Christmas Day on the ocean

We didn't really have a big Chrissie planned since none of our family was with us - Dave opened some presents early, the Girls & I went to the beach for a big play and then we headed out to a couple of our secret spots in Exmouth Gulf for some diving, fishing & hard relaxing!

It's a hard way to spend the day - gorgeous blue skies & ocean, a deserted island, perfect temperatures, a bbq lunch on board...beats the heck out of what the Midwest had!

I did my first dive since way way back in August. It was a pretty short one since the secret site we were on was very tiny and the day was more about spending time together than spending time underwater. I only shot about 15 frames and most of those were just potshots for giggles so no fabulous stuff, just a few happy snappies to share - of course it wouldn't be a Christmas post without Christmas trees (worms)


Happy Holidays!!

Dave's off to Perth...again

He left this morning for yet more screwing around with our healthcare system. He's hoping to drive back on Wednesday at this stage, but we'll have to see how it all goes with juggling last minute appointments and what not. Stay tuned. Neither of us are impressed with this spur of the moment trip, but at least the doglets will get their food supply topped up so we don't have to fool with having that shipped up. Trying to see the silver lining here, really.

The past few days have kept on with the crazy. Dave has been in the dive shop most of the time and I've been frantically trying to clear all of the editing and processing from my backlog. I am thrilled to say that everything bar processing a few orders is done and dusted and those few orders remaining will be sent off to the printer before noon tomorrow. Yippppeee!!

I've had enough time to toss up a few bits & bobs, including some random personal just for fun stuff, on my Exmouth photography blog and hopefully I'll have images from the last two weddings up there early next week. You'll have to go there to see my feelings on mushrooms and you know you don't want to miss that! Please remember to leave a little note over there as each and every time you do it raises a little more money to help make Christmases jollier for someone who needs a little HO-HO-HO this season!

We took the Girls to the beach to have a big romp & check out another dead whale. Dora and Tilly settle right in on their car mat before we even leave the driveway.

But as soon as we are wheels up, Tilly's right there - eagerly drooling over the front seat, anxiously waiting to see what's coming up

This new dead whale looks pretty small and I don't have any idea how long it's been there or how it died. I just know that it's become something of a locals outing

Yes, those are camping chairs staked out on the rocks LOL I can't imagine sitting up there as it's decidedly whiffy when the wind blows a certain direction! The decomposing whale has brought in a ton of small fishes and those have brought in some bigger predators. Most of those standing around while we were there were watching three tiger sharks patrolling. None of them were very big - max about 7 feet probably - but friends of ours swear there was a 15+ foot guy there at one stage.

This kid was throwing pebbles into the holes despite his mom shrilly insisting he stop. I know the whale is dead and all, but behaviour like that just feels so disrespectful to me.

After hanging out watching the sharks for a few minutes we cruised along the beach well away from the action and other humans so we could get on with the walk. Dave found a big stick and that held their attention for about 20 seconds.

Dora ended the game by taking the stick out and dropping it in the water then leaving. Tilly was torn between finding the stick again and trailing after her Sister. Dora was supremely pleased with herself.

The weather here has been blowy again in the mornings and that sucks. It then gets HOT mid-afternoon and the Gulf glasses off. Hopefully tomorrow and Monday will be gorgeous as we have good boatloads of divers and everyone is itching to get a few good dives under their belts. I will be in the dive shop.

Suddenly Sunday

I'm beginning to think I should just have an stock "Gee, I don't know how a whole week has slipped by me again" post because it sure seems that the days fly by without any news or even happy snaps from me.

Part of it is because I have no life, but the other part is because what little life I do actually have gets to insanely crazy with this, that and the other I don't have time or energy to keep up to date here. So here's another catch up post.

Dave is still on his way to Perth in SeaZone. He just called and they were meant to leave Geraldton today but they've turned back because of the weather & high seas. I don't know when they will try again as the weather isn't supposed to be better tomorrow, but we'll just have to wait it out. Crossing fingers for him to get there soon so he can come home!

I've been busy this week with spending every day in the dive shop and squeezing in a couple of photo sessions, too. I'll have some sneak peeks up this week and hopefully I'll also have a full post of images from Beck & Craig's wedding last Saturday. I have a ton of shooting coming up starting Friday so must get all of early October's finished before I get completely snowed under.

