The church

We finally managed to purchase the lovely little country church on the block of land immediately adjacent to our farm. Having originally been approached in 2007 to see if we were interested, the church was then taken off the market after a tornado in late 2007 knocked down the local Anglican church and "our" Uniting Church was rented to them. So they have kindly looked after it until we were ready to buy it! God acts in mysterious ways indeed (given that the Anglican church had also been knocked down in the 50s you have to wonder if it was just a coincidence that the weather requires the church to update their building every 50 years or so with a bit of help from the insurance companies!)
With a list of problems as long as your arm (contaminated soil, noise issues, heritage listing etc) it may be a little while before we can actually get permission from council to live in the church but the recently opened up view has me very enthused to get the process moving along! We took out a bunch of weed species including some quite large trees and now have a magnificent view across the macadamia plantations to the hills beyond.
Have a little more headspace to think about new house designs now after finishing up an incredibly hectic year of projects which culminated in winning an international award for the most impactful use of technology worldwide in support of learning - the Platinum award in the New and Research category of the IMS Global Consortium Learning Impact Awards in Long Beach California. This was for the simulator Rob and I were working on for the last 18 mths.
I have had a bit of time off, but Rob continues to be busy and is in Tasmania this week, Melbourne on the weekend, France and Norway in September, New Orleans and Norway in November, speaking about the simulator built for training dive supervisors.

Christmas 2010

Had a lovely Christmas in NNSW, with Paul, Anitra, Josh,Kay, Emily and Abbey, with Miranda, Bridget and Judy joining us later in the day. Rob and Anitra did a brilliant job of cooking Christmas lunch, and my pina coladas and strawberry daiquiris went down very well. The day was surprisingly cool - in fact the whole summer has been cry cool, with lots of rain.

Kind of felt strange not spending it with the extended family, but we managed to call Rob's family in Melbourne, and mine in NZ and England.

Chris and James took a few presents down for the family when they flew down on 6 January to get ready for their trip to NZ on 10 Jan. They are backpacking for three weeks with James's girlfriend. Should be a great experience. I'm going over to NZ with Breanna and Liam, together with Anitra on 22 January for a week of sightseeing before going on a cruise from Auckland to Sydney with Rob, Anitra and Jan (kids are flying back to start school).

Northern Rivers update

I can't believe it has already been 6 months. We are in a lovely rented house overlooking our farm. The new phone number is 02 6689 5902. We've had a few visitors - and looking forward to having my Mum over for a month in August and my Aunt in September.

We've had some interesting times settling in, and are extremely thankful for the wonderful friends we already had up here who have been a tremendous help in dealing with some of the issues - we've already tested out the local ambulance service, the local hospital (twice!), the vet, and the ability to get flights quickly for emergency dashes back to Melbourne. All services have passed with flying colours, and in every case our friends have been there ready to step up and help out with looking after kids, driving us to the airport, diagnosing the dog's illness etc etc. My heart goes out to people who have to deal with those things without the support of friends and family. Despite the ominous sound of all of that, we are all happy and healthy, albeit a little overworked right now.

We are so lucky though that our biggest problem is too much work after a move to rural Australia. That work has seen us in Melbourne for a reasonable amount of time, with the only frustration the lack of time to catch up with friends and family while we are there. Rob has done a brilliant job of managing the Australian Diver Accreditation Scheme simulator project - take a look at some of the photos at http://simulator.adas.org.au/ , while I get to spend much of this month down here in Melbourne finalising the training scenarios and software configuration to make it ready to train offshore dive supervisors. So this will be my office for a few weeks (that's James in the picture on the right, trying out the saturation diving supervisor panel):

Again, it's really interesting work, and the team of people we have worked with have made it a real pleasure to be part of this project.

On the side, I've been kicking off an e-learning project and am presenting at an e-learning conference this week. While it is hard to fit it all in, it is great to be doing the type of work I really enjoy.

On that note, I'd better sign out - we're off to visit Rob's family today followed by dinner with friends, so it should be an enjoyable break from the work.

Decision finally made (sort of!)

Well, looks like a permanent move for the Gatt family to Northern rivers.

And you can see why we love the area - just look at the view we should have when we build our new house on the farm.

