26 Things

Hi friends! Today is a day of new beginnings as I start the first day of my 26th year. I have looked back on a brilliant 25th year. It began with a vacay to the gorgeous South Pacific Island of Vanuatu, where I got engaged to the love of my life. We endured the floods of biblical proportions that swallowed Brisbane in the beginning of 2011. We spent the month of February with my beautiful parents as they joined in our adventures down under. In March we celebrated Dave's birthday and in April we traveled through New Zealand. In May we chilled out in Noosa and June saw us betting at the horse races. By July I was preparing for a new work venture in Papua New Guinea and spent all of August taking in this amazing new culture. September I was back home in Brisbane and loving the spring sunshine but by October I was sent back to Canada to work out of Vancouver for a month. I got to spend that beautiful fall with loved ones from back home and by the end of the month Dave and I were enjoying the beaches of Byron Bay together. To close out my final month in this first quarter century we set off for Sydney and Melbourne. Now I can finally say that I think I packed in as much good times as there was minutes in the day this past year!

To kick off my first day of being 26, I have come up with a list of 26 things about myself...some you may know and some may be new. Enjoy!

1.      I’m madly in love with the boy of my dreams, who I’ve been with for exactly 1/3 of my life. Well, I’ve loved him almost my whole life really, but it’s only been official for 8 and a half years. I still have a note written to my best friend in Grade 7, which I signed off as Tegan Dow. Somehow I knew that long ago that I was going to marry that boy someday.

2.      I share my birthday with my radiant twin sister, we are Sagittarius Wood Ox: Translation –They play hard, they work hard and, crucially for these Sagi girls, they have an inordinate amount of self belief - they just want to let the universe know that Sagi Wood Ox girl has arrived. I thank my lucky stars everyday for having such an amazing twin sis!! This year I am officially a whole day older.

3.      Friends and family are the single most important thing to me. I admire all of the wonderful people in my life and surround myself with the people who inspire me. My Grandma Ryan and my Grandma Mary are two of the most gorgeous women I look up to and I keep my Grandma Ruby in my heart always.

4.      My dream is to honeymoon in Europe – France, Spain, Italy, I could go on. I figure a two and a half year engagement warrants at least two and a half months of honeymoon vacay right?!

5.      I will be spending this Christmas on the beach in Thailand, then traveling to Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. Just the three musketeers  Me, Dave & Sabi. The last time the three of us had a night out together it ended in a free hotel room and minus one shoe...look out Asia.

6.      I’m a crazy dreamer and am constantly aspiring to new goals like climbing Everest base camp and learning to surf. We just bought a surf board...it’s actually our second one. The first one died a tragic death when Dave accidentally ran it right over in our juicy van a few years ago while on a road trip. Yep cracked the fins right off. Note: never store a surf board under the vehicle...err, I mean, it got snapped in two by a shark!!

7.      I need a creative outlet and love to blog...sometimes about nothing at all really. I have over 2000 views on my page since I started blogging over a year ago. I’d love to have more followers, so join up friends!

8.      I absolutely love our home in Australia and would never leave here if our family and friends weren’t so dang far away. Living in a hotel has its perks! Room service at your beck and call and you can never be locked out with a 24hr receptionist at your front door...not to mention the million dollar views and a gorgeous patio pool all to yourself as everyone else seems to be too busy working to enjoy!

9.      I love to budget and do a mini celebration dance in my head every time I save dolla bills. I’m queen of the daily deals!

10.  I am hugely competitive to a fault. I learned to play rugby this year and got sucked into a World Cup Rugby betting competition. I researched every single game (there were eight rounds of betting with up to eight games a round) and came out on top of the 26 participants from my office a couple months later and $400.00 richer...not because I care about Rugby but because I hate to lose. This is also why Monopoly is banned in our household...tragic ending, it’s true.

11.  I love to dance, even if it’s just a boogie in the kitchen. My favorite song of all time is Brown Eyed Girl, it’s our family anthem and we can’t deny the urge to cut a rug when the tune comes on. I guess it’s been programmed into our DNA since my mama used to blast it for all of us to dance to in the living room when we were kids.

12.  I love to sing, especially in the shower, but I’ve been told that the sound I hear and the sounds that everyone else hears are not the same?! Hmm.

