Connor and I like to play Yu-Gi-Oh the card game.  It’s suitably complex for Connor, and still fun compared to Magic: The Gathering which takes a lot of concentration.  We bought ourselves the Yugi and Kaiba starter decks, so we’d have an equally matched set and would have to survive on our wits alone – [...]

Ash’s school had Nude Food Day the other day.  This is a great idea with both health and environmental benefits, which asks kids to bring food that doesn’t have packaging – as well as encouraging the eating of more natural, unprocessed foods, it reduces landfill from all the packaging that is usually in kids lunches.
Excess [...]

We went out to a Greek restaurant for dinner for a friend’s birthday.  Early in the night we noticed Connor had a small Easter Egg that came out of his pocket (We always have a few floating around in the cupboard for months and months), and Monique asked him why he had it.
“Just in case”
Just [...]

One of the side effects of Mon studying law is that our week is more structured so that she can keep on top of things.  She has a timetable of when she’s studying, and I’ve copied the idea to make sure my time is better balanced.
This means there are times when she and I are [...]

Standing at the platform at Ringwood waiting for the train to take us to Sound Relief when the sky turned black as doom.  This pretty much set the tone for the weather, clearly God has a bit of a sense of humour raining over an inch of rain on a bushfire relief concert. This did [...]

Sad news in the Parlevliet house. Our 1975 HJ Premier is no longer on the road. There’s a lot of bits and pieces she needs done, needs new brakes and calipers, has some significant panel rust that needs work. We had been toying with the possibility of fixing her up properly, a [...]

We were talking over dinner about how you age wine, and how to brew beer and stuff. I was saying how it brews fastest in the barrel if you keep it at around 25 degrees, which is room temperature. The problem being of course that unless you are going to wrap it in [...]

The day before my birthday we were chatting idly, and Monique says “So…35 tomorrow…”
“Oh OK”, says Ash. “I won’t have to wear tights under my dress”
Nothing like kids to give you a bit of mental whiplash!

Our calendar at home has said ‘busy’ on the 21st of December, so I suspected something was on, although Monique had dodged the question pretty well.  So while wondered vaguely who it was that was busy, Monique had organised my Christmas present -  a trip to Spamalot, as well as a night at a hotel, [...]

Last weekend, Mon and Ash performed in our parish revue, entitled ‘A Load of Wild Bullocks, How the West was Spun’.  It’s run every two years, and is a variety show with sketches, musical and dance numbers and stuff, kind of like Gang Show if you’re familiar with Scouts. Might see if there are photos [...]