·:[ David and Claire’s Blog ]:·
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Greetings from floor 33 of a high rise apartment building in Singapore. I’m currently sitting on Bron’s couch looking out into the South China Sea where I can see 1 million shipping crates and a lot of container ships. Bron and I just got back from a cruise where we visited Malaysia and Thailand. Very nice times indeed! I’m going to try and get a few pictures up in the gallery if at all possible. We managed to fit quite a lot of excitement into so few days. We visited Penang, Malaysia where we wandered around Georgetown and visited a temple. We found a giant crazy mall and did a little shopping (DVDs!) then wandered some more and found an Indian section of town where we found a few shiny trinkets.

Next we went to Phuket where we went on a sea cave canoeing adventure. We drove to a bay with many islands then took a boat out to a couple. We hopped into canoes and were paddled out to some caves which led into the middle of the island where there were beautiful lagoons. Later we had a seafood lunch on the boat and then were able to jump off and swim around for a while. It was a very nice trip.

We made the most of all the eating and drinking establishments on board, including the buffet, Indian restaurant, sit down fancy restaurant, bars, karaoke, pool bar etc. Our last day was a case of wake up, eat breakfast, back to bed, wake up, eat lunch, pedicures, pool, pool bar, dinner, karaoke, drinks and finally sitting on our balcony watching the stars before bed. Oh yes, the balcony! I forgot about the best part. We had a balcony in our room!! So, so good. Nothing like opening a bottle of champagne and sitting outside on the balcony in the warm, tropical night while a storm rages right next to you. The winds must have been blowing away from us as we did not get wet! So good times were had by all and I now have a couple of days in Singapore to do a little sightseeing or whatnot before I fly home.

I miss my family but I am having a very nice vacation!!

While there are many, many, many good things about quitting a god-awful job and staying home for a few months, one of the nicest advantages would have to be the use of weekends for fun stuff instead of errands. We managed to do almost nothing summer-specific while I was working and instead we spent our weekends dragging the kids out grocery shopping, dropping off drycleaning or roaming the streets looking for notaries. But now I can get that crap done during the week and we don’t have to do anything on the weekend except come up with a fun activity which is actually harder than I would have thought because we have no idea what kinds of things we would like to do. We went to the Jersey Shore for a daytrip which was pretty good. We had no clue about where to go so we picked randomly based on a “family-friendly Jersey Shore” google search and ended up at Point Pleasant Beach which was actually not too bad. This is only the second shore town I’ve visited but I find the actual beaches disappointing because the water is just too rough to go in, so it’s really just a case of hanging out on the sand. Maybe I need to keep looking for a better town, or maybe the whole shore is that way but it would be nice to take the kids into the water. As it was, Brynn and I were standing well back so most waves weren’t even reaching us, but every now and then a bigger one would come up to our ankles and then we’d get a really big one that would come up to her knees knock her off her feet and scare the heck out of all of us. She was 10 yards from the water line but it seemed entirely possible that she could be dragged out to sea by one of them.

The whole sand thing is a problem with little kids of course. Neither of them really like the texture on their feet but Brynn doesn’t like sand in her shoes so there was a lot of shoe off, shake out sand, shoe on. Evan managed to get it in his eyes within 30 seconds and then started rubbing his sandy hands in his eyes to make it feel better which, obviously, it did not. Thankfully the issue seemed to resolve itself somehow. The other bad thing about the water being so rough is that you can’t really hang out near the water and make sandcastles. The sand near our towels was too dry so that was a bit disappointing. But there’s lots of other things to do instead of just sit on the sand. We walked along the boardwalk, ate some boardwalk food, checked out the aquarium and then called it a day.

Today we went to a church festival near out house. They had a lot of carnival rides set up and Brynn is crazy about carousels so we had no choice once she spotted it as we drove by. She went on the carousel, the ferris wheel, a car ride and then a little mini roller coaster (all by herself!). I think this dinky little fair was pretty much the highlight of her life to date. She was so excited about the rides that she would almost start crying waiting for the previous riders to disembark. Evan also went on a couple of rides and I could safely say that the car ride was also the highlight of his life. I have never seen him more excited about anything. As soon as he was buckled in he had a huge grin plastered over his face and he kept doing his crazy little squeal/laugh the whole time. He threw a fit when it ended.

Apart from that we’ve been having picnics, going to the zoo and of course there was our trip to California last month. What a nice week that was! I put up a Bruinwoods album in the gallery and it is also my intention to get some other albums up there but I have pretty much a year’s worth of disorganized photos to try and work my way through so it will be quite the project.

I have finally gotten around to moving the gallery I maintain over to my new Linux box. You know, the one with 5 hard drives and 2 TB of storage, and the dual AMD 64 bit CPU. Needless to say the site should run faster now. I have also resurrected the gallery random image. Enjoy!

P.S. for all zero users that used the forum in the last year, it’s toast now. But I am experimenting with a WIKI

Lying in a wheelbarrow: