Dear People,

First things first: if you haven't done so before, update your address book.  We finally moved in to 'the renovation' last weekend of October.  This in no way implies it is finished, but events have overtaken us.  The phone number here is 02 4009 1774.  Not only have we moved, but in the calendar year our whole family will have moved.  The reason we moved? we now have a granddaughter courtesy of Scott and Joanne: Anna Catherine Jobson 9lb 3oz, 21" (4150g, 53cm) about 8:48pm 6th December.  It was a caesarean section, but both are doing well.

We haven't adapted fully to downsized living - the house is 3.6m (12ft) wide and 12.5m (42ft) long, two storeys.  Downstairs is a lounge at the front, bathroom and stairs in the middle, kitchen/dining at the back.  Upstairs is a lounge at the front, bathroom and stairs in the middle, bedroom at the back.  We opted for two living areas rather than two bedrooms, as living areas can make temporary bedrooms but bedrooms aren't as useful as living areas. The front and back yards (a rather grandiose description, they're not that big) are still full of renovation debris, the bane of Poss's life but I'm not prepared to heave much until the renovation is finished.  The major unfinished item is the upstairs bathroom, just an unlined shell with a bath and some plumbing at the moment.  Elsewhere there's some architraving and other trim still to do.  Visitors find the lack of handrails on the stairs a bit disconcerting, but we're so used to it, it will seem strange when they go in.  We still plan to put a veranda/balcony on the front but no timetable for that.

Despite the space constraints, it is turning out to be a very workable house.  It is moments away from Beaumont St, a major Newcastle eatery precinct.  Poss has started the 'eat our way from one end to the other' regime - a different restaurant each Tuesday. Tomorrow we will be seven eateries and two blocks from home.  The train station is less than a block away, and almost all shopping is within walking distance.  It is surprisingly quiet for such an urban location - there's quite a bit of background noise in the day but we're just far enough from the rail and major roads that night noises are not intrusive.  Weatherwise it is interesting - being two storeys in a predominantly one storey area means it is easy to get a cross breeze on a warm night, but it also means the southerlies have unrestrained access to the bedroom window!  But it seems we built well, we've had some wild weather but nothing has worked its way inside, and the block doesn't have any flooding problems.

Flooding has been in the forefront of Newcastle residents' minds since the 'Pasha Bulker' storm - 8/9th June.  It was a wild one, we had more than 200mm rain in 12 hours (the peak, 17mm in 10 minutes) and some places had more than 400mm from Thursday to Sunday.  Joanne on her way home was surrounded on high ground by rising floodwater, eventually rescued by a kind stranger with a 4 wheel drive that drove through water up to the doorhandles to take her home.  Sandra and Adam were flooded in for a while at Adam's parents' house.  Beth's work was the backdrop to much TV footage of the flood, the ground floor was waist deep in water which ruined the newly laid carpet and wrecked the kitchen.  Fortunately for Beth she was on a long break and by the time she returned to work the kitchen was workable.  Beth said that in the long term it was beneficial, some of the kitchen gear was in need of fixing and it is now replaced with all new kit.

In Carrington we had water lapping at the front and back door for a while.  Fortunately we were out when the water started rising, and arrived back as the gutters overflowed.  We parked on higher ground and waded home.  If the car had been in its usual place it would have had water over the bonnet, probably a writeoff.  The 1-tonner was slightly higher on the other side of the street, it had wet carpets but the water was not high enough to enter the engine.  The worst loss was at our storage unit, it had about 50mm water through and we had boxes of books on the ground, and some chipboard furniture.  Fortunately most of the books were pulp fiction, reduced to plain pulp.  A few were worthy of salvage, but there was no way to restore them to their unwrinkled state.  The furniture wasn't anything valuable, now patched up and doing duty as storage in our garage.

