Back in town!

Hi everyone. Sorry for the radio silence but we have been in oz since before Christmas and Emma and Cami are still there and coming back next Friday (YAY!!!!) but I have been here alone with Cooba for 2 weeks now. We had a great time in oz catching up with family and showing our precious little Cami off! Em still has the camera so we will post an album when she gets back and you can see how she has developed. For me, being with Cami pretty much 24/7 was just awesome and made the trip so very special for me. I really feel we bonded so much and she is at a stage where she is interacting so much more all the time. I remember Emma telling me about a book she was reading whilst pregnant that some Dads have an instant connection with their baby whilst others grows over time. I think I fit into the latter and that is not taking anything away from the love that is so much there from the start, but I feel that everyday my love for Cami just grows so much that it is hard to know where it is all coming from! Maybe also the fact she is very clearly saying "Daddy" has helped ... poor "Mummy" is beaten by "duck", "bird", "tree" and probably many more words soon! Here is a bit of a quick photo snapshot of some of the things that we got up to. These are only some of the pics on my iPhone so don't get offended if your photo isn't included yet.

Cami became addicted to ice (the healthy variety) and just loved standing at the "esky" sucking on cubes all day long! 

 We visited sim and Clare and had a lovely visit to Flynn's vineyard in Heathcote. I highly recommend the MC Shiraz!

Cute pic of Eliza, Cami and Em in the cubby that Zac put in for the girls.

Cami spent a LOT of time in the car seat traveling around and visiting everyone.

Cute smile again in our apartment kindly lent to us by Kat and Tim (friends of Dicko and Em).

Relaxing at St Kilda beach on a beautiful sunny and warm day.

How babies should eat! Nude and al-fresco!

Cami had her 1st birthday Party 1 mth early in oz, but had a great time with all the kids and adults! here she is with her special birthday balloon from aunty Sam.

With Daddy during lunch at Claypots (Emma's and my favorite restaurant) with aunty Emma as well.

 We headed across to Perth for 3 days at the end of my trip for a work meeting. Here we are at il-lidos in Cottesloe for dinner watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean whilst Cami was babysat by my old boss Joce and her daughter Eloise.

We snuck in a quick visit to Little Creatures brewery in Freo. Had a few pints of their single batch beer Big Dipper which was an amazing hoppy IPA. Took a pic of the description of the LCPA for some good recipe stealing ideas!

My first weekend back in Stavanger and the forecast was pretty good so we organized a quick ski trip into one of the turistforening hytte - Kvinen. Chuck, Blue, Rayray and Rob joined Coobs and me.

Unfortunately Coobs broke his "thumb" claw on the trip back and had to have surgery to remove it and the other one. He has been stuck inside all week with a bucket on his head which is lucky for him as it has snowed quite a bit at home and been very cold this week.

Lots of snow in the mountains. We had to spend a fair bit of time digging out the cabin to get in and the snow was pretty much up to the roof as you can see from this picture of the snow up past the window in one of the bedrooms. 

 This was our fridge. Just open the front door and leave the beers in the wall of snow!

Now the real reason for this blog post! I have been able to get stuck into a little work on my brewing machine in the last week. Mostly working on welding up the gas beam. Here I am leak testing it. Needless to say there were a few pinholes and I needed to grind back a few spots and reweld. I need it to be completely gas tight as Propane will go through this beam (even though it is only at 0.5psi I don't want to risk any leaks)!

Using my beer gas and regulator as the leak testing system and pressure gauge. 

Soapy water checking for leaks.

This was the final leak path and now it is all pressure tested at 40 times the working pressure! Tomorrow I will start with tack welding the whole frame/stand up and then I can start piecing it all together. Good stuff! Nothing better than playing with power tools and having a beer at the same time!

Summer Holiday in Fayence, South France

We returned a couple of weeks ago from a fantastic holiday - 2 weeks in the South of France. We were so lucky to be able to take Cooba with us - Joel drove our car down there and Cami and I flew down and met him and Cooba in Nice. It was such a wonderful holiday shared with two other families - Aud Trude, Kristian and Oliver, as well as Mari, Kev, Oscar and Elliot.

One thing I realised when compiling this album is we've become the typical first-time parents and taken 500,000,000 photos of Cami and hardly any of anyone or anything else! We will be sure to remedy this next time. Seasoned Campaigners Mari and Kev are clued onto this and have a much better set of pics showing the house we stayed in and lots of photos of the whole crew, the link to their blog is in the list of links in the top right so feel free to stop by there for some other photos. But boy do we have some cute photos of our little girl!

In other news, Sally arrives tomorrow, and I'm pumped!!

Double click on the photos to view the slideshow.

Spring in Stavanger

We have been enjoying a really lovely spring here in Stavanger. It’s amazing how quickly the days become longer and you emerge from the long dark winter and all of a sudden it’s springtime. The change of the seasons is so much more pronounced than in Australia, here there is genuine excitement when in February you start to see the little snow flowers grow, and tiny green buds start to form on branches and bushes.

We are lucky to have a beautiful forest area right on our doorstep, called Våland Skog. We take Coobs there for walks all the time. Joel has just bought a new lens for his digital camera, a 50mm prime F1.8 (whatever that means) and a tripod, so we tried it out in the forest the other day (and many days since).

What have we been up to? Well Joel had a trip up to the north of Norway to a place called Verdal, north of Trondheim for work. He was visiting a jacket up there, it’s 100m tall and it will be installed this year by a ship that can lift 14,000 tonnes. He seemed to think that was pretty impressive!

