Hello everyone! it's been a while since I've posted, and since then we've had two beach trips,
Thanksgiving, a trip to DC to see Ellie and Jason (plus a failed attempt to buy Elephant Art which was later resolved),
Christmas (we kicked ass at Dirty Santa at Jen's place), 
New Year's ....Oh, and Edo and I moved to Australia.
For the week of the New Year, Edo and I decided that we'd have a last "hurrah" of a vacation before we had to start preparing in earnest for our move Down Under, so we rented an ocean-front house on Topsail Island (Surf City), NC. The first day, Massimo and Nadia came down with us and stayed for the night. 
The next day my parents arrived and stayed until New Year's Day.
It was also the first trip we had taken together with Silver, and it was so much fun! The first three or four days, the weather was fantastic, so we spent plenty of time on the beach with Silver and Charlie playing in the sand and trying to get them into the water. Neither of them are exactly water-babies so we were mostly unsuccessful, but there was one time when they had gone in a few feet after a ball and Charlie got clobbered by a wave that snuck up behind him! 
The entire week was just wonderful; neither of us had work commitments (well, Edo did, but he ignored them because we were vacationing) so we could do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. We ate a lot of seafood at local restaurants like Rick's (particularly stews; North Carolina coastal cuisine is very much seafood chowder-based), and one evening we went into Wilmington with Mom and Dad to eat dinner at Elijah's, always a favourite!There were some quirks about the beach house that made for a rather interesting week: the heating system was bizarre in that when it came on, the top floor heated up very quickly while the downstairs stayed cool. Thus, in the middle of the night, we were often roasting while the rest of the house was freezing.
Also, the master bedroom had a beautiful window overlooking the ocean and there were hardwood floors throughout. This meant that every morning at 6:30am the light came streaming into our bedroom because there was no curtain to cover the massive window (which was fantastic every other time of the day, by the way). As for the hardwood floors, it meant that when Silver got up to turn around or look for something to do in the middle of the night, we heard "click click click" of her paws on the floor. Fortunately, most nights she was so exhausted from playing on the beach all day that she barely moved.When we got back to Raleigh, we started packing properly for the Big Move. Edo was offered a position at Monash University as a Lecturer in Civil Engineering, so we were off to Melbourne (Australia, not Florida)! The shipping company collected our stuff on the 24th of January, after which we went to stay with my parents for the last few days. On the 29th, we flew out of Raleigh and two days later landed in Melbourne.
The University was kind enough to set us up in a serviced apartment for a couple weeks while we looked for a place to stay, and in spite of all the nightmare stories I've heard about people looking for decent houses to rent in Melbourne, we landed a great place just as that two-week window was about up.
We are living in Oakleigh, a suburb of Melbourne that's about 20 minutes by train from the City (and by City, I mean a 1 square mile spot on the map. seriously.)Oakleigh is very Greek; it's like Little Athens. It's also affluent and has a central district that is more like a European square than the typical strip mall shopping centres you can get in most suburbs of Melbourne. There are cafes and restaurants, plus a more American-style shopping mall, all within about a ten minute walk from our house. We also live very close to Chadstone Shopping Centre, which is a HUGE shopping mall that just dwarfs the mega-malls in North Carolina. Southpoint, eat your heart out. Edo hates it and everything that it stands for, but it is damn convenient.
For all the Hellenic flavour of Oakleigh, the best things about it aren't the Greek ones (except for maybe the baklava at Nikos Cafe which isn't bad at all). There's a wonderful Persian/Afghan restaurant called Nights of Kabul, an Italian-owned fresh pasta shop -- really, that's all they sell -- and the Korean supermarket just down from that sells great little ice cream treats. The produce market is run by Chinese, as is the "if you can't find it anywhere else, we'll not only have it but have it for dirt cheap" shop where I have bought lots of obscure things like draft snakes and reasonably priced CD racks.
Our house has two bedrooms (visitors??? let us know!) and hardwood floors throughout.
It also has a beautiful kitchen with stainless steel appliances, a sunroom overlooking the backyard which is big and comes with its own gardener Thank God, and sizable living and dining rooms. What it doesn't have is central heating. 
It has two gas fireplaces which do well to warm up the house quickly, but in the morning we're quite chilly. We're working on solving that situation. We also bought a car! We decided after renting one from Thrifty over the long Easter weekend that we couldn't live without a car (really, you need one in Australia -- not as much as in the US, but more than in Europe) so we are now the proud owners -- and by 'owners' of course I mean 'slaves to the lending institution' -- of a 2004 Hyundai Getz. They don't exist back in the US because they would be crushed by the Hummers. But it's a cute little car, with great warranty and a CD player, power everything, and very easy to park. It's all about priorities.
We've spent some time in Melbourne City (or Central Business District, CBD), but we find ourselves being pulled out of the city just about every weekend. Melbourne is nice if you're a city person, but Victoria is beautiful!
The best thing about living in Melbourne is waking up on a Saturday afternoon and saying "would you rather go to the beach or the mountains?"
and within an hour you're there. We have also visited the Wine Country of the Yarra River Valley and Healesville Sanctuary which is full of local fauna. 
OK I've written a novella here so I'll stop and write more in a couple of weeks. Sometimes we miss North Carolina... actually, we often miss North Carolina. But I don't feel like I want to leave here yet. Maybe one day we'll go back home, but for now I really like Australia. Except for this central heating issue; in spite of what we're all led to believe about Oz, it actually does get cold here in the Fall and Winter!Oh, and Vegemite sucks :)
