Ice Cream & Talent

This afternoon we went to school to witness the talent contest. Sadly I wasn't near the front so the band are quite a distance away.

The band are Knight on piano, Raoul on tenor sax and our very own Harry on drums. Note that Harry's third drum lesson is tonight!

At the end the 200 kids in the audience were asked who was their favorite act out of the 11 finalists. And the band did it, clearly the most popular act of the afternoon. Their encore was their 2nd appearance in public.

Well done lads.

Checking blogpress

I took this on the 89th floor of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne. You can see where we live on the horizon. The lake in the foreground is Albert Park where the F1 race is held each year.








I took this a while ago but I'm testing a new blogging tool.

Harry's 11th Birthday

He's made it to the grand age of 11.

The celebrations started on Friday although strictly speaking he wasn't born until around 8:30am Saturday morning - the wonders of time zones. But it least it's an excuse to keep partying. Since Friday was a school day only a little celebrating happened including birthday cake at Friday evening tennis.

Saturday started with a hockey match and their 3rd straight win.

Then it was back home for the party. The tradition has been that I make the birthday cake and each year it gets harder to think of something different. Inspiration came from the Woman's Weekly Party Cake book following a visit to see a comedian do a whole act on the subject at the Melbourne comedy festival.

Pool party massacre got a good reception from the assembled crowd.

Then Harry and his mates headed to the ice rink for a couple of hours skating. And that is them all in the centre of the rink.

We had a couple of them stay over last night, they've gone now and now the house is quiet and Harry's happy that he had a great day. Today it's more tennis (probably the subject of an extra post) and Iron Man 2 to end the weekend.

Office for old times sake

Here's a quick picture of the office and some of the usual contents.

A non local band

While I'm checking the new tools. Just want to see if this works.



You should be able to see a video of a band I sometimes see in town just busking.

And this one I think is actually them on Bourke Street

Geocache

We thought it would be fun to try Geocaching so headed out on our bikes with GPS in hand and 3 local caches to find. A couple of kms later and Cache number 1 was located in one of the local parks in a great natural hiding place and Harry was the one that found it. We'd never geocached before so it was fun to find the cache and explore its contents. Surprisingly (to us) it had been accessed only a couple of days before.

Another km or so on the bike and we are somewhere near cache number 2. A micro cache. Doesn't seem likely that we'll find it in the undergrowth in the area.

But after about 10 minutes or so of looking Harry spots the tiny container and its contents. So back on the bike and we head from the parks to the beach. The GPS indicates that it isn't on the road near the beach but near the beach itself so we head down the cliff and backtrack along the beach path only to find  the GPS says its somewhere between the beach and the road, i.e. somewhere up the cliff. So we explore and finally find container number three hidden away.

So a great bike ride and successful treasure hunt.

P.S. Sorry its been ages since we updated but now Blogger have fixed their tools we can do this more often.

Melbourne Show

We took a trip to the Royal Melbourne Show yesterday. It's a great mix of agricultural stuff and fairground.

I think the 'fascinator' is the duck's own creation. As well as this little fella we got to witness the 'chook washing'. The chook has been washed and is getting a blow dry before being buffed by a silk hanky!

This next picture featuring our very own Harry is of Chris the person that came 3rd in Masterchef Australia in 2009.

He works for a beer club. From what we saw on TV he shouldn't give up the cooking. I still want to try his 'beeramasu', a twist on that Italian classic.

We are hopeful of appearing on Foxtel (Aussie Sky I think) on their hit series AusAxe (woodcutting as a sport). Here's my own clip from the finals of the contest. This is an exclusive preview as Foxtel won't be screening the finals for another few weeks.

And finally it's the cute animal video. This time we finish on something quite extrordinary - a pig diving into a pool. Enjoy!

Gold Coast Adventure Sue's Birthday

It was Sue's Birthday so we decided we'd venture to Queensland and the Gold Coast. We were staying in Broadbeach south of the infamous Surfer's Paradise. Our apartment had a view of the Pacific Ocean.

Our first night meant going to the Outback Spectacular which I wasn't too sure about but turned out to be really great fun. Impressive horsemanship, equally impressive food service with the main course being served to around 1000 of us in about 7 minutes. This also happens to be the duration of "The Man from Snowy River" a classic poem from Banjo Paterson that was recited during the food service [a little aside is that he is an old boy of Sydney Grammar, some where I was fortunate to visit just a couple of weeks later]. Just in case you were thinking, who's he, well he's the poet that wrote Waltzing Matilda.

We were all given hats on entry to the Outback and here you can see Harry after being picked to do the Pig Chasing with a couple of other kids.

The next day was Sue's birthday. We started with a trip to Sea World.

