Ouch!

Bruno's Parents come for a visit

Bruno’s parents came over for two weeks recently, which was great, aside from repeated requests from Bruno’s father to eat our native national emblems, the Kangaroo and the Emu. They stayed with us and they were great company; Bruno’s mother made ravioli’s that the angels might have envied. Unbelievable.

Mogo mid April

This weekend we went to Mogo with my family. Stephen, Julian, Lorette, Fe, Mum, Dad Bruno and I shared a fantastic house 2 minutes away from Broulee beach. My mother loved it. We went up to the Mossy Point headland and watched the sun set on the spectacular coastline and my brother Jules pronounced genially that we forget just how beautiful Australia really is. And it is. Especially Broulee. My mother stood on the headland and said that she feels its a good place in her blood.

On Saturday night we had a massive feed of baked Barramundi fish, fresh prawns and dozens of oysters. We all sat around a long white table and told Hickie stories. Then we all watched Back to the Future 2 and 3, surely some of the dumbest movies ever made. The next morning, Geoff Nimmo and his son Mark came over and we had a massive breakfast, with muffins, bacon, piquant sausages, pancakes, bananas, honey, and assorted muffins, and we ate very well.

One particular highlight was definitely the leeches Bruno and I got to meet in our bushwalk. We had wandered down a valley taking photographs of spectacular gums and the huge ferns, padding our way across silent leaf litter through long shards of afternoon sun. Suddenly, we looked down and the floor seemed to writhe with black, groping fingers, all leaning out to SUCK OUR BLOOD. So we bolted back up the hill and furiously checked our bodies for the slimy black blood suckers, pulling off loads off our feet. Bruno was seriously not impressed and that canned our walking in the rainforest experience. Boy, did we feel like a beer afterwards.

Everyone except my mother and I left on Monday morning. We stayed and thus enjoyed an unseasonably warm day, in baking delicious heat. We went down the beach, strolling in the early morning heat talking about a thousand things. We walked down a path surrounded by Banksia trees and the rolling coastal duen plants common to most wild beaches. Whilst chatting and admiring the foliage wrapped path, we were interrupted by a huge parrot, sitting not more than a meter away, cracking Casuarina with his claw. He was wildly slashed with brilliant red, with green leggings and grey feet. His eyes were jet black, ringed with white, and berry bright.  Delightfully, he took no notice of us.

When we emerged from the path, my mother stopped by a large clump of Spinifex grass, which had carpeted a dune right on the beach. The quality of Spinifex is quite sharp - it is a hardy grass, and I have never found it lovely, as it possesses neither an accented colour nor a textural softness that is pleasing. But my mother stopped in front of me and showed me how beautiful it was, describing the colours where it met the sand as cool blue, and the waving tops as green yellow and wild khaki. In an instant my perception changed and I could stand there tracking a patchwork of colour and bristle brush energy, where once I could only see tough, unlovely Spinifex. I reflected then that my mother is an amazing woman.

Then we took off down the beach and went for a swim. I went swimming topless for the sheer sensual pleasure of it, and my mother went in her underwear, which she afterwards wore on her head so it could dry off in the bone-dry heat. From amazing to crazy in three easy steps. It was such a good moment – such a perfect moment of an almost deserted beach, turquoise ocean, endless blue sky and curling waves as far as the eye could see.

Monday, NEIS course

Dan writing:

I went to my NEIS course today. I'm doing a certificate course on small business management. It's pretty full on, fulltime, lots of work. For instance, this weekend I both partied my ass off, and then when I was coming down I did 7 hours work writing documents like 'features, benefits and target market', and 'tables comparing banking fee's'. I dunno about you, but whenever I used to pick up a bank leaflet that talked about um, GST accounts or account fees or what ever it went straight to my recycle waste bin. It's still goddam boring, but now I guess I understand I'm learning why these things might be important. It's like knowing the framework, and then seeing why these things have some value. (Not alot of value - banks suck. I should become a bank, they always make money, like the casino guys. The mafia!)

So I went to the course. Today they showed the CORNIEST video ever made by human kind, about "How to sell your product", called 'Fair dinkum selling'. It was narrated by a Texan with lego man hair, and a horrifying similarity to Bush (glorious leader). Anyway, he touched on theories based on NLP stuff - you know - neuro linguistic programming. "Talk to yourself in the mirror in the morning, tell yourself you're a winner". He had this furry little stick with fluffy hair in his pocket and his assistant looked like a child molester. Luckily, I have ten more segments of his video to sit through.

