We’ve had a lot of fun and activity over the holiday this year filled with great food, wine, friends, and lots of Pickleball! We started the fun with a night of 90s music Bingo at the local brewery with friends.
Leigh unwittingly won the dress up side things with her knock off of the Wallflowers album cover.
Before we knew it, it was Christmas Eve. Hugh and Justine invited us to a Pickleball match with friends in the morning which was a great way to start the day. At least I thought so…Rob and Justine weren’t very happy about a 7am start but starting any later than that in our summer heat is pretty icky.
While Rob was napping, I started to get ready for our Christmas Eve seafood dinner. As you know, Rob does most of the cooking these days but I’m still usually responsible for the crab cakes. I even multi-tasked and made butter tarts and then decorated some gingerbread cookies Rob had picked up for me. I think I’m little out of practice!
After laughing at my decorating skills, Rob sent me off to the patio with a glass of wine – Super Duper Pinot Noir, a favourite of mine – while he put together an amazing feast! On the menu was oysters, prawn cocktail, lobster, garlic prawns, crab cakes and creamy scallop rice. We are so spoiled with the seafood here!
Christmas morning started with coffee in the pool and then opening up the Christmas stockings. We keep Christmas gifts to a minimum these days but it’s still nice have something small to open each year. This year I gifted Rob some fun beer coolies filled with Australian animals wearing Christmas sweaters and he gifted me these fun pickle socks and another lego kit.
The rest of the day was spent chatting with family in Canada, swimming, and of course more food and drinks. Thanks to Hugh and Justine, we even had ‘real life’ Clamato this year!
Sadly, Christmas also brought the end of my 2023 Advent Calendar. This year, Rob surprised me with a Lego themed one. It was super fun to get up each morning and build a small piece of this Lego world.
On Boxing Day, we were invited to Friendsmas with a group of friends we’ve made through Pickleball. Most of us have all moved to Yeppoon from elsewhere so Geoff and Sharon decided to host a day to bring us all together. It was a great day!
New Years’ Eve was a quiet night at home enjoying great conversation with Hugh and Justine. Fortunately we managed to fit in a swim before the storm rolled in. We’ve had night time storms and rain again the past few days. This is a picture Justine took of the storm the night before New Year’s Eve. So beautiful!
After watching the Sydney fireworks and ringing in the New Year, we decided it would be a good time to start a euchre game. We all felt pretty impressed with ourselves staying up until 3am. I’m not sure what we were thinking though given we’d all committed to a New Year’s Day Pickleball tournament! Fortunately, the tournament didn’t start until 3pm.
The tournament was a local event that was set up as a round robin with six teams. We made it through three or four rounds before we had to call it quits due to another late day thunderstorm, but it was still great fun. Rob’s team was declared the winner as they were undefeated and also had the most points (even though I was the one with the Pickleball socks!).
During the first week of January, we had lots of blue skies and the seas were once again calm so Rob and I decided to fit in another day at Great Keppel Island. I even convinced Rob to get up early to take the early morning ferry, but seriously, how can you complain about seeing this first thing in the morning?!
For this trip to the island, we brought our snorkeling gear with us. We had another perfect day! We didn’t bring our underwater camera this time so can’t share any coral and fish pictures but we saw a few new ones this trip. I finally saw an epaulette shark! Epaulette sharks are completely harmless and actually ‘walk’ more than they swim by pulling themselves along the coral with their fins.
I have one last day of leave and then it’s back to work. I always feel a bit mixed about leaving behind the lazy days of holidays, but I will admit I’ve missed my early morning visits by these little guys. They tend to waddle by my office window at the front of the house as I start my work day each morning. It’s always nice to start the day with a bit of a giggle.
We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and cheers to a happy and healthy 2024!