After the Dolphins it was on to the thrill rides.

And then on to see this fab Turtle.

Sea World is also where a national kids TV show is produced, called Toasted, so we sat and watched it being filmed for a while.

In the evening we had a slap up meal at the Kurrawa Surf Club along side the beach. You cannot fault the quantity of food that is produced and quite delicious too.

Someone might have being playing on the playground later that night.....

Harry Skiing

This is Harry coming down the last little bit of the Summit



And this is Sue, see if you can see where she appears from.

Hotham Ski Weekend

Just got back from a great weekend in Hotham. It's about 5 hours drive from Melbourne and offers skiing for a range of abilities. Which is lucky given my inability to ski. Sue and I have both been skiing before but a very long time ago and I know that I really had no ability what so ever.

So when the opportunity to go skiing with a few work friends came up we thought it would be good fun to give it a go. The other 6 people in our party are relatively accomplished so after we arrived and got skis and things me, Sue and Harry had a lesson. It was great and after 90 minutes we were all a bit shaky but just about able to snow plough turn.

The run in the picture is a green run that comes down from the summit of the mountain. So on day 2 we set our sights on conquering the summit. As Harry still needed a bit more confidence for this we got Natalie to give him a slightly more advanced lesson for 1 hour. Sue and I had a coffee while we waited for him. By the time we caught up with him Natalie declare he was a natural and good to go on a blue run. Excellent for harry not so good for Sue and I. While we were having coffee Harry had done the summit twice. So he showed us how it was done. I'll post a bit of video soon.

The following day Chris, Sid, Matt, Damo, Nathan and Minette took Harry (and Sue) under their wing and and took him on a blue run. So we all managed to have a fantastic time, I got to the summit and down in one piece, Sue and Harry did blue runs. But proud Dad here as Harry really went from not being able to ski at all to doing a blue run in 2 1/2 hours. Not bad for a little chap.

Where do you go for a picnic round here?

Hanging Rock of course. The full gallery of pictures is here. Its a really nice walk, 105 metres high and its the remains of an extinct volcano.

Harry shooting for a basket

Harry has taken to playing basketball for the Brighton Wolves (go wolves!). This means our Saturday mornings involve going to the day's fixture.

You can see from the clip that he's getting the hang of the game:

Melbourne by Night

Pin Oak Court

Here Sue and Harry stand on the edge of one of the most famous streets around Melbourne. It's called Pin Oak Court, and known in the UK as Ramsey Street.

Philip Island

We took a day out to go and see Philip Island and the Penguin Parade. There's a great koala reserve on the island and this is footage of a koala trying to down from a tree, however the koala can't because of the plastic around the trunk.

The park keepers are keen that you know that there certain things you shouldn't do to a koala. These would appear to include not touching the bottom of a koala, not shouting at them and not shaking their tree. Seems reasonable.

The other thing to be careful of when looking for Koala in trees are the things you don't see on the path in front of you. Like this little fella.

Some of the local wildlife

Sometimes the local wildlife around here can be really dramatic, and sometimes it can be quite surprised, like the Possum that sits in a tree in the driveway. The dolphin was one from a group that we swimming in the bay at the bottom of the road.

Footy

Footy is the local sport round here. Not soccer, but footy. A whole cricket pitch is used for teams to run around after a rugby shaped ball in an attempt to get a clean kick so that the ball goes between the inner of the two sets of goal post. The game is in 4 quarters and lasts over 2 hours. Those of you who know my interest levels in sport will understand that for me to volunteer to go more than once to a sporting occasion must mean that it is good to watch. Also a little note for the Pie Eater, it seems compulsory to have a Four'N Twenty at a match.

This match is at the MCG and was really close with Carlton 101 to Hawthorn 106 in the dying moments of the match. And then Carlton get to kick for goal, if they get this they win the match. Check what happened next.

The Great Ocean Road

One of the great days out around here is the Great Ocean Road. We decided to take Chris and drive to the Southern Ocean some way west of Melbourne, and return along the Great Ocean Road.

Have a look at the gallery to see some of what we did. 

We took a little too much time so by the time we were half way home it was dark. A wallaby jumped out of the darkness in front of the car, it caused a bit of a fright. But wallabies aren't as scary as the kangeroo that hopped alongside the car a bit further on. It must have been over 5ft tall.

Oh and Harry not content with eating his own dinner ate an eyeball from Chris's Red Snapper, much to the disgust of the waitress! Apparently they have a very chewy centre.

Beach Walk

This is a collection of little clips from a walk up the beach. We go from our house over the railway, over the road and then to the beach. We saw the remnants of a wedding and then when we got to the beach huts we realised there were 3 different weddings having their photographs taken.

1st attempt at embedding some video