The Chronicles of Williams

We arrived in Sydney/Springwood and are loving it so far. We arrived at 6am after trying to sleep on the plane... (not) but we were so excited to see everything we pretended we weren't tired.   We had our bank account opened, the keys to our new house, walked around cute downtown Springwood and checked out the Springwood tennis courts by 2pm. It was great! It's colder here than we thought so we looked for some jeans for Cullen and they were $100 so we told him to suffer another day... poor guy. We all took a nap about 2pm and then David and I got up around 5pm and we went groc shopping, made dinner with our hosts and the whole time couldn't get Cullen up... he was OUT!!! He woke up about 7am with us and we had a nice big breakfast on Turkish bread (we discovered we love that). Today we'll be buying mattresses and a few more items so we can move into our house. It has lots of rooms and 2 fireplaces and a nice view of the bush behind our house. We're also going to ...

Sabbatical is great for lots of reasons but I always like the "simplifying" and cleaning out process.  Not just our closets and junk, but streamlining everything and making life simple again.  We're prepared to rent an unfurnished house in Australia because it's very difficult to find a furnished one.  2 bedroom houses are hard to find and apartments don't really exist in this area, so we'll probably rent a 3 or 4 bedroom house... plenty of room for visitors!  We're also prepared to furnish the house with fun garage sale items and possibly reclining in the evening on lawn furniture in the living area and not having a TV.  We don't need much so it will be really fun to live light for a while!! (Everyone in the family gets 1 plate, bowl, cup etc and washes it out every night... sounds great to me!!! ha) Now that we have our house rented and most major items figured out, we can start looking and thinking about Cullen and the new things he can enjoy in A...

OK, we are behind on our blogging...  We've been busy with Tanner's graduation and watching his soccer team win state! Austen is doing awesome and getting ready for his junior year as an art major at the University of Wyoming. Cullen is busy settling into summer, tennis and hanging out with friends. David and I are just working hard to get everything ready and money saved up for Australia! Very strange packing our winter clothes up knowing we won't need them until October of 2011... will be crazy to have a year with 3 summers in a row and skip out on the winter! We're leaving Aug 23 ish and coming back May 15 ish.  More to come.

Today we surfed and learned more about Australia and where we'll live, go to school and play tennis!! Springwood NSW Australia is about 30 m west of Sydney and looks like a great place to live... in the Blue Mountains National Park. Lots of little towns and art and good food (just what we like!). David will be working on a global warming project with his associates at Western University and he'll love that but it will be a good break for him. Link to Springwood NSW: http://www.bluemts.com.au/tourist/towns/Springwood.asp Need someone to rent our house for 9 months... so if you're on sabbatical at University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY let us know! Watching the Olympics, sitting by the fire after a day of tennis and skiing. It was a good day!

It's still Feb and snowing right now... a fire is keeping us warm while we watch the Olympics BUT I heard a bird today!!! Tweeting away and so I know that spring is going to come to Wyoming eventually. More snow means another month of skiing so that is good. 2010/2011 will be our year without a winter since we'll be in Australia, so let's enjoy the last bit of winter (while we listen to the cute birds tweeting!)

Hey all, Just a brief summary where our little family is in 2009.... Austen is a sophomore at the University of Wyoming and is majoring in Art. He's a hoot and fun to have around! He looks forward to going snowboarding as much as possible when he's not working or in school. Tanner is a senior in high school and plans on going to UW in the fall. He's taking his first UW class this spring and is thinking about Communications/Journalism major. Loves tennis, snowboarding and is still playing soccer:) He's still a sweet boy (even to his parents!) Cullen is in the 8th grade and is almost as tall as me!!! He loves skiing, tennis and hanging out with his friends and the new Wii. He's very entertaining and keeps me on track around here. I still love my fused glass art and also tennis. I'm looking forward to learning more about enameling / metalsmithing in 2010. I also want to design some tennis apparel:)   David loves his job here because he can walk to work everyd...