No rain?

We've had 3 virtually dry days in a row - that's a huge relief after the constant rainfall earlier in the week. We even managed an outing for our Freewheelers cycling group on Friday morning (check out http://bvetscycling.blogspot.co.uk/). I had a plan B in case we were rained off again - Keith Gray and I were going to go to Kippie for a swim and sauna. In the end, Keith didn't fancy the cycle but still wanted to go to Kippie, so I rushed in after the morning cycle, showered, bolted down some lunch and then headed off to Kippie. From sitting around doing nothing most of the week, all of a sudden it was all go.

We got some photos from Cade and Scott of Lucy's citizenship ceremony in Portland last week:

It's virtually a whole generation that Lucy's been in America, so it was hardly a surprise - in fact why did it take her so long? - but we couldn't help feeling a moment of sadness.

This family blog has now passed 400,000 viewings since inception almost 9 years ago. Although numbers have dropped a bit from their peak of a couple of years ago when it was viewed 200,000 times that year (last year was half this), there still seem to be about 300 people who read each post.

My Chronicles blog, which is now finished of course, attracted about 150 per posting and the other relatively active ones - football, cycling, music and beer - are each viewed about 100 times each posting. The golf and hill-walking ones are mostly summer seasonal and the squash and pet hates are only spasmodic ones now.

We're starting to prepare for packing now - I plan to travel as light as possible. It's dark in the very early hours of Monday morning in Adelaide as I write this and it's still 24 C there. The forecast for our arrival there this weekend is around the 30 C mark in daylight hours, which is thankfully a bit cooler than they're going to have it for the next couple of days, when it's again approaching the frankly unbearable 40 C level. Bit of a change from our low single digit temperatures in Banchory.