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Labour Day long weekend


02 Oct

Posted in Friends, Sydney city | No Comments »

Old sink, Cockatoo Island

The plans for our long weekend changed when our car was taken away on the back of a tow truck. It had been serviced and had a clutch replaced, and we only picked it up on Friday evening, so it was very disappointing to see it on the back of a tow truck on Saturday morning.  Luckily it doesn’t appear to have been a difficult thing to fix, something wasn’t put back together correctly, but it did affect our weekend plans.

So, instead of going to Mt. Tomah on Sunday as planned, we had to stay around Sydney. We took the ferry to Cockatoo Island with Aurelie and Nico, and had a picnic lunch before taking a 2 hour tour of the island. It was a fascinating place, with a convict and ship building/repair history. I was rather amused by all the talk of ghosts from our tour guide. She said she was a ghost hunter and that there had been some sightings on the island, but I just can’t believe that sort of thing. Call me an unbeliever if you will. 🙂

After the tour we took the ferry back to Darling Harbour where there was a Brazilian festival over the weekend. I think it was with great delight that the boys watched the dancers with feathers in their hair and very skimpy bikini-like sparkly outfits on! They were good, though, and I love the music. We also watched some dancers from other south American countries and listened to a Columbian group singing and playing their instruments for a while.

We ended up that evening at Aurelie and Nico’s flat for dinner. We’d been invited several times but between us we had just never found a good time. So it was great to have the evening with them. Unfortunately it had been a hot and sunny day, Andrew’s sunglasses were in the car when it was tows, and neither of us remembered a hat for the day. So Andrew wasn’t really feeling so well and we left early.

Monday I spent a lot of the day in my ‘garden’, which consists of some large tubs filled with potting mix on our balcony. I have a worm farm and it was time to clean it out as it was a bit full, so by the time I’d done that and put half the worm castings in each of the tubs, last year’s potting mix looked like a lovely nutritious mix. I planted one tub with only dwarf bean seeds. The other tub got basil, radish and sping onion seeds. I also plan to replenish my dwindling herb supplies from seeds, so we put some seed raising mixture into old egg containers and planted seeds in them. I planted some thyme, oregano and sage seeds, while Andrew planted chilli seeds. Hopefully they will grow and we get around to planting them out this time (last time we grew some of these chilli seeds we never planted them in pots and they died). I just hope that all the new seedlings will survive 3 days without attention in a couple of weeks when we are down in Melbourne.

Tricia and Aaron


28 Sep

Posted in Family, Friends, Sydney city | No Comments »

Tricia is a friend I have known my entire life. Literally! She is one year older than me, and when we were growing we lived across the road from each other. Our parents are good friends and for many years they have played cards together most Sunday nights that they were all free, and we used to laugh about their post mortems in the days following their matches. Trish would even come on our family holidays when we were kids. I moved to Melbourne to go to uni, Trish went there to live a few years afterwards and once again we could regularly see each other. She worked in the city and I travelled through each day, so we’d meet up on Friday nights for dinner and eat out somewhere. Then I moved to the other side of Melbourne, and by this stage Trish was married and soon had a son, and so we’d catch up about one Saturday a month for lunch. Then I moved to Sydney, and it again became hard to keep in touch. But it doesn’t matter, for no matter what happens in our lives we will always be friends.

Anyway, Tricia came to visit for a few days with her son Aaron, who is now 10 years old. They arrived on Saturday evening, and so yesterday we spent most of the day wandering around the city and Manly. We drove to Darling Harbour and then walked to the city and Circular Quay, stopping at the Lindt shop for some refreshments on the way. Then we caught a ferry to Manly where we had a late lunch of fish and chips. Aaron wanted to play footy on the beach and harassed Tricia to buy him a football, so we found a cheap, small squashy ball that would do, but by this time we were heading back to the ferry. So we decided to walk to the Opera House when we got back to Circular Quay, and then go to the Botanical gardens where there are lots of large grassy spaces that we thought he’d be able to play with his ball in. Unfortunately, when we got there we saw a sign saying no balls, so poor Aaron couldn’t play even there.

We went to the BBQ King for a chinese dinner which was really tasty and both Andrew and I enjoyed a lot. Unfortunately I don’t think it went down too well with 10 year old Aaron. From there it was back to the car, and a short drive home. I think everyone was exhausted after walking so far!

Tricia and Aaron were staying until Tuesday morning, so Monday night after work we all went to Gabe and Julie’s house for dinner (we took lasagne and a salad, Julie organised garlic bread and dessert) and had a great night there.