We have loved being back in Melbourne, and it was a very tough decision. It's been made easier in a way by the decision to keep Chris here in Melbourne, so psychologically it feels as though we aren't really leaving, as we will initially keep the house, and we'll do a little bit of single parenting with a parent in each State for at least some of 2010. Chris is quite confident that he can manage on his own, and I am quite confident that he is right for at least some of the time - perhaps not all of the time yet, given the importance of year 12, and the amount of study he should be doing.

Rob and I have a major project being constructed in Melbourne until June 2010, so we will have work reasons for being here for a lot of the time. So just need to manage the needs of the Northern Rivers part of the family as well, since we felt it was best for James and Liam to start in their new school at the start of the year. Breanna is more flexible since she is only just starting Grade 5, but we'll probably start her up there as well.

Still looking for a house - "our house" in Donaghue St came up for sale, but we missed out on that one. So we'll see, and keep you posted with a new address and phone number. In terms of post Gatt family C/- Dunoon Post Office will definitely find us, and our mobile phones will work up on the ridge in Dunoon itself.

Wishing everyone a pleasant and safe Christmas and New Year season. And please come and visit us once we find a house!

Settling back in

Sitting here with multiple layers of clothing, a blanket over my knees (thanks Kay), and the heater on. Have survived the return to the cold, and enjoying catching up with Melbourne friends and family. The older boys are loving being back at school amongst their friends, even with the 6 am starts some mornings when James has to go in for gymwork / rowing training.

We're still not unpacked properly having been a little unwell when we first got back (not swine flu, but nasty bugs all the same). Only just managed to see Paul (Rob's Dad) a couple of days ago, as we'd been keeping away to make sure we didn't give him any nasty colds, since he is recovering from an operation. He's looking great, so I'm sure it won't be long before he's up and about properly.

Need to make a decision about schools by end July - ADAS is headhunting Rob vigorously, so the pressure is on to move back up to Dunoon. Would like to be in both places at once, although Rob would probably prefer to be doing only one job, rather than the current situation where weekends and evenings go to ADAS and the day job has a little less energy brought to it than he would like. We'll keep you posted on any decisions!

Back to Melbourne 30th June

Well, we were very tempted to stay - I was even trying to concoct plans to keep the house here and alternate between the two - after all, I still have full time work up here for another 6 months. The younger two kids were quite happy to stay up for another term and keep me company with the weather warm enough to still be swimming in the sea! They love their school - that's them in the photo on the right getting an award, with the marimbas showing in the bacground.

However, the landlord made the decision for us by not renewing the lease on the house. So with only 14 days notice, the kids have learned another valuable lesson - the vulnerability of tenants. We couldn't believe it, coming from Victoria where tenants are well protected under the tenancy laws, but sure enough, at the end of a fixed term lease in NSW, the landlord can give tenants only 14 days.

We are so fortunate to have somewhere to go, as our own tenants moved out just last week. It must be so tough for families that are purely reliant on rented accommodation. We had already been approached by three families who knew we were supposed to be going back to Melbourne and who wanted to ask if the house was available.

I was very pleased though to see that Breanna has some compassion, as her first question was, "but we're not going to throw our tenants out are we?" I assured her that they had made the decision to go themselves and that we didn't need to do that at all. We were also very lucky to have friends offer to have us stay, but since we were due to go back to Melbourne in a few weeks anyway, we decided to just pack up and go. Another very good friend has offered to store all our things so that we will have a full household of furniture ready to go whenever we find a house to live in.

Yes, we do love it up here and yes we would very much like to stay, but of course, there are also many reasons for staying in Melbourne, so it will be interesting to see how we go with making a decision.

We are really looking forward to seeing all our friends and family in Melbourne, but not looking forward to the cold!

Rob in NZ and only 8 weeks to go - in theory

Rob's away in New Zealand at the moment - no climbing this time - doing an audit on a couple of diving schools. He gets back tomorrow - looking forward to having him home again.

After a tough start to the week doing our tax returns for last year, I'm feeling a lot better now that I've got them all done - and looks like we'll get a tax refund, so that's good news!

Still in denial over our return date - can't face the thought of trying to move out in only 8 more weeks, especially as I have more work than I can cope with at the moment (very fortunate given that the country is in recession). I'm really enjoying the work especially having just been formally awarded an e-learning grant so I can look forward to focussing on the area I enjoy most over the next 6 months.