Tilly has tried to lighten my work load, albeit slightly misguidedly -> Lucky she's cute.

The early mornings here have been lovely most of the week so the Girls and I have been heading out before sunrise to get in a nice long walk before the world starts to stir. I love early mornings, best part of my day, really. And how's this for coincidence? Both of these images were taken at 0557 - Oct 9th & Oct 10th!


I love how different it can be from day to day.

It's been low tide early so we've been spending a lot of our walks out on the sand flats.

Dora loves the small puddles of water - walking through them, keenly watching the small fish or just hanging with her sister. She'll veer off our course by miles if it means she can romp through 1 inch of water.

The patterns in the sand are so cool I could spend all day just taking photos of them. Even our footprints and those of the little birds that tease MatildaLily are pretty nifty

We've also found some cool stuff: crabs, big broken baler shells, tiny worms, various bits of random stuff the tide has left behind


Yup, I love my early mornings all to myself out on the beach

I really appreciate those of you who have checked in with me to see how my Big Changes are coming along since I haven't been very good about keeping up the reporting! I am now almost seven weeks without Coke and I'm not missing it at all. I've had a few days here and there where I thought that the acid burn & tingle would feel so awesome, but it's never been more than a passing thought. Nice money saver, too, since bottles here are stupidly expensive...I'm up over $300!

I'm also doing great on hitting my 9 fruit/veg serves per day. I got stuck in a rut of 4-6/day which isn't bad, but I truly do feel better when I eat more than that. So the past couple of weeks I've been happily averaging 8 or 9 and it's good.

I'm still culling things out of my physical space, though a lot of that has been cleaning and organizing my hard drives. I have to admit to being bad about just saving everything since I do have a lot of storage available. But I pared over 100GBs the other day and it was strangely satisfying. I'm no where close to being done with that project but it's good to have job security, right?

Still with me? Good :)

Other than on our beach walks, my cameras have only been doing work and not much frivolous stuff this week. I did grab one the other day when we had a neat visitor to our front yard, though. I am assured it is some sort of ibis. All I know is it's a bird and he talks to me. Not in a "I'm crazy coz a bird speaks English to me" way, but in a "Hey, lady, you're annoying me honk honk" way. Very vocal and not a little pissy that I was out there.


The cats didn't even bother to check him out.

Well, that's pretty much my week so far. Today is windy and a little chilly so I doubt the dive shop will be very busy, but I'm here to handle the rush if it happens!

Please keep an eye out on my Exmouth photography blog this week. Not only do I hope to have lots of new photos up, but I am also going to announce what I hope will be a cool event and also some exciting news!

And I will try to add some vaguely interesting stuff here, too :)

Beach walkin'!

Finally!  Light wind, early daylight, no hustling to work early.  The Girls and I hit the beach just before the sun rose this morning and it was so great to be out there again.  We were a little later than I'd like to be, but at least we finally had a morning suitable for a big romp.

I tried to get a shot of Dora & Tilly sitting pretty, but they were most uncooperative. What a shocker. And Til gave me about 7 seconds before deciding that was enough cooperation altogether. Once again Cesar would have a cow.

It may appear that Ms D has, ahem, put on a few pounds. I'm thinking the camera isn't lying as when I hoisted her posterior into the car my back screamed in protest. (Why is it that she is perfectly capable of getting all the way in when we GO to the beach, but coming home can only hoik that front half up? Cesar would have a whole HERD of cows with our family.)

Today Dave loaded up SeaZone to take her to Perth for the summer season. He'll be gone about a week or so, we think. So I'm on my own again. Seems like I've been on my own a lot this year, but that's just how things go. Happily I have a ton of stuff this week to keep me occupied so I'm sure the time will fly!

I had a very busy weekend to ease me into a crazy week. Shot a lovely wedding on Saturday and you can see a sneak peek of one of the fun shots I got of the bride & groom over at my Exmouth photography blog. You'll also see the damage I did myself. Looks like I'll be shopping for a total coverage shirt in the very near future!

Sunday Dave ended up having to go out on the dive boat...as a GUIDE! LOL He hasn't had to guide divers in, oh, I don't know, ten years? And there's a funny story:

When we discovered that one of us needed to go, he suggested we flip a coin and hauled out a $2 coin for the task. He said "you call it". I declined and told him it was his coin & idea, he could call it. "Tails!" says he.

Flip.

It's heads.

