experiment underway

Today I have kicked off an experiment which I have been wanting to do for a while. Jackson says “mummy” or “daddy” (or variations of) A LOT! He also says “I just wondered if….” a fair bit when he wants to as something he knows we’re likely to say no to.

So, I’ve started a tally of how many times Jackson says “mummy”, “daddy” and “I just wondered if” through the day.

At 801 local the tally was

“I just wondered if” (shortened to “IJWI”) 14
“Daddy” = 24
“Mummy” = 17

I’ve taken an early lead as Jackson was playing his PSP earlier and needed my help on some hard bits. Kylie should still be considered the favourite to win the tally.

Updates will be posted to twitter: http://twitter.com/ckjchambers

captains log, star date 191008

Everyone loves a list. Right? So, the other day I was cleaning up the garage and came across some old photos and it prompted me to think of some of the cool things I’ve done in my life. I love stats and spreadsheets, so it made sense to start some lists! Lists of memories….. I have no idea of how often I will post these, or when I will post the first one, but they’re coming soon.

Our trip to the US of A is coming up quickly, thankfully! We’re so looking forward to it. Our plans are mostly locked away and thankfully we’d paid for a large portion of our accommodation, flights and tours before the AU dollar dropped from 98 to 65 US cents.

Today we’re off to the Gumdale State School Fete, Jackson has been looking forward to it all week. Each day he’d ask if we were going to the fete today, but when the answer was no, he’d get upset. Thankfully, today when he asked me if we were going to the fete today – I could say YES! big smiles.

Work wise everything is going well. Tourism Queensland launched a facebook profile for Queensland during the week – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Queensland-Australia/26225930097, it features current campaign and competition activity, holiday packages, events, free downloads and discussion boards. It looks good (I think, though I am a touch bias).

That’s about all for now, over and out.

g’day world

Life continues to scream past! It’s now August and coming into September.

I went on an overseas trip, to the USA, for work earlier this month. I won’t go into the details here (in case some other STO is watching in) but it was a very succesful trip. I have some great ideas to work through and the meetings which were the main reason for the trip went really well & I’m looking forward to continuing the project moving forward.

A cool site I found recently was this one http://www.iliketotallyloveit.com/, looks like a great way to find gift ideas! From their own site

“The site allows users to publish and share products with the broader public which they find cool, innovative, exceptionally beautiful, or just weird. Included with every item is a link to an online shop where it can be purchased.”

I’ve found a few gift ideas on there already.

Jackson keeps growing up and coming out with some cracking lines. He’s great entertainment, though a little cheeky for my liking sometimes.

Today Jackson has a 5th birthday party, Kylie’s off to the hairdresser and I go to the footy tonight to see Carlton flog the Lions. Tomorrow Jackson and I are going to see the new animated Star Wars movie: The Clone Wars.

Planning for our holiday (in 85 days) is going well. We’re locked in to most of the main things we want to do. It should be a great trip and we’re particularly looking forward to catching up with Kim and Ian in Telluride!

‘aveagoodone

weekend in the city

Kylie, Jackson and I are heading off for a night in the city today. I’m really looking forward to spending the day looking around SouthBank and doing the things we’ve got planned. We’re going to check ot the Picasso Exhibition at GOMA, have dinner at a restaurant at SouthBank, check out the KungFu Panda movie and stay at Rydges SouthBank.

Tomorrow we’ll have a yummy breakfast somewhere and check out the art auction which is on at Rydges.

Should be fun!

hot, hot, hot!

Brisbane, 23rd Feb, 2008…

Today was HOT! Not a lot doing today, the hot weather was a good excuse to keep a low profile and do not a lot of much. Highlights of the day;

* swimming in the pool! love the pool…
* playing star wars on the wii, i think Jackson has his first addiction. The first thing, and I mean within 2 minutes of waking up this morning, Jackson asked for was to play star wars on the wii. He’s a bit attached!
* snooze (for cc, not kc)
* having some birthday cake and singing happy birthday for kylie!
* downloaded some youtube videos of Telluride and the NASCAR driving experience for our hols in the US of A.

The blues are on later tonight, so I might get to watch a quarter or so of their game.

We’re progressing our plans for our holiday later in the year. The plan so far is:

22nd Nov leave Brisbane for San Fran,
25th Nov leave San Fran for New York,
4th Dec leave for Cape Canaveral,
6th Dec leave on Carribean Cruise,
13th Dec leave for Walt Disney World,
20th Dec leave for Telluride – SKIING!,
27th Dec leave for Honolulu – THAWING!,
2nd Jan leave for BrisVegas…. home

The planning this time around is coming together a lot quicker than our past trip. We are going to many of the same cities, but we have very different things planned in each place… more to come.

hope you managed to stay cool today!

cc, kc and jackosaurus

captain’s log star date 170208

the year has started off with a real bang…. Lots going on in the Chambers household!

