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.