Merry Christmas!

I know I'm a bit early, but I'm off to Budapest tomorrow and i'll stay at Simon's tonight cos the bus to the airport leaves from near his place. :)

found this great site - click on the picture to see something very funny.. hope you enjoy it as much as me and dee.. heheh..



p.s. make sure the sound is on!

new hair, new job

just wanted to let everyone know that as of next Feb, i'll be coordinating Lab in a Lorry for the North-West of England.

Lab in a Lorry is run by the Institute of Physics and is essentially a mobile physics laboratory. A 10 tonne truck travels to schools where volunteers run lab sessions with school students (11 - 14 years old). My job will be getting it all to happen: booking schools; liaising with the lorry drivers to make sure the truck gets there; recruiting, training and organising the volunteers; welcoming students to the lorry; making sure the experiments are working (and maybe coming up with some more); handling any media.. i'm sure there's more that i just don't know about yet. *grin*

Because the job is for the North-West, I get to stay in Manchester (where I have good friends and a comfortable place to live), and the extreme project management for this position is going to be good for me... as long as it doesn't kill me. *grin*

I've got a lot of ends to wrap up in my current position before February, so I think I'm going to be busy over the 'break' (not to mention that I'm going to Budapest from 24th - 28th.. woohoo). But I hope to be able to chat to all of you sometime in the next couple of weeks - on Skype would be good, just let me know when you'll be around.

happy happy happy

happy birthday Lisa!

Have a great day sis.
(haven't been able to get your pressie yet.. sorry.. it'll be in the post soon)
*hugz*

Happy Birthday Carolynn!

Happy Birthday Carolynn.

It was good to 'chat' to you this morning (my evening).
Hope you have a great day, get good shopping done and have a great time at the break-up.

*hugz*

Housey house stuff

Today (after a minor freak out with the car and a call to RAA, but that's another story) we picked up the keys to our new house! We took out some stuff, and we'll take out more as well before the removalists arrive (7am tomorrow)

Here's some photos we took while out there... there's not many inside the rooms because really, all the rooms look pretty similar :)









Also, they're not in the photos but Cheryl's friend Bron bought us a couple of garden gnomes! We put one in a clear place, and the other is hidden a bit further back. I think the house really has character, especially that back yard. Plus the second shed is huge! I'm already planning a gym/games room in there ;)

We look forward to all of you visiting, and we'll add some more photos when our rooms actually have furniture in them :)

13 days until Christmas

Well, I told Damien I would attempt an update, so here goes.

Carolynn has been invited to ESC's award night, which means she has done well enough in her classes this year to get a good number of awards. They can get an award in each class for achievement and effort, and there are 7 classes per semester. Last semester Carolynn got 5 awards. The people who get an invitation to the awards night are the highest scoring, so to speak. It's somehow worked on the average of the class. Anyway, Carolynn has been ahead in most classes this year.

She's also been given her subject list for next year, and I was happy that instead of Astronomy she has been put in to one of the other science classes (living world). She didn't want to do it because of the teacher, but I think with her other subjects, and the fact she's been doing so well, this means she can move in to Biology or Chemistry, I think.

Jared has been going well at school as well. His teacher is really happy with his progress, especially in reading. They give the children books and MP3 players so they have to read the book at the speed of the recording. Jared's teacher said this slows Jared down, because he tries to rush. I'm hoping it will help with his speaking as well, since when he talks he has a habit of slurring his words.

Trinity is becoming more and more of a chatterbox, and a cheeky one. A couple of weeks ago we were looking at photos and I was telling her the names. She repeated, quite clearly, "Aunnie Se-well" but refused to try any others. When we visit friends she says excitedly "Day-me" (Jared's friend Jamie's house) She is still pretending to be a puppy when we visit Nanny and Poppy. I'm not sure what Foxie thinks, but he seems to enjoy the extra pats he gets because Puppy Trinity asks for them.

I'll try to put some photos up on koffeekat, will get resizing this weekend if I don't start earlier!

House update

Hi all,

Cheryl and I are well into packing boxes now. For example, exhibit a - our spare room:



Of course if you think that looks bad, you probably shouldn't look at our lounge room at around 3:30 this afternoon, which I like to call exhibit b - armageddon:



It doesn't look quite that bad now.. close though :)
The reason we are in a flurry of packing is that the truck comes to pick up our stuff on Saturday 15th, giving us less than a week to get everything we have into cardboard.. and we seem to have a fairly large collection of stuff. Where does it all come from?

happy birthday Dee!

time for an update...

