I have a couple of spare minutes before I leave work, so I thought I'd write on here. Jeremy's just phoned me from his work to let me know that Dad's friend, Jeff, is going to Sydney for 3 weeks and he's lending us his car! Praise God! Jeff floats between here and Sydney so it was real nice of him to lend us his car....so we have wheels for 3 weeks....SO EXCITING! You never realise how much you rely on a car until you dont have one! But we're still believing for one. Need to get a computer at home too with the net so we can keep in touch with everyone more often!

Well I'm gonna sign off, thanks for your comments :)

stinking hot still!

I have to apologize.
This week has been a pretty crazy week
Actually, ever since we go back from Canada, we've been preety busy. From work to social gatherings (what can I say? People love us!) and having no internet at home, we can't get to this as often as we'd like. Oh well. There hasn't been a whole lot to report anyways. unless you want to hear about the cricket, a topic on which I could write a few more paragraphs. And my brother happened to mention to me that the Oilers lost again to Calgary. Nathan seems to be under the mis-guided impresssion that the Flames are the better team. I have only one word in response to that...Conklin. Ty "stinking" Conklin. You know what I'm talking about. If you're a Seinfeld fan, you'll know that whenever something went wrong, Jerry always said "Newman!". Kind of like the Seinfeld-ian swear word. Now if anything bad happens to me..."Conklin!"

Stubbed my toe? "Conklin!"

spilled my drink? "Conklin!"

Oilers lose? "Conklin!"

you get the idea.


Well, gotta get ready for church tonight!

a quick sentence or two

well, we've had a week to ease back into it, but the heat has hit us like a punch in the face.
For the last few days, we've been sitting at 34 each day...and this Sunday, it's supposed to climb up to 41. Can you believe it???? I can't...and i don't even have an air conditioner to lessen the load. ARGH!

I just thought I'd share that with you. Happy?
Good
See ya!

We made it!

Well, we made it home safe. And our journey was not without dramas, let me tell you.

The last thing you want to have to deal with when you fly for hours on end is any sort of hiccup. When we landed in Singapore after about 20 hours of flying, we had a hotel room booked for the night because our flight to Melbourne wasn't going to take off until 10 AM the next day. Oh, Meg and I were looking forward to a nights rest in a bed, and a nice shower...well, we never quite got there. Once we arrived, we went to the Singapore Stopover counter to get our transfer to our hotel. But the guy told us that what we had booked was not with them and we would need to return to our luggage belt, because someone would be there with a sign saying "DYCK" to pick us up. The problem with this was that we had already left the security area of the airport, so we tried to get back in to where our luggage belt was. We were told at first to go upstairs, so we did that. Once we got there, we were told that we needed a boarding pass to get in and we needed to go back downstairs. We went back downstairs and pleaded with the security guards to let us back in so we could find this guy. They let us in but we found no one holding any sort of sign. We went back out again and called the hotel to see where this guy would be. At first, they told us they had no record of a booking for us that night, but then they found it but told us it was not their responsibility to arrange pick-ups from the airport. That was the responsibility of the flight agent. Newman! If you have been an avid reader of our blog, you'll know the flight agent and us haven't been getting along very well.

So, we were told we had to find a taxi, which would've ended up costing us $70 there and back. I don't think so! So, we had to stay the night at the airport. Now, I know that sleeping in an airport is supposed to be glamorous and exotic, but don't believe everything you read. After a couple hours on the ground we did manage to find these "napping" chairs which were fully reclined and had a vibrating alarm in your headrest.

But after all that, we managed to make it home safe and all our Kraft Dinner made it through customs. That's the most important part!

They say that if you have a good experience with a company you, on average, tell three people about that good experience who, in turn tell three other people...and so on. While, if you have a bad experience, you tend to tell at least ten people about the negative experience that you had. Well, I know for a fact that there is more than ten people reading this blog and our church has a few hundred people in it. I intend to let everyone know just how terrible our experience with Flight Centre was. Meg and I are still deciding on a course of action, but we intend to take this to the top. So, the next time you walk by a Flight Centre in a mall, or down the street, give them a dirty look for us...

