The Twist!

Every good tale has a twist!

The twist (By Rachel)

I was working for the same company that I was in Melbourne, but on Monday, Feb 26 my position was made redundant. I chose to finish up on Friday, March 2, so I am currently job hunting.

I'll definitely be looking for something closer to home, as I was travelling 1.5 hours each way and it was a killer!

Picture - Botany Bay, just across the road from work, where I would have lunch most days. Was very close to the airport, so had great views of planes coming and going. Never did go for a swim though...


We went to Waitara church this week. Forgot to take our Bible in, but was loaned one from someone sitting behind us, which actually became a conversation starter after the service and then lead to an invite to the church lunch (a HUGE aray of Asian dishes - they theme each week)
Stayed for lunch and chatted to many nice 25+'s.

That afternoon we took HJ to the beach! He hadn't really been to the beach before. The sandy section at Lilydale lake, while on a lead, was the best he'd done before.




He had a ball! We were there with Costa (lot), Rachel's sister's dog.
Henry ran off a couple of times following other dogs that were passing by (especially the huskies) and took some coaxing to come back.





He didn't mind swimming and also full on rolling in the sand - including literally plowing head first through the sand (see video below)! I don't know how he does it.


It poured that evening. First rain we'd really seen up here in a couple of weeks. 50mm or so (but my rain gauge kept falling over as I only had it sitting on the ground and not on a post yet.

Settling in

The first weekend and week at work: (By Scott)

After unpacking half the house (lounge, bedroom 1, bathroom, laundry) the weekend came.
Rachel's step-sisters, Kylie and Kristy, live 12 minutes up the road from us and invited us to attend Galston church as the youth were running the church that week. It was a "cafe church" and the entire congregation met in the hall, sitting around tables with bikkies and chockies on them, while we watched a DVD and had a group discussion. There we met some relatives also. Graeme Wegener and family were there (Dad's cousin) - who I hadn't seen since I was a wee kid.

Everyone was very friendly and no doubt we will be back again for a 'normal' service some time. Leaving, we drove through the gorge, which included a free ferry ride, lovely and calming really. I suppose it's good before the rally cornering out of the gorge that awaits!

During this week we heard the "QE2" and "Queen Mary 2" boats were in the harbour. The "Mary", as pictured from a borrowed source, was promoted as being the largest moving man made object ever to visit Australia. Also, to stand up on it's end it would be taller than Sydney tower. I wanted to go and see it purely for this visual amazement, but they never even looked like trying to stand it up on its end - ripped off!!!


I picked up Rachel from work and headed back through the city (7:30pm) - extremely slowly, (if standing still is slowly) to see the boat on the way home. We got parked and almost to the boat (9:00) when the fireworks started, so we saw fireworks on Sydney harbour on our first week here. They was either for us or the two hugenormous boats.



Leaving the boats, and needing to visit a rest room, we decided to go to a restaurant (9:45). Ordered a hot chocolate, and hoped the traffic may have eased a little. However, being a Tuesday evening (the worlds slowest evening for restaurants), they only had one waitress and the place was packed being close to the boats. Took us about an our to get the drinks, and the the traffic hadn't eased anyway!
Once on the bridge the traffic flowed and we only stopped for one set of lights all the way home! Got home about midnight. Don't think we'll ever have a quicker trip home from the city unless we hire a helicopter and land in at the Hospital helipad.



One afternoon I came walking up through the bushy gully from work and could hear one precious doggy barking his head off. Great, hope he hadn't been barking all day! I found Henry in the backyard circling a Blue-tongue Lizard (pictured). He acted the same when we found a blue tongue and echidna at our Basin house. I locked the HJ inside and relocated the lizard over our back fence in the bush block. Haven't seen him since.

Our telephone had what we thought was the world's strangest dial tone. Took us a while to figure out it was Telstra home messages telling us we had a message to collect, but when we did figure this out, our phone had gone dead. It took a couple of days for Telstra to get the phone working again.

On my first Thursday of work the SPD had an "Away day" where many of the employees went to an island on the Hawkesbury river for team building activities and so on.
My highlight was having a go at fencing (that is the sport, not the farming version), wearing the whole mask thing and all - very tiring but an experience! Don't think i would want to sword fight for my life. Pretty freaky.

