Christmas shopping is all done

We finished our Christmas shopping in true last minute fashion by waiting till Christmas eve to get the last of the presents and the food.  I am quite confident that we will just about have enough to eat.
We made a list last night while playing monopoly and worked out the menu for the day:

Breakfast
croissant
bacon
eggs

Snacks
nuts
soy crisps
fruit
marshmallows (Evan's contribution to the list)
cheese
cabonossi
crackers

Lunch
humane leg ham
salad
prawns
oysters
pasta bake
cheesecake

Dinner
A turducken - never had one of these before but it sounds so cool I am excited about trying it.  This turduken is wrapped in bacon, so our carnivores are in raptures over the sheer meatiness of it.
roast vegies
gravy
Christmas pudding with custard and icecream


and if we are still not totally stuffed after all of that we have shortbread and mince pies for afters.


Looking forward to all the fun of eating and unwrapping pressies tomorrow

Ho Ho Ho bring it on Santa.

In the meantime to pass the time we have engaged in a massive floor game of monopoly.  Sarah and Harry laid out a square of mats that they named after the streets in monopoly.  We grabbed some big game pieces and are walking them around our improvised board.

We have all of the cards and money from the original game.  So it's exactly the same, just in jumbo version.  While playing the boys are still managing to use their ipads and ipods, playing their apps at the same time as playing the big family monopoly game.

This game is gonna take days to finish

Christmas Travels

Oh I do love a good family trip away.  It is such a big to do, packing and cleaning and getting everyone in the car and trying to get away at a decent time.

We managed to get underway by 10am, which was one hour behind schedule, but pretty good considering.  The traffic wasn't too bad up our end of the coast, well at least in the direction that we were travelling.  I did feel sorry for those heading north as they reached the new bottle neck of Macksville.  Every time a new section of road gets opened the bottle neck moves to another location just a little further along the road.  The Beautiful Kempsey bypass is open and now Macksville is copping the endless lines of traffic, stretching for kilometres.

The thing that I like about travelling at Christmas time is all the silly bling that you see.  Tinsel and lights, Christmas decorations and Santa hats abound everywhere.  It's a nice way to break up the monotony of a long journey to be rewarded with random displays of silliness.  We saw a few good ones on the way.  The big brown dump truck up on a pole just outside Macksville that had a big inflatable Santa riding in the tray and the truck itself was adorned with reindeer antlers.
There were lots of cars dressed as reindeers too, or just sporting a nifty little bit of tinsel.  It's so nice to have a time in the year where everyone can let their silly side out for a bit of a run.

Our intention this trip is to stay at various scout camps/ halls in lieu of accommodation.  Our first stop was an over nighter at Woy Woy where we camped at the Kariong scout camp.  It was a big regional camping ground like Glenreagh with amenties block, camp warden, dorms, activities and different camp spots.  It was a bit of a hike to get into the camp, but we had trolleys to help us.  When we booked it we kinda thought it would a little remote and we would pretty much have the place to ourselves.  When we turned up at the car park there were about 30 other cars there.  So this was not going to be a quiet camp by any stretch of the imagination.  Bankstown Scouts were there and they were intent on having a raucous time. Luckily we were far enough away for it not to be an issue.

Unluckily, they were near the toilet blocks and we weren't.  I had decided that a twinkle in the bush was going to be just fine for me as I was not too fussed on heading up to the toilets in the middle of the night.  Steve was not so lucky.  He came down with the tummy bug, and not only spent all day feeling extremely poorly, but decided to pick that night to get a bad case of the trots.  He found himself haunting the toilet block for a goodly proportion of the night.  By morning he was totally wrecked and could merely supervise the pack up of camp.

With another full day's travel, Steve was happy to sit back in air conditioned comfort while we drove along.  Ellie travelled relatively well and managed to sleep through a good portion of the journey on both days.  She coped so well in fact that I was bursting with milk by the time we reached camp on the first day.  She was so interested in everything and the places that we were going, that a feed was pretty low on her priority list. 

We got to Bateman's Bay around 3.30pm today after we had a stop in Nowra for lunch.  We reaffirmed the fact that we are not overly enamoured of the place.  Today, in particular, it was hot and sticky.  We were pretty glad to be on our way again and back in the air conditioned car.

We will spend 6 days here in the Bateman's Bay scout hall.  We are not allowed to camp inside, but we have full use of the kitchen and bathroom facilities.  And we have the place to ourselves.  The kids are busy, as I type this, pitching our big tent outside.  We will sleep out there, but have a nice cool hall to retreat to in the heat of the day.

Tomorrow we head to Narooma to check out our old house and visit some old friends.  I am looking forward to seeing the town again.  Every time that we go there, some little things have changed and slowly it is starting to feel less and less like our Narooma.  It's always a mixture of happy and sad heading back there.  Happy to reminisce and see good friends, but sad that as is the case in life, things have a way of moving on and changing.

Bowraville

We went to Bowraville today to watch Evan play in the Coffs Harbour City Orchestra.  They were giving a performance in the old theatre there.  Bowraville is a lovely quiet little town inland from Macksville on the NSW mid north coast.  It still has lots of its original buildings, like a boarding house, a wash house, an emporium, and of course the theatre. It has a reasonably high Koori population and as yet seems to not have been discovered by the alternative community people like Bellingen has been.  I was really surprised at how quiet the town was today.

