Jonny's Birthday Weekend

On Saturday Jonathan turned the big 27! We were so thankful that it fell on the weekend so we could celebrate together. Since Jonathan gets every Friday off, we hit the beach early that morning for a little sunrise breakfast. If you've followed our blog at all, you've seen these BBQs on the beach before. We've enjoyed lots of dinner cookouts. On Friday, though, we used the barbies to make a little breakfast scramble. I also arose at about 4:30 am to make some pumpkin scones to go along with it. Add two large skinny extra-hot flat whites to the picture, and we're talkin' a breakfast made in heaven! Here are a few pictures documenting our breakfast.
It's just too tempting...I am going to share my Montana Eggs recipe because it is the BEST! I am more of a pastry/sweet breakfast person, but this egg dish is to die for!

Saute:

red potatoes, diced (I give 'em a good zap in the microwave first so they're mostly cooked)

zucchini

red onions

mushrooms

fry some eggs to layer on top of potato scramble

sprinkle with fresh tomatoes & feta cheese & enjoy! I'm not kidding: this dish is fabulous!

After enjoying breakfast on the beach at Mooloolaba, we headed north to Maroochydore beach (better surfing) and Jonathan got to spend his day doing what he loves best. He seriously surfed for four hours straight. I spent the time reading on the beach and swimming a bit. Not too bad a day, if you ask me! Here are a few attempts I made at capturing Jonathan surfing. My arms started getting tired from holding the camera, so I didn't actually get one of him standing. I still have a few more days to capture that:).

Once we took in about as much sun as we could handle, we returned home and loaded the car for Brisbane. One of Jonathan's birthday gifts was tickets to a Friday Night Footie game (rugby) of the Brisbane Broncos vs. the South Sydney Rabbitohs (what is a rabbitoh? I'm still not quite sure!). Romana headed down with us and we grabbed dinner at a little Italian place before heading to the game. Let me tell you: rugby is a brutal sport!!! I kept thinking about how glad I am that we won't be living permanently in Australia and we won't be having any kids that play rugby:). In all seriousness, we watched a player tear his ACL in the first few minutes and then watched others leave the game because of concussions and other various injuries. Jonathan reminded me that it is games like rugby that will keep him in business as a physical therapist:).

After an amazing Bronco victory over the Rabbitohs (who are owned by Russel Crow = random), we took the train up to north Brisbane where we stayed the night in a Queenslander house (a raised house typical of early Queensland) owned by one of Romana's friends. Here's a picture of the home.

After a stop at the outlet malls in Brisbane, we headed back to the sunshine coast where we enjoyed a few more hours at the beach and a lovely dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant (sadly our last amazing pad Thai experience!). It was quite the birthday weekend for Jonnycakes.I will add here that I am absolutely blessed beyond belief to be married to this man. Seriously. He is amazing in too many ways to name. We were laughing the other day as we thought back to the days we met almost nine years ago...when I would go to the Mead/LC football games and "accidentally" stand in the path his team would take to run by:). Who would have known that this many years later we would be living in Australia and celebrating his 27th birthday on the beach. God is so good!!!

Tagged

Okay, so I’ve never done one of these “tagged” things, but I’m going to try it out. It’s a rainy day here on the sunshine coast and so it’s a good day to spend indoors. Here goes…

10 Years ago…
I was a freshman in high school, a scrawny fifteen-year-old. This particular year was one I wouldn’t care much to forget. It wasn’t as if anything bad happened, it just was a year of awkwardness & insecurity. My sophomore year was huge in terms of gaining confidence, building better friendships, getting the drivers license, and eventually meeting my future husband (at the end of that year – woah!)….yeah, I’d prefer to recall my sophomore year and the ones after them than my freshman year.

Things on my to-do list today:
*Call the Australia business bureau in order to file an Aussie tax return
*Finish collecting addresses to send Jonathan’s graduation party/moving from CO invitations
*Start a slideshow/powerpoint to show my 4th grade kiddos when we return
*Work on Sydney plans (we leave in two weeks)
*Plan Jonathan’s bday weekend
*Work on job applications (yuck)
*Grab sushi at the Sunshine plaza
*Make lasagna, spinach salad + bruschetta for tonight’s dinner w/ Martin & Romana and their friends who will be visiting
(sadly, yesterday my “to dos” involved simply “beach” – can you tell it’s an “inside day”)

What would I do if I became loaded:
I know this sounds totally lame, but I am terrified at the thought of this. I have been spending a lot of time thinking about money and how we will actually have a paycheck (hopefully two if I can get a job!) for the first time upon our return. It’s not as if we haven’t had paychecks in the past (I did teach for 2.5 years, of course), we just have been forced to live simply because one/both of us have always been in school full-time. The thought of being a good steward of just this small thing makes the thought of being “loaded” quite overwhelmingJ. Here are a few things I’d likely do though…
1. Pay back all our student loans!
2. Meet with an investment person
3. Give money to Krochet Kids International (http://www.krochetkidsinternational.com/) + buy plane tickets to visit my sister in Uganda next year:)
4. Buy a scooter for us to use in the states (and, I suppose, a house too!)

Three of my bad habits:
*Coffee, coffee, coffee! I seriously have a problem. When we moved here, I said “why don’t I try to give up coffee while we’re in Australia, just to see if I can do it”. That lasted about a day. Actually it might have been two days. Even with our freeze-dried rubbish situation, I still drank a cup (or two) every morning. I don’t know what I’ll do if I ever get pregnant.
*I make “to do” lists way too much! Not only do I like the whole organizing myself part, but I find way too much satisfaction checking things off my list. Now, you may be thinking that it’s not too bad of a habit. The problem is that I can get way overboard! Sometimes I end up with so many lists going at the same time (all under different categories “school things”, “errands”, “other important things”) that I end up making a list to organize my lists. Here in Oz I have had to let go a bit too, as I had a list that looked like this:
1. go to the beach
2. read a book
3. get coffee
4. smile at a few strangers
Yeah, I realized right away that I should put my pen & paper away for a while and just relax!
*I have an over-active imagination when I’m worried. I am really not that much of a “worrier”, but when I start, I always think of the worst possible scenario. Example: Jonathan will be late from work. I won’t even think about worrying for over an hour, and then once I start thinking about it, I’ll convince myself he’s been hit by a hydroplaning semi-truck, has been discovered dead on the side of the road, and the police will call any minute. Morbid, I know. Horrible. It’s just how my mind works sometimes.

Five Jobs I've had:
*Cleaning lady in Oz resorts
*3rd & 4th grade teacher
*Starbucks barista
*Volleyball coach (x5)
*Whitworth “Campus Visit Coordinator”