13.  I am an aunty of 3 gorgeous girls and soon to be a new aunty to our first nephew, and my new birthday buddy! I can’t wait to spend more time with them when we move back to Canada.

14.  I get so excited with new books that I start them before finishing the last ones...I currently have 4 books on the go right now. I also hate to actually finish a book because I don’t want it to be over, so I usually leave a chapter or two for later. Such is the case with Ellen’s new book. I seriously love her, she makes me smile on a daily basis. When I walk into any book store I head straight to the self help/real life section and try to absorb as much info as I can, I get it from my mama.

15.  My favorite movie is the notebook...yes, I’m a hopeless romantic.

16.  I don't carry a cell phone...i have two, a blackberry in Canada and an Australian cell phone that I don't ever top up with credit so I don't bother to take it anywhere. I can only receive calls on it. This is strange for me because I lived on my smart phone in Canada, but something about our aussie lifestyle promotes simplicity and I love that.
 

17.  I’m trying to learn to play guitar...I’ve never had so much trouble picking up a new skill...ever.

18.  I love to travel...I’ve been to 8 countries so far and I’ve been on 11 flights in the past 14 weeks totaling approximately 25,000 miles. It’s only going to get better when we have 8 flights in 4 weeks over Christmas.

19.   I love school and sometimes wish I was still at university...maybe one day I’ll be back! Mostly I miss hanging out with our very best friends, the family we chose for ourselves, on a daily basis. And apparently six years of university has instilled an inherent need to research EVERYTHING to the max. I use spreadsheets and lists to compare and organize every aspect of my life.

20.  I love to dabble in photography and have been practicing taking photos every chance I get. Luckily I have such a handsome model to practice on.

21.  I still ask Dave or use a calculator to crunch quick math even though I got a 4.0 in engineering calculus. And I can’t spell to save my life.

22.  I haven’t owned a car in a year and four months...that’s 487 days of getting to where I need to be with my own two legs. I haven’t been brave enough to attempt driving on the other side of the road...did I mention I hate driving?

23.   Some of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had are held with a sleep talker. Last night I asked [sleeping] Dave to tell me something about myself (to be used in this list). He told me “you drive like Maggie!” Considering I haven’t driven in over a year and that I don’t personally know anyone named Maggie I asked him to explain. He said “You drive just like Maggie Simpson...you know the cartoon the Simpsons...like her!” Well, I’m glad that’s now out in the open.

24.   I am currently working as a Civil Engineer for a mining engineering consultancy in Brisbane designing tailings dams. Ironically, none of my projects are even in Australia, they are overseas in Fiji and PNG.

25.   I don’t miss the Canadian winter at all, and feel slightly ashamed for this. I am currently plotting out a plan to escape next year’s winter...that’s how much I despise it.

26.   I love to have fun...it’s my most favorite thing to do, ever! I love to laugh hard and love big. Life is for living!

 

Xo Tegs

Saying Goodbye to 25 in Sydney

Last week was so jam packed with awesomeness that I'm going to need two posts to share all the fun we had (and that’s even despite a rotten bout of food poisoning that left Dave clinging to life on the airport floor...but more about that later!)

On Friday we kicked off my birthday week celeys by hopping a flight to Sydney after work. We met up with Aunty Joy at the train station once we landed, she is always just the most wonderful to us and we love any chance we get to spend with her. We had an awesome time catching up at her place for the evening. On Saturday we had a big family BBQ (FYI: a BIG family get together for us now consists of 12 people ...that is 90% of our aussie family in attendance!) where we finally got to meet both of Dave’s cousins sweet babes (Eve & Michael’s daughter Ayla and Josh & Jodies’s daughter Lily). They are born less than a month apart, and at 8 months old are just the most darling girls! We also had some fun hang time with big bro Cooper and big sis Mia!

 

In the afternoon we headed back to Bondi before venturing out to Darling Harbour for an evening on the town. So there we were, a gorgeous summer evening on Circular Quay...wind blowing through our hair (ok, just my hair...note Dave's new super short cut, which I think looks stunningly handsome if i do say so myself...which was inspired by the accidental racing stripe (see last weeks post). There is just something magical about being in the Opera House, maybe it’s the iconic nature of such a gorgeous structure that tugs at my engineering heart strings, but getting to go in for a performance was incredible.  

