Yayness!!!

It has been a fabulous start to the weekend! Yesterday morning my cousins texted me to say that we have a new baby niece. We all plan to meet tomorrow for yum cha first and then visit her and her ecstatic mummy and daddy at the hospital. That is not the only good news I received. After a year of waiting... John got his PR yesterday !!! We are very happy and relieved. We are also feeling very blessed because we were not sure whether John would get it because the Aussie government has halved the skilled migrant intake due to the economy. We are very very relieved. The news gets even better. One of the conditions is that John has to make a trip to Australia before a certain date... which means we get to see each other again sooner than expected! How wonderful! We are indeed very blessed. *beam*

I went for a walk this morning and decided to take a different route. I love morning walks on still winter days just as the sun is rising. It drizzled just for a little while and just as I was thinking that it was a slightly crummy way to end a nice walk, the drizzle stopped and I saw a rainbow in the distance. :) Ah weekends... what's not to love?

Oh! And here is proof that my gardening skills are all right. Meet my potato plant. Unlike the weed that remotely resembled a potato plant, this is the real McCoy.



And meet my shallots! They are looking healthy, no? :)



Wheee~! Have a fantastic weekend everyone!

Bliss

These past nine days have been bliss. Being with John always is. :)

Usually whenever we are together the first place we tend to gravitate to is the city. We love the food, the shops and the sights and sounds of city living. This time however, we chose to avoid the city as much as possible because of the threat of swine flu. Victoria has acquired the dubious honour as Australia's swine flu central with a total of 874 cases as of Friday.

Instead of heading in to the city, we have been exploring places we seldom frequent like Chadstone Shopping Centre and Camberwell Junction. We even went to watch Star Trek. Loved it. :) I just watched Terminator Salvation yesterday and I can tell you that I definitely enjoyed Star Trek more. Can't wait for the new Transformers movie. The trailer looks awesome!

Other things John and I did include going on a ferris wheel ride, going to Victoria Market, shopping for baby items for my nephew and niece and hanging out with Dennis, Li Zie and Joshua.

I was a bit on the mopey side after seeing John off at the airport yesterday morning. It takes me at least a day to get over the emo mopey feeling. On the other hand, we know that we are blessed. We only have roughly six to eight more months till we are done with our 3 years of long distance. This is in camparison with my parents who were in a long distance relationship for 6 years. A three minute phone call to mom used to cost dad $6. That was half a day's wage at the time so they depended mainly on snail mail and had to resort to numbering their letters to know if a letter had gone astray.

Couples in long distance relationships today are extraordinarily blessed. We have mobile phones, relatively cheap international call cards, MSN, Skype, Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, email, webcams in addition to the traditional snail mail. Plus relatively affordable airfares are making a huge difference. :) Nothing beats face-to-face conversations.

Unpaid leave~

John is with me!!! :D He arrived on Saturday morning and we have been eating heaps of food. We have already had our Vietnamese beef noodles, salmon sashimi and chicken katsudon and pizza fixes! :D

We might need to cut down on going to the city though.

Victoria is fast gaining notoriety as swine flu central. We now have 300 cases. That's more than anywhere else in Australia.