5 Things people don't know about me:
*I always have a song stuck in my head. At all times (almost). When it gets inside, I have a hard time getting it out and it usually can only be replaced by another song. Jonathan is kind of like me and one of us will hum a song, we’ll have a conversation for ten minutes, and a few minutes later the other will start singing the same song, while the other will say – “how did you know I was singing that same song in my head”. Weird.
*Along those same lines…I grew up in a musical family. I can’t tell you how many times we had to do some sort of kid singing thing in church. I guess we were never “forced”, yet my dad said things like, “it would just mean so much to your mom if you, Dev & Leah could sing at church for Mother’s Day…” and that’s how it would happen. It didn’t help that our last name was Vaughn (we got all kinds of “VonTrapp Family Singer” jokes). As a side note, I am sandwiched in between an amazingly musical brother, Devin, who writes songs & plays the guitar, and an amazingly talented little sister, Leah, who plays the guitar as well and sings beautifully. This has always made me feel pretty pathetic, though I love my talented siblings!
*I have a small scar on my forehead from four stitches I received as a child (I think I was eight or nine?). My mom went out of town for the weekend and my dad decided to set up a miniature golf course in our backyard. It was a bad idea. My little sister, having only seen real golf swings on TV, took a huge wind-up and clubbed me in the forehead (on accident, I think) as I stood behind her. My poor father had such good intentions:). (Sorry for another embarrassing one, Leah)
*I have never missed a meal in my life. Seriously. Some people can get busy and “oops” they just missed lunch. Not me. I have to eat breakfast within about a half-hour of waking up or I feel like I’ll puke. I try to blame this phenomenon on my roommate from college (the beloved Andrea McDivitt, who kept hundreds of snacks under her bed for moments she felt she might “keel over and die”), but it’s probably just part of my nature too. This last fall I had to get my blood drawn and therefore had to restrain from eating until 2pm one day. I had to teach that morning and my class kept asking, “Mrs. Hook, are you okay?” – they knew the gravity of the situation:).
*I have really long toes. I think one of my mom’s first words when I was born was “oh my, she has toes as long as fingers”. I think I could probably grip a tennis ball with them and fling it across the room!

Well, there it is! I responded to my first “tagging”. I know it has nothing to do with our time here in Oz really, but there you have it. I am going to tag: Rachel, Janelle, Katie Ryan, Kristen, and Jessica Chase. I dare you.

(Side note: There are many of you I would tag IF you had a blog – and you don’t. So, I hope you feel really left out – and that it motivates you to get your act together)

Fraser Island

From the very beginning of our time here, we’ve been given one piece of advice over and over again: “go to Fraser Island”. In fact, we were initially told about Fraser by a group of backpackers during the first few days of our trip in Fiji! It has been on our list of things to do for a long time and we were finally able to get up there this weekend. I say finally because the whole undertaking involved a lot frustration in planning. We changed our reservations three different times due to changes in transportation issues. We even considered bagging the whole thing at one point. Thankfully that didn’t happen and I can say with confidence that all of the madness involved in planning this weekend was well worth it! Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world (Fraser Island). There is just one resort on the island and you must travel by boat/barge to get there. There are no paved roads so it’s only accessible by four-wheel drive vehicles. Our pastor Tim & his wife Donna let us use their 4x4 (incredible, I know!) and we thankfully brought it back to them in one piece:). Their vehicle is a Holden Jackaroo, a true Aussie-made vehicle, which only added to the experience. I feel like a broken record here saying “there’s just no way to explain how beautiful…” over and over again, but Fraser is definitely one of these places. It is seriously hard to put it into words. As we bumped along the sandy roads in the Jackaroo, I couldn’t help but feel like I was on some sort of exploration safari, on a mission through the jungles to bring some medical supplies to a never-before-heard of tribe:). Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that remote, but it felt like it to me. This was as close as we got to capturing a picture of a dingo (a wild dog). The dingos of Fraser Island are actually quite scary. We know a girl here who was attacked by a pack of them on Fraser as a child and was seriously injured. There are signs everywhere on the island about staying far away from them and keeping an extra close eye out on small children. We saw this little guy from the security of our car. Not too scary looking, is he? (it's a bit blurry, sorry!)

The coolest features of the island, in my opinion, were the crystal-clear lakes. Since there is no soil on the island (except for the kind produced by the decomposition of trees/plants), the rivers & lakes look almost fake. Most of the ones we saw were really deep and I overcame my fears of deep, dark water and actually swam across two of them:). It was probably the assurance of shark-free waters that helped make up my mind about swimming! Another bonus was that we got to take in a few sunsets! Living on the east coast of Australia, we get sunrises but not sets. It was wonderful to get to experience a sunset on the ocean again. Here are a few pics we took that night (of the nearly fifty pictures - we had a tripod and got a little bit carried away!)...

