Close encounters of the eight-legged kind

Redbacks - infamous and notorious spiders of the kind that linger underneath things (most famously the dunny in the days when the toilet was in a little shed down the garden).

Spiders of the kind that can kill with one bite, though to be honest they can only kill with one bite if you are hyper allergic to the venom. Most likely you will need a trip to casualty, be in pain and feel sick should you get bitten. But you don't want to have to get bitten to find out whether you're the trip to casualty and feel a bit sick and sore for a while kind of person, or the hyper allergic kind of person.

So, you can imagine our reaction when one of the little dears crawled out from the gas fire in the front room.

This gas fire has been kindly lent to us by friends, and had been sat in their garage for a while, quietly gathering dust, and as it turned out, Redbacks.

Anway, there was a bit of jumping about and 'get that thing out of here' from me, the application of a fair amount of Mortein (bug killer) and the Redback left the house in the sort of state that meant it wasn't going to be bothering anyone ever again.

A potential calamity avoided, though I now have a guilt complex for hastening the spider to the end of its life quite so quickly??

Just don't tell Grandma, ok? Or Emma..... Or Tom......

Cheryl x

The furniture has arrived!

Yes, rolled up at 11am (ish) today - two very cheerful and helpful young men. Very careful. I was a bit worried about the vinyl flooring which was only laid yesterday, but all was well.

And what a difference it makes. It may still be in a bit of a muddle, and there may be boxes everywhere, but it makes you feel so good to have your own stuff around. It is beginning to look like home now.

A bit like Christmas too, especially those boxes we didn't pack ourselves. Everything is wrapped, and you pull things out, have a feel to see if you can guess what it is, and then think 'oh yeah, wow, I forgot about that' when it appears out of the paper. Some of the boxes are full of styrofoam bits, so delving in there is like delving into a luck dip bin!

I expected there to have been casualties - no matter how carefully things are wrapped they are going on a ship halfway around the world, and it seems a miracle to me that things arrive at all, let alone in one piece. So far the only broken item is the microwave, but it was insured so that will soon be sorted.

There is the mystery over the washing machine however. Darran nearly had it plumbed in before the fact that the plug had been taken off it alerted him to the fact that it wasn't actually ours. So, who does have ours, and who's have we got??

Typically the office is closed for the weekend, so we will have to wait until Monday to work that one out!

In the meantime, there is unpacking to be done, and more surprises to unearth (albeit of things that we own but can't remember after 2 months).

Cheryl xx

Bringing it all up to date

It's been hard to keep the blog running. Internet access was limited for the first few weeks, and now we have it at home there has been a lot of sorting and catching up to do.

Things should calm down a little now, so I thought I would bring things up to date briefly, and then anything that we've done that deserves a post of its own I'll add later.

So, we landed, and the first couple of days were spent in Perth getting over the jetlag. We would have liked to have got tickets for the West Coast Eagles vs Fremantle Aussie rules football game, but it was a derby, and tickets sold out straight away. We had to content ourselves with watching some of the game on the screens in one of the food courts! Fremantle (who we now officially support), very surprisingly it turned out, won.

After a couple of days of mooching about we caught the train and headed down to Secret Harbour, south of the city, to stay with friends whilst we found somewhere to live. And once there is was straight down the beach to do a bit of fishing, and to watch the sunsets and dolphins.

The main job really was to find somewhere to rent - an interesting process. You drive past the houses you're interested in to have a look, and then contact the letting agent, who lets you know when the next open house will be. You duly turn up at the open house (it is open for just 15 minutes) and find yourself viewing it with everyone else who is interested. So you wander around eyeing the house up, and eyeing each other up, deciding whether to put in an application for it or not. We applied for 5 houses, not sure how long it would be before we got one, and then were offered the first one (which we took), and then another...

Anyway, more details on the house to follow, but for now the main things to know are that has plenty of room for visitors, and is a 4 minute car drive to the beach :-)

We moved in, all 4 suitcases and ourselves, and set about sorting out the essentials - a few pots and pans and things to put us on until the furniture arrived. Our 2-piece suite is currently two $10 plastic garden chairs from Bunnings (like B&Q, only better). A four bedroom house is very empty when you have no furniture, however we have since added a table and chairs and a computer desk! We have a cheap and cheerful radio and CD player (and you can tell it's cheap and cheerful!) and a small, yellow, borrowed Simpson's tv.

The work situation didn't pan out quite as planned for Daz, but he is now working as a Tap Doctor, driving around in a van with a 3' tap on the top. Which he loves......... He'll be doing that for the next 6 weeks, and then it is back to college, to do a servicing course.

As well as work and house stuff, there has been time for some more fun activities - a trip to Penguin Island, a tootle down the road to Bunbury, into the city to see The Living End (Australia's answer to Green Day), bike rides, and just taking in the sunsets and the dolphins.

I'll post more about these later, but for now the two important bits are that Daz is working and we've found a house.

Just don't mention the football..........

Cheryl x