Experiencing Christmas

When I was a teenager, my father left home and his gifts became more expensive. The first year he gave me a suitcase with gifts inside.

Another year, he enrolled me in a scuba diving course, and he took the course right along with me. I still carry my diving card proudly.
It was issued in the days when computers took up an entire air-conditioned room and typing was still done on manual machines. I am surprised they even had plastic cards in those days. It must have been one of the first ever printed.

While I cannot remember a single gift that was inside that suitcase, I have always carried the experience of diving with me. That gift has lasted all these years and brought me much joy.

I spent most of my adult life as the stay-at-home mother of six children. I loved that time when my children were small, but travel and adventure could seem very far away when I spent my days washing clothes, faces, and dishes, or changing what seemed like hundreds of nappies.

Just knowing I had the qualification, made me feel I was still an adventurer at heart.

Almost thirty years later, my diving qualification has also been useful. Last year I was offered an opportunity to go diving at the beautiful Nelson Bay marine park in New South Wales, Australia.

The sea life was amazing and the coral seemed unspoiled and so beautiful in colour, shape and texture. I saw a huge blue groper with a droopy jaw, stingrays, baby sharks and a puffy orange boxfish. I admired purple and orange fixed coral and wavy, fronded, flower-like coral. It was magic.

The experience of diving was one of the best presents my father could have bought for me, and one that still has value today. When all the physical presents are gone, the experiences are still there, ready to be taken out and mulled over if I am ever grounded by age or illness.

As it comes up to Christmas, I have been thinking about what I can get my boys for Christmas. I want the gift to be memorable.

I would love to give them scuba diving courses but it would be too expensive this year. I will have to be more creative. I am thinking camping or maybe spending some nights on my friends moored yacht.

We are also going to put together baskets of goodies to leave anonymously at doors on Christmas Eve. It is one of my favourite traditions, and a fun experience for me and for my boys.

I hope your Christmas plans are coming along well. Experiences make lovely Christmas gifts. If you have any better ideas for Christmas experiences, please share them in the comments section. I would love to hear them.

Paint the Town Pretty

These pictures could be decorating a preschool but they on the walls of my local railway subway.

Around the corner there are many more works of art.

And designs that wouldn't be out of place in a child's bedroom.

 

I am fascinated with the way Australians decorate their facilities. Everything from buildings to roadside motorway barriers is made decorative as well as practical; every large concrete retaining wall, every long line of motorway fencing, every extended length of building. Surfaces are given texture, colour or murals that catch the eye. There is everything from a few leaf shaped indents to enormous extended portraits of local people, plants and animals. I am impressed. Someone has gone to some trouble to make things look nice as well as functional.

This toilet block was front and centre and right in the middle of four fields and playing areas in the middle of Brisbane. Recent renovations by hoodlums had left rubbish all over the inside floor, including the dismantled toilet seat, but the outside was a bright glittering work of tiled art. I am used to dismal grey toilet blocks huddled in a dark corner of the park.

Things are decorated on a grand scale. This is part of the wall of a city building and is presumably glass and concrete.

There are so many like it including a landmark building on the Brisbane skyline that has long and sloping blocks of window in four different colours. Even the rubbish bins look like they were designed by artists.

Maybe it is because Australians spend so much time outdoors but they sure put some thought into the outdoor environment. I am impressed.

Winter in Queensland is harsh....

It’s the middle of winter here in Queensland Australia, and so cold that yesterday I had to put a long sleeved t-shirt on over my shorts. Brrrrr ...... lol.

Spare a thought for the poor Queenslander. We can only go swimming on the clear sunny days and we need a jumper in the evening if we go for a walk.

Yesterday a neighbour said “Isn’t it cold?” and I thought …. No. Not really.

It is cold in Wellington, New Zealand where they recently had five days of rain in a row, and it is extremely cold in the Antarctic where my friend lived for 18 months. Queenslanders are lucky.

Here is it is midwinter and the temperature ranges all the way from 20C down to 9C on a cold night. When I am cold, I only have to remember my last winter in wet and windy Wellington, New Zealand, and it puts a warm smile on my face.

I love this about Queensland, but then I started thinking about all those of you who are not so lucky to be in this climate and so I decided to write about the disadvantages of winter here. Just for you.

Well, let's see. .....  There is advertising on the lawn. Yes really. In Wellington everything is wrapped in plastic and stuffed carefully into your letterbox because of the wind and rain. Here they deliver newspapers and junk mail by throwing it from a car. Since it is rolled into a log big enough to stun someone with it is quite a hazard.

And ... ummm ... well that’s all I can think of.

Winter in Queensland? It’s awesome!!

Geocaching - A Worldwide Treasure Hunt

Rummaging around in the undergrowth of neighbourhood parks is one of my favourite hobbies. Occasionally it leads to suspicious looks, but it is perfectly innocent; I am searching for geocaches.

A geocache is a small container that people hide for others to find using a GPS device. The most common caches are made from film canisters, eclipse containers or plastic lunch boxes but they can be any size as long as they can contain a log book for visitors to sign. They are usually camouflaged in some way and are sometimes hidden in items designed to look like something else.

I am getting better at this but there are still some I have not been able to find. I went back three times to one location until I found it exactly where the clue said it was. It was well hidden and only the size of the top of my thumb.

There are at least 1,300,000 hidden around the world and they are hidden everywhere from central cities to suburban parks and remote mountain bush walks. There are thousands of caches hidden in Queensland, including 440 within 10kms of central Brisbane. I have found 37.

I was going to write a blog to tell you about how it works, but then I found his cool video on Youtube that explains the sport. Enjoy ......