He has also been on a ‘teambuilding’ (read: junket) with work up to a beautiful place called Haukeli, and they also went downhill skiing in nearby Røldal. It’s about a 5 hour drive from Stavanger. He said that Haukeli is the kind of place you imagine when you think of winter in Norway. There is snow about 3m high, everything is absolutely white and they were spoilt with fantastic weather, blue sky and sunshine. I hope to get up there myself some time soon.

We were invited up to Joel’s work’s cabin for a weekend in Sirdal with Rob and his lovely girlfriend Inka. We had a great time up there cross country skiing.

We’re spoilt here in Norway with 5 days off over Easter (Thursday is a holiday) so we are going to head up to Sauda (about 100km north of Stavanger) for some skiing over the easter break. We’ve rented an apartment and will be joined by friends of ours Louise and Charles. He is Aussie, she is American and they lived together in London for the past 8 years or so before moving here. We’ll also be able to catch up with Mari, Kev and Oscar who will be staying with Mari’s family who live there.

The Melbourne Extravaganza!

We have had this blog entry waiting as a draft for weeks, so it's about time we published it I think!

Here we pick up our story again from the blog entry about Christmas.....

Gradually after Christmas everyone started to head off from our place in Stavanger, John, Sharyn and the girls continued their trip of Europe with a visit to Ireland, Zac, Fraze and Eliza headed back to Melbourne and Simon stayed on a little longer and hung out with Cooba and clocked all Joel’s scores on the Wii! We had a lovely New Years Eve with Simon who prepared (with Joel’s help) a beautiful Bouillabaisse with crayfish and other seafood. Coupled with a bottle of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc from NZ it was absolutely perfect! I think it was the first time ever I haven’t stayed up until midnight on NYE, we were in bed by 10.30pm and the fireworks woke us up at midnight!

The reason for our early night was not just that we are both over 30 now and feeling the effects of old(er) age, but actually we had a flight to Australia the following day, and anyone who has done that flight will tell you it’s not a good idea to begin it with a sleep debt and/or hangover!

We had an amazing 16 days in Melbourne, we were so lucky to have the use of Sam and Brett’s apartment in Port Melbourne, and although we missed them, it was so convenient to have the place to ourselves for the first week as they were away on holidays. It was fantastic to be back in Melbourne, the sun was shining for us the whole time which was such a thrill after leaving Norway in the dead of winter.

I won’t go into all the details but can touch on a few highlights:

*Catching up with Jenny Guala and co for her birthday
*Enjoying the hospitality of Jules and Matt who hosted us for a BBQ with friends
*A trip to Lorne which included wedding planning and the chance to catch up with lots of Lorne mates plus Katrina, Greg, Brooke and Jade who are our friends from Tassie now living in Canberra
*The ‘Lorne Bowlers’ (Franky, Benny, Zac and Bowie) reuniting (like the Blues Brothers) for another shot at surfboat rowing glory (6th out of 7 in the final)
*Meeting with Anthony Toms who will conduct our service and signing all the necessary documents to ensure we can get married in November
*My parents Ann and Nigel meeting Joel’s dad John and stepmum Sharyn for the first time over a lovely meal in Brighton
*Belated Family Christmas dinners with both Joel’s and my families
*A visit to Pat Ireland, Joel’s nan is so lovely
*Lunch with my grandparents
*Getting to meet little Fisher O’Brien, 2 days old!
*Wedding dress shopping (successful!) and bridesmaid dress shopping (also successful!)
*Getting to eat all the things we miss in Norway – for example fish and chips, potato cakes, meat pies, twisties, cheeszels, Lebanese bread, flathead, tasty cheese, cheap wine & beer (Boag’s Draft), to mention just a few!
*Gathering together our bridal party plus partners for a meal together in Port Melbourne
*Joel having a couple of successful fishing trips with Dad (Emma’s Nigel), Brett and Zac

Hmmm so that is not even half of it actually, so you can see from this list that we were so incredibly busy. It was really fun and just so great to see everyone again after such a long time away, we missed you all! But we have to say it was really exhausting physically and mentally as well and we’re really sorry if you’re one of the many who we didn’t get to spend as much time with as we would have liked.

The culmination of all of this was our Engagement Party on our last Saturday in Melbourne. We had over 100 people there and loads of kids, someone even commented that they’d never seen so many kids at a ‘grown up’s’ party before! We were so lucky with the weather and a beautiful sunny afternoon made for a perfect setting to sit outside by the water at Patterson Lakes. The drinks were flowing and the food plentiful, and everyone had a fantastic time, especially Joel and I. We thanked everyone in our speeches, however it’s just worth mentioning again my mum and dad for all their efforts and work in the preparation for the party, we pretty much just said “hey can we have our party at your house, and can you organise everything too?” and they were wonderful. We also really want to thank Joel’s family – especially Bernadette, John and Sharyn who were incredible with their support.

Here are two photo albums, one of the Melbourne trip and the other of the Engagement party. Those on facebook can also find a lot of pics there, and we have also updated our wedding website www.emmaandjoel.com with some pics from the night (thanks to our photographers for the evening Andrew Lee and Grandpop Cousins!). Thanks to everyone who helped make our short trip back to Melbourne so wonderful, we miss you all and are already looking forward to our return in November for The Big Day!

Our Bobil Adventure, Summer 2008

And here it is, the blog entry you've all been waiting for! Our summer holiday photos. We have embedded it as a slide show, so click on the heading above to start the slideshow and enjoy!