Since our holiday in Tassie, it has been mostly work and some play while we hoard annual leave for our next trip!  Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Cricket: After watching so much T20 cricket on our holiday, we decided we should go watch a game live.  We went down to Etihad Stadium to watch the Melbourne Renegades battle the Perth Scorchers.  Continuing our streak of picking excellent teams, we witnessed “history” as the Scorchers managed to chase down the Renegades run total of 170 in 18.4 overs without losing a wicket. Strangely enough, that last sentence now makes sense to me.  They even had x-games style entertainment during “half-time” – motorcycles doing jumps.  Not bad for the $20 price of admission.

New Years Eve: Friends of ours recently bought a house, so they decided to host a New Years Eve celebration and luckily invited us.  It was a great experience to have a BBQ and sit outside on the deck while it was light until 9pm on NYE.  Unfortunately, I was roped into the Australian version of the drinking game “Kings” – what strange rules they have here.  I ended up having to drink 3 warm glasses of champagne.  That hurt in 2016.

Tennis: We are both fans of sport, so we figured it’d be good to check out the Aussie Open.  We got a “grounds pass” for the first Saturday of the tourney.  The pass allows you to see any of the outdoor courts and one of the indoor courts.   Much like going to a horse race, this seemed to be more of an excuse to drink outdoors than see actual tennis.  Sara and I managed to stop by a few courts and watch some juniors play.  They were quite good.  But mostly the people watching was fantastic.

Moving House: For some reason “moving” here is called “moving house”.  Anyhoo, our lease is up in mid-March and we were looking to move.  Renting here is quite strange – things are priced weekly, but paid monthly – I still haven’t figured out what the point is, other than make people multiply by 4 and still not have the rent right (people: multiply by 52 and divide by 12).  Also, when a place is for rent, they have “inspections” scheduled – basically an inconvenient 15 minute window where you can go look at the property and decide if you want to rent it.   Most rental agents won’t rent to you if you haven’t inspected the property.  The first place we went to look at had been rented already, but they failed to notify us – so we showed up and couldn’t even look.  The second place we looked at had about 40 people looking at it and it was terrible.  This had us worried about the market here.  We kind of liked the 3rd place we looked at – enough to put in an application at less than they were asking for and a date a few weeks after it was available.  They tried to negotiate and we didn’t budge so they didn’t accept.  This made us a bit more worried, but the next weekend we looked at another place and loved it.  We put in an application for list price starting on the day it was available and we were accepted. Woo!  Now we have to deal with furniture.  But we are excited to have much more space – making having visitors (MASSIVE HINT) much easier and more comfortable.

Mardi Gras:  We went to a Mardi Gras party – though half the people there called it a “New Orleans” party.  It was fun and it made Sara mad that she didn’t throw her sweet bead collection in her suitcase when we moved.  We got dressed up.

Soccer: Some of Sara’s co-workers wanted to see the Melbourne Victory play Melbourne City.  For some reason they call it a derby (pronounced: darby) here when two teams from the same city play each other.  For $48 we got some 3rd row seats.  Not too shabby.  Also, 4 goals were scored, but only 1 at our end.

ROC Race: I’ve always loved watching “Wipeout” and wondered how I’d do.  We saw that the “Ridiculous Obstacle Challenge” was coming to Melbourne, so we decided we’d partake.  I think I determined I’d make an ass of myself on wipeout.  It was a 5K run with 9 various inflatable obstacles set up.

It was a lot of fun, and fortunately, it allowed me to wear a ridiculous outfit.