This week and next week are to be spent house-sitting for one of our sons while he and his wife and 3 children go to New Zealand for a couple of weeks.
The duties are not arduous – a dog, 2 Mexican walking fish (Axolotl’s) one Guinea Pig (Simon) and one Henry Lawson i lizard (Henry). Apart from a few squabbles between our 12 year old Chihuahua X, Mischa, who doesn’t want to play and Leroy the 18 month old resident Spoodle who does want to play, all is going well so far. I’m hopeful that all of the menagerie will survive till the end of next week – us too of course!
City life is obviously quite different to our more serene life-style on Bribie Island. Even though we had lived in Brisbane for 27 years, we lived in the suburbs – a quite different life-style to now being about 10 minutes from the City. We are in fairly a quiet street with just the occasional car passing by but there is airplane traffic which you get used to after a while but it is something we haven’t experienced before.
We arrived late in the afternoon last Saturday and enjoyed a lovely dinner with the family. Afterwards we received our instructions for the care of our charges and the would-be travellers had an early night. We waved them off at 4 am Sunday morning! The scene was mildly chaotic: Doug and I were bleary-eyed while keeping the dogs from rushing out the front door every time Marc took some more pieces of luggage out to the front gate ready to pack into the taxi. The children were not saying much but were obviously excited; Marc was anxiously pacing and looking out the front door for the taxi while Jacinta remained calm; someone had to be calm but it’s quite a project to organize 5 people for an overseas trip.
Later on Sunday I met with 5 of us ‘girls’ from our support group for lunch. We cooked our seafood on a hot stone in front of us. Yesterday we visited a very large shopping centre. I usually avoid these places but Doug had a few things to do while I made a visit to the shops to check out the end of financial year sales. Just after we had entered the shopping centre we passed by a wonderful looking Chocolate Café and being somewhat of a chocoholic I suggested we have a hot chocolate for morning tea. Goodness what a choice – but we decided on a hot Mocha each and shared a plate of fresh strawberries with a pure chocolate sauce for dipping. (Don’t think about calories I said to myself!!) What a way to begin my shopping expedition – couldn’t have been better.
Lots of things to do next week before we head back to our Island home.
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