It was really wonderful to have Tricia and Aaron visit. 🙂

Red hands cave and missing hockey


03 Sep

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Red hands cave, Blue Mountains National Park

Life has been so very busy of late that I haven’t really had time to write much here.  The weekend before last we took my friend Iris and her friend from Germany to the Blue Mountains.  We had to leave Sydney quite early, because Andrew was playing hockey at 5 pm so we knew we’d have to leave the mountains relatively early. 

We picked Iris and her friend up from Strathfield, and our first stop was in Glenbrook where we got directions to the Red Hands Cave.  I’d never been there before, and found it quite interesting.  It was about a 10 minute walk in from the car park, and the cave is blocked off by mesh and rather scratched perspex.  In fact, the best view we got of it was by taking a photo!  We then went to a lookout over the Nepean River, which was absolutely gorgeous, and checked out the campsite for future reference. 

From there we went to Katoomba to see the Three Sisters for the typical tourist photograph, and then on to Govetts Leap for a late picnic lunch.  We stopped to check out Wentworth Falls on the way back, but didn’t really have the time to walk down to the lookout.  So we drove back to Sydney, dropped off Iris and her friend, got to the hockey ground with about half an hour to spare.

 It was about then that Andrew realised that we hadn’t brought his hockey shoes.  I’d been trying to hurry him up in the morning, and so had packed his shirt, shorts, socks and hockey stick into his bag and took it down to the car.  I hadn’t even thought about his shoes.  Because I’d packed his things, Andrew forgot to pick up his shoes (I guess thinking that I already had them).  So this debacle meant that he couldn’t play.  We drove home, but it was too far to make a return trip to the ground worthwhile (the game would have been more than half over).  So that’s the story of how Andrew missed his last hockey game of the season. 

The lives of others


28 Aug

Posted in Food, Friends, Movies | No Comments »

Last week Iris organised dinner and a movie at Govindas. Andrew and I had been talking about going back there, because we had such a wonderful time last time we were there. Unfortunately, however, whenever we were free there weren’t any movies that interested us showing there.

Iris decided to take her friend there, and invited Andrew and I as well. The food, as last time, was delicious. I just love the dahl soup they have, it is so very tasty. Then at around 9:15 pm we paid and went up to the cinema which has very comfy lounge-like seats. The movie was called ‘The Lives of Others’, and was in German with English subtitles. It was very interesting, and I really enjoyed it. It was set in the years before the fall of the wall in Germany, with the last bit finishing a few years after the fall. I loved the ending, too, it really was a perfect way to finish the movie.

Birthday yum cha


10 Jul

Posted in Food, Friends, Sydney city | No Comments »

Yum cha

Andrew and I spent Saturday in the city. It was Andrew’s birthday on Friday and mine on Sunday, so we sort of split the difference and decided to celebrate by having yum cha on Saturday with Gabe, Julie, the kids and Iris.

We picked Iris up from Redfern station around 9 am and then drove to a car park in the city. We walked down to the Pyrmont Growers Market and spent an hour or so wandering around. Andrew and Iris both had Wagyu beef steak sandwiches for breakfast while I had a Thai chicken curry pie. I bought some goats cheese that I simply love, tasted some blood oranges that were delicious so I bought some of those too, then Andrew went off for a coffee and Iris and I both bought some orange juice. We went past a stall that sold ‘icecream sandwiches’ and was told that if I chose a flavour and came back in about 10 minutes I could taste it (it had to warm up a bit to make it easy to cut). I chose caramel pecan, which was caramel icecream between two pecan biscuits. Very delicious, I must say! We bought a loaf of bread and the newspaper, and took everything back to the car.

We planned to have yum cha for lunch, but we were waiting for Gabe and Julie to meet us with the kids. Julie rang to say that Angela was still sleeping and they’d be later than planned. Iris said it would be nice to just sit in the sun for an hour with a Starbucks coffee, so we arranged a place to meet and said we’d call her in about an hour to let her know what was happening. Then Andrew and I headed to the city to wander around and do a little window shopping.

Just over an hour later Julie rang to say they were on their way, so we called Iris and organised to meet her near the Chinese restaurant. The timing was pretty good, by the time we got a table Gabe and Julie were only about 5 minutes or so from the restaurant. It ended up being a pretty late lunch, so there wasn’t as much choice of food as normal, but we also were able to sit around the table for ages after we finished eating because lunch was over and they weren’t seating people for dinner yet.

When we finally left the restaurant, Andrew and I walked to Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair to see the USS Kittyhawk that was in Sydney for 5 days. From there we walked through the botanical gardens and back to the carpark.

It was a lovely day.

Pasha Bulker


03 Jul

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Pasha Bulker

The Pasha Bulker got stuck on Nobby’s beach in Newcastle some 25 days ago during the massive storms that we had. It was one of the many ships waiting to pick up a load of coal in Newcastle.  It had ignored advice to move further from shore during the storm while it waited, and so it was pushed onto a beach. Last Wednesday night was the first planned attempt to refloat the ship, and using three tug boats pull it into deep water. The timing was due to a full moon on Saturday night, which means that the tides will be high for about a week.

