Canberra

From Newcastle, we travelled on to Canberra when I was starting to feel a bit better. By this point my cold was much better, but had progressed into that dry hacking cough that drives everyone around you into a murderous rage crazy!

While we were there, Canberra experienced it's coldest day in 43 years (or something like that) our friend who lived there told us.

We had a heated motel room & didn't really care. It was just COLD. The motel was OK, most importantly it was heated, but I was a bit dissapointed as we booked it on Wotif. Their Wotif details indicated that each room had a washer & dryer. We therefore took a few things we needed to wash so that we could do our laundry before returning to newcastle. When we rocked up, there was a laundry facility, but not a washer & dryer in each room. Not impressed. Usually I check the actual motel website before I make a booking on Wotif, but this time I must have overlooked that step. Never again. (Please note: Laundry facility was almost vitally important as being North Queenslanders, our supply of warm clothing was minimal to start with. When you are wearing more than one layer of warm clothing because the weather is so cold, that further depleted our stash to 3 days tops. We made do however & know better for next time)

On the first day which was bright & sunny & beautiful (but still cold), we visited Questacon (all indoors for those who don't know). The kids loved this. They had a room just for littlies that Little Bear thought was FANTASTIC. Cheetah enjoyed all the bigger kid exhibits, however 1 level was closed unfortunately so we missed out on that one.

One of the activities was to press a button & press it again after 15 seconds, trying to get it as close as possible to the 15 second mark (counting in your head). I was chuffed that I took one go & got it within 0.005 of a second (see photo below). This also meant I had the most accurate guess of the day, up until just after lunchtime when we left. Not sure if it was broken after that.

That night we went up the Black Mountain Tower (aka Telstra Tower, aka Telecom Tower). The first time we got up there, we got through the door & found that they only take cash, not credit card, for the admittance fee. We trundled off to grab some dinner & some money & then headed back about an hour later. This time we actually got through the entry gates.

Here is Little Bear with the boys on the viewing platform. As you can see it is cold & windy.


I still remember visiting this tower with my family when I was 3. I remeber seeing big machines through glass windows & having to use some stairs. This time, all you could really do was go to the revolving resteraunt (patrons only) or go to the kiosk & viewing platform (via a lift that didn't give floor's, but rather told you exactly how far above sea level you were as it lifted you up).

The view was OK, but probably would have been better at sunset (when we first attempted to get in) rather than at night, although the lights were pretty.

The next day it was cold & overcast (I think this was the coldest day). This was the day we had set aside to take some photo's in front of Parliament House, go to the National Zoo & Aquarium & also the Cockington Green Gardens & Walk in Aviary.

The first thing we did though, was go to the Royal Australian Mint. We got there, only to find the Mint was closed for renovation & only the souvenire shop in the entry way was open. The attendant cheerfully told us that we could watch the process on some screens set up in the entry foyer. This set up was a series of 7 photo's (not all of which worked), on a screen where you press a button to see the next photo. The photo's weren't that crash hot & as some where 'missing' (should we be concerned about other things going missing at the Mint?) it really left a lot to be desired.

We did get to stamp our own $1 coin to comemorate our visit. This cost us $3 for which we got $1 in return. Hmmm - now we know how the Mint makes their money! (Obviously that was a joke because our whole gripe is that we never actually got to see how the Mint makes the money at all).

After the Mint, we got to the Zoo but somehow completely missed the Aquarium section. We saw the White Lions. Little Bear loved seeing Giraffe's up close. Unfortunately, she was not happy to be photographed & every time we pointed the camera at her, she turned her head. Didn't get as many photo's as we wanted, but got a few that show how rugged up we were.

We went home (well, to a Motel room that was acting as "home" for 2 1/2 days) to have lunch & a sleep. Unfortunately, Little Bear slept for about 10 minutes in the car & as a result, did not sleep when we got back to the room. At about 4 ish, we decided to give up on Cockington Green & the Aviary & just bum around in the motel until dinner time.

For dinner that night, we met up with our friend & his gorgeous wife in Canberra at Zeffirelli's for pizza. I can't believe that Little Bear sat still enough for me to braid her hair (in 2 braids, not 1) to go out looking nice. I took a photo of it, because I doubt I will get another chance like that before she is 5. She is like the energiser bunny - just keeps going!

At dinner our friends wife - M - began asking Cheetah about school & he hit it off with her right away & talked her ear off all night. We then went back to their place, where Cheetah taught M to play "21" (that's Blackjack to all the gamblers out there). DH then had to teach M the correct way to play, as Cheetah had learned the game of his young cousins who had the rules a bit muddled (or had 'changed them' to suit themselves as Cousin C is known to do sometimes).

Little Bear was completely taken with their two puppies - 13 year old Nala (some little furry breed) and 2 year old Toby (a golden retreiver). Little Bear talked & sang to Toby, through a glass door, most of the night until it was time to go.

The next day we headed back to Newcastle for Little Bear's birthday. That will be my next post!

Nanny in Newcastle

For the travel update I know you are all sitting on the edge of your seats for...

We left Brisbane on Friday morning, after missing out on seeing my friend who I was going to meet up with there.

I was absolutely devastated when she sent me a message saying she wouldn't be able to make it because something urgent had come up at the very last minute. I was also a little bit relieved, because by this point my stomach was causing me absolute agony (due to constant coughing, combined with no sleep for over 36 hours & sitting in an uncomfortable commodore passenger seat). Brisbane city is lots of hills & I wasn't looking forward to trying to juggle both kids, the pram & my stomach ache to make that visit (as I would be walking to meet her, not driving).

Anyway, this also meant we were able to leave a bit earlier that we had previously anticipated & took off at once for Newcastle via Port Macquarie.

The drive to Port Macquarie was a bit taxing, given that Little Bear was starting to despise the car seat (which had been laundered I might add). However we got there about 6pm (ish). After spending a lot of time coughing while glued to a not so comfortable car seat, my stomach was killing me (worse than it had been in Brisbane). The next morning I was starting to wonder whether it wouldn't be more prudent to book a second night in Port Macquarie to avoid driving that day, but after a couple of hours of being awake it settled a bit & I was able to travel (although it was anything but comfortable).

Our motel in PM was OK & was right on the beach - you could see Flynn's Beach (I think that's what it's called) from the motel & it was quite beautiful, but we only caught a glimpse of it as we left, because we arrived after dark & left first thing in the morning.

We got to Newcastle about 1pm the day we left PM. Nanna & Big Pop were excited to see the grandkids & for the next few days I didn't do much other than laundry & try to relax as much as possible as I was really crook by this point.

This means that so far we have very little photo's of our journey as it was just too much for me. We also had to cancel our Albury leg of our journey to visit DH's brother because I was still too sick to travel when we were meant to be leaving, but we did get to add another day onto our Canberral leg which worked out well as we had crammed a fair bit into that & it allowed us to have a bit of breathing time while we were there.

We took plenty of photo's in Canberra, but Little Bear has been a bit camera shy. I will post these when I get home. We took a few more when we returned from Canberra to Newcastle & now that we are at Surfer's Paradise, I expect that we will take a lot of photo's when we visit Seaworld tomorrow.

The Travelling Bug

I think the travelling bug means that you can't stay still, you have to keep travelling. My family seems to take it literally though. Every time we travel, we get sick.

I was meant to work Monday, Tuesday last week & then we would leave. I ended up sick & at the doctors with a really bad head cold & no voice. Little Bear was just starting to catch it when we left.

On Wednesday afternoon we left. We had dinner in Ayr at about 6:30pm & just about had to force feed Little Bear as she wanted to play on the slides (can you guess where we had dinner?)

At about 10:00pm, with the car an absolute mess from trying to keep children entertained, we began to regret our insistance that Little Bear eat more for dinner.

She threw up. Not a little, but all over herself & her car seat. Very wet, sticky & smelly.

The only place to pull over was on the side of the road where there was a steep bank. Of course DH pulled over & gravity took over making a bigger mess of what had previously been fairly well contained in Little Bear's lap.

I cleaned up as best I could, dressing Little Bear in the spare clothes I had packed within easy reach. & using up an entire packet of baby wipes. This was somewhere just north of Rockhampton I think. Someone pulled over, thinking we had had an accident (becuase of the angle of the car on the side of the road), but they couldn't help, so we thanked them & on they went.

After cleaning Little Bear & the car up as best I could, I put a towel in her car seat, sat her back in & put a sheet over her to keep her warm as it was starting to get very cold.

We travelled on, reasonably uneventfully until about Gin Gin, where Little Bear woke up & promptly threw up. I think this was about 4am. Same story as above, but this time I didn't have spare clothes for her, so I dressed her in a long sleeved shirt of Cheetah's. The kids then watched the Bee Movie at 4am & dozed again after that finished.

