Email from Trish

One of Dave's sisters ran away and joined the circus with her husband. Seriously!! :-)

Anyway, they are now down in Australia, got this email from her yesterday. Or was that today, Australian time? Hmmmm... maybe it's tomorrow? LOL I'm trying to convince her to start a blog of her own, would make it so much simpler to keep up with what's happening with them.....

I'm not going to post her pics that she sent - better if she does that herself!! ~hint ~hint Trish!
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Hello Mates ..... How'reyagoin??

Which is the normal greeting translated as: Hello how are you!!

Well things here have been a little crazy since we arrived. There were huge challenges getting things set up and some things are still not going all that well. For Perry it got so bad that he actually put in his resignation. Happily, they wouldn't accept it and instead are working with him to resolve water and equipment issues. For me, I still can't get the bank and the credit card machine people to turn off the automatic settlement at 9:30pm. It's been very trying at times - at least in the work world.

The weather was quite nice when we arrived, considering it was the end of winter. Then it got pretty wet and cooled off some. Of course to these people, cool is a high of 16 celcius. The past week has been glorious. It is around 23 most days and nice sunny skies. It is full spring right now and the trees are about halfway to full. September 1st is the first day of spring. People everywhere were wishing you a happy first day of spring!! Wierd! Now that I have experienced how warm spring can be, I can't wait for summer. We move from Sydney to Brisbane in early November and will be getting right into summer. I love the land here. The rock cliffs, the beaches, they have the most amazing trees and the flowers are everywhere. Some of them grow to about 8 feet tall. I guess a giant sunflower would be our equivalent. The birds are also amazing. The cockatoos and parrots are everywhere. They are actually pests in some areas. They are beautiful to look at but make the most horrible screech when communicating with each other, and they destroy property.

Sydney is a really cool city. I think I hated it at first! There is lots to do. We are living right downtown - beside Chinatown (not my first choice). We have a nice two bedroom apartment with a balcony that looks directly into the parkade and office building next door and down into the alley!! LOL ;-) We can and do walk everywhere. There are lots of neat places you can walk to for dinner or just for the night air. We've been to Sydney harbour, where the harbor bridge is and the Sydney Opera House (see pictures). We have not climbed the bridge yet, but we will before we leave here. It takes about 3 1/2 hours to walk up to the top cross over and walk back down. We still have six weeks to go!! The 'Rocks' which is the oldest
neighborhood in Sydney, Darling Harbour, the botanic gardens, the Taronga Zoo and more. There are an endless number of beaches but two of the best are Manly and Bondi. Bondi is amazing!!! I think we've walked a thousand miles since we've been here. We took a day trip to the Blue Mountains. They have a set of points called Three Sisters just like we do. Legend says the witch doctor cursed his three daughters into stone - I can't remember why!! The forest here is mainly eucalyptus trees and the heat of the sun on the leaves produces an oil that gets up into the air and turns the horizon blue - hense the 'blue' mountains. It also smells just amazing. We took another weekend trip up to Port Stephens. There is a beach there that is 32km long, in some places 2km wide peimarily consisting of sand dunes. Sahara desert kind of sand dunes. You need a permit to go on them, but you can rent a quad and go driving up and down them, or you can toboggan down them. Of course I chose to gallop a horse (Tex) across them - it was spectacular!!! One of my best days here. We also took a morning stroll (Trish at 6am pic) up a very large hill to watch the sunrise. The picture does not do it justice. The view was simply indescribable. The view just takes your breath away. We take the train on day trips, buses if we need to (I miss my truck) but it really isn't too hard to get around. It costs like $60 a week to park a vehicle in the city and gas in $1.42 per litre. I think I will keep taking the train!!

As I said we are moving to Brisbane the first part of November and then we are taking two weeks off. It is not 100% sure yet, but the plan is one week in Fiji, which is about a 5 hour plane ride from here and then a week fishing for giant marlin on the Great Barrier Reef. I'm hoping the fact that the Crocodile Man died two weeks ago right where we hoped to go will have settled down by then. This country is just horrified that he died. They really loved the guy. And the fact that he was killed by a stingray is almost embarrasing, because stingrays are typically so gentle around people.

