Friday

Family & Friends dinner - was good and crowded! it was lovely to meet D's significant other, Y, finally. She has been over here from Moscow for less than a month but seems to be settling in well although she said it was very different - since everything closes so early here in Australia. They were telling us that in Russia everything stays open until late - including financial institutions so you can actually even do banking at 8 o'clock at night. I wonder how big a population Australia would need to have to keep European hours? The other thing she is fascinated with is our birdlife here and certainly around Latimers and environs we seem to have (more than) our fair share.

It was also interesting to hear how they met. It was through work - both of them ran transport companies - D in Sydney and Y in Russia. And because of the wonders of the interweb (it does have some good uses) they were able to get to know each other and ... The rest is history.

Mouse was concerned and disappointed with her cooking for the guests though. She made borscht and vereniki - which we all love - but she thought the borscht was overcooked and she had to remake the vereniki because the first batch had the wrong cheese. Of course, we just all thought the meal was amazing - and we took some borscht home for the weekend. But even she couldn't doubt the dessert - F's favorite rhubarb crumble. And who knew that rhubarb leaves are poisonous ... and paw paw leaves? (It's amazing what topics get a look-in at dinner - although now that I think about it, I do wonder what Y and D thought of our talk of such things.)

Y (and how do you pronounce her name?) was good company - I wouldn't have liked to have been her ... thrown into the deep end as she was. But she seemed to relax more as the evening went on - realising that Mi (who was in good form) was joking with a lot of the comments she made ... mmm, rhubard leaves.

We finally got to ambush little H with the other nerf gun this evening - as well as ambushing M who didn't know that there was another nerf gun in the house, so while she and H were shooting each other, we ambushed her! All good fun. The Great K, usually more reserved, even had a go and he was a good counter for little H. It was too rough for me so I ended up reloading guns (and doing a little ambushing) and clearing jams. That's probably the biggest problem with the guns - the darts get stuck in the barrel - and until it's cleared, you can't fire any more.

We all went home tired but happy!