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June 27, 2006
I'm a Sheep
How many of you have heard of Mark Viduka? Yeah, that's what I thought. I got so caught up in the whole AUS World Cup thing I bought a t-shirt with his face on it for $30 so I'd have the right colours to wear to the Italy vs. Australia game last night. What a tough way for Australia to lose.
However....not near as tough as for the poor Oilers who not only lose the final game of the Stanley Cup but then have their best player demand a trade. Talk about getting kicked while you're down.
NOW...lest you think that this blog is becoming nothing more than a sports update page...here's what we've got going on....................click on the link below to keep reading...
.........only 2 more days at the office. It's really hard to believe that on Friday we're going off to travel the coast of Australia for a bit before flying home to Canada on the 19th. We'd talked about flying on the 18th to try and get free stuff as that will be my birthday, but we figured that it might be more fun to be doing something other than sitting in a metal cylinder for 23 hours on that day.
Mo finished her last shift at the restaurant on Saturday - and the 46 year old crazy Serbian waiter who often made her and Jisca miserable got fired the next day...too bad that couldn't have happened a couple of months ago. She's with me at Strathfield this week, where I'm continually learning quality lessons on how not to run a business.
so many thoughts going through my mind right now. I'm really excited to see our families again. There are so many people I cannot wait to see in BC and back in Montreal - we've missed so much over the last year and look forward to reconnecting. But...I'm pretty frustrated at the same time as I'm not sure I'm much closer to determining what I would like to do "career-wise" and now I have to go back and try to get hired in Quebec again, which was a brutal experience last time. We'll see what pans out I suppose, but I'm starting to get a bit nervous about work, finding a place to live, how things will have changed while we've been gone, etc. I guess we've changed too....
....hey, we're going to be in the Rockies in just over a month! crazy. We went to the Blue Mountains outside Sydney on Sunday...what a scam that is. They're not mountains and would barely qualify as "hills" in my book...more like a deep valley.
OH YEAH...DID I MENTION THE CANUCKS GOT ROBERTO LUONGO?!? Ask mo, when I found out at work yesterday morning I got giddy and couldn't sit at my desk for a few minutes while I tried to plot out what the Canucks would be doing next. Man it's tough to be an Oilers fan right now. By the way, I just want to mention how proud I am of my younger brother Stephen who had the cojones to show up at a game 7 party in Saskatoon with a "Go 'Canes" poster. Gotta love it.
Posted by David at 6:06 PM
June 17, 2006
Go Socceroos!!!
Man, it is tough missing out on the Stanley Cup finals (more on that later), but it has been a huge blast to be here in Australia while the World Cup is on. It's a shock just for Australia to be in the tournament in the first place (it's been over 30 years since the last time they qualified) but they topped that by pulling off a miraculous comeback in their first match against Japan this week, scoring three goals in the final 8 minutes to win 3-1. The city and country is going crazy for "football" and we're all looking forward to their next game against Brazil. The problem is, with the time change, that game will start at 2am Monday morning......alot of us will be very tired at work on Monday...
2 more weeks of work left!!!!....we've booked our plane ticket out of Sydney to Cairns for June 30th and plan to...
...head straight up from there to Cape Tribulation and the Daintree rainforest for a few days of R & R. I mean, c'mon, we've been working almost two months now, time for a break! :-)
Today Maureen and I rode a ferry through the harbour to check out another beach - good waves but it's way too cold out here (10-16) to actually get in the water. We did walk by Russel Crowe out pushing his child in a baby stroller though...wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs hat no less.
some random things I've been thinking about lately...
-I really miss those Nature Valley sweet and salty granola bars
-Australian Kraft Dinner just isn't the same, and neither are their beans and hot dogs...what is the world coming to?
-Go Hurricanes? ok...I'm having a huge crisis here as I watch the online boxscores for the Oilers Hurricanes games. I like the Oilers a lot. In fact, I'm a huge fan of Smith, Smyth, Pronger, and Peca...and I'm a Canadian. However.........I'm a Canucks fan. If Edmonton wins the cup, every Oilers fan I know (for example, every single one of my inlaws) will be reminding me about it over and over again for years. I mean, winning the Stanley Cup gives you a free pass to gloat for at least 4 seasons. I'm not sure I can handle that...at least if they lost, then Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver will all have lost in the last 12 years (ok, we lost a long time ago...but still) and we'd be on a level playing field. Or....do I cheer for the OIlers now knowing that at the same time I'll be cheering against them all over again in October? tough call.
-Australian Rugby and Aussie Rule players are huge...and their kickers regularly get off 50 metre kicks and kick field goals at ridiculous angles - why are there only a couple of them in the NFL?
Posted by David at 8:55 PM
June 13, 2006
On our own...
....it has been basically two weeks since we last wrote anything in our blog. Well, a busy couple of weeks it has been! Mo finally got her first day off on the 11th and we took off for the day to visit the Hunter Valley just outside of Sydney. It's one of the premier wine growing regions of the country and we had a great time touring a couple of vineyards and trying various samples. We even got a steak dinner to top it off - only my second steak in the last 6 months!
The 10th was a pretty great day as well - Mo was working during the day but I got to hang out by the harbour listening to some live music during the city's jazz festival and that evening Paul, Jisca, Maureen and I all got decked out and went to...
...the Sydney Opera House to see the Sydney Symphony perform. What a blast! It was really neat to actually go see a show inside such a world famous landmark. The acoustics were absolutely amazing and the performance was outstanding as well. It was without a doubt the best music venue I've ever been in.
The really big news, though, is that Paul and Jisca have decided to leave Sydney this coming weekend and aim to be back in Canada in just over 2 weeks. We've spent almost 6 weeks living together in a 1 bedroom apartment and the better part of 9 months travelling as couples so it will be weird for Mo and I to be on our own again.
Posted by David at 8:46 PM