I am pleased to announce we have found a house! Well hopefully, its all been verbally agreed, just waiting for the paperwork. Steve took great pleasure in serving notice on our current landlord. It is a lovely 2 year old house and modern interior with 3 beds and a study that is big enough to take a double bed so can be made into a guest room when needed, it also has a large area upstairs with room for another sofa and a wet bar with a  sink, fridge & dishwasher. The balcony upstairs is big and the current tenants have a BBQ up there as it has sea views and a good place to chill. It is in a village called Parkdale which is less than a 10 min drive from where we currently live, but Ellie can walk to her new school in 15 min, Ste has a 5 min walk to the train station and it is a 5 min walk to the beach, so ticks all our boxes really. I am sorry to be leaving Beaumaris but there just aren’t any decent rentals coming up, and Ste & Ellie have long journeys also from here.

The weather remains changeable, just like the UK weather really but hotter! You have 3 or 4 lovely sunny days then 2 – 3 days of rain in punishment, and it is no different from the UK in that everyone goes shopping when the weather is bad. Unfortunately the bad weather has been happening on the weekends and everyone is fed up of it now. We have just returned from Costco, people were battling for car parking spaces – crazy. Have started to buy a few Christmas items though, much chocolate and even got some Robertsons mincemeat for my mince pies. Its going to be a last minute Christmas for us though as it looks like we are going have to move house on the 23rd Dec, the agent wanted us to move into our new house asap but we have to pay rent here until 24th Dec so would be paying double rent. At least we wont have to suffer Christmas in this house, Ellie can decorate the tree in our new house while we sort the other things out! It will be tiring but we’ll get it done, at least Sam & Tom will be here to help, less than 2 weeks until they arrive now. Hope they get to take off on time as I believe you are all shivering in the cold and snow! I must admit that the warm and sunny weather doesn’t do anything to create the festive atmosphere. We are going to go into the city next Friday evening as there is a good evening planned with a few famous people attending, lots of carol singing, then when it goes dark they are going to turn the Xmas light on, so that should be nice.

Steve finishes work for 3 weeks on 17th Dec, he has completed his project and the manager called him and told him to take Thur & Fri off in reward for his hard work, and they let him just take this Thur off to view houses without using a holidays. They seem really good like that and they reward you with weekend away or meals out for your hard work, especially if your bid was successful and earns big money for the company!

I am still playing tennis and getting slightly better! We play for 2 hours every Monday morning, it was 30 degrees last Monday though, my god it was hot. It was so hot you couldn’t even sit out in it, it was just like opening the oven door when you went outside, then when it rained it was warm rain! Back to normal again now though, should be fine for tennis tomorrow anyway!

Here’s hoping the Pommies kick the Aussies ass in cricket as they are just bragging about how well they are doing at the moment, but if they loose at anything they don’t even mention it on the news – so funny! Ste and the boys are going to the boxing day test so watch out for them on TV.