A Few Resolutions...

Happy New Year! We finished off 2009 with a New Year's Eve full of great fun and reuniting with friends we haven't seen in a while! We hope everyone had a happy end to 2009 too. It's snowy as ever here in Toronto and it's still kind of a novelty. We've even volunteered to shovel snow once or twice...

But alas, to be really cliche and do that thing we're supposed to do every January 1st, it's time for a few resolutions!

1. Write more blogs! (No kidding!)
2. Get back in touch with old friends.
3. Spend more time enjoying the outdoors.
4. Get creative-- time to get out the paintbrushes, crochet hooks, sewing machines, all of that good stuff while we're holed up inside avoiding the cold.
5. Get cultured. Go to more museums, art galleries, and cultural events (we had a great time hanging out at the Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, festival held at Harbourfront Centre this past November. Not exactly like being back in Mexico, but pretty swell anyway). Toronto's got plenty to offer and we're going to get into it!
6. Eat more rice. Not that we're sad to have returned to the land of cheese (yay!), but we sure felt healthier while in Asia, living off rice for at least two of our daily meals.
7. Exercise more-- yup, gotta throw that one on there.
8. Try new things. Bollywood dance, anyone?
9. Fill 2010 with adventure-- wherever and whatever that may be.

And speaking of being creative, here's a little fun we stumbled upon online tonight: Cubeecraft.com is a nifty little site where you can download 'cubist' versions of your favourite characters-- from Domo-kun to Barack Obama, seriously-- to print and fold out of paper. Random fun!

Happy New Year from the Top End!

Hey all! Hope it's been a great New Years for you-- we rang in 2009 in tropical Darwin, at the north tip of Oz. Definitely great to be able to wear anything we want for the festivities, not worrying about winter coats and such, and partying it up outside under palm trees on the patios! The tropical weather's nice at night, but during the day-- as we discovered today-- it's pretty unbearable. We went for a short walk along the oceanside and were sweating buckets. We were pretty much running for shade from tree to tree, and most likely had our tongues hanging out, panting, as we stumbled towards the area with the ice cream shops (we found beer first, ooh tragedy!). You must get used to it, but coming from our air-conditioned refuge at the Comfort Inn (yep, we've given up camping for a day or two again) it was pretty tough.

Our trip has been whizzing by-- we're already nearly 40 days into it-- and we barely got a chance to write about the Outback before we zoomed out of it a few days ago. There's an imaginary line, quite a few hours north of Uluru (Ayers Rock), where the climate is no longer arid desert, where the land gets only a dry season and a wet season-- and we're in the heart of the Wet here in Darwin (which usually means humid days and heavy rains in the afternoon or evening). Along the highway, you could almost spot the line where the sunny skies stopped and the downpours began. The day we passed through this boundary we saw fierce clouds and dodged winds that whipped trees and dust and nearly pushed Daisy off the road. We've been hearing from a few people that even the main highway westward has been flooded by huge rains (the aftermath of passing Cyclone Billy) and rivers are blocking the roads. We're hoping this won't be the case in a few days, when we'll have to start heading west. But the weather here is so powerful, and lately it seems our biggest obstacle has been water... ironic in one of the world's driest countries...
(Read on for the rest of the update... going back to the Outback days)

Happy "International Year of the Potato"

Happy new year! Hope it was a good one for you all, and that it wasn't too chilly back in Canuckistan. Our boiling-hot New Year's Eve was a definite first for us-- we spent it on the beach with friends, watching three simultaneous fireworks shows from different directions (they LOVE their fireworks here) and we all went for a dip in the supposedly non-shark-infested bay-- refreshing!

Now it's back to the grind: the job hunt, organizing our home, and spending way too much time online. Luckily, we've somehow come up with the time to post a couple of awesome videos from our Stanthorpe days with the creepy-crawlies. Check them out here and enjoy! [Arachnophobes, please note the material may cause nightmares]

In other good news, Dayle got a brand-spankin'-new camera for Xmas and once we get through the tome of a manual, we'll be taking better videos and pics than ever before. We're especially excited for the 6x optical zoom for the upcoming Australian Open tennis championships, since close-up tickets, of course, are way too "dear" (that's your Aussie term for the day, kids- it means "expensive"). Not that we're real tennis buffs or anything, and really, we could have gone to those pro tennis matches in Toronto, but it just seems cooler to do it here! We've been brushing up on the game the last few nights during dinnertime on our two-channel television-- there's a series going on in Perth right this moment. The Open kicks off in Melbourne on January 14-- anyone have suggestions on who we should go see? We've been a little out of the sports world for a while now...

Hail to the almighty potato!