So far we are ok here in Algester, but the flooding is beginning to creep closer to us as the Brisbane river gets closer to bursting its banks.

The Wivenhoe Dam was built in the aftermath of a huge flood in 1974 as Brisbane’s defense against another major flood. Its currently at 173% full. 100% is the normal ideal capacity for drinking water, it has a 100% extra space for overflow, so at 200% it will start to overflow and then we are in trouble. To give you an idea of how fast its filling it was 140% full 48 hours ago.

A few blokes here at work have gone home early (its 10am at the moment) after hearing that there houses under water. The roads are being closed around us and it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing the end of it for quite a while.

I’ll be updating here and via Twitter and Facebook to let you know how we are doing. Our house itself I think should be fine, its reasonably high up. It maybe a day or two before this suburb is hit with the worst of it though.

We haven’t updated the web site for ages, I know. We’ve still been updating our fickr page, mainly from our iPhones, but I’m planning to Tweet, Audioboo, update Flickr and post here as much as possible while we are away on our 5 week long trip.

We’ll be putting the wedding photos up on Flickr too so stay tuned for them, there will be a lot of activity on our Flickr page over the next 5 weeks or so.

So we leave tonight, just a bit of a last minute drama with letters from priests that we didn’t know we needed.

If we can get wi-fi during the trip at the airports I’ll be tweeting our progress.

Ok, off to finish packing my bag.

In typical Val style she wasn’t confident at all. She kept saying to me, “do you think some people are just not ment to drive”?

Well I think she drives pretty well, and now we can get a lot more done during the week, when Val and the girls hit the road.

Look out Australian pedestrians!

A Brief update on what we’re up to.

• We’re still trying to sort out the finance for the new house.
• We had to move out of the house we were renting because it was sold.
• Our very nice friends and ex-next-door-neighbors have let us stay in there holiday home for a few weeks. It’s in Burliegh Heads about an hour south from the house we are buying.
• We are hoping, yet again, to hear back from the mortgage lenders early this week.
• As soon as the finance is approved we can get the keys and move in, so we’ll hopefully be in by the end of this week.

Failing that we will be probably giving up and renting again for a while, before having another stab at getting on this crazy property ladder.

I may be bald and/or grey by then.

I took the day off work yesterday and we looked at a few more houses and we ended up putting an offer in on this one.

We do have one other option with this one, but we basically have 2 days now to have an offer accepted.

Wish us luck.

You can see it in the picture here and there’s a link to all its details here.

We’re going to have another look at it tonight with the real estate agent.

What do you guys think?

My first post on this site.  Just to let everyone know I am now the proud owner of a ‘Permanent Residency Visa’, at long last….. It was a pain in the butt to get organised, especially as we were simultaneously moving house but it was all worth it now and a big thanks to everyone who helped me with the paper work.

We are looking forward to Christmas, celebrating it with Granny and Grandpa Henry and Brissy friends. And I think Simon is getting more excited than the girls about Santa coming and the Christmas morning opening of presents.

We wish you all a very safe and happy Christmas.

Grace Jane Pither

My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt; helpless, naked, piping loud, like a fiend hid in a cloud.

William Blake

It all went well, just took a while as Ella did.

Just had 3 hours sleep. Now I’m off to pick Ella up and go back to the hospital. Very excited to introduce Ella to her new sister.

Should have some more pictures of all that later.

oh, and as you can see I’ve made some changes to the website, and having a few problems with the format of the page (one post running into the next. Hope to get it fixed in the next few day.

Update – Site now fixed.