We made it into Brisbane at about 10:00am & after trying to find a Loo Stop near the freeway on the northside of Brisbane, we wasted about 1/2 hour, and then took another 1/2 hour to make it to our motel.

Thankfully our Motel let us check in early & they had a washing maching & dryer so I spent the better half of the day doing laundry. Because the kids were wide awake & didn't have much of a midday sleep (because they had been sleeping in the car), I went from 7:00am Wednesday to about 9:00pm Thursday without sleep.

I finally got to crash that night & crash I did. (However, tired as I was, I did manage to check & see that Qld won the first state of origin match, but now they are all catching the swine flu because some bright spark thought Melbourne (swine flu capital of Australia) would be a good venue for a match between Qld & NSW. Not looking so hot for the next match, but best out of three boys, that's all you need !!!

Au Revoir

This afternoon we leave on a 2 1/2 week holiday.

I apologise for my lack of blogging lately. I have been busy working, while trying to get ready for our holiday & on the weekend I caught a nasty cold that meant all I wanted to do was stay in bed. Unfortunately I couldn't do that all the time, but I could choose bed over blogging which is what I did.

Tonight we will be driving to Brisbane where we will spend 1 night. We will then spend a night in Port Macquarie, 3 nights in Newcastle, 2 nights in Albury, 2 nights in Canberra, 3 more nights in Newcastle, 3 nights on the Gold Coast & then we drive home.

Holiday, who am I kidding !!! I am going to need a second holiday to recover from this one!

I may or may not get the chance to blog while we are away, but I am sure I will have plenty to share when I get back.

In the meantime, I leave you with these words of wisdom ....



GO THE MIGHTY MAROONS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Child Labour

Today Little Bear was sick so I had to stay home.

It was also the day that the Qld Teachers took strike action. Therefore I had Cheetah at home with me too.

I was tired as I have been under the weather myself & dealing with a sick Little Bear was about as much as I could handle, so early in the day I devised my devious plan to keep Cheetah out of the way thought up an interesting activity that would keep develop my child's co-ordination, physical ability & problem solving skills.

We have had a large palm of some sort in our pool area that attracted locusts & green ants like you wouldn't believe. Knowing how much my child loves to play with heavy artillery big boy toys, I told him that he could use my secateurs and his fathers saw to cut as much of this tree down as he wanted too. (the fronds shoot off from just above ground level so the secateurs can do most of the work at cutting it back).

I expected this might keep him busy for half an hour, maybe an hour if I was lucky.

He stayed outside ALL day. Breaking only for a quick bike ride, lunch & a couple of snacks.

Here he is almost finished.



And this gives you some idea of how busy he had been. The pile of palm fronds to the left is all his work.




Behind this tree was a fig tree growing that I only found out about a couple of weeks ago when the neighbours told me about it (as they didn't want a fig tree growing next to their new carport & were pretty sure I didn't want one in my garden either). I went to cut it down on Sunday & was very surprised to find out that it was an established fig tree that had 2 trunks 3-4 meters tall & I hadn't been able to see it at all behind the palm tree Cheetah removed without actually crawling into the back corner of this garden bed. I got most of it out, but there is still a fair bit of stalk remaining so I will have to find a way to remove the whole thing.

I was very proud of my Cheetah today.

You can read another post about his love of gardening tools here.

Powerless

Over the weekend, DH & I cleaned up the garden & under our house. Yesterday we spent all afternoon finishing cleaning under the house. The kids helped in the way that they do best (by 'rearranging' all the stuff you just tidied).

After a very VERY dusty, dirty day, we headed upstairs to clean off & get some dinner. Dinner a la Macca's. By the time we got the kids to bed it was late. I then had to hang several loads of washing that I hadn't been able to do all day because of being so dirty. I started ironing about 9:30ish & at 11:00pm was still going but only had a few things left.

Just then a very loud army helicopter flew over & all of a sudden at 11:00pm our power went out.

Not the streetlights.

Not the neighbours power.

Just ours.

Our circuit breaker has been tripping a lot lately (we have 2 main circuit breakers & we found the entire house except for little bear's room & one power point are connected to one of them. This includes the washing machine & pool pump downstairs. What genius thought that was a good idea?!?)

Anyway, we knew it wasn't the circuit breaker, as the whole house was down. DH checked the safety switch but it wasn't that either. We called Ergon & were advised that if it was our problem we would have to pay a $340 callout fee. Unfortunately you don't know if it's your problem until you call them out to check!