We had 2-3 offers on our house this week. About $5k below what we hope for, but the buyers wouldn't budge. SO we accepted, but before they got word, the highest bidder raised the price by $3k if we get rid of the wood and stuff under our house. That was the only condition too. Not subject to finance or to a building inspection. Was a deal! Happy to have sold it quickly.
When the funds come through we will think about getting an investment unit to rent out, probably in Melbourne.

Rach's work has been a traveling experience. She'll tell you a little bit about that in the next post!

Moving in

Not much to tell really. The removalists (or were these the depositists?) put everything in each room and left. Only one breakage to speak of. A light that may be able to be fixed anyway. Here's some pics of the place empty, and then HJ making himself at home!

Moving Up

Our little Corolla hatch did well to carry everything we had left over to take by road. That included lots of clothing, our digital musical instruments and, of course, Henry and Bill (the budgie). The first days travel went pretty much without incident.





Towards the end of Day one's travel, we pulled off the Hume and headed to Tumut (near Canberra) where there was a pet-friendly bed and breakfast to stay at. Almost there, we saw a Henry Street. Pulling over to take Bill (or was it a picture of the sign with Henry?) there was a huge dog on the property over the road who seemed to be interested in jumping the fence to meet Henry. The vocal owner of the property managed to convince the dog to remain inside the fencing, fortunately, but Henry, still affected by calming medication, was in hysterics. He just wanted a piece of the dog. We'd never seen him like this before.
We rushed over the the sign and Rach took the pic. You can see me gritting my teeth, saying "COME ON!!!" and Henry trying to squirm out of my arms saying "BRING IT ON!"

The place we stayed at was Russel-lee B & B. It had a huge enclosed yard where HJ could run around. He loved their sprinkler. He would run up to it and snap his mouth at the water coming out and get soaked.
Inside, the place was decked out in soft toy animals - including an half size lion, which Henry wanted to drag off as his new toy of choice for us to throw for him.

Henry actually slept in our bedroon for the first time. Only on one other occasion had we tried to let him sleep 'out' but in the early hours of the morning he decided to jump up on our bed, to our surprise! HJ did really well however, didn't jump up once.

Leaving in the morning we had to slowly pass through cattle grazing on the road (we hadn't made it back to the Hume yet) and of course, for thoes who know HJ, that brought much barking.

We didn't medicate HJ the second day. The medication seemed to make him quite irrational and didn't send him to sleep that much, and we found he slept ok the next day without drugs. YAY!

Billy, however, seemed to travel the best of all of us. His toys would move around and so he had 'friends' to interactively play with all the way up.








We stopped off at the Dog on the tucker box at Gundagai. Got HJ to sit and stay on the edge of the pond around the monument. There was a local news camera man there who thought HJ was so cute that he got filmed sitting at the statue and then running off (to me when I called him). We forgot to watch the news that evening, but ever since HJ has insisted on getting the 'star' treatment now that he has appeared on TV and all.





Our second pet-friendly place we stayed at was Sydney's Hughenden Boutique Hotel (only pet friendly place where we could stay just one night) . HJ had his own atrium (pictured) to sleep in, being a tv star and all, that's all he would accept!

Goodbye House

Our house sold in its second week on the market, as hoped for, only a week after we left for NSW.
We hope to reinvest the monies we're left with into an investment unit we can rent out. Probably in Vic. Special thanks to those who helped clean up the 'treasures' under our house and around the property while we were gone. SOOOO appreciated!
Here's some pics of our last time at our house before we left.

Note the sign hanging on our "Basin" house that was there when we bought it 5 years ago!!


. . . and one last swing on our 10m+ swing into the view.

Moving out

While the news of moving North was not seen as "good" news to family and frinds of ours, the news that Signs would pay for removalists as well recieved! Several family members helped us move into our 'Basin' home, carting everything up the 45 stairs. We thank them sincerely for their help and hope no one is offended that we got professionals to cart it down and out for us.

Getting quotes from removalists brought a range of exclamations, from "This is the worst access we've ever seen" to "Oh, we've seen worse".
Service offered by the companies also ranged from "We can move it overnight to Sydney" to "That's impossible, it will take 2 weeks to move your stuff".

