Food and drink

Busy, busy busy. It's food and drink festival month here in Sydney so we have been doing the polite thing and eating and drinking our way through the city.

The noodle night markets in Hyde Park were a great way to spend a couple of evenings - trying out all the tasty snacks under chinese lanterns whilst being entertained by chinese dragons and thai dancers. And the beer festival last weekend was also good fun. The chilli beer was a big hit, though I am less sure about the one that was infused with lemon myrtle. A bit like toilet cleaner to be honest...

Weekends have included catching up with friends for breakfast, brunch and drinks, plus a trip to the bead and gem show last weekend. I have also started my silver jewellery class and Alec and I have our first Spanish lesson tonight. Phew! A bit busy as I say.

It's been mostly warm and sunny here. Too warm some days. But there have been a few spring storms sweeping through from time to time. There's one due tomorrow in fact. We get some spectacular thunder and lightning with them.

And rain is pretty welcome here, given that we are in the middle of quite a bad drought in NSW. The pictures on the news of the dusty feilds where crops should be are uncomfortable to look at sometimes. What's going to happen if the drought doesn't break?

Apparently it's not usually this warm til later on in the year and the heat and dry weather sparked off the first big forest fires of the season last month. These still feel really remote when you live in the city, but it is weird seeing them on the news on a regular basis. Watching them rip though people's homes. Scary.

I'm coping okay with the heat so far though. I bought a fan to help keep me cool at night so that we don't have to resort to air-conditioning on the warmer nights and we splashed around in the pool at the weekend to cool off a bit. (It's an unheated pool so it certainly does cool you down!)

As if we weren't busy enough already, both Alec and I have been looking for new jobs because we're limited to how long we can work with one organisation on our visas. Alec strated his new job last week - tech support for Pernod - and was impressed by the vast array of alcohol fridges in the office. Not to mention the bar. In fact, he was give 6 bottles of wine on his first day. Which almost makes up for him having to get up really early and travel north of the harbour to work every monring.

I have a few jobs in the pipeline. Working on the final details of one at the mo and it looks like I might be heading back to the corporate world... Watch this space.