Anyway, it seemed likely it was an Ergon thing & so we got them out. They turned up sometime after midnight (after going up & down the street in the cherry picker several times), turned on all their floodlights & aimed them at our house (just so the neighbours know who to blame for keeping them awake on Sunday night Monday morning.



A few months ago Ergon replaced the cable from the power pole to the house, but they didn't replace the bits that join the wire to the house. That was the problem & at 1:00am this morning we got a new one of those too. They didn't need the cherry picker after all that, but they did check our connection to the power pole too, just to be sure - seeing as they had the CP there, I guess it seemed a shame not to use it.



This is kind of getting old hat for us now.



At our last place (a rental thank goodness), the power went out one day & I smelt burning electrics. After 'smelling' around the house for a bit (a couple of minutes), I went downstairs to check the meter box (located in the centre of the house right under the upstairs (wooden) floorboards.



It was on fire, but it extinguished as I watched it. Phew.



Anyways, contacted the owner who corrected that problem for us. That night or shortly thereafter, we turned off all our electrical appliances to go to bed (at about 11:00pm) and suddenly the power went out again. Another call to the owner (who worked for Ergon) & Ergon was out in the middle of the night fixing the fuse (sans Cherry Picker). When they do this without a cherry picker, they have a very long pole they use to manover the fuse into position in the box (which is at the top of a power pole). Issue seemed to be fixed.



A couple of days later, again at about 11:00pm we turn off our appliances & again the same thing happens. By now we know the drill. Ergon comes out with Cherry Picker this time. Turned out they needed the fuse to be between 2 posts, but it was jammed in beside one of the posts, instead of between them. When all the power was on, the current was pulling the two posts together enough that electricity was able to flow. As soon as we turned off all our stuff, ka-boom, blew another fuse.



Somewhere in all of this, we spent 3 days without power, running our fridge & a single portable fan from extension leads attached to our very generous neighbour's power supply in the middle of a North Qld summer. Not pleasant.



On another note, the washing machine guy was out today. He'll fix the latch on Wednesday (hopefully) & then look at the hole in the outer casing of the drum (not sure what it's called) which we found when we removed the lid to release the catch to get the washing out. Could be why my "Ultrasilencer" is not ultra silent!

Diet Time

Today I finally saw a dietitian. Probably something I should have done years ago instead of bothering with doctors, but as the saying goes - you live & learn.

I found out that I am intolerant (& no I didn't smack her out for saying that).

My symptoms are textbook for some sort of food intolerance, the trick now is to find out what.

To do that I have to go on an 'elimination' diet. In a nutshell that means unprocessed fresh meat (cooked but not too brown or burnt) & rice. Thankfully I am allowed to eat cashews (I am guessing without salt but havent' checked that closely). No milk, no wheat, no fruit (except peeled pear), very few veges, no fabric softener or strong smelling soaps/perfumes/aromatherapy stuff etc, flavourless toothpaste.

As we are going away in a couple of weeks, the Dietitian (hereafter called V) told me to start cutting back on thinks like the coke, the milk, the bread/wheat products, etc slowly to ease the withdrawal & then start on the strict diet as soon as I am back home.

After two weeks of nothing, I then get to add things in but only one 'group' of food at a time & then I have to wait anywhere from 3-7 days (longer if I have a reaction to it) before adding the next group (& there is about 10 groups of food to add back slowly).

I love rice but I will probably be happy to never see another grain of rice again in a few months time.

However despite all this, I am actually looking forward to this. V was so enthusiastic & so positive that this is exactly what the problem is & how much better I am going to feel on the diet but told me many times that I can't stay on the diet (apparently people feel so good, they don't want to 'challenge' themselves & possibly make themselves sick again. I can fully understand that sentiment right now).

However before I start cutting back, there are a few things I need to clear up.

* I have about 2 1/2 bottles of wine (including our anniversary champagne which we didn't drink on our anniversary) to share with my husband.
* Easter Eggs - It would just be too cruel leaving them there & not being able to have even a little bit.
* Some flavoured cheeses & various little snacky things that would just be too tempting to leave lying around.

I'm sure there's more goodies lying around & no doubt I will find many more once I am actually committed to this thing.

Off on a tangent now, I took home 1/2 a shopping bag of mandarin's from my parent's place on mothers day. They were finally ripe enough to make juice with today & I made over 2 litres of juice, leaving a few small mandarins for eating & after throwing out a few big ones that had gone kind of woody. The juice tastes delicious but with a mouth ulcer it is just too painful to drink ATM, so I am hoping that Cheetah really likes mandarin juice (as DH & Little Bear don't). He seems to so far.