Pancake faces

After rugby practice - Sunday morning pancakes - not good behaviour, but funny.  Destroy Conformity.

Sailing J-80s with Simon

I went sailing on a J-80 with Simon yesterday; it was fantastic.  We raced Greg and Pete.  These are fabulous boats.  When the wind gets up, which it did, they really motor, and have a crazy angle of lean - getting the rail right into the water, which feels somewhat precarious to someone who usually sails a dinghy - apparently you cant flip them though - which is a good thing, because they are quite big small boats.  Never thought I'd find a sailing boat outside a windsurfer thrilling - but it really was.

Pete and Greg - gentle cruise out to the open sea - where the wind gets going.

Simon at the helm.

Game face portraits

These are "game face portraits" - Saturday morning and a bit of Wii before banning.  They played far too many screen games for their own good over the holidays, so we're whittling down to term-time rations now.

The rugby warrior marches on...

Aiden is getting better and better all the time, and enjoying his rugby.  He plays wing, though he's quite tall, here he is with his mate Luke.  Unfortunately his team got beaten in all three games that the grand parents came to watch (having been promoted to the league 1 group was a bit of a step up - in the previous tournament they won all three without having a try scored against them), but they played well in all.

Looking suitably grubby... and he takes it pretty personally too.

Temple of ten thousand buddhas

It's a very cool place, though a misnomer, because there are actually 12,000 and something Buddhas.  It's a place that deserves colour really, wild golds and reds - all the Buddas are gold in colour.

Liked this one for the bamboo in the background too.

Ev in front of a wall of writing up at the top of the temple.

This is what the long and winding (and steep) path looks like all the way up; each Buddha is different too, which is pretty cool.

50 years together

It's so improbable on so many levels - so such a special thing

Cousins from Melbourne

 It's the thing about diaspora, as you'd know so well, people you'd likely have seen regularly in other times, you might see so infrequently now; so this first time was a special thing, for me, for them - it was just great.  Zara and Ariel are lovely.

By and large the weather was fantastic, including some beach quality days - got some swimming in too - and a game of cricket of course, Ev steaming in, Geordie at cover...

This was the morning that they arrived on - Ariel looks like he last slept a month earlier.  He and Evan ate about a ton of french toast in 12 days.  That requires getting an early start.

With a ball in Sai Kung on the big day