Last Update for 2009

This will be it for 2009, the final communique via this medium. What a year, what an ending to the year! Our garden is a bit dry at present, like everyone else's in Brisbane, but it is growing well considering it has only been planted since last February.

Last night we attended yet another delightful dinner party, this time not only with great food and company, but also mango daiquiris. Seriously, deliciously wicked concoctions contrived by the wonderful hosts Edwina and Frank. Thanks folk for a gorgeous evening, yet again.

The very small back garden is coming along well with its small lemon and lime trees and olive bush. Once again, quite dry, but still thriving...and not yet 11 months old.

Some of our first lemons, still with a way to go, but still - our very first fruit is on its way.

Lovely colour. We have endeavoured to have a variety of colours and heights in our small garden.

A friend gave us this climbing plant around last March and it has produced its first blooms this week.

Last Monday friends and family gathered at Hamson Terrace for a lunch in the park. Our home is immediately behind the group. Mosquitoes were annoying, so be bathed ourselves in repellant. The food was terrific, and we later adjourned upstairs in the air conditioned house and partied on until the final guests left around 10pm.

Little Griff, my god daughter's 4 month old, looking quite animated at the camera phone. His grandmother, Di, is holding him. Griff's Welsh grandmother and grandfather are arriving on Monday to spend Christmas and New Year Down Under. I can only imagine the degree of spoiling this little chap is going to get over the next few weeks.

My newly oiled deck plus revarnished railing. A lot of work, but a great result. Three coats of varnish on the railings, two coats of oil on the decking.

Sunday we depart to Amsterdam via Taipei and Bangkok. My new phone weather ap shows me snow showers in Eindhoven NL, and even Boulogne in France where we spend Christmas (actually, Condette, just outside of Boulogne). We have an appointment in Rotterdam for dinner with the gallery owner where Rene has some of his art on exhibition there. On the eve of the wedding we are having dinner with an uncle and aunt of Rene's who live in a house across the road from where Rene was brought up. We have New Year's Eve planned in Utrecht where we meet the old friends from the cafe around 6 then go to dinner at the apartments where Rene once lived. We meet the wedding official on Tuesday morning in Son. After that we go to a family Christmas party - we have four small gifts each to place in the middle and take turns throwing the dice and selecting and swapping the presents. Spain is arranged, the flights from Germany and back to The Netherlands are booked, and the Taipei stopover is organised. Add to that the wedding day on the 30th, then you could say we are packed and ready to fly.

The photo above was the first one taken with my new phone, and of course it features dearest Rene. Here he is distracted by the ever present Nintendo DS. Upon our arrival back on these shores January 20, he is going to receive his Australian Citizenship at the Convention Centre on Australia Day (26th). The City Hall is closed for renovations, so this coming year everything is transferred to the very large Exhibition and Convention Centre. There is no limitation on the number of guests one can have at the ceremony.

Many members of our trivia team recently attended the Singalong Sound of Music at the Lyric Theatre, Brisbane. This slightly blurry photo is from a website where various audience members were featured. A fun night all round (see a previous entry about it below).

Well, this is it, have a brilliant Christmas plus a fantastic 2010 complete with happiness, good health and perhaps, even, peace on Earth. Next update after January 26. Thank you for your comments and taking the time to read this. I really appreciate the newsy emails and phone calls generated by this blog.

86 10 150

On this day, my mum would have been 86. Today is also the 150th birthday of the State of Queensland. December 10 is a good date.

Alfred Nobel also died on this date, but he had read his obituary eight years earlier when a newspaper accidentally published his instead of his brother's. In it he was condemned for being the inventor of dynamite so he set about leaving a better legacy to be remembered for - hence the Nobel Prizes, awarded each December 10.

No, I go back to Meg, my Mum. Happy Birthday Mum, wherever you are. I'm sure you are happy knowing that your big boy is finally getting married - she had tried many times to marry me off.

From two days ago

A Spanish man who was imprisoned as a teenager for being gay has become the first to receive an official letter of apology.

Antoni Ruiz spent three months in jail under a law introduced during General Franco's dictatorship.

In 1976, when he was 17 years old, Mr Ruiz told his family he was gay.

It was just months after General Francisco Franco had died and homosexuality was strictly illegal.

When Mr Ruiz's worried parents confided in a Catholic monk, he promptly denounced their son to the authorities.

The teenager spent three months in prison and was banned from returning home for another year.

Mr Ruiz now heads an association for other former prisoners and estimates that around 5,000 homosexuals suffered a similar fate to him during Franco's dictatorship.

