Still Cold in Mudgee

I am out of creative titles.  It is winter here and therefore it is cold.  Grandpa is here and that has not changed. 

I can't write this post.  I've had more than 3 glasses of wine. Monkey is practicing his French with me...this is more than my head can deal with right now.

Not a busy day.  Grandpa and I volunteered at the school.  We hid at a friend's house in the morning while our place was warming up.  We skipped lunch in favor of a walk to go wine tasting and then we picked up the kids.

We spent the (afternoon) arvo playing Mastermind and reading with the short people.

 Dinner discussion centered around the use of force in war time and the speed with which bombs would fall from planes when fired.

I just kept drinking wine.  All of the people with outdoor plumbing were enthralled by the discussion.

I need to go to bed

A Frosty Day in Mudgee

It was cold here overnight.  I am confident that I am the only Mudge resident with an ice scraper.  In fact, I showed these photos to some friends and they had all sorts of questions.  Thank you mom!

 It did a fabulous job!

 Dad and I hit a couple of cellar doors.  I think this is the routine for the days here.  We found an excellent chardonnay at Farmer's Daughter and a fabulous deal on 12 reds at Vinefera.  All told it was a very successful mission.

It remains cold here as this image of hail on the back deck will show.

 The current discussion is around airplane ejection and the aftermath including parachutes, emergency rations and safety ratings.

Grandpa's Adventures in Mudgee

So what do you do in Mudgee while the kids are in school?   You drink wine of course!  Grandpa's first full day in Mudgee was a Monday. That means that many of the cellar doors are closed.

 But not all of them!!  We waited for Dave to get home from work and we hit Lowe winery.  What a beautiful view for tasting!!

 Today we hit two more and enjoyed a fabulous lunch outdoors in the sun at High Valley.

I think that my trip planning for Darwin and New Zealand may slow down a bit while dad and I focus our efforts on the task at hand!

Tonight he is being babysat by bigC Grandpa was reading to him until his throat got too sore.  BigC is now in charge.

City 2 Surf

City 2 Surf is an iconic race around Sydney's wate front.  It was one of those things that I just had to do while in Australia. 

In 2009 the Sun-Herald City2Surf became the world's largest run and was voted Sydney's favourite sporting event. Today we ran it with 80,000 of our closest friends.

Start line selfie:

 course map:

 Let me know if you can spot the few minutes where we were stopped to go to the loo!!

At the 6km mark is a hill called "heartbreak hill". It goes on for over a km.  You can clearly see where it is on the graph below.  To be honest, it wasn't all that bad.  We were moving fairly slowly due to the crowds so our cardiovascular ability had not been all that stressed up to that point in the race.

We made it in good time!!

I grabbed a quick selfie. Check out the port-a-loos in the background. I really know how to set up a shot!

This one was a bit more picturesque!

The Eagle Has Landed

While I was in Sydney this weekend I managed to connect with this guy and bring him home to Mudgee. I usually sit at the head of the table...except when my parents show up of course. 

 He brought a suitcase filled with goods I'd had shipped to him as well as a couple of yummy Canadian treats:

 He is currently teaching the children about the ins and outs of mathematical theory.

 He is trying to teach Monkey about the circumference of a circle.  I heard the words "radius", "pi" and "thingamajiggy"

 I missed my dad.  I did, but I was unable to help Monkey as he cast me confused looks.  Kid, you just got a 15 minute glimpse into my childhood.  Sorry dude, you're on your own here.

 

When mommy is away the boys shall play

Saje is out of town again preparing for an amazing race tomorrow (we'll let her make her own post to fill everyone in tomorrow ). 

Meanwhile back at the ranch  home in Mudgee the boys got up to their usual tricks. We shopped. We went to the library to get books and movies. We stopped by the market. 

Oh. And we got our lab fix since Jazz's owners were gone again. Here are the boys enraptured in goofiness : 

'Is it time yet? I've been a good boy!'

Throw it. Throw it.

Yes. Yes yes yes yes....

(Pure joy)

Big C's turn.

Cat races.

All too soon it was time to go home for movie matinee and then dinner. They were thrilled to have pizzas and we even made enough to have in lunches later this week.

Have a great race sunshine. We'll see you and grandpa tomorrow :)

My Brain is Mush

Things in my brain are a bit screwy.  Seriously.  I now understand how my brother in law left the Canary Islands for Canada because he "missed seasons".

I found myself reading a book by a North American author who was talking about winter.  I got nostalgic. I thought to myself "how bad can winter be when you have central heat?".  Intellectually I know that I hate Canadian winter more than I hate brussel sprouts and people who talk with food in their mouths.  Somehow though my brain has forgotten this as I sit here and freeze in my house.  I suspect this same light brain fog is the reason that I got pregnant a second time and gave birth TWICE to 10+ pound children without the assistance of anesthetics.  So there is a history here...  As I remember it, Canadian winters are not so bad.  I know that can't be right...but here we are.