Well, there you go, that's our Canada holiday all wrapped up. Now on with the real world, I guess...

CANADA WON GOLD!

Good news everybody!!!

Canada won Gold! Since Dec 26th, we've been watching the World Juniors Hockey championship. It started off with a round robin, playing Finland, Switzerland, Sweden and the US. Canada, of course, defeated all those teams. The USA were the favorites to win the game, and they funniest thing is that they didnt even get a medal! Canada ended up playing Russia and beat them 5-0. It was the second consecutive year that Canada has won Gold at the WJC.

What else has been going on? Not a great deal actually. After we came back from Toronto, Dale & Cathy (Jer's parents) had to go back to work. So Jeremy and I have just been hanging out at home, shopping and just starting to pack for the big trip home.

Poppa & Grandma took us to the Calgary Zoo on Monday which was pretty cool. We got to visit the "Australia" section at the zoo. It's soo funny to see Emus and Cockatoos in there and people standing and watching them in amazement.

Tomorrow is a big packing day before the weekend cause we'll be doing family stuff on the weekend seeing as we leave here early Monday morning. We fly from Calgary to San Francisco and stop there for about 2.5 hours then from San Francisco to Korea stop there for an hour and then from Korea to Singapore and we're there for just over 9 hours. And then the final stretch from Singapore to Melbourne. I'm so excited to get back home it seems like we've been away for so long but at the same time it will be sad to leave our family cause we dont know when we'll see them again. Maybe Jeremy and I could live in some country that's in the middle of both Australia and Canada that way we wont be so far away from one side of the family?!?! hehe....

We just wanted to say "thank you" so much to all our friends and family that have been emailing us and posting comments on our blog since we'ce been away. It's so nice to wake up in the morning and see who has written to us, it's nice to know we're being missed. And just to let you know we're missing EVERYONE so much too...

I'm excited to get back and see my little friend Azhia and her new pet fish "Frankie!"

I guess we'll be seeing all the Bendigonians next week. Have a great weekend :)

Happy New Year!

We're Back!

I think we almost died going a week without internet, but we made it...

Flying into Toronto, you could tell that the weather has been different over there from here. I think the entire time we were there, we saw the sun maybe once. The ground was covered in a good blanket of snow, and the weather was actually more winter-like and below 0 most days.

It was very busy week. Every day was taken up with going somewhere, meeting someone or doing something. On Tuesday night, we got all the family together for a big Christmas dinner. Mmm..Turkey! Meg got to meet the Lintons (Mom's side of the family), most of whom she hadn't ever met before. The cousins took an instant liking to her, which I guess comes naturally with a Kid's pastor. It was a fun night, and I think it was a little overwhelming, but fun none-the-less.

On Wednesday, we met up with Meg's friend Dan and his girlfriend Amanda, who drove up from Ohio to see us. We took him 5 pin bowling(that's right, 5 pin) just to do something Canadian. It was good to catch up with him, and we really appreciated him driving all the way from Ohio to see us.

The big highlight of Thursday was our chance to drive down to Niagara Falls. It was a rainy day, so weren't sure what the weather would be like, but we went for it anyway. As you can see by our gallery pictures, there wasn't much to see that day because it was so foggy and misty. And when it gets damp in winter it gets cold...really cold. We braved it out there for a few minutes, but not for too long. We also took a stroll around the nearby town of Niagara-on-the-Lake. The poor people live there...yeah right. I doubt if any houses there go for less than a million...

Friday, we took the epic journey to downtown Toronto and saw the Hockey Hall of Fame. It was absolutely amazing. There is so much stuff there. We even managed to find a jersey of an Australian team, I'll try and find the picture later.

New year's Eve. From what I hear, Bendigo was a very hot-spot, hovering around the 40 degree mark. UGH!
Meg and I went to the hockey game last night. It was very exciting game...but not a very good end. Calgary managed to score the go-ahead goal with only a minute and half remaining in the game. A bit of a fluke, if you ask me. To be honest though, it was a very good and exciting game. Meg was excited about it.

well, Feel free to check out our gallery pictures of our trip. And please write to us.
I hope you've all had a wonderful Christmas and New year

Jer and Meg!