Author: Carly (Admin)

My Grandpa passed away this morning. While he knew and we knew that it wasn’t long until he would be leaving this world, it is still hard to say goodbye.

Grandpa was a very well loved man. He had a smile that would brighten the room and a cheaky imagination that delighted his grandkids. He was many things to many people and did many exciting and brave things in his time. For me he will always hold a special place in my heart.

I will always love you Grandpa!

Congratulations to Elizabeth and Paul on the birth of their first child at 7:50pm today.  Well done to Elizabeth who endured 3 days of Labour!

Everyone is doing well now and we are looking forward to visiting tomorrow.

Andrew and I set up our new bookcases today. There is still stuff that needs to go into the bookcase but there will also be a lot of free room for us to expand into.

A big thanks to my Dad who took me out to ikea with the ute and helped me get the bookcases home

If you have read the northern lights books then don’t see the Golden Compass movie. Take one fantastic book with some really deep feelings, discoveries and messages and strip out any thought and meaning seems to be the formula for the movie.

The actors and the casting were great. They really did bring some of the characters and scenes alive. I just can’t believe how much they destroyed the story. Making books into films always requires some creative manipulation of the story and I also did understand the pressure to remove any mention of the church. However the movie does not even follow the concept of the book and the ending was just wrong! Andrew and I sat there completely astonished at how woeful the movie story was.

If you have not read the book then you might enjoy the movie. However really do read the book because it is fantastic! One of the families that we met on our honeymoon introduced us to it. While it is a kids book, it is a wonderful read for adults too.

I’ve just returned from my work’s christmas party. What an adventurous but successful afternoon!

The first part of this afternoon was spent on a treasure hunt around brisbane. We were all split into teams and given clues to destinations where we would find more clues etc eventually leading us to our dinner destination. We started at 3:00pm and got to the final destination at 7:45pm. Our journey led through brisbane, up to spring hill then over to southbank, back to riverside and then ended up at Royal on the Park which is near the botanical gardens.

Besides following the clues, there were extra points for taking photos of various clues and also collecting items such as hotel matchbooks.

After spending the afternoon finding all the items, taking all the photos and following all the clues. Although we were the last team to arrive at the destination (it was not a race), we were the winners!!!!!

It was a very long journey, but one thing that kept us going was that we had to beat the team that was mostly comprised of people from england, and there was no way they were allowed to beat us!

There were many times that it would have been easy to throw in the towel and retire early (like a couple of teams did). I’m really proud of my team pulling together, especially when we had to cross victoria bridge after just walking to spring hill and back.

After doing the geeky thing and measuring our journey in google maps, we travelled 9km walking about 7.5 of those and 1.5 being the city cat journey.

yes our end point was about 2 blocks away from our start point.

My team members in front of the “angel on queen”

We passed team 2 on the way to the “big ben of brisbane”

My team members riding the mob bus

Dead team leader

The bronze train

One of the bonus photos was to get a photo with a policeman handcuffing a team member. The police were really friendly but unfortunately they are not allowed to for legal reasons. Our team thought out of the box and did score a photo but it is not going up here

Bec was finally able to get off her conference call and join the team. We plowed through the clues and walked the way to the mill in spring hill (including the 85 steps!)

We then walked back to the end of the mall and to the new brisbane city council building. We then rested for a little while at the library before continuing on across victoria bridge.

Go team! Photo at the serentity temple at southbank.

We then journeyed to pick up some sand at southbank then to the city cat for a trip back to riverside.

We reached eagle street at 7:15pm to collect our final clue, which involved walking back to the bottom of albert st.