We ended up getting all our belongings packed up the Thursday before we planned to arrive in Sydney, and removed down all the stairs on the Friday.

We spent Thursday to Monday night at Rachel's parents house.

Henry has a a little pal over there, Annie. Being half the size, Annie has a doggy door half the size of Henry's, but Henry would fit through at a squeeeeeeze.

We planned to give Henry some medication to help calm him for the drive up. We decided to do a test run before we left. The tablets certainly had an affect on Henry, which gave hime very wobbly legs.
At one point he accidently fell over onto Annie. She couldn't get up with HJ being twice the size of her, and HJ couldn't get up being drugged. Poor little fluffies!

Henry had fun running around the house with Annie's squeeky toy. See video (turn your speakers up).

But Why?

Background to the move - the short version! (By Scott)

It took less than 4 months between having no inkling of moving to Sydney to being completely relocated 1000 km's away from Melbourne.
When faced with the opportunity of helping the entire South Pacific Division's Adventist community get online and networked together (only about 1000 sites!), it was only the prospect of leaving behind family and friends that would have stopped the move - by far the hardest part in the decision.

After umming and arring for a few weeks, it became apparent the writing was on the wall. Not only was this job a considerably tempting prospect for me, but other circumstances also hinted that this was going to be the right thing to do. For example:

- Following 6 years in Pathfinders, we were planning on having "the 7th year" off. Having Rachel directing for 4 of the years in a club that grew from 15 to nearly 50, really took a strain on life for us both.
Silly as it sounds, we thought this might be a chance for us to leave a busy church lifestyle behind and de-stress, in Sydney, if that were possible - in Sydney. A chance to regroup mentaly.

- After Camporee finished in January 2007, we had nothing on our calendars at all. It was as if there was a void of activity for us in 2007. Not something we ever remember encountering.

- When Rachel tried to leave her job, which she wasn't really loving that much anyway, she declared she had to move to Sydney to her boss, who replied "you can still work for us, in our Sydney office". And this came with a change in role that was more interesting too. If anything, it would be a chance to relocate to Sydney and Rach could look for work while up there.

- We were planning on selling up our house and palming off the 45 stairs up to our front door for a flatter, more family, orientated block. Leaving behind our house didn't cause too much grief, even though we loved it so much.

- While looking for jobs in Sydney while in Melbourne wasn't sounding like fun, housing was also a daunting thought. Finding somewhere in Sydney from Melbourne was also a daunthing thought, but that worked out too!
A "church" owned house became available just as my job came to be, right over the creek, 10 minutes walk from work. Apparently they don't come up very often at all, but right on time.

- Though the rent was to be more than the mortgage of our house in Melbourne, (even though the rent was already $100 less than market value !) Living so close meant we could sell a car (our Vienta) saving us on services, registration, repayments and fuel bills, helping to offset the rent.

- A rent assistance option in Scott's salary also came in handy, meaning the Melbourne home would not have to be sold and we could stay 'in the market'. We decided to sell the house and get something more rental friendly as an investment.

- My replacement at Signs could arive 1 week before I had to leave, meaning I could hand over and train the new guy (Jarrod) just in time.

- When we bought our "Basin" house 5 or so years ago it had a sign hanging on the front deck. It said "Wahroonga" - right where we were considering moving to. I figured it was a 3 way sign. 1. it was literally a sign, 2. I worked at Signs, and 3. it was potentially a sign from God.
(NOTE: when checking out the Wahroonga house, I made sure there was no sign that said PNG on that house - though, I have used that joke so often now that I'm is sure God will send me there as a joke, sometime!

After all the above started to fit in nicely, and more, to stay behind I thought might cause me to end up somewhere dark and smelly for 3 days, before having to being mysteriously flown to the Sydney Adventist hospital to be cured. Yup, a Jonah tale.
And so the decision became financially feasible, mentally resting and with apparent promptings from God.

That's the short story of how this came about. Later on, hopefully I can share the steppinng stones that have lead me to this point. At the time not apparent but now looking back - since Year 12, everything seems to have had a purpose on a road to . . .