A few of the things which have been happening;

* Jackson started pre-prep. Pre-prep is like kindy. He’s going to a community kindy which is close to Kylie’s mum and dad’s house and near to the school we will book him into. He’s loving it – he’s really enjoying getting to play with kids all his own age and interacting with kids again, after not going to child care for about 10 weeks while we had our holiday and pre-prep was closed. He has a new mate, Jack, they play in the home corner and “fix” things.

* We’ve decided to go on another trip back to the USA. We’ve been bitten by the bug and have planned out our trip, which will be at the end of the year. We’re going to San Francisco, New York, Orlando, cruising the Caribbean, Telluride for skiing and Christmas and Hawaii to thaw out. We’re looking forward to it already…. (only 273 days to go!)

* We bought a cross trainer, which is in the living room. It’s to help us get fit, but also to get ready for skiing! We’re getting into the swing of using it and I don’t hate it as much as I did after the first couple of days…. It’s definitely helping.

* I “mc’d” the recent TQ Awards for Excellence, at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Ctr. I shared the duties with Dallas Free, which was fun. The awards were held at a breakfast ceremony and it was a good morning. Some of my great mates won awards, including Sarah from my team for Most Outstanding Staff Member (the award I won last year) – way to go Sarah!!, Steve McRoberts (my boss) for Excellence in Leadership, Al Bendall won the award which receives nominations from industry, Megan Thompson for excellence in International and Monica Groenert for Excellence in Management. All very worthy winners! Obviously professionally the last year has not been all that crash hot for me – I went from most outstanding staff member to not even getting a nomination .

* We bought ourselves a new David Bromley, which hangs nicely in the “compound”. I’ll get some pictures and post them. It’s a great pic and I’m sure we’ll be collecting a few more along the way.

* We only got one number in each of our systems eights we put in for last nights mega lotto…. back to work Monday & the art business has to wait – again….

That’s the big things…. of course, it’s 645am Sunday morning and I haven’t had my cuppa coffee yet. I’ll post more as it comes to me!

over and out.

Chris

’tis the season

This posting was started early Saturday morning…. I am a tad weary and hoping that the headache I feel starting in the back of my head goes away. Last night Kylie and I had Christmas parties and Jackson stayed with my mum and dad (thanks!!).

First thing’s first. Photos from our LA stay are up and live on the information superhighway. You can find them by clicking on this hyperlink, right here: LA photos. Remember – click on the big arrows at he bottom of the screen to move through the pics, there are about 60 pics of LA there.

The highlights of the LA pics…

Santa Monica is beautiful! The Halloween spider. The Roto Rooter van (childishly amusing). Pumpkin head shots. Jacko meets dora, spongebob, jaws and the simpsons.

Remember, please post comments on the pics here. We’re getting lonely!

Yesterday was a big day for me (chris), I had a flight up to Hervey Bay for a work meeting with Whale Watching operators about their campaign site. It was a flying visit as I left Brisbane at 8 and got in at 9′ish and left the meeting at 11 for a 12 flight and back in Brisbane by 1. I didn’t get to see anything much, but Hervey Bay has changed a lot since I was last there and I think we’ll head up to Fraser Island / see the whales next season. The meeting went well and then I was back to Brissie for the TQ Christmas party last night.

Kylie had a big day too. Two Christmas parties in one day.

The TQ party was good. I don’t have any stories from Kylie’s party, so if the Energex folk could kindly post all the great stories about Kylie’s behaviour here, I would well and truly appreciate it. I was a saint, of course. I would like to thank Tige for encouraging the crazy woman from the party next door to talk to us all night and be very persistent in trying to get one of the drinks “vouchers” we had to get our free TQ drinks…. Well done Michael S, TQ’s new CEO (Chief Environmental Officer) for being the one who sat between me and her and took the brunt of the nagging. Marcus T for suggesting the Jager bombs, looking forward to some more of those this week as we farewell him and he goes to the minister’s office. There was a big crowd for the night, which was great and very little shop was spoken.

This weekend is a big one, we’re off to an exhibition of Charles Blackman art this morning at a gallery in Paddington. This is their website, though it has nothing of the exhibition, it was in the Courier Mail a couple of weeks ago: www.joelfineart.com. I’ll post a bit of an update on this afterwards.

Kylie, Jacko and I are going cruising to look at the christmas lights tonight and tomorrow we’re off to the Cox’s for a bbq lunch and sometime this week we really must put up our christmas tree!

I also wanted to put a link to the Warhol Exhibition in here. Warhol on Queensland Holidays The Warhol exhibition is in town and showing at the GOMA, which is a fantastic setting for an awesome show. I was fortunate enough to hon knob with dignitaries at the opening a couple of weeks ago and the exhibition is great. I will definitely be going back as I didnt get to see all of it and I need to pick up some of the great merchandise they have. You should go and the only place to see this in Oz is Brisbane…

enjoy the photo’s! next up New York, so when they get posted ne sure to have a cuppa nice warm coffee with you, as there is about 300 NYC photos…. (I PROMISE not to post them all)

morning officer

the subject of this post bears no resemblance what-so-ever to to the topic at hand… however! it does sound better than general weekend update.

not much going down this weekend.

