted and maybe enjoy a night or two away somewhere.

If I don't blog before (we are without the internet for 5 days after we move) I wish you all a Happy Easter and hope you have fun over the holidays too.