Rain, rain, here to stay...see you at the end of the day...

While the weather up in your Northern Hemisphere is cooling down quickly, our skies have been looking like this (above). Living in a tropical part of the world, this time of year has already proven to be a wet season indeed! We actually had some pretty severe storms around Thanksgiving time that made world headlines. Most people lost power, had damage to cars and homes, etc. We did ok but it was quite scary driving around in what felt like a hurricane one evening!

Well, whilst you all were enjoying a Turkey Day feast last week, we opted to not make a big meal for several reasons: 1. We didn't have the time to research and hunt down each and every ingredient in town. 2. Turkeys are expensive here. 3. We refused to have a Thanksgiving meal unless there was an amazing pumpkin pie at the end of it.
So, you can imagine with all the hassle involved....we scratched the idea completely. Instead, we went out for Dustin's birthday dinner the next night and ate an absurd amount of food- the sick feeling we had afterwards was definitely comparable to a Thanksgiving food coma!

Sean (above) and Jill (below) even joined us!!! We were stoked because they are parents of an 11 month old and never get a chance to get out of the house at the same time! :0)

The gorgeous Jill (Mel's sister)

We ate at Fiasco's steakhouse, where Mels works. In fact she was our server this evening for our dinner! (Here's Dustin blowing out his cupcake candles)

The whole group at the end of our fantastic meal.

**An update on our visa status: Keep in mind this is a LONG, LONG, LONG story... but summary of the story goes like so- the Aussie Immigration department told us we need to re-lodge our application again. (sigh) And this time, it needs to be online, and we must not be on Australian soil at the time of the application and visa approval. Weird rules, but we can't complain- only comply, right?

SO what does this mean? It means that though we didn't plan or budget for this, but we also didn't read the very fine print about the limitations of our current visa. Therefore, we will be planning a trip to south New Zealand (probably Christchurch/Queenstown) sometime in late December or January. Why NZ? Its the cheapest option to get out of the country, and Brian is dying to go bungee jumping in Queenstown. He's gone before a few times in Vegas, but the AJ Hackett bungee place in NZ is the mother of all the bungee places. (And yes, we are looking into major travel insurance before going) We'll know more about all this within the next few weeks, so as always, keep "following us down under!"