Kylie went into town with Mum yesterday to buy some comfortable walking shoes for the 5th ave assault.

Jacko and I hung out at home and did a lot of nothing. When I say a lot of nothing, I mean we did a lot – but not a lot of anything in particular. playing outside, playing inside, you know… kid’s stuff

Some exciting news is that Kylie and I are parents again! sort of…. My Scarlett Chested Parrots have babies, four of them to be exact. Jackson and I spent some time yesterday cleaning out the bottom of the cage and shoo’ing away ants – there’s lots of ants around at the moment. Lots of ants all around in the yard. not sure why, but there is – out the front, out the side and out the back. anyway, the reason for mentioning the ants is that two of the baby birds had left the breeding box – which I think would have involved a fall of about a meter and a half and were on the bottom of the cage and the ants were giving them grief, biting them and such. So, we pfaffed around and got them back into the box and then they fell out again. I’ll do another check on them and try and get photo’s later. v exciting!

We went out for dinner with Colin and Ju last night. To Thai Mali – it would HAVE to be Brisbane’s best Thai restaurant. I don’t know why we bothered with the menus, we ordered pretty much the same thing we always order! It was nice to catch up with Col and Ju, thanks for dinner! Col and Ju and the boys will be looking after the house and vegas when we’re on our holiday.

The US holiday itinerary is all but done! I’m so close now – i did a fair bit on it yesterday and we just need to tidy up Honolulu – which is our last stop – and we’re done. Only 13 sleeps to go!

This week looms as a busy one at work – with a trip down to Sydney Thursday afternoon for the Australian Marketing Institute Awards. TQ is a finalist in three categories – two finalists awards for the Where Else campaign (brand revitalisation and also for the digital campaign) and a finalist for the Whitsundays campaign. It should be a good night out hopefully. Back on Friday.

I bought Jacko a great little gift this morning – a raiders jersey! he’ll look v cool in that.

anyways, that’ll do it. aveagoodweekend

g’day… how you doin’?

couple of quick hits…

1/ last night we went to a teppanyaki restaurant down at Raby Bay, imaginatively called the “Teppanyaki Bar”: http://www.teppanyaki-bar.com/. As far as our, recently, regular Saturday night restaurant visits goes, this one was ok. The meal was definitely entertaining – Jackson thought it very funny when the chef threw a bit of cooked prawn for me to catch, in my mouth (which i did!) and Jackson also enjoyed watching the cooking of our dinner on the “barbie” right in front of us. The food was pretty good, at $125 for the three of us, it wasn’t a cheap night out – but OK priced for what we got. Our chef had his “L” plates on, and obviously hadn’t been a Teppanyaki chef for too long…. still, he managed to entertain Jackson. Of course Jackson didn’t eat much and told us he thought he was allergic to chicken… and then later also allergic to beef… surprisingly, he has no allergies to ice-cream and he ate that all up post haste! We wondered who had taught him about being allergic to something, so we asked and Jackson informed us “Wubbzy”! Wow Wow Wubbzy is an annoying cartoon Jackson likes to watch…. punish yourself and check out the “wubbcast” channel on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Wubbcast

2/ planning for the us extravaganza is at full steam ahead now…. with only 20 days until departure, and seven “official” full days in the office – time is evaporating. Yesterday, we locked in two very exciting bits of our holiday.

part 1 was we now have a reservation for a Mustang convertible in Vegas. We’re going to hit the open road and do some cruising in the Vegas desert. I’m looking forward to this and have started mapping out a bit of a drive route for us, hopefully we get to see some interesting desert rock formations, and not just lots of tumbleweeds! of course, we’ve also got this tied in to a visit to a major outlets shopping mall, on the California / Nevada border…

part 2 was we’re also now locked in for our Vegas to grand canyon helicopter tour. This will be FUN! The tour is a four hour trip (hotel to hotel) which will include some time on the canyon floor. We’re supposed to fly into Vegas as the sun goes down, which should be pretty spectacular.

the itinerary for the trip is now blown out to 39 pages…. just that alone will be a significant chunk of our luggage allowance!

aloha…

Quite weekend so far…

We had a nice dinner over at my mum and dad’s last night to celebrate Dad’s birthday.

Today we zipped over to carindale to do some shopping. We talked to kimmy this morning to sort out some details of our NY stay and Kylie has honed the itenerary a little bit more. We found a very nifty service by AMEX, where you can order your travellers cheques online and get them sen out to you, instead of having to go into one of their shops….

Tonight we’re off to blue smoke, which is an american ribs restaurant. we’ve been there once before and the food was great, so we’re looking forward to it.

The Chambers

What we get up to….

Category Archives: weekend updates