I'm home! And damn it feels good.
Christmas shenanigans
Christmas Eve: Sprat wanted me to help wrap the last of the presents. I asked if she was sure she wanted MY help. Apparently she was. So we settled down to wrap. First thing I did was accidentally tear the wrapping paper. She then suggested I cut sticky tape as we had run out of tape dispenser tape. I cut a few strips and then broke the sticky tape.
The presents eventually got wrapped :)
Christmas Day: Sprat and I were settled in her room (I'm set up in her room as I usually am when home) and I was about the hit the 3d. I felt bad listening to the sounds of preparation going on for Christmas dinner, so I walked out and stood next to my mother who was chopping tiny chillies. As I was asking her if she needed help with anything, I somehow managed to cop chilli juice in the eye while she was chopping. Staggered to the bathroom to rinse it out. Returned, stood on the other side of the kitchen and asked if help was needed. It wasn't. Then I got a huge blister sharpening Very Small Small Girl's new coloured pencils. Josh suggested I probably shouldn't have gotten out of bed.
Everything else
I've already written about the backup malarky. I'm getting a friend who knows what he's doing to try to merge my backups from the 28th of November with whatever the current state of the sites are after I've dumped the databases of the mostly afflicted sites. Sometime after silly season maybe. Not happy about having to fix my ssl certificate for Friendica again. It was a pain in the system. I'm starting to think there's a conspiracy theory afoot and someone wants some of my sites offline for some idiotic reason I can't begin to fathom (I know, I'm not that important, but this is the second backup malarky in a relatively short space of time :)).
Now, without further ado, the first of many photo posts (most of which will be unedited because I iz lazy).
The kids and I travelled by ourselves on the 22nd as Josh had to work on the 23rd. He joined us on the 24th. The check in opened 45 minutes late and the kids were terribly eager to be on our way, but were otherwise great through the airport. The plane staff were awesome and the plane was an actual plane (737!) rather than the lawnmower with wings that we usually take up, and was very sparsely populated. We had an entire row to ourselves!
Halfway through Cub "want get off dis plane!" and Tao "want[ed] to go to Nanny and Granddad's house NOW!" Fortunately I managed to distract them with tablets (Tao played a game, Ru watched Darkwing Duck, Cub joined her for a bit) and all of them had a short nap.
I took a photo of our approach with the crappy camera on my iPhone:
Josh's of course look a lot nicer as not only did he come in on a not overcast day like we did, he also used a real camera:
My parents took a bunch of photos of the kids in the first couple of days we were here, I've been too lazy to get it off their camera. When Josh arrived one of the first things he did was hunt down a source of smoke he could see (part of the mining operation) and take a photo of it.
Christmas was a bit exciting for the kiddliwinks, they had stocking for the first time ever and also woke up early enough to be able to open presents before my parents and sister went off to church (otherwise they would have had to wait til after which was not going to go down well as Cub was already poking at the presents under the tree from shortly after he woke up).
Josh took a couple of videos with his camera but Sprat is in her PJs and apparently she will kill me if I post them.
Most of the day (aside from a stint at Lily Beach to get the kids out of the house so they'd stop letting all the flies in) was spent helping out for the Christmas dinner which we hosted as per usual. Christmas dinner was full of feasting and awesome. And sparklers and whirlygigs.
After the party the midnight flowers opened up. Very pretty.
Since we got here I told the kids we could go to the beach every day or at least every other day. I couldn't take them the first day we were up as I had a headache so splitting I couldn't see straight (then the damn thing lingered for a couple of days after til we went to Lily Beach for the first time, didn't bring the camera but my headache cleared :)
Today we attempted to hit the beach again. Went to Lily but it was a bit too rough for swimming there, so we doubled back to go to the Cove. On Lily Beach Rd we spotted a robber crab.
The tide at the Cove wasn't really any better for swimming. In fact, I'd say it was probably worse:
There were a few surfers out. We headed home. I took an over the shoulder run and gunning shot out the car window of the sunset.
Had to clean the lens afterward. Did I mention it's good to be home?
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