What's up?

Well, it has been a busy week, or at least weekend. The week itself was the same as usual. Work for Karen and I and school for Ben. Ben went to football training on Thursday night and clashed heads with one of his another boy from his team. Here is the resulting injury. We thought it was quite cool, but Ben did not share our enthusiasm.

The weekend was an entirely different story. On Saturday I hired a floor sander to strip back the floor in the babies room and polish it. I had done about ten minutes work on the sander when my phone rang and it was Stuart, the captain of the brigade asking me to be on a crew to assist with storm damage. I raced off to the station at about the same time Karen and Ben were leaving to go to Ben's football game. Ben's team were up against the top of the ladder and were beaten by a mile, but he had fun.

We ended up only having to attend to two houses on our call outs. No damaged homes, but a couple of crushed fences. The second house we were at fed us toasted cheese sandwiches and tea and coffee before they would let us leave. Once that was done we went back to the shed, cleaned up the truck and left for the afternoon. (Only to return later in the evening..read below.)

When I got home, Karen and Ben were back from football. I resumed sanding and found that the floor boards came up very nicely. I put the first coat of varnish on and left it to dry. (12 hours!) Over the remainder of the weekend I put the second and third coats on. We are really happy with the way it all turned out. The first photo is the bare boards and the second photo is the finished product.

On Saturday night we had a social function at the fire brigade. We have been having a deck built at the back of the shed for social gatherings. This is now complete and we had a deck warming/card night. We got there at about 6:30pm and started on the nibbles. We did an "official" opening of the deck later on with champagne and a ribbon cutting. After that we got down to playing cards, eating pizza and partaking in some "beverages". It was not for money, just for fun. We played poker, Blackjack and a couple of other games. It was great fun and most of us may have had a few more drinks than we should have! Karen, Ben and I left at about 2am and the rest of the guys assure me they left at about 3.

Sunday was a bit slower. We slept in until 11am! (Guess that won't be happening for much longer!) I got ready and went to the fire brigade for a maintenance day. I Spent about 2 hours there doing some gardening and tidying before coming home again. We spent the rest of the day on the couch watching stuff recorded over the week.

Karen and I both took Monday off so that we could take Ben to Blacktown to compete in the regional athletics championships. He was selected to represent the region in javelin. We got there an hour before his 10:45am event only to find that it was actually at 11:30, so we watched for a while. Ben did his best but was up against some stiff competition. He was a bit disappointed in himself, but we are very proud of his achievements. He got a Sydney West Athletics jumper for his troubles. This is Ben in action...

Well, that is it in a nutshell. One last photo to leave you with. A progress photo of Karen's "alien growth"...