Now he has become the first to receive official recognition of his suffering in a letter from the justice minister of Spain.

- BBC

Rene and I are honeymooning in the south of Spain - where gay marriage is also legal now. The country has advanced far in three decades...

Not long now

Ho, ho, ho, holiday! Yes, the summer vacation has already begun and I'm making the most of it being very hot before we jet off into much colder climes.

It's not long before we set off for Europe. I'm starting to get excited, but there's also some fear of setting off on a very long plane journey - Brisbane/Taipei/Bangkok/Amsterdam. Of course we travel Cattle Class, so that makes it worse, but I'm fairly sure we'll have exit row seats on each leg. You can never guarantee these things, but I called into China Airlines office beside the one we Ambassadors use at Brisbane Airport, and they saw me and sort of assured me we would get the seats, but they don't know until the day of departure.

For those of you who, like me, know more about aircraft than that they just have jet engines, I can tell you that we go firstly on an A330 to Tapei, and change to a B747 to Amsterdam. The return is also a 747, but from Taipei to Sydney we have an A340 (I've never been on one of those before). Several of my friends reading this have suddenly glazed over - WAKE UP, back to news...

We've rented an apartment in Utrecht for a week - built in 1690. It looks wonderful, and it's right down where our favourite cafe is, beside the canal. We arrive in Utrecht on New Year's Eve and currently we hope to meet some friends at the Ledig Erf cafe for a wonderful first night back in Utrecht for five years.

The pictures below are of New Mexico in the USA and remind me of the first time I went there in the mid 80's. I've been back twice because of friends there and the fact that the South West is such a fantastic place to visit. The desert, mountains and a very special atmosphere all combine to make this a very extraordinary part of the country to investigate. I had a whole album emailed to me just today, so I thought I'd share a couple of typical views.

A couple of posts ago I mentioned the great difficulty I had in choosing a new phone and a plan to suit my needs. Well, my patience and research has paid off with an exceptionally good handset - the HTC Magic - from Vodafone, complete with a data download facility for exactly the same amount per month as my old phone. This SmartPhone is too clever so far, and I am taking small steps each day to master it, but it is wonderful. It has a 3.5 megapixel camera, GPS, Google maps, Android OS (which means it's not Mac or Windows based) and it is light, easy to use as a phone, and text messaging is via a very large QWERTY keyboard that is touch sensitive. The memory card in the phone is 8Gb - so lots of music and videos can be stored on it for long trips on planes (hint, hint) plus if we get lost or need phrases in French, Spanish etc, it has an Ap for these too. When I type messages I can turn the phone sideways and the keyboard is bigger. How cool is that? I love it!
I've been to several shows lately, the most recent being the Eurobeat show - a send up of the Eurovision Song Contest. It was a very funny, most entertaining evening. I organised a group of eight to go, but alas Rene chickened out saying things like, "I'm not sitting through crap like that!" etc etc............ he had surrendered more than enough dignity in attending the Sound of Music Singalong a week earlier, where he provided more than enough entertainment as we all watched him cringe with horror when we all raised our arms every time the word 'hills' was sung, and we booed the Nazis and hissed at the Baroness.

I've got a few dinners left this coming 10 days, an airport Christmas lunch - now at the City Novatel since the new Airport Novatel won't be ready for this Friday. I attend the AGM for our apartment complex on the Sunshine Coast tomorrow, and I have one evening shift left at the airport before I hang up my uniform until next February.

My friend Kay helped me select a white cotton shirt for the wedding, so now I have all my clothes sorted. It's always a challenge to travel light for me, but we will have to try really hard not to take anything unnecessary on this flight. At one stage (Weeze to Seville) we are flying Ryanair - the only direct choice available in winter - and they have a 15kg limit on luggage so I'll be leaving some gear at people's places and collecting it after our return. We fly Transavia back to Eindhoven from Malaga and they have a 20kg limit, so we'll more than manage.

Finally, I am about to start on the oiling of the deck. The timber requires a refresh of oil into the timber every year or so - it's exposed to the western sun a bit and everyday wear and tear - so in readiness yesterday I hammered every nail flush to the boards and this morning washed the deck throughly. Over the last three days I've sanded the handrails and given them three coats of varnish - really good varnish made in Norway. The front should look lovely and refreshed after I'm finished. It's lovely being able to get out and do these things with school closed now and my departure still a few days off. Last vacation I left for America the first day of my vacation and came straight back to work afterwards so felt exhausted most of the term.

There will be one more update before we go. Enjoy December!