Gav's first Haircut

I will let Gav tell you about his first haircut in a wee moment but first I thought you would like to see a couple of pics from our Manly trip last weekend, can't believe it was a week ago! We had a wonderful day in Manly which is a suburb of Sydney, but you can take the ferry to reach it. It was lovely to sit and drink hot chocolate looking out at the ocean and hearing the lapping of the waves crash against the beach... blissful! We also did a walk through some of their national park and climbed up to a view point on a cliff. Here is a pic from the viewpoint:



On the way home we got a great view of the Sydney bridge and opera house all lit up. Here is a pic of the Opera house.



Work is going well and both Gav and I are enjoying working. Yes Jude I do have to make coffees and the first time I heard flat white, my reaction was the same as yours.. they also have a long black.. strange people! Gav is already looking very tanned, purely because he is not using suncream! You can gather that I am not impressed!!! He is sitting giggling beside me. However, on Wednesday this week he came home and presented me with a beautiful bunch of flowers,



needless to say I was totally overcome and forgot all about telling him off for not wearing suncream. I can forsee lots of flowers in the future if he intends to try and distract me from telling him to wear suncream.

Right, will hand over to Gav as he has a few stories he wants to tell you.

Gav the builder can he fix it! Gav the builder....... probably not, but he can dig holes, paint, shovel and fetch the morning coffee's. Well here i am once again let loose on the internet, i have to be honest and say that i had mixed reviews about my last blog but i wont let a few hecklers put me down. A lot has happened since i last wrote to you about my now famous ninja skills but as i said i don't want to talk about that. All this shovelling and digging and lifting seems to be paying off as a couple of days ago i noticed what appears to be the start of a muscle. In a flurry of excitment i decided that i needed a haircut to match my now new arnie/rocky/superman physique. I enlisted the help of my wife who has told me now for many years that she is an excellent hair cutter person (great english) but the only victim that i know of her's is her wee bro johnny who walked away with a fringe that appeared to be a result of a tag team cutting by Freddie Kruggar and Stevie Wonder. But as marriage is about trust i finally gave in and accepted her payment of 100 dollars to practice her skills on my golden locks. Here are the results i will let you all make your own minds up about it but i think it looks alright (i hear that denial is normally the first emotion that people who suffer a trauma go through). However the results of an extensive poll showed that i am still the most handsome man walking about on this earth (results gathered from interviewing a Mrs J McKinley).

Before


During


After


Anyway I have one other story to tell you all about. The work that i do is basically turning up to peoples houses and doing landscaping and general improvements like decking, driveways, fencing, stonework etc. In other words i am like a Handy Andy of Oz (or rather the bloke that Andy tells what to do!). I have seen lots of great houses as all our clients arent short of a bob or two, however they seem to forget how to make a cup of coffee! The last job i was on was a farm owned by a family of nut cases. No joking they are real wack jobs who have a huge house and a huge expanse of land in which they are making a kind of farm/zoo. They have three Al pacas (basically lama's but i was told not to call them lama's, it's funny as you know how i forget to do these things.....) loads of chickens, fancy pigeons, fancy turkey things, two horses and a reindeer! I was standing in the middle of Australia stroking a reindeer called bambi ( I didn't want to point out that bambi wasn't a reindeer as i had already mentioned the lamas like three times at this point!). But these guys are notorious to work for and none of our guys want to go there as they are so fussy about everything and watch continually out of their windows at what you are doing. I was told about them before i went to work there, and specifically about their ten year old boy who once brought a lama, sorry Al paca placenta to school for show and tell! The job that they wanted us to do was a really boring job that no one wanted to do so the boss in his wisdom of selecting the best qualified picked me and two others to go and sieve huge mounds of soil that they had got for free. The aim was to remove the stones and then go and fill in any holes in the ground that we could see. If you haven't already picked up on how stupid this is, basically the owners want this telly tubby looking farm with no holes in the ground that originate from the chickens pecking or the lamas and horses running around. They even want the natural bumps and hollows in the ground evened out. Pack of muppets they are, but hey its been fun to compete with chickens who are intent in pecking out the soil that you have just put in. And no the owners won't lock the chickens up when we work, sad as they seem to get covered in soil for some strange unknown reason.....

Anyway must go here as i have a chicken in the oven and lama sauages cooking.

Hope you are all well.

Gav and Jess

Nelson Bay

Well hello there! So whilst I was away Gav snuck on and painted this glorious picture of himself as the fearless spider killer..... if only you had been here to see his reaction. However, he did kill the thing so I can't take that away from him, even if he was yelping!

Another glorious day here in Sydney, clear blue skies not a cloud in sight and roughly around 24 degrees! Bliss!

