Q1 been and gone ...

Crikey is it already after Easter? And here's me with no published blog for months :( In mitigation I have been travelling like a Romany on his holidays - Perth, Lima, Accra and Manila in the last short while, not to mention the associated mine sites for each region. Why we don't have any mines in, for example, Vienna I do not know. It seems that gold is always in the most remote and harsh environments. Our one Peruvian project is at 5000 metres of altitude; one of the Aussie ones is 1000km into the desert from Perth and the Philippines one is accessible by means of an 800 metre runway which I cannot recommend for the faint-hearted. I thought the services of a proctologist would be needed to retrieve the front seat cushion of the ageing Beechcraft Baron after our landing up in the hills at Mankayan, Luzon Island.

But still, I'm having fun. The kids have now started school and are depicted here with Lily dressed up as a Red Indian (or Native American for the more PC among my readership) and Henry as a generic Indian from India, for the pre-school's multicultural day. The fact that Lily's bag comes from Peru and Henry's shirt from Ghana does not detract from how good they look.

Over Easter we had Mom staying with us, and Brett and family also visited. The combined mass of kids (6 in all) had an uproarious Easter egg hunt in our small garden, extended to the point of exhaustion by my cunning ploy of stealing eggs from the central collecting bucket and re-hiding them in amongst the shrubbery.

All in all a jolly good day, with an adequate braai administered by yours truly. I learned a lot about ventilation, cooking temperatures and other characteristics of our built-in barbecue which is used very seldom, and the charred meat was salvaged by Marcela's trademark roast potatoes, salads and pudding.