We've had to learn a new language here. 'Howreyagoin' is how are you, 'way out' is exit, 'no passout' means you can't get back into the building here, and there are 'heaps' more little things that make us chuckle every day. It isn't much different from home, except that you have to go north where it's warmer. Oh yeah, I drove a right hand stick shift up the mountainside on the left side of the road!! No shit - I'm not makin this up. I had a hoot - it was a lot of fun and shifting gears with your left hand is not as hard as you may think. :-) Tomorrow is the Jenolean caves and 20 of us are going deep sea fishing on Monday. The weather is supposed to be 'fine'. Oh, when you go to the beach don't forget your 'swimmers'. :-) I wish I could remember them all just for this email, but it is late at night here and my brain is tired. Oh yeah, the time difference: When it is 10:00am Monday morning here, it is 6:00pm Sunday night in Calgary, making calling home a challenge. But I've managed to do so a few times. Perry also attended his first rugby game last night. He said it was a lot of fun. They sure do take their sports here seriously.

I've attached some pics for you guys. I've got so many photos already it will be hard to send only a few. I included a portrait of us in our makeup for the Techno show. In case some of you don't know, the staff did a spoof of the show in Seattle. Perry was one of the main characters and I was a trapeze girl!! My five minutes of fame. The whole process was so much fun it should have been against the law.

So enjoy, and remember that I think of everyone back home everyday. Yes, everyday!! There are many days I would take my little cabin in the woods with a flower garden and a dog over this, but we are still having good fun and seeing lots.

I hope life is treating all of you well. My sister tells me that you are already expecting snow. I really hope you have another mild winter. Drop me a line and let me know what is happening back home. You guys don't have to wait for an update from me to write - and I know some of you have digital cameras, so send me some pictures!!

Perry has to go back to work for midnight to fix a water line that Montreal forgot to glue together in the kitchen, and I need to go and wake him up. I think of home often and believe it or not, I do miss home.

Talk to you soon.
Luv - Trish and Perry

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My response back to her:

Good to hear from you!!

http://owlfeather05.blogspot.com/

If you check out my blog above, you'll see some pictures of our summer. You should think about doing something like that, then we can check it, off and on, to see what's happening in your life!! And we can post comments as we see fit, and do a 2 way conversation thingy. I use it alot for my aunt on the island, my cousin in Drum, and my GF in Denmark. Works great!

It was so cold the other morning, we had to scrape frost off the windshields!!! GGGRRRR!!! And my plants have been covered in the backyard since last weekend, 'cause I just KNOW it's gonna warm up again!!!

I don't know if you got to meet Brewster, our kitten that we got at the end of April. Life hasn't been the same since we got him! Poor little begger got fixed on Monday, but poor Dave got clawed pretty good trying to get him into the truck. I think he must have known what was gonna happen to him, 'cause I had just taken him to Waterton with me and Gracie last Wednesday, and he was just ducky fine then, in the truck. Go figure. So poor Dave has some nasty scraches on his chest!!

I'll let my blog tell you our BIG news.... hehe Something to get you to REALLY check it out! Unless, of course, you've heard already.

The days are getting shorter and shorter and shorter! The hawks haven't left the country yet, but I'm sure it won't be long now! Especially with this crappy weather we've been having!

Anyway, good to hear from you, I'll share it with Dave!
Love from both of us, and the fur kids too!
C & D

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Her reply:

Okay ------------- I scanned the blog ---------------- really neat way to do things. Perry has been talking about doing something like that for a very long time. Maybe I should look into it. So – the BIG news is the engagement ring right??!! No I did not know about this. Nobody tells me anything!!!!!!!!!!! So can I have more details?? Anything set in stone? Do I need to take time off work? It’s not that easy here you know. I am going to set up a phone call at moms in a couple of weeks. It will be very early on a Monday morning here and mid afternoon Sunday there around 3 or 4pm. I’ll let you know what day for sure – maybe you and Dave could join the call.

Talk to you soon

Luv – Trish


So Trish - if you are reading this...
Nothing set in stone. No date set. Altho I did promise Dave that if I won another trip, we'd use that as our honeymoon. Well, yesterday, I qualified for a trip to San Francisco thru our radio station. Guess we'll know more on Oct. 4, when they give the trip away! LOL

TTFN