We will return in January and I am fully confident that it will take me about 45 seconds to remember this:

I will wish to be back here and confident that as a Canadian I can easily do another Mudgee winter. I will be wistful and wish for the opportunity.  I understand that even as I throw more wood on the fire.

 (wife's cold feet not included)  This meme made Dave and I just about wee!  The last several mornings we have woken up to discover that he had thrown all of the covers off of himself and generously over on to me and the floor on my side of the bed.

It's amazing how quickly and easily a person can forget how not green the grass is on the other side of the fence. I'm cold.  I want it to warm up soon.  At the same time I find that I no longer despise the icy toilet seat on my tender back side.  I have become accustomed to it.  It is less horrible now.  Also, unrelated, I have found that a couple of glasses of wine warm me up nicely.

I hope this post makes sense, I'm nice and warm tonight

Dog Sitting

We still think of the dog sized hole in our house on a daily basis.  When you have a dog you enjoy having them underfoot, picking hair out of your food, someone snoring next to you in bed, guarding your food against guilty looks, having someone to talk to when you get home.  Okay...most of those things.

This week we are watching Jazz.  Jazz loves his back yard and our until attempt to bring him to our place was a complete failure.  Jazz prefers his house and his yard.

 So every day we have been going over and hanging out with Jazz.  He LOVES the attention.

 The boys love having a silly lab to play with.  It both makes them feel better and makes them miss Roxy.

Labs seem to have the same personality the world over!

An Australian Lumberjack?

I've long understood that the role of the spouse who is not earning an income is to ensure that the family's income stretches as far as it can. So when I was asked if I wanted to go with some friends to cut firewood, I said "sure".  I mean my calf is currently injured so I can't run, and I am doing my annual "month off of Facebook", so what else do I have to do (other than the few dozen things on my to-do list that is...)?

So I applied for my forestry permit, which took a bit of mucking around since my Ontario driver's license number doesn't jive with their system.  No worries, I have enough years of breaking systems and I got something in that made sense!

Dave packed me a lunch (so reminiscent of home!), I put on my lumberjack clothes and Wanda and I were off. 

It was a great Spartan training experience and I was well pleased with the amount of wood I was able to haul.  That said, I will be speaking with the New South Wales Forestry Service about putting the good felled trees a bit closer to the road to make it easier to haul them out the next time we go.

I loved the steel toed boots. I felt very tough!!

Below, my hand is not actually on the log, for good reason.  That ant is HUGE and apparently bites HARD, much bigger than it looks.  We left the log that was full of these little fellas right where it was!!

This trunk also got left behind after we determined that this was a funnel web.  For those of you who have not been long term readers of the blog, or paying attention to the lessons on critters, funnel web spiders will mess you up.  You will die.  Some are apparently "less deadly than others".  I'm not sure how you end up less dead?  Maybe you still end up dead but the agony of getting there is more prolonged?  I don't want to know the answers to these questions.  Australia, you are a bit messed up!

A hard day's work, but we filled two trailers full of wood to warm our houses.  The last load that we bought cost $150, this cost me the $30 permit and a day's labour.

A Doors Wide Open at Mudgee Public School Day

One of the truly awesome things about me not having a workplace to report to this year is that I can be at al school events, no matter how big or small.  

The school offered parents the opportunity to come and view their children's classrooms in action.  Here I am going over BigC's math workbook.  He is still at the age where he is happy to climb in to my lap to show me things.  I make no apologies for taking full advantage of that!!

I didn't get any shots of Monkeys classroom because that would not have been cool.  He does love to come and visit his brother's classroom and play with all of the sensory things as you can see!

I was the only mom outside playing at recess.  This kid loves to play tennis and he saw this as a perfect opportunity to get some practice in.  No video of course, so just picture two tall and uncoordinated people running frantically after balls lobbed in every direction...you get the idea.

Here is a close up of this man's dinosaur costume.  The video for the concert is below it.  I am not sure how it ended up sideways...sorry about that.  He is the terrified looking dinosaur at the right hand side of the stage.  I am so proud of him for getting up in front of the entire auditorium.  He was very nervous.

Monkey's entire class got voluntold to be in the senior choir, so here they are (right way up!):

At bed time last night he tanked Jesus that he had not gotten too nervous and that he had been able to do the performance.  Bless his little heart!!

It was an awesome morning with my kids.

A Night Out

The three of us took advantage of a unique opportunity to take Monkey out for dinner with Dave and I.  We were all very amused by the sign here that may have been meant to warn trucks about the ledge....It would appear that the message may have not made it to someone who might have needed it....

We suggested that Monkey order Butter Chicken.  It is nice and mild.  He does not typically eat food with sauce.  He pictured a piece of chicken with some butter on it.

When his butter chicken came, he (surprisingly) dove in and loved it.  This evening turned out to be the beginning of him eating foods with sauces.  Ever since then he has eaten food with sauce and thoroughly enjoyed them.