Garden update

Now that the cold has gone and there is some sun mixed with lots of rain things are starting to grow in our not so little garden. Marty spent most of the winter working hard getting a whole bunch of veggie patches built and now its time to eat some fresh produce. The only problem is that the grass keeps growing really fast and we got rid of Victor the sheep...not very fun with half an acre of grass to mow.

bub pics

It all feels much more real after seeing the first ultrasound pictures...hmmm does it look like a boy or a girl?

New House

Suz and Marty decided it was time to upgrade our house, and also try and find a block of land that wasnt like going hiking just to get to the front door. So after accidently making an offer and having it accepted on a house we looked at we had to rapidly get our old house up to scratch and on the market. Somehow it all turned out fine and we sold our house within one week of having it on the market...yay! We were really stressed about possibly having both houses at the same time, fhewww. And we even managed to sell our old house at top $$ and buy our new place at bottom $$ so couldnt have asked for more.

Here is the new place: Its a 1950's weatherboard place on half and acre but its been completely renovate recently...and it even came with a sheep, her name is Victoria (aka Victor or sheepface)...stay tuned for Martys landscaping adventures!

new synchrotron uniform?

wow we have been back from France for over a year....

so what has happened in that year.....

- Suz unemployed for six months (almost goes crazy), gets job (CSIRO), stays in job 9 months, gets ARC grant, moves back to Monash...would have been quicker not to go to France and stay at Monash! Also Suz managed to obtain six publications in 2010, which is strange considering she wasnt doing any research.

- Marty still at Monash doing postdoc...think he is aiming to be the first person to do all of undergraduate, postgraduate, postdoc and whatever happens after postdoc, all in the same department. Oh and he did some first year lecturing for the first time.

- Suz and Marty get married...ohhhh....Yarra Valley, Tokar Estate, 9th October 2010. Of course it was the best wedding ever. Wedding version 2 in Sydney the week after to involve the extended family and sydney-ite friends - awesome spit roast! Honeymoon followed in Margaret River, lots of food, lots of drink.

- Suz and Marty spend the entire last year pulling out all the weeds that grew into trees while we were in France. Now we have a veggie patch and the rest is resembling a garden. Marty has developed an unhealthy obsession with talking to his vegetables and growing stupidly large zucchinis.

- Marty decided to become a woodworker, bought all the tools, made two screen doors, a mantle-piece and is half way through building his man-cave (aka wine cellar).

- And thats about it...see I saved time by not updating my blog for a year.

being unemployed

....if anyone is wondering about the sudden burst of action on my blog, I can only suggest it has something to do with being unemployed. Although that being said, I have been unemployed now for 3 months and its only now that I could be bothered updating the blog. Its a strange thing having no job, everyone thinks it would be great all this time to do the things you never have time to do...cook nice things, get fit and healthy etc. but no it doesnt work that way. It appears that you need to have a job in order to feel like doing anything :)

Oh well, the good news is I have just been offered a job at CSIRO doing powder diffraction...so now I can go back to not having the time to do the things I want to do...

The Dordogne, France

OMG its only 2hrs east of Bordeaux...how did we not find this region earlier. Gorgeous. More to the point why did none of the Bordeaux-ians tell us about it!!! I'm not usually drawn to winding rivers and castles but this area just has a different feeling about it. I think its because of the underlying history that you can see everywhere.

There are thousands of caves in the rock faces which have Palaeolithic cave paintings (16,000 yrs old). Lascaux is the most famous. Along the cliff faces are hundreds of insets where apparently wooden huts were built so that they were overhanging the water. Unfortunately we didnt get to go into any of the caves as it was the wrong season...but we will definitely go back.

We spent some time in Sarlat, a medieval town in the region...apparently the best in France. And after going there now I would totally agree. Even better we werent there in the peak season so it wasnt full of tourists. This was definitely the best meal of the year!!!

Spain with the parents

We decided to escape France one more time when my parents came to visit to sample the extremely tasty food and wine. You might see a trend here that we spent most of our time searching out food...oops, I blame my parents!

St Jean de Luz, a fantastic seaside town, which is technically in France but has a distinctly Spanish air to it. First stop, lunch...muscles...delicious, especially being a seafood town. Then we decided to follow everyone elses lead and go for a siesta - in fact there really is no choice everything is closed until around 7pm. Next of course is dinner - the pictures tell the whole story really, we had seafood paella and seafood Bouillabaisse...if only we weren't so full from lunch!

Vitoria-Gastiez, probably my favourite town in Spain, just so relaxed and friendly - oh and the bestest tapas we have had yet! Marty was in food heaven here.

Re-visited Bilbao and this time actually made it into the Guggenheim instead of just looking at the crazy building from the outside - well worth the visit! The outside of the building is made of billions of Titanium panels to look like fish scales...really looks great.

Then off to San Sebastian, amazing town but way over touristed and full of English people (apparently there's a direct flight from London). But even with all the English folk the beaches look very tempting and the tapas are world renowned...and not suprisingly the worlds best restaurant is here, El Bulli (unfortunately you have to book a year in advance so didnt get to try it out!)

Suz goes to Rennes sans Martin

After a lot of attempted negotiating with the emotionally devoid French, Marty was forbidden from accompanying me to the conference in Rennes. So I left him in the apartment with a kitchen full of food and a new puzzle for entertainment and went to Rennes.