Renovating again dominated our year.  Our first frame inspection was in March, when the inspector pointed out that there were significant differences between what he saw and the submitted plans, and could we please submit a revision to the plans.  I spent a day rectifying what the inspector saw as problems, but after that it was more paperwork and give them more money and the problem went away.  We had plumbing, wiring, kitchen cupboards, and some fancy cornices done by contractors, we did the plasterboarding, carpentry and painting.  Since moving in we have shuffled our belongings between the storage unit and the house, trying to strike the fine balance between what we need and what we'd like to keep but is not immediately useful.  Our storage unit is still full, now mainly with Alan junk but also some much loved furniture including our rickety dining table which is too big for the kitchen but too much part of our lives to sell.

The family has been healthy all year, apart from a few snuffles and a bit of hayfever.  Unless pregnancy is a disease - well it seems to be catching, Joanne came down with it then two months later Sandra succumbed.  So we will have a pigeon pair come February (Joanne wanted a surprise so we didn't know Anna was a girl until she was born.  We know Sandra is having a boy).  Adam went skiing and did serious damage to his ankle, he has now recovered fully.  A good thing as he is hard at work renovating as I type.

Nicole was first to move this year. She was in a share house with three people she didn't know, and the chance came up in February to move in with Nat(alie), a friend of Beth's.  It is working well, the house is in a quiet neighbourhood about 2km from us, so we see her most weeks.  Nicole also decided it was time to change jobs.  She knew working in the clothing warehouse was not her destiny, so she did a secretarial course in the first half of the year, and has landed a job with a firm of financial advisers.  It was a bit of a case of 'who you know, not what you know' as Poss found out about the job from one of the families for which she cleans.  But Nicole won the position in a fair contest, there were a number of applicants and Nicole was not the first choice.  But first choice fell through and Nicole was next.

She is very happy with the job, already she is being given more challenging work as the firm is discovering her abilities.  She may end up a career woman, her last relationship became GI (geographically impossible) as Cameron was studying in Sydney and Nicole was not prepared to move.  Since then there doesn't seem to be a 'special person'.  Outside of work she is becoming an accomplished circus performer with a couple of trapeze acts and a cabaret routine based on hoops.  In May the circus group were joined by other performers to present 'Samuel Dark's Dinner Hour', a half cabaret half performance art loosley based on a past Newcastle businessman who ran an iceworks that occasionally doubled as a morgue.  It was quite something, performed 'in the industrial cathedral that is the Honeysuckle Boilershop' to quote one reviewer.  This gave the group good publicity and Nic has since done several paid performances.

Beth was next to move.  In May she broke up with long time partner Andrew and made a bolt for the first reasonable accommodation she could find.  She rented a room from a lady lawyer, who wanted someone on site to feed the cat while she was away, which was most weekends.  The arrangement was not a comfortable one so two months ago Beth moved into a house sharing with an anonymous man.  It is a most odd arrangement as the property is owned by a security company, and they use the back yard as parking space for vehicles during the week.  They let the house to a guy who uses one room as storage space, he then sublets the remaining rooms to Beth and another.  Beth has use of two rooms, and it seems the other tenant is rarely there so she has the run of the house most times.  The house is within walking distance of ours, she and Poss catch up most Tuesday mornings, and she drops by frequently so we're sort of up to date.

Beth should complete her chef apprenticeship this coming year.  She is still working for the Travelodge, and is quite happy there.  It is possible she will be offered a head chef position when she is qualified, but she is not sure if she wants it.  She has expressed an interest in studying photography, and has also started playing bass in a band.  She, like Nicole, does not seem to have a 'significant other'.  Where this is going we know not.

Our move was next, precipitated by Joanne's pregnancy.  When Joanne married, Scott and a friend were living in a house that they had bought to renovate. Jo and Scott also bought their own house in Carrington, the deposit being the money Jo got from selling the house she shared with Sandra (are you with us?).  As they could not afford two mortgages, Jo and Scott lived with Tas and Tif (Scott's friend and his partner) in the house they were renovating, and rented the Carrington house to Nicole. And when Nicole moved out, we moved in.  We were expecting to have to move out when Scott and Tas sold their house, but the baby accelerated the whole process as five in the house just wasn't going to work.  So we moved out of Carrington, Joanne and Scott moved in two weeks later, and now they are three.  We are wondering if Scott's renovation will outlast ours - hopefully not as they now need the money.  Jo is taking 12 months maternity leave, then Poss may be looking after Anna so Jo can go back to work part time.