Then we did a few tables on my projected annual sales figures and I was pleasently surprised to learn that I would earn 6 hundred thousand in my first year. Then I rechecked my figures, and sure enough, all that maths for dummies classes at school where they made me count the macaroni hadn't come to zip. So, anyway, got the theory, now I have to figure out what the real numbers are.

After class I was delighted to go have tea with two other complete left brainers, a belly dance teacher called Kara and a singing tutor called Kristina. we discussed over coffee and cake how our lives are and whether we've harmonised our masculine selves with our feminine selves. Lovely people, very Byron Bay. They were extremely impressed I could say big project management words, like 'outcomes'.

My brother arrived home

My brother arrived home from 4 years abroad today!! I'm going to go see him now! He is the one we called the 'Evil One'. We shall if time will have earned him a different moniker or .... not.

YAY!!

Kingfisher

We have a forest kingfisher living near us!! It's ver pretty!

We've found a house

Life is smilling to us, we bet. We have finally found an apartment and signed the contract for 6 months rent yesterday.

It's a very nice two bedroom ground-floor apartment in a small block of four, 100 m from Bondi Beach, with a shared backyard (shared only with the other ground-floor apartment next door), a nice sunroom at the back and a veranda at the front. It's not as large as other places we saw but plenty of space for us and enough space to host a guest as well :-)

As soon as we move in, we will be sharing some pictures from it and the surroundings.

--B

Not yet ...

One of the houses that we liked got offered to someone else and we are about to go to the real estate agent to see if we get the second one ... Not all perfect yet.

Diving on Sunday

WOW!

That's in one word what I can share with you about our diving on sunday! It was fan-bloody-tastic!

We woke up at 8.30 a.m. (on a sunday, there should be a law against it!!! how cruel is that?) and after a bowl of cereals and a nice warm tea, we headed up to the dive shop where we met the guy we would go diving with. We decided to have a refresher dive since we haven't been diving in a few month (since november last year) and we have never been diving in these waters before (also, we have always had the luxury of been diving in tropical waters and the temperature of the ocean around Sydney, this time of year is around 17ºC or 18ºC). Andy explained to us the theory and after a coffee, we tried on the wetsuits, masks, BCDs etc and jumped on a van, on our way to Clovelly Pool.

As we got to the parking lot, we could see quite a few divers in the pool (it's a natural pool, with an entrance directly on the ocean, it's very good to get a refesher on diving since it's 6 m deep and you don't have currents) and more coming out and others arriving (just like us). Upon arriving, we got in our gear and our instructor had left his fins back at the shop, so there he went ... we just stood there, looking at the wonderful ocean, opening just before us and the clear blue waters in which, a few minutes later, we would be diving in.

When Andy got back, we put the whole gear on and went into the pool. The tide was quite low so we had to actually slide on our bottom down the stairs to the water and ... the cold cold water just slided down our spine and for a few minutes I was thinking "what the hell am I doing here freezing?" but it was just a few minutes of discomfort and as we went underwater, it all faded away as we did a bit of the techniques we wanted to remember ... The pool might be just 6 m but it was great. We had a blue gropper following us during our dive and we even saw an octopus! Yeah! A big one too! Which is a very rare sighting!

After around 40 min, we left the pool, went back to the van, exchanged our tanks for full ones, had a bite and we headed off to Gordons Bay, to have a proper dive.

Gordons Bay is on the other side of the parking from Clovelly Pool and it even has an underwater trail, that you can follow when you go diving. It's a chain that's layed down with markers ... It goes around the bay and back to the access point. It's deeper than Clovelly Pool but not too deep.

After having some inconvenient moments, trying to get in the water (you have the waves hitting you, you are trying to put your fins on, you slide on the slippery rocks, etc) we snorkled a bit and went down. The colors you can see there are from another world! Bright orange and grey, deep purple, fluorescent blue, etc. As we were following a wall, I saw three Port Jackson sharks, sleeping, one on top of each other! The biggest one was around 1 mt, so not a white shark but ... Then we saw a stingray, a flathead, Danielle saw another octopus! We just couldn't believe it, in a bay just around the corner from where we live! What about that? :)

Next dive, we want to go over to Ben Buckler and see the Weedy Sea Dragons ... this time we didn't see any but it was expected, this is not their favorite place.

After we came back from the dive and had a warm shower and a nice warm cup of tea, we layed down and I was teasing Danielle about her "5 minutes naps" that usually last 1 hour ... well, when I opened my eyes again, 2 hours had pasted! :) It was a beautiful experience and we will certainly go diving around here soon!