I know I've been slack with the Bandwagon.. I've done quite a bit of stuff since my last post.. wow.. i just had a quick look at my calendar and there's a LOT of updating for me to do. :)

As I'm sure you all know, I went to Prague back at the start of September (wow, so long ago!). I caught up with an old Uni friend, Alex, and we spent the weekend wandering around the city. I've put up a bunch of photos here. I may have only been there for a long weekend, but I managed to take a LOT of photos. :) Got to make the most of being there, right?! I think I've put comments on most of the pictures, so you can get an idea of what we got up to.



Hmm.. what else happened in September?

The lab group went to Alton Towers - which is a roller coaster park. I SOOOOOOOO like roller coasters.. I'd never been on one that did loop the loops before - I LIKE IT! The photo here is Luke, Laurent and Vicki, three of my friends from work.

Stuart from Canberra visited and we went to see Xavier Rudd play live (very disappointing on so many levels).

My friends, Paul and Tess (who have recently moved to Huddersfield), had a housewarming party - it was fancy dress with a Movies theme. I went as The Shadow (I'll post a piccy soon). My costume was fairly simple - a black trilby hat, a black cloak (made out of one piece of cheap stretch velvet material), a red scarf and two guns! My friend, Simon, went as Harry Potter but he cheated and hired his costume.

October was also fairly busy - Gregor came to visit for a weekend, but got sick so enjoyed just relaxing and watching dvds at my house; Max came to visit for a while; Vicki, Laurent and I went to see The Coral; the lab group went over to Sheffield for an evening to celebrate Bex's birthday (the photo to the right is one Vicki took on the night); I went to Birmingham for a day to catch up with Bradley from Sydney; and then it was the Manchester Science Festival.

The festival kept me very busy. It was only one week, but it was pretty full on with Murphy's Law in full swing - including me losing my voice on the Monday evening. I couldn't make a sound on Tuesday, but by Friday it was back (but very husky). Overall, I think it went well - about 1250 kiddies came past Marvellous Magnets, the hands-on magnets stall I put together. I had a couple of days off the next week (recovery) and that was October done.

This post is more than long enough, so I'll leave November for next time.

Someone else's turn now!
*grin*

Movember Week 4

I found a chair with my face on it! What's with that?

We have a moving date!

Our finance has been finalised, and it also looks like our settlement date will be changed from the 21st Dec to 14th Dec, Yay! We just need to send back the form that we have signed and it'll be official :) Finally we can start organising things like annual leave, a removalist, carpet cleaning ... and start packing everything. Eep! It'll be great to finally be in our own home with a real kitchen, a lounge and dining room (although I can see us still eating in front of the TV Haha!), and a yard with plants! It's quite exciting now that things are moving along again.
So we're going to be very busy and maybe a little poor, but it'll be a very nice Christmas present for us! :)

Movember Week 3

I'm afraid it's all the untidy stage from here on in. And I'll be very glad to shave it off in December.. it's so hot :(

In other news, why isn't there any other news? Come on guys, I've been posting about the fact that I'm not shaving, surely you all have more interesting things than that to blog about.

I am taking over the bandwagon...

Ok, here's my best shot at Glenn's header naming. If anyone can fill in the blank (or correct me) please do :)

Trin - Lemming
Adam - Halo
Lisa - Commander Keen
Glenn - Wario!
Dee - Mario
Carolynn - Link from Zelda
Nana - A playing card?
Dad - Leisure Suit Larry
Mum - Mrs Pac Man
Jared - Sonic the Hedgehog
Dayna - Kurt Hectic from MDK
Cheryl - Lara Croft from Tomb Raider
Damien - Glenn from the year 2020?

Movember Week 2

Movember week 2 is all about the scowling.

We have a house!

Ok, so there's still a lot of stuff to be done, papers to be signed and the like, but the real estate agent just called and said Cheryl and I have got the house we bid on! Woo! You can see the place here. Tomorrow we meet the agent and sign the contract. Then we have to get a building inspector in to check it over (the contract is subject to inspection) and our mortgage broker will be sorting out the finance for us.

It's all very exciting and more than a little scary.