The all new wife

First off, apologies that there's no photos to accompany this post - Jo refuses to let me use one until it's flattering. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Jo cut a long hairstyle short. The blonde is now gone, back to natural color, and the style is pretty short and funky. Promise photos soon!

We also had some socialising this weekend. Anne is another psychologist with ADHB (though works in a completely different department to Jo), and her partner Rob is a civil (boo!) engineer. We met them at the ADHB "new international staff" night in the first or second week after moving over, and as is usual when moving far from home, we latched onto a fellow Melbournian. At least Rob is English, so there's a bit of diversity, but it's taken this long to get around to catching up with them again.

We headed out for dinner at the Viaduct area at the bottom end of the city, which is (from what we saw on a wet evening without exploring very far) quite similar to the Docklands precinct in Melbourne. There's one of the old America's Cup boats on a stand in the forecourt (one of the really bloody big ones, I think the year that the Americans turned up in an even bigger catamaran...)

Can't remember the name of the restaurant we ate at, but their specialty is the hot plate meals, where you get your meat served on a superheated stone, so you can leave it on as short or long as you wish. I chose the tuna steak which was pretty good except that by the time I'd turned it over it was already as cooked as a good piece of tuna should be, and I had to whip it off the stone and find somewhere to put it on the edge of the plate. It still went down well with a couple of pints of beer though.

Speaking of food, there's some fantastic meat here (sorry vegetarians, might want to skip this paragraph). Even the cuts in the supermarket are two inches thick! Significantly, I haven't cooked a bad pork steak yet, normally the hardest meat I find to get right. Every time I've cooked one here, it comes out as soft and juicy as ever. Brilliant.

I also bought a line trimmer on the weekend for the lawn edges that the mower doesn't get in to. Cheap as hell, electric, and far too short for extended use, it's lucky that we don't have enough lawn for that to be a serious issue. It also only came with a very short length of line, which was barely enough to go once around the lawn before it ran out. I guess that's the cost of buying the cheapest thing in the store. (as an aside, it's in the news that Bunnings will start charging 10c for plastic bags. I wonder if I can manage to convince them to honour their "better the competitor's price by 10%" policy on the basis that Foodtown's price is exactly 0 cents...? Worth trying for a laugh anyway.)

well, that's enough from me, time for bed!
cheers all,
matt.