End of summer drinks

 Frangipani picked off the side of the road

 The tea light holders are muffin cases - who would have thought??

 Good place for a party don't you think?

Lenka & Emma - the party planners!

On Friday Emma and I held the End of Summer Drinks at Manly Yacht Club.  This was the first fundraiser for the school this year and it was meant to be low-key and casual with just a little bit of fundraising thrown in.  The tickets sold out in 3 days which is unheard of and there was a huge flurry of texts and emails with people trying to find spare tickets up to a couple of hours before the event started.  Emma and I are both accountants so aesthetics is not our thing.  Fortunately we roped in a very lovely friend who manages to make everything look beautiful using very basic, and often free, materials.  Our theme ended up being limes and frangipanis because this friend has an overladen lime in her backyard and the frangipanis are in bloom at the moment with flowers littering the kerbsides.  We had a major panic at about 10.30pm that the bar was going to run dry - I had allowed for 5 bottles of beer per male and 2 bottles of wine per female so I was slightly incredulous that we could even get close to running out!  Overall the evening was a huge success and we raised almost $6,000 for the school - a good start to the year.  

Yes, sadly we did end up drinking straight out of the bottle - never a good look!

Whilst Tess played netball on Saturday, Tom had a surf lesson with Samson.  It's the first one we've organised this year and Tom really enjoyed it.  In fact he probably had his best surf so far this year.  When we asked him about it he said "I don't know what it is about Samson, it's sort of like he casts a spell on me"!!  

 Waxing his board

Driving the Robbie R

Jules and Tess did race duty for the Yacht Club on Sunday spending the day manning the Robbie R (the rescue boat).  It was the perfect opportunity for Jules and Tess to have some father/daughter time which can often be hard to fit in with all the surfing that goes on in our house.  

I received this classic email (Callum is a good friend of his from school):

tom and callum chatting whilst eating a snack.
 
Callum: 'Tom is your dad good at making food?'
Tom: long pause... 'no not really'.
Callum: 'my dad makes horrible sandwiches, he doesn't cut them, he just folds the bread'
Tom: laugh...short pause... 'well...my dad doesn't even know how to make sandwiches'.