The Great Barrier Reef

We made it up north to the Great Barrier Reef this weekend with Jonathan's parents. We took a tour that departed from the town of 1770. Yes, this town's name is a number. Quite interesting, I know. It is named after the year that Captain Cook sailed into the harbor. At least all the school kids will have the benefit of remembering a date in history + be able to spell their city correctly.Once aboard the "Spirit of 1770", we braved a 90 minute trip out to Lady Musgrave Island. I don't think any of us had been on such a long boat ride in the ocean before. Who ever knew that they (those boat people) have a similar "spiel" as flight attendants, including the life vest and barf bag demos. Their demonstrations came in handy as a poor little boy in front of us lost his breakfast during the trip. The crew on board were experienced barf exterminators, slipping on their plastic gloves in a moment's time to come to his rescue and then quickly dispose of the upchucked remnants. We were all grateful not to have to use our bags. Lady Musgrave is a small island in the southern section of the reef. It once boasted a resort but is now deserted except for campers who have to cart in all their own water and supplies. It is entirely made up of coral and has a very delicate and interesting ecosystem comprised mainly of the pasona trees and a few bird species. Green and loggerhead turtles come ashore to lay their eggs. It's absolutely beautiful. The coral cay surrounding the island is incredible as well. We spent hours snorkeling in the coral around the island and touring it in the glass bottom boat/partial submarine. We saw turtles, sting rays, and lots of colorful fish and coral. The blue you see in the pictures is the actual color of the water. It was so bright it almost looked fake!
The rest of our photos we took on our underwater cameras and these will have to wait to be developed, sadly. It's tough to capture this place with pictures. It was one of those days we'll never forget, and we're so glad we got to experience it with ma & pa Hook!

Week With The Hooks

This week has been another whirlwind. Jonathan's parents arrived on Sunday morning and left this morning (Sunday). In just six full days we squeezed in as much as we possibly could (while still taking some much-needed time for relaxation). It was wonderful to share some of our favorite places with them. Since Jonathan worked long days Monday-Thursday, I took them on some of my favorite trips. On Tuesday we went up to Noosa for the day. On Wednesday we hiked at Mary Cairncross (yes, I returned to the leach hike and came out victoriously unscathed this time!!). Each day we fit in a few hours of beach time because the weather was beautiful! My mother-in-law is a swimmer (a really good one at that--she had an Olympic qualifying time back in the day) and my father-in-law is an obsessive body surfer:). This made for some fantastic beach moments. We also grabbed coffee with Tim & Donna (our pastor & his wife), shopped along the esplanade and the local mall, bird-watched in our neighbor's yard, explored the aisles of the grocery store, and meandered through the streets and round-abouts of the sunshine coast. Thankfully we had a rental car during their time here and my father-in-law impressively handled driving on the "wrong" side of the road. He did manage to turn the wild shield wipers on a few dozen times instead of the blinker, but did an impressive job following the rules of the road, round-abouts and all!

We also fit in some good food, per usual. After we took them for the fish & chips experience on Sunday night, they also took us out to our favorite Thai restaurant for a combined birthday dinner. Jonathan likes the Pad Thai so much he pulled a never-before-seen maneuver and refused to split a meal with me (we always do this so we can order two different things and share them). I suppose I can't blame him; it is the best I've ever tasted (so we just ordered the same thing - which I do feel a bit lame about). We also introduced the Hooks to muesli, meat pies, and Vegemite. I think they preferred them in that order:). In fact, after taking his first bite of toast with Vegemite, my father-in-law actually proceeded to squeeze a thick layer of honey on top. I told him it would be like trying to make a hot dog better by adding chocolate. He ate the whole thing despite.

Here are just a few pictures to document our week. I'll have to admit that this week was rougher without the presence of Andrea's click click click at all times. If you can believe it, I think I developed a camera dependency in just one week's time. When mama Hook's camera battery died I know I did a very sub-par job stepping into the role. So my apologies for a set of photos that doesn't do the week justice...