The attempt on Wednesday night didn’t happen, Thursday night the ship was moved about 9 degrees before a couple of cables attached to the tug boats broke. Friday and Saturday night’s attempts were postponed, and so on Sunday we decided to go and have a look at the ship.

We picked Iris up at Redfern station just after 10 am and then headed north. In Newcastle we found ourselves a parking spot and started walking towards the ship, but I think that none of us realised how far we’d have to walk to see it. Because of the salvage operation there was an exclusion zone about 500 metres around the beach, and so we walked a long way before we found somewhere that we could see the entire boat from. It may not have been clear from our sightings how close it was to the shore, but we could tell it was very close. From photographs in the news papers, it looked less than 100 metres from the water’s edge!

Walking back to the car we stopped for a late lunch of fish and chips. The shop we got them from had a board saying “seen the ship, now have a chip”. hehe. We detoured through The Entrance on the way home. Unfortunately we missed the pelican feeding, but the sunset was stunning. Andrew took some photos (he also took the one of Pasha Bulker above), and this is one of them.

Sunset at The Entrance

Sunday night the Pasha Bulker was successfully rotated so that she was ready to be pulled out to sea, and last night it seems that it all went well and she’s no longer beached. She has sustained some damage, so I guess she’ll have to get repaired before she can go anywhere. It’s amazing that three little boats could pull such a huge ship stuck that was stuck in sand around and then out to sea. Well, I’m amazed, anyway. 🙂

Weekend of chocolate


18 Jun

Posted in Food, Friends, Weather | No Comments »

I’ve dubbed this past weekend the ‘weekend of chocolate’. I think I’ve eaten more chocolate in the last 72 hours than I normally eat in an entire year.

It all started with the arrival of my friend Stephanie who came to visit from Melbourne for the weekend. She arrived on Thursday night, complete with two large blocks of Cadbury’s chocolate. Normally I don’t have chocolate in the house, so it was a real treat to have blocks of chocolate. I had Friday off work to spend with Steph, but unfortunately the weather ruined our plans. It wasn’t as bad as last weekend, but it still severely restricted our options. So, instead of going out for walks and taking photographs, we stayed inside on Friday. I decided to make banana muffins and Steph decided that they had to have choc chips in them. The shop at the front of the complex had choc chips, so that sealed the deal and they were added to the mix.

So the chocolate blocks and the choc-banana muffins were devoured over the weekend. Saturday, with flash flooding still being forecast and lots of roads impassable due to fallen trees, we decided that our safest bet would be to stay home. None of us really wanted to go out walking around in the storms anyway. Because we’d stayed home, Andrew decided that he really should go and play hockey. So Steph and I dropped him off at the ground soon after 3 pm and we went for a drive. We went to a lookout on Prince of Wales drive which looked out over Botany Bay entrance, and then we drove to La Perouse to go for a walk on Bare Island. However, once we got there the rain started pelting down on us with strong winds driving it sideways, so we ran back to the car and sat there for a while waiting for it to ease, but it didn’t.

We decided to see if the boys were still playing hockey in this weather and drove back to the hockey ground. They’d been playing for about half an hour when we got there and the ground was almost flooded. The ball didn’t go far when they hit it, being slowed down by all the water. It was the first time I’d seen them running faster than the ball could be hit! The rain kept coming in storms with a few minutes between. I couldn’t believe that they played on, but they did. At half time Andrew’s team was up 1/0 and they’d wanted to call it quits, but the other team didn’t want to and so they played the entire game through the storms and finally lost 1/2. The players in the next game weren’t so tough, and their match was called off. I really don’t blame them, I wouldn’t have wanted to go out there and play either! We took a saturated Andrew home to dry off and warm up.

Sunday there was still rain forecast, but we thought it might not be as bad as the last two days, so we went into the city. We wandered around Hyde Park, went on the monorail, browsed Paddy’s Market and ended up in China Town for a yum cha lunch. Then we stopped at the Lindt place that Andrew and I saw last time we were in the city together. Andrew had a coffee, Steph had a hot chocolate and I had an iced mocca. We chose a little chocolate each to have with our drinks. It was all so chocolatey and sweet!! The photos above are from our afternoon tea at Lindt.

From there it was down to the Rocks area and the Opera House, and we caught the train home from Circular Quay. It was trying to rain by that stage but it was really only spitting, so it didn’t slow us down! We dropped Steph off at the airport at around 6 pm.

It was a nice weekend, and great to see Steph. We need the rain, and apparently some of it has fallen in the right place to help our parched dams. But it really did restrict our weekend movements.

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