While the conference turned out to be a bit of a waste of time it was a good chance to catch up with some ex-kepertites, see Rennes, have a crepe Suzette and some cidre.....oh have a run in with a crazy hotel lady in a pink dressing gown.

a bit brokded

I always tell people that climbing is a very safe sport and there isnt much chance that you can injure yourself if your sensible. However, Marty decided to prove me wrong and fell off a wall whilst bouldering, indoor climbing mind you and onto a mattress, and broke his ankle. Lucky enough for me I happened to be in Poland at a conference so I didnt get to hear the crack and have to put up with hospitals in French.

So four days in hospital, three screws and a very annoying resin cast later he managed to hobble home. I say hobble as they dont provide crutches at the hospital you have to take yourself to a pharmacy somehow and get them (tres intelligent).

So apart from being a traumatic experience on both our parts we did come out ahead in some ways. Marty managed to get the next two months off work with pay, they even paid him a few weeks once we returned to Aus...dont quite understand. And I learnt the value of living in a country where you can speak the language perfectly, knowing half a language isnt helpful!

Marty in Lourdes getting healed - dont think it worked!

climbing adventure - dordogne region

Nice days climbing in a little crag in the Dordogne...pretty fantastic rock features in this area and some nice 5c - 6c routes, lots of small finger pockets which were quite sharp on the fingers though. We were even all alone for the whole day which was a nice change from being constantly stuck in a city.

Went out for a well deserved beer and a cepe omelette (local mushroom delicacy) in the local town Brantome. Pretty amazing scenery for a small town in the middle of nowhere in France - massive abbey alongside the river built in 769, pretty young hey!

...paris, strasbourg, munich, saltzburg, bratislava, high tatras, budapest, trieste, lago lugano, lyon, bordeaux...where to begin

Head in the clouds

So straight after Dr G flew out we headed off to Verbier, Switzerland to visit Jo and Gareth and see the 15th Stage of Le Tour de France, which just happened to be finishing there. We decided to drive this time rather that fly because it takes just about as long once you transfer all the way to Verbier (9hrs), which as it turns out was a great idea as its really beautiful scenery - very different from the completely dull trip from Melbourne to Sydney of about the same time.

We were only in Verbier for 4 day (too many holidays already), the first day was beautiful and we all hiked up the mountain a little way and did some yoga with million dollar views...I could certainly handle doing that each morning. Unfortunately the next two days it was pouring with rain, 15 deg colder and snowing 500 m higher than us, yay for unpredictable high mountain temperatures (Verbier is at 1500 m). So that killed all our grand adventuring plans of mountain biking and rock climbing...grrrr.
Luckily, the weather cleared up on the last day for the tour. The final part of the stage is a 8 km climb from Le Chable to Verbier (about 8 %), so we camped out on the corner in the last 1 km...was fantastic fun, would love to follow the whole tour one year. Also silly us forgot to bring our bikes with us from Bordeaux so we could have a go at the hill while the road was closed off, oh well.

Another public holiday long week in France - Fete de la National (aka Bastille day)...so a perfect opportunity to escape France and head back to Spain.

First stop - San Sebatian which is a lovely, but entirely too tourist infested town on the north coast of Spain. You actually struggle to find someone who doesnt speak english. So we just made a quick lunch stop and moved on to quieter, less-touristy places.


We set up camp in Mundaka, a beach town known for its surfing...although when we arrived we were slightly confused by this as there was not a sign of a wave around. Even the next day as we baked ourselves in the sun, unaware that we were getting completely sunburnt (good job coming from Aus and NZ you think we would be experts at not getting burnt), there was no sign of waves. But finally on the last day, when the weather was grey and miserable the waves appeared - but I still think the Aus beaches are better (way too spoiled)! NOTE: see pastey white bodies in photos this is pre-sun burn, we were all red for about a week, followed by much peeling, but now are not so white....some might even say we are carrot-brown/orange due to the entirely uneffective carrot containing sunscreen marty recommended to us...hmmmm ;)



So while Mundaka was a lovely place, it contained all of three restaurants and the occasional very small supermarket, so we had to escape each night in search of food. One night we ventured to Bilbao for a yummy dinner, but owing to our roasted red bodies we didnt hang around too long. Definitely the highlight of the food and drink was a fantastic tapas bar in Vitoria (kindly recommended by lonelyplant) where we all tried to decide if we should kick the chemistry career and begin a Tapas bar????

tennis champion

So I go and teach Marty how to play tennis, then in his very first competition he wins....how rude!!! (btw I lost)

Paris adventure

With one of the many many long weekends in May we had a trip to Paris :) It is certainly very nice to be able to hop on a TGV train in Bordeaux and end up in Paris 3 hours later! oh and earning Euros makes Paris not so expensive.

We had a fantastic dinner on the grass of the Eiffel Tower and watched the sun set...awwww ;) then went up the tower at night with the other billions of tourists (obviously we werent the first to think of going up the tower just before closing to avoid the crowds).


There was plenty of time to visit all the other sites. It was actually a great time of year to be in Paris as its not peak season but still really warm weather. We managed to get into the Louvre without waiting in line at all. And we discovered a really cool tour in the Sewers of Paris which sounds pretty gross but was actually a good way to see the history - there are even street signs under there.

The main event for Paris was Roland Garros...we went and watched Dominik in the qualifiers and unfortunately he lost so we didnt get tix to the main draw. Anyway I would certainly go to the qualifiers again as its exactly the same quality tennis and atmosphere but without all the people.