Sandra and Adam will be last to move. They are going back to their Cardiff house, but not until it has been severely worked over.  They're rotating the functions of the rooms.  The old kitchen is now a bathroom, the bathroom and enclosed veranda bedroom become kitchen and dining, dining becomes lounge, lounge becomes bedroom.  It sounds crazy but Poss germinated the idea after we lived there a year.  The old layout didn't make much sense whereas the new one is much better and more functional.  They hope to have all this usable and move in the weekend before Christmas.  It will, as with our renovation, be a work in progress but they have the advantage of a cavernous garage in which to put things.  Hopefully we don't have another storm like the June one, the garage is the lowest land and was awash with more than a meter of water (at that time the house was tenanted so not Adam's problem thank goodness).  Adam is picking up quite a bit of work as a barrister so the year of living frugally is paying off.  Which is good, as Sandra is leaving work at Christmas.

We have not had any extended time away this year.  The trip to Maleny (foreshadowed last year) for Poss's brother David's birthday in February went as planned.  It was good to see Kerry and Nigel again, their B&B enterprise seems successful.  We caught up with McDowells at Lennox Head in April, in what was a brief extension of a visit to Poss's parents.  Poss has been back visiting Norm and Dawn a number of times, they are still at the retirement village in Woolgoolga and I think quite happy there.  Poss's sister Barb has arrived at Emerald Beach for her summer stay, so we'll catch up the family sometime early 2008 (Woolgoolga and Emerald Beach are about 10km from each other).  We'll catch up also with Kate, Barb's daughter, who stayed with us for 6 months in 1997.  Kate has been accepted to do a postgraduate programme at Macquarie Uni starting next year - returning to her aussie homeland (even if she was born in Canada, but why let the truth stand in the way...).  We will get back to travelling in 2008, we are planning to go to the Isle of Man.  The Cashin clan is having a reunion in June, and this will perhaps be the only opportunity I get to meet my extended family.  So far the planning is chaotic, we have booked 2 weeks accommodation at Port Erin and that's as far as we've progressed.

Not much else has changed.  We still play tennis on Sunday morning and go once a month to plant trees.  Poss has halved her cleaning jobs in preparation for grandmother duties.  I occasionally go to the speaking group meetings as a guest, it is a way of keeping up with old workmates.  Now renovation work is winding down I'm contemplating taking some part time work - we could do with some extra income for the Isle of Man trip, and a trip to New Zealand that has been talked about for years but hasn't progressed.  I wonder how much the Information Technology scene has changed in 5 years?

The other project I hope to start is something on 'the block' on Sherwood Creek Rd.   We haven't done anything with it in the 6 years of ownership, hopefully it is growing lots of trees and doing our bit to combat global warming.  There is an urban myth that the trees are worth something and we should do some sympathetic logging.  Next year maybe.

Our family get together for Christmas will be breakfast with Joanne and Scott.  It is the easiest location, so they don't have to gather up the baby clobber to come here.  Beth is working Christmas day starting 10:00am, and Scott and Adams' families are having get togethers later in the day.  So breakfast it is.  It is very convenient that all the families live in the Newcastle area, travelling in the busy season is sometimes a gruelling affair.

Should you be in the Newcastle area, please drop in.  We are one block off Maitland Road, which heads directly into the heart of Newcastle , and was (in 2001, and maybe still is) part of the old Pacific Highway.  And one block from Hamilton Station, on the main line to Sydney with trains every hour most of the time.  We have what we hope is quite a respectable fold out couch so can accommodate couples for extended stays.  It would give us an excuse to revisit the vineyards, the beach, the lake, or the bay.

Hope this finds you as happy and well as it leaves us.  And if you are unlucky enough to be travelling over the break, have a safe one.  May the season and the year ahead fulfill all your wishes.

Best wishes from Alan and Poss.