Magazines, mountains and Melbourne

Hello everybody!

I started a new job in January – working at Pacific Magazines in North Sydney. My title is Market Research Analyst and I’m in charge of all their homemaker titles – Family Circle, Better Homes and Gardens, Home Beautiful, Diabetic Living and Monument. I’m just so happy to be here – it’s so me and our team is awesome. As well as analyzing quarterly readership figures and bi-annual circulation figures, my job entails writing reader surveys and presenting the findings, reporting to publishers, editors and sales and marketing managers about readership performance, keeping apace of societal trends that impact the business/magazine titles, investigating new magazine projects and this list goes on. I’m a busy beaver – and happily so.

Apart from the new job and new location (North Sydney is gorgeous! I walk to work every morning over the bridge!), I have been dabbling in a new interest. Well – I’ve had the interest for a long time, just never did anything about it. I have completed a Wine and Spirits Education Trust Intermediate Certificate (with Merit!) and am now studying towards my Advanced Certificate. These courses involve wine tasting and learning all about varieties, styles and wine regions. There is a lot of geography involved! It’s going really well, but this paper is a real step up, so I am beginning to brace myself for the exam, which involves a wine tasting component …gulp!

The old faithfuls are still around – philosophy school and yoga school – both of which I still love very much. I go along to the yoga school 4 times a week plus practice at home. It’s such a grounding activity, I couldn’t live without it. The yoga and philosophy are a nice marriage…funny how things work out!

The biggest news is that mum and dad came over for another fabulous Easter holiday with us. We hired a car for 2 days and headed down the south coast, stopping at Wollongong, enroute to a wee town called Kiama. Some gorgeous sea-side scenery there. I think the pace of life was really what made things gorgeous for me. I have been craving escape from Sydney’s racy city centre for months. The next day we went in another direction – out west to the Blue Mountains. And what a change of temperature! We all put on another layer and hurried to a warm café for soup and warm pita bread sandwiches, dribbling with melted cheese, before venturing out to the peaks/rock formations known as the Three Sisters.

Over-looking Bondi Beach

Taking in the view - The Three Sisters at the Blue Mountains

An added bonus this year was we got to catch up with Anita and her mother, plus some family friends of mum’s and dad’s. Seems like half of Wellington was in Sydney at Easter! Well, not quite…

If that wasn’t enough excitement for one month, the following weekend Gareth and I made a long awaited trip to Melbourne. We both had a great time – I soaked up the culture in little Greece and Chinatown while Gareth, er, um, soaked up the ‘culture’ at some Aussie rules museum there! The highlight of the trip was that we finally drove the Great Ocean Road. Immediately my favourite drive ever – probably because it reminded me so much of home. The coastline is very rugged there, and the fact that it was slightly overcast gave things a dramatic edge. By the time we made it to the 12 Apostles, it was nearly sundown, and the atmosphere was incredible. We just gazed in awe at the beauty and at the same time the harshness of such an exposed coastline. Amazing – it’s falling away at about 2cm a year. Now that sounds like heaps to me. A few years ago (1990?) some tourists actually got stranded on London Bridge, a rock formation, when the ‘bridge’ connecting it to the mainland got washed away. They had to get helicoptered out! We didn’t quite finish the road in a day, so overnighted in Port Campbell so as not to miss the last remaining sights before the end of the road at Warrnbool. We originally decided to try and make it to Warrnbool that night, but made a big U-turn when we realized there were things like the Blow Hole, London Bridge, and Thunder Cave we were driving past in the dark. Plus, I think G had spotted quite a nice wee fish and chip place back there…and can you believe it was already closed upon our return to the town just ½ later!! His face dropped, but luckily there was another one still open. I had nearly forgotten how early some of those small, sleepy towns put things to bed.

Bells Beach - not a bikini-clad bottle-blonde in sight - this is a hardcore beach for diehard surfers

The 12 Apostles(minus one now)

London Bridge