Merry Chooshamoosh

--or "Christmas" for all those unfamiliar with Phillips-speak.

I'm having a break! I'm out at the farm writing this blog post on ancient dialup connection on mum's slow pooter. Mum and Dad have finally taken some time off together and are up north in Brisbane visiting Uncle Lionel and mum's good friend (and my godmother) Jean Herford.

The farm rocks! We're near desperate to get our own, but it's kinda awkward right now for two reasons. 1) Janene's on maternity leave, so it's hard to re-finance an existing loan on just my wage; and 2) we'd have to sell the house in town BEFORE we could buy a farm... well that's as far as I understand.

Any legendary homeloan specialists or financial advisers out there that can give us some hints on another achievable method?

Chooshmoosh Eve
To accommodate everyone, we decided to have an early Christmas dinner at Janene's Parents' house with her family (two sisters + their husbands + kids).

The most memorable part of that day was the rain! We had steady drizzle most of the afternoon, which really cooled things down, making it a rather unusual Aussie Christmas.

Chooshmoosh Day
Surprisingly I had to wake the boys up myself at 8am. We opened our little bunch of presents then jumped into some respectable clothing and went off for the 9am church service.

After the service we came home and had an afternoon of playing with toys etc, and generally staying indoors, since it was very chilly outside! This Christmas will go down in history, as further South they had a heavy fall of SNOW! While it might be something taken for granted in the Northern Hemisphere, it really is an extremely rare occurrence for us Antipodes. A REAL White Christmas.

I guess we were just happy that it was cold, giving the rain from the day before more time to soak in, rather than just evaporating.

Christmas afternoon we had a nice big dinner at the Radburns' house (Corps Officers), followed by some general chit chat, a few game of darts and a twilight game of cricket. I retired by hitting a few catches, after a lengthy innings of first class backyard batting.

That was my Christmas in 2006.

Happy Christmas everyone. God bless youz and I hope you experienced the genuine meaning of this season.