 

  

Ever since we arrived to Australia, it’s been on our bucket list to see a concert in the Sydney Opera House and it just so happened that extra Jason Mraz tickets opened up on the weekend we had planed our trip, so we were all over it. If you are wondering what songs he sings, one of them is called Lucky...I sometimes think this song was written for Dave and I. A few years ago, I decided to make a little slide show (click on it at the end of this post to hear the song) of our first Aussie Adventure in 2009...and I couldn’t believe how perfectly it all fit together. It all came full circle on Saturday night while we were groovin to him singing that song live, in the Sydney Opera House, as we celebrated living out our amazing dreams together!

 

The concert hall is a really intimate venue, it almost felt like we were sitting around a campfire just chillin with the band. Dave ranked the concert as his top 2, next to Jack Johnson outside at the river stage last year...yep it was that awesome. So we went out for some drinks afterwards to soak up the evening at the Searock ... beware of the oysters people, you've been warned! It wasn’t until we got back to Eve & Michael’s, who were so generous to let us crash at their place (and maybe crash is actually appropriate for once), that all hell broke loose in Dave’s poor tummy. Needless to say that he didn’t sleep that evening and we had a plane to catch at 6:30 that morning. The attendants denied him on the flight as he was deemed too ill to fly and so we were forced to wait out the extreme sickness over the next six hours on the floor of the departure lounge. After some good meds and a lot of blue poweraide Dave pulled through like a champ and we were off for the next leg of our adventure in Melbourne!

 The countdown is running low, only 2 more days left of being 25 and oh what an amazing year it has been. I'm ready to see what 26 has in store for me, because if its anything like 25 (which I think it will be) then it's going to be fabulous!

Xo Tegs

Just home from a most amazing road trip down in Melbourne over an extended long weekend! Here is an early view of one of our pictures taken at the 12 Apostles, more to come in a couple days!

Xo Tegs

Look what I found in Daves mop!!!

You never know what you're gonna find in Daves gorgeous mop of curls when its time for a haircut in this house!! A little burst of cuteness! Im going to be looking for this little gaffer's mates down in Melbourne this weekend!! We are Road Trippin'!!!

But seriously!! Dont you just hate it when you go to cut your oh so handsome fiances hair for him and before he even has a chance to mention that he took the "gaurd" off (which effortlessly allows one to buzz cut at a desired length) you notice that he's missed a spot and you run that ungaurded razor blade straight from sideburn up to crown of said skull, clear cutting all hair in its reckless pathway?! Yep, that was us this past weekend...I gave Dave his first racing stripe (singular). My heart sank and I felt just brutal...at least we were able to get a good belly laugh out of it. And its a good thing he's so darn good lookin too, cause nobody's staring at his hair anyways ;) We debated "blending" in the mistake in the form of a crew cut, faux hawk or even a matching racing stripe on the other side, but I veto'ed that...I wasn't about to do any more damage than I'd already caused. So now he's sporting a buzz cut one length up from actually being bic'd...and his movember mo is leading the hair race...its the latest summer trend in men's style...yep. 

Not to be trusted with an electric razor,

Xo Tegs

Our new ride

Yeah, we got a new ride...its our only ride actually 

(besides our borrowed pedal bikes I guess)

Check it out yo!

Soo...it`s not actually the lemonader rental car there, it`s the sweet surfboard strapped to the top! We found this beauty in Miami, a small surf town south of Surfers Paradise. She was just leaning against the front of this shop we've been to a couple times, called The Boardroom. When we drove past, on our way back to Brissy, the beauty caught our eye...I mean, look at her, she turns every head in the room! Okay, so mayyybe we are just those typical biased owners that are blinded by our love for her. Even though she has plenty of good years behind her she is such a perfect fit for our family. We've named her Betsy and Dave spent some time with her last weekend getting familiar. Here are some shots of his first time out, it was ridiculously windy this day!

I cant wait to give it a go soon too. The summer sunshine has been out in full force, this weeks temperatures reached upwards of 28 degrees...with that kind of heat, you need to mix in some water.

 

Xo Tegs