New Plant

Bought this great plant from Mexico today. 

Front Entryway

It looks nice with the rest of the plants at the front of the house. 

Home Gym

Well, for our New Year's resolution this year we vowed to exercise more, and so we bought ourselves this home gym. We've been using it about every other day. Gromit the power lifter uses it more, we suspect... 

Bowling

Our friend Geoff MacDonald from Canada is having his 33rd birthday party today at a cool retro bowling alley called Strike - should be fun! (Tim and I are wearing our matching bowling shirts (a wedding gift...). 

New Web Pages Coming Soon...

Zamboni helped me with our new web pages today. They should be ready to go live by the end of the week. They will have cool new slideshows which will allow us to update them quickly and easily. 

Today we went birdwatching, which is what we often do at Christmas and New Years. We packed a picnic lunch and headed to the national parks and state forests in the Granite Belt, about 90 minutes southwest of Brisbane. 

The forests here have lots of nice vistas - mostly of granitew outcroppings. 

Since it was near 100 degrees Farenheit in Brisbane, it was nice to get into the considerably cooler rainforest. 

This is one of my favorite trees in Australia - it is called a boonah tree. They take a long time to grow this tall... 

Here is a beautiful butterfly we saw in the forest today! 

Good news!

Well, today we got an early Christmas present - the lab tests on both Darwin and Newton for feline leukemia were negative. (Just before we said goodbye to both Darwin and Newton, the vet drew bone marrow from both for this test.) This means that the other cats cannot have it. We are very relieved by this information... 

Snake at the front door...

We found another snake last night! This dwarf crowned snake was thinking about sliding under the front door, but then thougt better of it and slithered over to the corner of our porch. (His head is to the left - it has a white stripe on it's head.) These snakes are in the cobra family but are only very mildly poisonous (just enough to kill the geckos and little lizards they eat - and since our porch is filled with geckos, maybe he'll hang around!). To find out more about these cool little snakes click here. EVERYTHING here (toads, snakes, lizards) shows up at our front door.... (NOTE: if you click on this or any photo on the blog, it gets bigger and you can see things better... if you want to...) :)  

I stalk the wild slipper...

We have been opening Christmas presents early... Joann sent some cool slippers - Zamboni really likes them... 

Think Pink!

I have bought myself an early Christmas present - a pink colander! Still wondering what to make for Christmas day dinner.... 

WASH ME!

Ah yes, just another day of laundry and other chores on a Saturday.... 

Peter off on more Australian adventures...

It was great having Peter visit - he's off today to Mission Beach in North Queensland for four days, then on to Melbourne until Christmas... I'm looking forward to visiting Peter in San Fransisco next year... 

Eumundi craft markets

Saturday we had fun going to the Eumundi craft markets with Peter. We all got swell Christmas gifts for friends and family... 

Turkish food

Saturday night we had our last dinner together at the Ottoman Turkish pot, where Peter had the Turkish chicken salad, Tim had the "Finicke" chicken and I had my beloved OTTOMAN LAMB HOT POT! 

Off to Castle Glen!

On Friday we went down to Stanthorpe, southwest of Brisbane. There we took Peter to the infamous Castle Glen Liqueurs... 

Samples Galore!

This is a temple to the production and selling of fine liqueurs, which they are more than happy to let you sample, until you fall over... 

Lots to choose from...

The variety is staggering, and includes fruit flavours like blueberry, creme liqueurs (like Bailey's but without dairy products so they keep two years instead of a few weeks), and even nut flavors (we bought the Pecan and Hazelnut flavor - yummy!). 

We indulged a bit....

They also have really cool bottles - we bought the Pecan and Hazelnut and another flavor, Knight's Delight (a mix of Kahlua & Tia Maria) in the moom-shaped bottle (shown) and another flavor, Whiskello, in a decanter with 24 carat gold leaf floating in it - very pretty... 

More fine dining...

Thursday night we continued our culinary adventures at Watt Modern Dining, a restaurant on the river, about a 30 minute ferry ride from UQ. For appetisers Peter had the tempura tiger prawns, Tim had the salt & pepper squid and I had the kangaroo spring rolls. For the main course, Peter had the lamb T-bone with parmesan mash, Tim had the salad or rare beef, and I had the veal schnitzel with mustard and braised shallot mash... a VERY nice meal! Afterwards we took the ferry back to our car, and got to see the river spectacularly lit on a clear night... 

More Art!

Wednesday we took Peter to our friend Jim Peterson's art gallery - the one where we recently bought a kingfisher. Peter bought a lizard and Tim bought this galah (a pink parrot which is common here...). To see more of Jim's work, visit one of his showings  

Peter comes for a visit

Peter Baum, a friend from Princeton, came for a visit this week. We went to see the emus and kangaroos at Lone Pine (like the wallaby pictured here), and patted a koala. That night we went to dinner at Tukka, a restaurant serving modern Australian cuisine, where Peter ordered rare emu as an appetiser, and had seared wallaby served medium rare, with polenta, wattleseed & orange jus as a main course... yum!