But wait. There's more. I start to walk into the dive shop and he pulls me back.

"You won't believe this," he says. "I knew it and I forgot and called "tails". It's a two headed coin!!"

ROFL - he was going to cheat but he mucked it up, how totally sweet is that?!?

Saturday snippets

Let's start with some awesome news.  Well, for those of you in the US anyway.  United has just dropped their airfares to Australia AGAIN.  Right now there's a special deal for $699 LA Sydney LA PLUS five nights accommodation - check with them to see if you can extend your stay and see more of the country before flying home.  Click here! It would be so nice to get deals going the other direction one day... Thanks once again to my friend Amber for keeping me up-to-date on all these great deals!

Now some sad news. We have a dead humpback whale caught up in the intertidal zone at one of our beaches here in Exmouth. It's just a wee bit north of where I usually walk the dogs so we are avoiding that area except at very low tide as I don't want the dogs in the water anywhere near the carcass. There's a little more news and an extra link over on our Exmouth Diving Centre blog.

The whale has been sick for a few days and yesterday it finally, thankfully, died. It had become severely blistered from the constant sun and predators didn't waste any time helping the cycle of life along. I went out this morning right at day break after walking the dogs. It's pretty incredible to be able to walk right up to the whale (it was low tide, but the water was coming in fast). If you get queasy, now is the time to scroll



Dave is still out on the boat with the guys at ManCamp '09 but I expect them back later this afternoon. It will be nice to see him again - I know it's only been a couple of days but it seems like longer. And not just because I need him to fix the shower...

Paradise perhaps

Late yesterday afternoon Dave and I loaded the Girls up and headed out to the beach for some fishing, hiking, photographing, relaxing, romping and eating. I was excited because I finally got to take my new boots out for a spin. Don't laugh, it's not *that* sad!

Dora and MatildaLily were excited because, well, pretty much just because they're dogs


How spoiled are we? When we drove up there was - GASP - another car close by! We looked around but couldn't see the people who belonged to the car so decided to stay anyway. Yes, we truly considered going somewhere else. Tilly was worried that she wasn't getting out of the car RIGHT THIS SECOND, I mean, c'mon, we'd slowed down, we must be there!

I know, it's a luxury to have a beach to yourself - except here it feels more like a right :) At least if you're a local! Anyway, turns out that it was one of our friends out for a spear and he left very soon after we arrived. Happiness is having a beach to yourself as far as you can see.

While Dave got all his gear organized for fishing, the Girls and I headed off down the creekbed for the first time. Never could explore up beyond before as there are all sorts of pricklies, sharp rocks and other rough terrain that I didn't want to subject my bare feet to. Those days are gone, Baby! Now I have boots I can go anywhere. The dogs loved snuffling around in the new area, but Til's attention span is still pretty short so she turned around and trotted back to her dad after about 20 minutes. The sun was very bright and pretty hot once we got out of the breeze, so Dora and I took some time to smell the flowers before heading back to the beach

Back at the car I found Tilly in the back on their mat. She does this for no apparent reason every time we go somewhere. Just jumps in and hangs out for a few minutes before bolting out like the nutter she really is again

Dave tried to take the opportunity to have some quiet fishing time, but the dogs had to make sure he was OK out there

I really must remember to switch my camera to video mode next time as his gesticulations to try to shoo them away are pretty flippin' hilarious. I still don't understand why he doesn't want them helping, they're so quiet and calm

Eventually he gave up and walked his line back to shore. The fishing stuff was still out there, I guess, coz he went back out later to wind it back in. I don't really get the whole fishing thing so apologies if you have no idea what I'm talking about here



We came prepared to have dinner on the beach


and enjoyed sitting around, watching the Gulf

A beautiful hawk type bird landed just out in front of us for a few moments before winging away down the coast

Both Dora and MatildaLily become very well behaved around the bbq

Always so optimistically living in hope



Til thought she might have a better chance if she backed away a little bit

While Dora went with the Oh Look How Pitiful I Am approach

Neither gambit worked too well, so they resumed the ol' How Close Can We Get and How Hard Can We Stare Before We Get Told Off For Begging tactic



Tilly kept double checking to make sure she wasn't missing anything from Human 2

They both stayed vigilant, even during clean up - yes, those dark patches on my knees are from doggie slobber. A big reason why I don't wear good clothes when we go out with them...


Such a great way to end a busy day...