Here's SAAANNTTAAA!

We hope that you all had a great Christmas. We were in Sydney for the festive season. You may remember that we were in Sydney once before, staying with parents of one of the couples here at Cornerstone. Well, they invited us back for Christmas. Dave manages a Christian conference centre and it was empty in the build up to Christmas so they let us stay there. We had all the facilities to ourselves. It was like being in The Shining except with less snow and more Cornflakes.

Speaking of snow...the weather was incredible. As in 'unbelievable'. As in 'it
rained a lot'. We drove to Sydney and back to Dubbo in torrential rain. It was crazy. There were a couple of very nice days when we in Sydney but it wasn't as warm as we were expecting it to be. Christmas day was very grey, just like back home. The difference was that it was still warm enough to wear shorts - but I wore a long sleeved top for the first time since winter. Apart from that it was all very nice. We're thankful to Dave and Ros for their generosity, and we've been blessed by the generosity of people here in Oz.

We had a BBQ for Christmas lunch. Prawns were included in this event, so I guess we've now had the stereotypical Aussie Christmas lunch. Reid certainly enjoyed his 'frozen prawns' as he called them.


We did quite a few nice things while in Sydney too. We visited a couple of beaches. We didn't get to Bondi, but we did visit Manly beach - which was pretty stunning as you probably won't be able to tell from the photo below.


Reid managed to get totally soaked at Manly Beach - he seems to love splashing in the waves fully dressed. Ruth managed to knock up this little number out of Xanthe's kanga, so Reid wondered around Manly looking like a tiny little Hare Krishna. He enjoyed that too. Basically, every day is a celebration for little Reidy.


We also visited Palm Beach. Now why would we visit that beach, you may ask? What's so special about Palm Beach? Well, listen up. Palm Beach is where they shoot the beach scenes for Home and Away. That's right - we've been to the beach where Alf Stuart lives. If you look at the photo below you can see that piece of land sticking out into the sea. That's Stuart's Point. From Home and Away. Even having to get out of the water because someone spotted a shark couldn't dampen the magic of being at such a hallowed place. Tune in next week to see if I can crowbar another Alf Stuart reference into this blog.


We visited Taronga Zoo which was pretty good too. We had to, seeing as we include Ruth Webb : Zoo Visitor amongst our number. Here are some photos of our day out - including the rather nice view we had while eating our picnic lunch. Bonus points will be awarded for posting "That's a nice photo of you James - no wait, it's a gorilla" comments.






I've actually enjoyed receiving a few annual newsletters and e-mails from Pommie friends this year. I'm always very keen to find out what everyone is up to now that we've left the country. I expect the quality of life in general has gone down.

I'm reading a book called Living in Christian Community : A Personal Manifesto by a fellow called Art Gish. I wasn't really keen to read it at first because the author's photo on the back of the book looked like a medieval woodcutting of a leprechaun, but I'm glad that I did. It's got nothing do with Cornerstone, but it's probably the best effort I've come across of communicating exactly Cornerstone's vision for community. I've only just started it so it might go downhill rapidly but I don't expect it to. If you wonder what's at the heart of our decision to live communally then try and get your hands on this book. If you can get your hands on the author then even better. I think he'll be forced to give you a pot of gold if you do.

I'll finish with a photo of a St Andrew's Cross spider, so called because it's completed web usually has a clear 'X' structure in the middle of it. This web is not completed and the photo is a bit blurred but Ruth was quite proud of it (bless her) so I'm putting it up for everyone to see.