One month gone...

Hello again to our loyal blog followers!!
We are humbled by the awesomeness that is our loving friends and family dutifully following our blog! Thank you for leaving us comments on here and Facebook, its nice to hear that you are enjoying our trials and tribulations!!

We can see you....!

We have been keeping pretty busy this last week! In the last post, the rivers were flooded. It took a full week for them to go down so that they weren't over the roads (many of the miners were stuck, all the main roads were closed into Emerald - couldn't get supplies or the post/newspapers in!)

Compare this pic with the previous posts one... The water is 1m higher than the road! It only rained for a week, harden up! This pic was taken two days after the originally posted one!

We went for a drive with Richard one night, to see the flooding and to see if we could see some "wildlife". Saw this fat little cane toad (Bufo marinus)

We went to check on the John Gay Bridge, and the Botanical Gardens. Went for a wander through the Botanical Gardens but the river was up too high to get to where we were heading  so had to turn back. On the way, a mumma Possum fell out of a big ass gum tree and hit the ground so hard! Had a little baby on her back, hilarious!

She's a bit flooded! The big bridge is where the water flooded over in the big 100 year floods in 2008 and 2011! That's a shit load of water!! It is the main road in and out of Emerald heading east back towards Rockhampton (Capricorn Highway - because it runs East/West along the Tropic of Capricorn)

Because it is so F'ing hot here ALL THE TIME, and Australia to us cold blooded Kiwis equals being sweaty ALL THE TIME, we have been spending quite a lot of time at Lake Maraboon/Fairbairn Dam. Its the only place to swim at and is about 27kms from Emerald, a nice and relaxing place even though their mozzies are on steroids, seriously they are huge!

This is the Fairbairn Dam spillway - at above 100% capacity it spills for irrigation and water for Emerald.

 Looking towards Emerald's general direction...

Going for a swim in the very dirty water (Urenui river would be cleaner than this!), the buoys mark the "swimmers area" as they do a lot of boating in the lake. Very warm, probably around 20 plus degrees water temperature. There are turtles in the lake, you can see their heads popping up for air every now and again, there is fish in there too but too dirty to see them! We bought a Lilo to wallow on too, its awesome fun!

A lovely sunset at the Dam. We concluded that the sunsets in Australia are very yellow probably due to the deserts and that the sunsets/rises in New Zealand are more red AND are generally seen over water... so they are different!

We found Whittaker's chocolate! Wooo! Was cheaper than Cadbury too, double Wooo! It is also utterly ridiculous that NZ Tasty cheese is cheaper in Aus than in NZ (its $11/kg here) You can buy 3L of milk for $3!

Good news... Michael has a job! A 7 week duration contract picking watermelon, 10 hour days/ 6 days a week. Shahn is still working at the cafe, its pretty busy there. They make 300-400 coffees on a standard day, more in weekends and they are open less hours! She dropped two mugs of coffee on herself on Monday, awesome! Very busy days, but staff are awesome to work with and they supply the lunch and as many drinks as one can handle, its a pretty sweet situation to be in.  They reckon they will teach her to make coffees but they seem to be taking their sweet time!

Hope to be able to share some more positive news regarding job situations in the next posts!
xxx Love Shahn & Eak

A diamond in the rough...

We are settling currently in Emerald, QLD. Its about the size of Hawera, with the service industry of New Plymouth. There is alot of money to be made here, we are just struggling to find it!

Richard's and Scuba's humble abode in which we are currently residing (and Hugo) not to mention Richards' sweet ride the Holden Ute.

(16/03/12) After we had the "check engine" light come up on the car, we booked it in to Central Highlands Toyota for a diagnostics check (*cough* $130 later..!) and it came back that the oxygen sensor was buggered and needed replacing.  So we ordered the part (*bigger cough* $311).

We forgot to add this picture on the last post. This is Hugo's interior, pretty spacey huh?! Eak speeding and taking pictures while he is driving... and our cute sat-nav!

Later that day we went to the library and printed out some CVs to drop into businesses.  The first place Shahn dropped hers into, the lady hired her on the spot! Started Monday 19/03/12, Day one dropped an entire large cappuccino down her front - shirt, pants and undies were wet through. Awesome! Has been okay since then :)
Zoe and Jade, I understand why you enjoy working in cafes! They are fun, have as much coffee as you can handle and they give you lunch! Woo! They are also going to teach me to do coffees if I hang around! I know Zoe, I know!

It annoys me that its in text language, was it really that hard to call it "Love a Coffee"? I am sure that all the grammatically anal friends we have, will also find this amusing!

Eak still actively looking for work, I think he enjoys being a kept man (hahahahaha) but really he is hating it. He has massive cabin fever. hope that something comes soon! He has had a few meetings, but still nothing. So for now the stop gap work is an interesting stop gap!

WHY DOES AUSTRALIA HAVE SUCH HUGE SPIDERS... WHY??

This bad-lady spider is precariously positioned between the two trees where Hugo is parked (see photo one in this post) the web is THAT huuuge!

There was a Caine Toad on the porch when it was raining heavily the other night but I missed it with the camera. Other than checking the grass for naughty snakes that might be wanting to get me while hanging the washing or whatever, have not seen anything exciting!

Emerald seems prone to flooding even when there doesn't seem to rain for THAT long... It must rain alot heavier and for longer durations in Taranaki than here but Thursday (22/03/12) while driving to a job interview for Eak, we saw some road closure signs and being the naturally curious people we are, had a little look-see. The John Gay Bridge (awesome name, I know!) was closed as!

Thankfully, we don't live near this river... this is on the other side of the railway lines so we are safe!

Maybe Shahn can get a Radiography job as this cafe work is pretty hard work when your the floor & kitchen bitch, is $19.75/hr worth the pain and effort?! Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Until next time...

xxx Shahn & Eak