Two Drifters

Question: Where did January go?  Answer: In a lovely blur of family, lazy days at Rye and a week in Palm Cove, Far North Queensland. We had all the kids and partners and some of their friends at Rye until they all went back to work earlier in the month. I have forgotten how much food six (to a dozen or so) adults eat! Added to the holiday congestion that descends on the Mornington Peninsula every Christmas/New Year, I did feel a bit like I was relaxing in between supermarket visits!!! Also, a big group deciding what to watch after dinner is a minefield. Especially when there are a couple of voices very keen to watch the Big Bash which seemed to go on endlessly! I like cricket but Test cricket during the day followed by T20 at night is too much for me. Not whining….even though this reads like whining!! It was lovely to all be together. Our son, M, turned 30 so we had some celebrations for that too. Yes, I have a 30 year old child. How did that happen??!! Said 30 year old child and h...

^Choosing a few photos for this month's blog entry made me realise this has been the month of the Queensland beach walks!! What a privilege to live in a country where there are such beautiful, unspoiled beaches which are also accessible to all. We started the month in Palm Cove. Our last group who stayed with us are a couple we have been friends with for almost 40 years! It was lovely to spend a few, relaxed days together. Dropping them off at Cairns airport on a Monday morning, we started the almost 3,000 kilometre drive home to Melbourne. I wanted to be home by the Friday as I had concert tickets booked for Melbourne for the Saturday night and it was Mothers’ Day on the Sunday. We had also been away for almost three weeks and we were less than four weeks away from a two month trip to Europe (sorry, that’s a lot of numbers!!) The upshot of all that is that we had no time to wind our way down the East Coast. It was basically point the car and drive. And drive. And drive. We have a ...

30 September 2023…a day that will live in Infamy ha ha!! Not only was it our anniversary of finishing employment but it was the day that our beloved Collingwood won the AFL Grand Final. Collingwoooooooood (as the crowd chant goes!) WHAT. A.DAY!!  I have been lucky enough to attend three Grand Finals in my life – 1990, 2018 and 2023. I was 22 back in 1990 and only obtained a ticket because Andrew’s Mum had a work connection to Collingwood. Andrew had been to a few Grand Finals before 1990 and Collingwood had lost each of them so, when they won in 1990, he told me (repeatedly) how lucky I was! It was a fabulous experience. Little did I know that I would wait 33 years for a repeat! Collingwood was in a few Grand Finals between 1991 and 2009 but lost all of them. We had no money and/or small children so we watched them all on TV. In 2010, we were in Bali on a family holiday as we watched the Granny on the TV and were stunned when it ended in a draw. We arrived back in Melbourne before ...