We thought you might like to see a couple of photo's from our trip to Nelson Bay so here you are:

View from halfway up Mount Tomaree


Our Footprints in the sand at Nelson Bay


Us with some Pelicans


Gav and I are both working now, which is great. Gav is labouring away and he is enjoying being outside and working on his tan. He promises me he will wear suncream but I have yet to find any evidence of this as the suncream bottle is still lying in our draw. I am working at a gourmet sandwich shop which is very different but I am enjoying it. It is basically a bar with lots of different fillings and breads and customers come and tell me what they want on their sandwich and I make it for them infront of them. Lin is letting me use her bike to cycle to work and it takes about 15/20 mins. The past few days this magpie has been swooping down to try and get my hair and it is really annoying and quite scary! Apparently that is common here and so I need to work out a way of keeping all my hair under my helmet.

This weekend we are going to take a boat to Manly which is a big surfing place and it looks really beautiful.

From zero to hero!

Howdy all!


This is Gav making his first ever blog entry all on his own, and for good reason too. In the last post my character underwent a vicious slur and i would like to clean that little matter up before i go any further. As you have all been informed, I was the victim of an unprovoked attack by a beetle like creature which was roughly the size of a small dog. However, what proceeded this incident was wrongly reported. Using my famous ninja like reflexes i let out a mighty roar to ward off the beast and to alert the rest of my fellow gardeners (who are not trained ninja's like myself) to the potential danger. As we are at the other side of the world i forgot that my mighty roar would come out like a screech, but thankfully it worked anyway.

I can only put down the mocking actions of my wife and friends down to post traumatic stress that they incurred during this potentially fatal incident. However i knew that my time would soon come to restore respect within the baulkham hills camp and even further afield.

Not even half an hour ago did this very time arise and i can report that my house mates are looking at me in a new found respect. I had just come into the house from the garden and i heard Jess call out from the bedroom something like


"Help, help, I'm a poor weak woman i need the help of a quick thinking ninja"


Well, immediately i ran to the room in a cross between Steve Irwin, David Hasslehoff and Batman. On arrival i was met by one of the most deadliest spiders in the world - the funnel web spider (before what happened next i had time to take a picture)

On sizing up my new nemsis i grabbed my terminating weapon (designed by ancient ninja warriors) and without any thought for my own safety threw myself at the intruder. By this time my housemates were shaking in the corner (I heard one even between their snotty whimpers cry that no one could possibly save us now) however i was in warrior mode and in the blink of an eye i unleashed a deadly blow to my eight-legged enemy.

I then turned to my shaking housemates and told them to open their eyes, i had taken care of the monster that dared to enter my home that they shared with me. I was greeted with huge applause and even promises that they would all name their first born after me. However, being the type of guy that i am i just whispered in a humble but strong superhero type way "hush, it was nothing, that's what i have been called to do"

Then I walked out the room and dragged the beast behind me and disposed of its limp frame in the back garden.

That's about all i want to mention about this incident, frankly i would like to hear no more of this hero talk. I am just glad that there was at least one person present there tonight with nerves of steel and that no one was injured. The fact that my character has been restored through this incident is meerly just a bi-product. Anyway i must go on now as i need my bed, but one other note of interest is that we bought a car today for eighty pounds! Bargain! Will post some pictures of the chariot when we take some.

Will post soon!

Gav

Redback Spider!

It is so lovely to read your messages you have sent us, I was trying to see if I could reply to them but I couldn't work it out. Well we have been here for 2 weeks now but it seems like we have been here much longer... def settling in. There is so much to tell that I will probably forget something or ramble on about stuff you don't want to know.. so I will try and not go on too much.

The first thing to say is Gav screams like a girl if any creepy crawly thing lands on him! It is rather funny to say the least. We have been creating a vegetable patch in the back garden and Gav managed to get 2 big beetles land on him to which he yelped out and shouted 'you dirtbird, get that off me!' Mick, Lin and myself were in hysterics laughing and Gav was flinching all afternoon.. needless to say it was a perfectly harmless wee beastie but Gav insisted on killing it anyway.

The other thing we did see was a redback spider which is the second most deadliest spider in Australia. If you got a bite from that you would be dead within an hour! Lin's mum killed it straight away and I was asking why are you killing it... the poor thing was only sitting in a plant pot. After they all stood in shock looking at me they told me what it was!

We have been job hunting lots but nothing has come up yet, so we are enjoying doing nothing and trying to make the most of it by doing wee day trips, as I am sure we will be working soon.

Sydney is a beautiful city and as much as Gav and I are wilderness people we really like it. The Harbour Bridge


and the Opera House are magnificant and every time the bus goes over the bridge and you get the first glimpse of the Opera House it makes me smile as if I am an explorer discovering something precious for the first time.


There is an amazing aquarium in Sydney where we went and spent hours looking at beautiful and ugly fish! We also saw sharks and Gav insisted of getting a photo with me in the foreground.... I hope that is as close as I get to a shark out here.


We saw the most gorgeous little animal though and I was immediatley taken with it. It was a Platypus! They are such delightful little creatures.

Tomorrow we are going up the coast to Nelson Bay for a long weekend (it will take 4 hours to get there, but apparently this is a short journey here in Oz.... we could get across the whole of Northern Ireland in that time!!!!). We are really looking forward to going to see some of Australia's natural landscape.

Well I will go now before I start rambling. Hope you are all well and looking after yourselves.