The logistics of getting to Bowraville today were a little challenging. Evan needed to be there early to set up, and being a hour's drive away, it wasn't feasible to drop him off and the rest of us come along later.  Also, to further complicate matters, our 'big' car, the one that can actually fit in all of the family, was out of action.  That left us with the small car, which can only seat 5. As a family of six this meant we needed some advanced planning.  We weren't keen on leaving anyone behind, so Steve managed to organise a lift for himself and Evan with someone else from the orchestra.  They left quite early and had a long day at Bowraville.  Steve chewed up some time at the Bowraville museum, learning that the town was originally called Bowra.  When it got its post office the name was changed to Bowraville in order that it was less likely that it could be confused with Bowral.

Sarah was the driver for us today and she drove Harry, Ellie and I.  We left much later than the others and got to Bowraville about ten minutes before the start.  Along the way, Sarah and I discussed the outline of the story that we had thought up while travelling Australia in 2007.  Sarah reminded me of a lot of details that I had forgotten.  We nutted out a few more ideas and I wrote a bit of a skeleton of the story.  Sarah had various writings of the story that she had attempted in the past, and was able to show one of them to me that she had stored on her laptop.

The concert was very entertaining and we had great seats close to the front and right in the centre.  The theatre is quite old and still has its original style.  The acoustics seemed to be really good too.  The orchestra played a number of pieces such as White Christmas and Polar Express.  Then we had a sing along of Christmas Carols with orchestral accompaniment.

Ellie has a ball climbing the steps in the aisle and made herself a little friend when she discovered a little boy around her age.  He was a little less able on the steps, so Ellie had a great time showing off her prowess by standing and walking and getting herself up and down the steps.

Robotic vacuum cleaner

If you are wondering what to buy your partner for Christmas I can seriously recommend a robotic vacuum cleaner.  They are great and save you so much time.

 

 

 

Just before Fathers' Day this year my husband suggested that we get a robotic vacuum cleaner to keep our new floating floor dust free.  It is amazing how much dust shows up every day when you convert your floors from carpet to hard.  All that dust that you had never noticed before on a carpeted floor sits on a smooth hard floor catching the light and flaunting itself.  It really does require a daily clean. Who has time to vacuum every day?  I certainly don't, once a week is about as good as it gets, and maybe on a really good week, I'd get around to it twice. So basically, the floor spends most of its time dirty, with a very brief moment in time when it actually looks any good.

 

As head vacuum cleaner operator in our household, I jumped on my husband's suggestion of a robotic vacuum cleaner.  I knew that they were a little expensive, so the chances of him buying me one were pretty remote.  As he pretty much had all his vacuuming done free of charge and by someone else, there would be little motivation for him to fork out too much money in that department. Also, being close, but not quite a power tool, he would deem it of little value.  The same amount of money spent on a power tool that lives in the depths of his shed and being lucky to see the light of day twice a year is a justifiable expense.  I do recall him even telling me something along the lines of a power tool is a good investment, hence worth the expense.

 

 

Well after using our new robotic vacuum cleaner for 2 months, I can tell you it is definitely worth the expense.  This is no fad purchase that sits in a dark dusty corner silently reminding you of a foolhardy purchase.  I use it everyday, just push the button and off it goes. It sets off on a seemly random zig-zaggy path around the rooms, cleaning away relatively quietly.  I was worried at first that it would be horribly noisy, but it isn't.  It hums away merrily doing its thing, while leaving you to do your thing.

 

If you were paying someone by the hour to vacuum your house you'd definitely sack this little robotic machine.  It takes a while to potter around, and seems to miss bits, but will eventually make its way back to clean them up.  Although they are entertaining to watch, at first, you do find yourself pointing out bits it has missed.  It happily ignores you and gets on with the job, trundling up over humps in the carpet and managing small lips between rooms with surprising ease.  It works best on hard floors, though seems to suck an amazing amount of dust out of the carpeted areas too.  It struggles to get the lint on my rugs, but then I struggle to clean them with a conventional vacuum cleaner too.

 

The bit I like the most is its ability to go underneath the furniture and into those places that rarely get a thorough clean.  Now those areas are getting a daily clean, so those hidden dust harbouring nooks and crannies have had their day.  It can't get right into the corner, but comes pretty close. So it is necessary to go over the house once in a while with your conventional vacuum cleaner, so don't throw it away yet. I guess I'll get around to getting it out again, but find time is the hard part.  Today while my little robot was inside doing its thing I was outside enjoying the sunny spring weather and doing some gardening.  Meanwhile, I could hear my neighbour labouring away with his ordinary vacuum cleaner inside his house.  I know where I preferred to be.

 

 

Just like now, you wouldn't question your need to buy a washing machine as it beats hand washing by a country mile, so does having a robotic vacuum cleaner beat vacuuming by hand.  Sure there are a few small bits where doing it by hand gives a better result, but the overall time saver of having a machine do the bulk of the work for you is well worth the investment.  It's the next in our line of modern conveniences must haves that frees us up to enjoy other non cleaning aspects of our life.  Buy your partner a robotic vacuum cleaner for Christmas, you'll both be so glad that you did.