Great times

The mercury topped 32C today. And according to my friend Olivier it’s still winter. I reckon Spring started on the 1^st of September, but this is awesome, even for Spring!

It was a nice day out for Olivier, Sandra and I today. We took the train and then a little ferry south of Sydney and after a short walk along the coast we found a secluded beach in the national park. It was a great beach for swimming, only later did we realise that it was a nudist beach. And I can report that – as has been said a thousand times before – it’s never the really fit people that you find on nudist beaches. Oh well, each to his own.

The freakishly warm winter has made for some great weekends. I went back to the Blue Mountains with ‘the Irish’ last month.

Again it’s been such a long time since the last update, and when I apologise for that I do mean it – I wish I would find the inspiration to update more often these days. Maybe it’s partly because nothing particularly momentous had happened recently (until this week) while life has still been busy, and just so enjoyable.

There have been a hundred and one things on, with some highlights since my last update being…

- Last month I was one of 75,000 Sydneysiders taking part in the City2Surf fun-run. This annual event is the largest fun-run in the world. That’s largest as in number of people, not longest distance, obviously, though it’s still quite a challenge with a long uphill stretch in the middle of the 14km distance, before a long sprint downhill to the finish at Bondi beach. I was made-up with a time of 69 minutes, and it inspired me to enter the half-marathon (22km) next Sunday. I was absolutely done-in afterwards though, and the traditional post City2Surf drinking session nearly killed me! Thank goodness I cut my losses and escaped from the pub in the late afternoon and was in bed by 7pm.

- All this running has gotten me a lot fitter and I think I can finally… with some conviction… say that my shoulder is cured (and never let it be mentioned again!). I was swimming in the sea today for the first time and hope to start with the ocean swimming club on Saturday mornings now that Spring is sprung!

Right: the girls putting the 'fun' into 'fun-run'. :)

- I’m just about to book my next trip to India. This is the longest I’ve been without a work trip (4 months) and I’m really looking forward to getting back to the field. But before that I’ve got Ed’s stag weekend, and then Ed and Dace’s wedding in October, which I think I’m MC-ing, after which I’m MC-ing a work event too (how am I getting MC-ing jobs with my Scottish accent… what the hell’s going on here?!?). Got a trip to Melbourne next week too, followed by ‘Spring on the Rooftop’ – a bbq event at my place which should go gangbusters, given the level of excitement generated so far!

All of which means that there will be no shortage of more exciting news for the website between now and Christmas!

Right: Ed’s surprise birthday party. Not a surprise was Ed getting very (very) into the partying spirit. ‘Enough scotch to sink a battleship’ is the expression I reckon. Here he is getting into Dace’s hen night accessories. Almost topped recent antics at the Abercrombie…

Lastly, the momentous news is that this week the immigration department approved my application for an extension of my working visa. The extention takes my visa up to 2011, which is rather more reassuring than my old visa which would have run out in a month’s time.

A sincere thanks to Graeme and Fraser for badgering me to update. It’s effective… eventually!!