dmjg

I can only echo Petals, we love the peninsula. Although our kids are only 6 and 3. We rarely go into Melbourne, the closest we get is the visit every few months to Moorabbin to see my grandparents. Every time we go (today being the most recent) we think it is too busy and too bloody expensive. The house next door to them, on a back street is up for 2.1 million. How can a family earning $150k per year afford that?

Constant relief teaching is not a nice job.

Very few pure mathematicians/accountants have the ability to deal with other adults let alone a bunch of unruly kids. Thus science teachers are used to fill up maths allotments. They at least have learnt maths to second year or so university level. Very few other degrees do so. I know I have made huge generalisations about mathematicians, but it is mostly true. I can't see many of them who wouldn't prefer to chew off their own arm than spend 23 hours a week with 25 teenagers in one room........

No idea, I've never needed a cv for anything but teaching.....

Keep your cv short. 2 pages or so. Add a covering letter. Answer key selection criteria with examples of how you have met each criteria in your teaching. You need detail. 7 KSC may take 3 pages or so. Doing this, I've received an interview for every job I've gone for in maths and science.

It's not interested enough to search for it! However by the time we reach 38 degrees today, I may be bored enough to.

It would come down to equipment I presume. A fish and chip shop has deep friers and hot plates, thus fried seafood (the occasional fried fruit or confectionary too), chips and grilled burgers. A pie would require baking in an oven. An oven is common equipment at a bakery, thus, that is where you will find your pie. Most shopping strips would have these two shops within 100 metres of each other anyway....

Oops, now you've done it, you've mentioned the price of lemons!

Its a decent sized lens. My 20x zoom can't get the moon that close.

Now you're just showing off, PQ.

Our immigration took over 7 years............. way back in 2001 an Aussie met a pommie. But just to be different they met in America. Summer Camp is well know for chucking lots of young people together for an intense and short time. Everyone said it would be a short lived thing, it would never last. I kind of understood why that was said, but neither of us was the one night stand type. I had an ancestry visa to the uk courtesy of my grandfather and landed in London on a very cold November morning. An ancestry visa is something not often seen so immigration was closed down for 5 minutes as everyone on shift was shown my visa and explained its purpose and limitations. If you were waiting in line that day and wondered why the queues took so long to get moving, I apologise on behalf of uk immigration. i had to wait 3 months for the future oh to finish her US stint and spent it living with two mad Liverpudlians who had this absurd wanting for each other rather than me! when she got back, we continued where we had left off. Three years in Northampton whilst she did her nursing degree; I taught in a dodgy 11-16 comprehensive in a neighbouring town. We married in an old church in Northampton on 20 aug, moved to Yorkshire on 25 th Aug, I started teaching in a new school on 1st sept and oh started on 10sept. In that time we had to get rid of my parents and grandparents back onto the plane to oz after the wedding. A busy two weeks! the deal with the oh was that she needed about 3 years experience in nursing before we tried to give Australia a go. After these three years in Dewsbury a rug rat came along and we started to get the paperwork in. Her parents were supportive of a move to Australia until the day we told them the paperwork had been lodged. Her mother started dropping little comments on how bad an idea it was. These got louder and louder as each step was completed and passed on to them. you're taking away our only grandson. I wanted my daughter to live next door for the rest of my life (yeah right), we'll never see you etc etc. most times we visited them we were left sitting around waiting because another visitor had turned up and need to be seen first, or they were off to do jobs in town, or my favourite: the bi weekly haircut......the only benefit for me was that they had sky sports. They rarely took the 15 minute drive to visit us. The whole process of a spouse visa took about 4 months from go to whoa. We left the uk in aug 2009 and we were lucky enough to have my parents at this end. Within 2 weeks we had a little unit rented, a new car and a bunch of borrowed furniture as we waited for the container to arrive. The container turned up after an 8 week journey with a few things broken. Pickfords were great and had the claim sorted within a week. I had been anal cleaning everything and we had no extra charges from aussie customs. I wish we had known about the extra luggage allowance from Singapore airlines but they were ok with the 25+ ish kg we had each on our 20kg ticket. The stewardesses were lovely and helpful with the 18 month old on both flights. He had his own seat, both for the extra luggage and so he didn't have to sit on our knees. We wouldn't have been able to handle 24 hours of that. i had picked up a term 4 teaching job and oh had 2 nursing interviews lined up so she was working within 3 weeks whilst I had a month until mine started. Our $15,000 savings was ample for this time. after a year we brought an old 70 s brick house with bizarre colour schemes, crappy kitchen , a horrible garden and a bright yellow painted granny flat. It's been the best buy we have ever had. Lots of hard work means the kitchen is replaced , the granny flat white and the house has a matching colour scheme that does not include bright blue and psychedelic purple. Most of the garden has been adapted to look after itself whilst a variety of veg gardens give me the opportunity to do my bit removing some wealth from the supermarkets. Bunnings has become the only store I am prepared to enter without moaning to the wife that I am bored within the first 5 minutes. The ohs parents come over for a few months at a time every year. They are now past asking the oh when she is coming 'home' as she claims home is now here, she couldn't handle returning to the uk except on short visits. She misses her family but has come to realise that when they are here they actually have time for her and the kids rather than always having something else to do as they did whenever we went to visit. A word of warning to others, having visitors over is very difficult. They want to make the most of the cost of their airfares so come for a long time. They expect to be shown around and entertained. Whilst you are working, this is time consuming and amazingly expensive. We have to cater for an extra $100 per week just to have them stay. Over the course of a 2-3 month visit, this can make quite a large hole in a financial budget. I just send the oh out to do a few more hospital bank shifts, but its something that needs to be factored in when budgets are being made. the first few visits by the PIL were hard work but we have now worked out a routine that seems to work fairly well. The first two times we (I) was fed up with them by the end and counting down the days until they left, but each visit has gotten easier and less fractious. When entertaining the idea of people sharing your house I would recommend the following: DON'T! They need their own space, which gives you your own space. Find a property with a granny flat, or make one out of the garage. Or do up an old caravan parked down the side. They also need their own transport. If you can't beg, borrow or steal a vehicle for their use, some places hire them for about $20 per day if you have it for more than a month. With a second rug rat now 2, the oh is going for Aussie citizenship on Monday! She hopes to get into the Mornington Australia Day ceremony. We are organising a second trip back in a few years but plan that most of it will be spent over Christmas and new year in Scandinavia so the kids can see Santa, snow and reindeers pulling sleighs. I want to see the ice hotel and the northern lights. Then I want to leave, I am already getting cold shivers thinking how freezing I will be. We will only spend a week or so in the uk and use that time to catch up with a few friends and the ohs granny. Australia is happily home now, how that will change in the future; only time will tell.........

You don't have to if you have a death wish to be squashed by a tram.