Tennis

Brendan and I played tennis again today.  We're so evenly matched and had a great titanic battle.  So much fun.  And lovely in the sunshine.

Partying in The Blue Mountains

The theme of Dani's 40th party was The 80's. I went as a punk rocker with a huge mullet.  It was a wonderful experience having so much hair!!

Highlights of the weekend

• The great house that we rented for the weekend.
• Going up on the Friday afternoon and buying alcohol for the party.
• A lovely meal at a lovely Italian restaurant we'd been to before on our previous weekend here.
• A short walk with a couple of Dani's friends on Saturday morning.
• Setting up the house for the party with streamers and balloons.
• Playing tennis with glasses of Pims in the afternoon (great fun.)
• Having a big laugh putting on my costume with a mullet and skin tight leopard pants.
• Everyone arriving for the party - a lovely group of people as you'd expect being Dani's friends.
• Seeing everyone's costumes; lots of great ones. 
• Barbecuing for the whole group.  I've never cooked so much meat in one go before, challenging with all the different varieties with different cook times!
• The party itself, lots of fun with lots of 80's music.  I had a long stint at being the DJ.
• Dani's great cake that her best friend an made her - a rubik's cube!
• Helping to clear up the next day. Many hands made light work.
• A nice walk on the Sunday with some of Dani's friends.

Serving up a storm

I had fun tonight. Went to the "tennis extravagana evening" at the gym. All the tennis enthusiasts (must have been over 50 of us!) at the gym met up with all the tennis coaches and we did fun exercises accross 9 courts.

I was a bit nervous about going because my tennis is still rather shaky and i'm struggling with the new technieques i've been taught. it's like being a beginner again. Still, i needn't have worried - we were at all levels and there was a friendly, jovial atmosphere about.

One thing i can do is serve. While i struggle to get my forearm balls to go anywhere but in the net or catapaulting to the roof, my serve seems to just go in. So i was delighted to discover that one of the exercises was "fastest serve competition" They had one of those speed monitor things that tells you how many miles an hour an hour your ball flew over the net. The winner was 95 miles an hour. I managed 87 miles an hour - which i was very chuffed with. I also managed to hit the hardest shot of my group (over 100 miles) but it didn't go in unfortunately!! As my tennis coach said "If i can manage to get those in all the time, i needn't worry to much about my faulty forearm.

Still, it's all coming on (i only stated a few weeks ago) and I'm having fun. Also meeting lots of great people. Ally's tennis is also coming on in leaps and bounds.