We wish you a Merry Christmas...

Yep, the holidays start early down here! Or, another way to look at it is, if I want to get my presents home for the holidays, I'd better get cracking! So today I basically finished up my Christmas shopping and packed everything into boxes. It doesn't really look like much - I'm sending home five different parcels to various groups of people, and that's it! I'm cheating, too - everything for the Vincent clan's going in one box, everything for my Toronto buds in another, etc. etc. Even so, I know that I'll likely be moaning in pain tomorrow when I go to the post office to mail them... I have under 5kg of stuff that's being sent back home and it will likely cost me around $100 to do so! (Groan) So apologies in advance - not everyone is getting a present, and those who are, are getting something SMALL. With any luck the packages will arrive before the holidays!

Tonight, Mark, our trampolining coach, brought a squirt bottle with him to class. He proceeded to spend the first part of the evening spraying us with water - at first whenever we missed a trick, and then for no apparent reason other then to get us wet. Both Jen and I ended up rather soggy, but Jen definitely took the brunt of the spray (at one point I wisely stayed on the trampoline until Mark ran out of water - he would only spray those of us in the class who were waiting their turn, and didn't want to get the trampoline itself wet). Hee hee! It's not like we really even minded - it was hot today and the gym was sticky and gross. So I think it's fair to say that Mark's little stunt backfired... we found the spray rather refreshing! Although you've gotta admit that being sprayed with a squirt bottle like a badly-behaved cat is not exactly what we'd expected from trampoline class. :-)

Mark worked us really hard tonight. I think he's getting frustrated with both Jen's and my inabilities to do certain tricks. For Jen it's backovers and ballouts, for me it's still cradles and airplanes. Yargh. Tonight, Mark upped the ante a little bit - he'd tell us to do a certain stunt and give us five tries, and if we couldn't do it, we had to sit ups or push ups. Let's just say that we did a lot of sit ups and push ups and we're gonna hurt tomorrow. On the other hand, Mark does drive us home every week, and he's been pretty darned patient with us really - so all's good. I'm just not a fan of being so sore the morning after trampolining!

I'm flying out to Canberra tomorrow afternoon for a weekend camp! Jen's not coming - she needs to get as many days of work in the next few weeks as possible. So she'll be home all by herself until late on Monday when I return. In the meantime, I get to meet with Nikki, the Guide leader whose house we'll be borrowing for the week just after Christmas (Nikki and her family are going away on vacation and so Jen and I will have the house to ourselves). I'm going camping with Nikki's Guides at the Australian Capital Territory's Guide Camp, Innabaanya. So not only do I get to meet Nikki and go camping, I'll finally get to see what a Guide Camp looks like down here!

I'm back in Melbourne late on Monday, so check back then for my next report! And here's hoping Jen's able to keep herself amused while I'm away. She's assured me she plans to do a lot of sleeping in and enjoying the quiet. Of course she also threatened to rearrange all my stuff while I'm gone. Considering I've developed a bad habit of hiding plastic frogs in Jen's stuff whenever it strikes my fancy, I guess I'd deserve whatever she chooses to dish out! :-)