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  1. In the Air — Up, Up and Away!

    January 27, 2012 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    The time has arrived. Reilly left this morn­ing, and as we speak, She, Matt, Ash­ley, Maria and ofcourse Cove are on their way to the USA.

    Both Reilly and Lilly were very emo­tional this morn­ing. Reilly, because she was leav­ing us behind, and Lilly because she is stuck with me for 11 days!

    This Mon­day school starts and so Lilly will be at school from 9 till 3.30. I’ve arranged to leave work every­day at 3, so we’ll be just fine.

    It is cur­rently hov­er­ing between –10 and –20 degrees Cel­sius in Mass­a­chu­setts, so they bet­ter put on some warm clothes when they get there. I expect many snowy pictures!


  2. Commenting

    January 17, 2012 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Due to increased spam mes­sages, I have lim­ited the com­ment­ing option to reg­is­tered users only. Please reg­is­ter to this blog as user to be ale to comment.


  3. Week in review

    January 15, 2012 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    On mon­day the floor was finally fin­ished. What was sup­posed to be a one to one and a half day’s job, turned out to be a bit more than that, and we enjoyed 5 days of dust. Yay. But the floor looks good now.

    On Thurs­day last week Karen and John dropped in with a cou­ple of pet mice for Lilly. Now, I know that some may frown imme­di­ately when they read pet mice, and yes, I was less than excited by the prospect, although Elmo seems to be quite happy with the whole thing.……

    So how did we end up with pet mice?

    Karen and John have a big python in a glass cage down at the shed. The python lived on their prop­erty, so john decided to keep it. And nat­u­rally, even snakes have to eat. So of they trot­ted, to the pet shop. And they bought two small mice. Food for the snake. So for two weeks, the mice where in the cage with the python. The snake didn’t even so much as take a sniff at them. He would curl up, and the mice would go to sleep on top of the curled up snake.

    So, one day, John found a rat. He decided to throw that one in with the snake. The rat had barely hit the bot­tom of the cage and the snake had him gob­bled up. Can you imag­ine the poor lit­tle mice look­ing on dur­ing that lit­tle episode? So, the les­son.… This snake doesn’t like mice, but loves the odd rat.

    So we got the mice. That is, until Elmo does!

    Next week we have our co visit. No doubt it’ll be a busy week. That Fri­day, Reilly is of to the US with the Pen­folds. Lilly and me will be by our­selves for ten days. Poor Lil!


  4. Reilly’s email and blog

    January 5, 2012 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Yes, there have been con­tin­ued issues for some months now with Reilly’s blog and email. How­ever. This should now all have been resolved. So try email­ing her directly again. I’m sure she’ll be post­ing on her blog again soon also!


  5. Secret Spot

    January 5, 2012 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Had a great night last night. Even though the house itself was in a state of dusti­ness, Cam and Kel­lie had organ­ised to take us to a nice secluded spot along the beach. It’s a bit out of the way, in that you can­not reach it by car, so that means the tourists wont hap­pen to chance upon it. We rode pushies there.It has a large lake area, where the kids could play nicely and it is sur­rounded by beau­ti­ful tea trees. The inter­est­ing thing is the color of the water. Being sur­rounded by tea trees, the water has gone this deep amber color. Not a murky brown, but quite a nice amber instead. The water itself is  beau­ti­fully clear. Need­less to say the kids enjoyed it very much, and so did we. We brought Cham­pagne and nib­bles and had a very nice after­noon / evening. We stayed there until about 7.30 pm.

     

    The photo’s fail to do it justice.


  6. New floor

    January 5, 2012 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Yes­ter­day the car­pet in our main liv­ing area got removed and they have started to pol­ish the con­crete. It is a dusty job. Our car­pet was very old and dete­ri­o­rated, so the own­ers have opted for the pol­ished con­crete option. So the process is to Paul up the car­pet and smooth edge. Then pol­ish all the con­crete and fill any holes and cracks. They then give it one more quick pol­ish and put a clear coat of sealant on top. It will look pretty cool as far as I’m con­cerned. Just very dusty at present.

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  7. Long weekend

    December 25, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Yes, how quickly time passes. Ten days since my last entry on my blog. As the silly sea­son hits us (Christ­mas and New Year), work got extremely busy. I’ve been work­ing a lot, so hav­ing a break is a wel­come change. Yes­ter­day, we pretty much had a nice cruizy day with a bit of a sleep in and a leisurely break­fast. We still had our meet­ing to go to, but that is never a burden.

    Today we’ll be clean­ing out the garage in prepa­ra­tion for Dad’s visit. We are going to do it up into a bit of a bed­room, so that we can all be com­fort­able. When not in use as a bed­room, it can be a study and a cof­fee room. Ryan Ped­er­sen has given us some slid­ing glass doors, which we’ll be installing just behind the garage roller door. That way we can open up the roller door and have a nice bit of light come in, keep an eye on the kids play­ing out the front, while still hav­ing a closed room.

    Cam and Sean have been busy boys in our back­yard. They decided amongst them­selves that, while our fence made out of bam­boo reed was ok, it could do with improve­ment, so they con­creted the poles in and have started putting up a proper fence. It’s great! It gives a nice level of pri­vacy in the back­yard. It was quite a nice sur­prise to see their hard work when arriv­ing home.

    Jan­u­ary is going to be another busy month. We have our CO visit, and Reilly will be going to the US with the Pen­folds for the intense pro­gram at the Son-Rise centre.


  8. Successful trivia nite — visitor gone

    December 16, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    After some hic­cups the Trivia nite turned out a great suc­cess. So much so that we have no hit the tar­get for the Pen­folds to be able to go to the US this Jan­u­ary. It’ll con­tinue to be an ongo­ing costly exer­cise, but at least this hur­dle has been overcome.

    The board went for $2200!

    We had a bit of a hic­cup. About an hour and a half before we were to start, the lap­top on which I had the Trivia pro­gram setup (to run on the pro­jec­tor screen), decided to just die alto­gether. It just went blank and wouldn’t power up any­more. So, I very quickly drove home, installed the soft­ware on a dif­fer­ent pc, re-type the ques­tions (which I thank­fully had printed the night before), redid the audio clips and drove back to Ban­ga­low, to have it all set up and run­ning just in time. Phew, that was a close one.

    Aunty Shane left yes­ter­day. We enjoyed hav­ing her here. I would’ve liked to have spent a bit more time with her, but unfor­tu­nately was very busy at work. But we man­aged to catch up and have some nice talks. I think she enjoyed her stay and had a good rest also. She devoured a few books while here and slept in a few mornings.


  9. Visitor and Reilly’s planning skills put to the test.

    December 8, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    yes we have been busy and even Reilly’s plan­ning skills were put to the test this week. tomor­row nite we have the Trivia Nite for Cove. And today Aunty Shane will be com­ing to visit for 8 days.…. or so Reilly thought.

    In fact, she arrived yes­ter­day! Reilly received a mes­sage at about 12.30 say­ing that she had arrived at the Gold Coast air­port. Whoops. So I jumped in the van and went and picked her up.

    All is good!


  10. Recovering Cove trivia night

    November 29, 2011 by Sebastiaan Scholtens

    Before I forget…

    We have a spot to book tick­ets for the Trivia Night.

    (16–12-11 — note: link now dis­abled) There is a link in the side bar on this blog, but I’m insert­ing it in this post also: