Goodbye 2009. Hello 2010!

Just a quick note to say HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone! I hope it’s a safe, happy and healthy one for all!

And if you’d like to read a great post on the Noughties, check out Jodie’s blog, Mummy Mayhem. xx

My year that was…

Well what a year 2009 has been. Up’s and down’s, high’s and low’s, tears and laughter, we’ve had it all.

In a nutshell….

It all began back in January when we got engaged! We then jumped on the wedding planning rollercoaster, and like any good ride, we were excited, then scared (mainly by the budget!), elated during the fun part (the wedding) and then relieved as we set off on our Honeymoon!

There were babies; 2 baby nieces, Dominique Claire and Amelie Rose. There were also babies of the fur kind, as we welcomed baby kelpie Jack from the RSPCA.

There were losses; RIP Poppy and our good friends fur-baby, RIP Bert. There were friendship and love losses, but more importantly for our friends there were love matches! There were health scares, and recoveries. There was a house renovation in the midst of planning a wedding! Therefore there were stresses and sometimes stumbling blocks. I discovered some fantastic new blogs and made some great ‘online’ friends! I started reading more books and even started cooking! (Stay tuned in 2010 for my 16 dish challenge!) And Hubby finally fulfilled a long standing dream and bought his own yacht.

Globally we lost some very famous faces; Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze, Farrah Fawcett, and sadly this week Brittany Murphy. (And there were plenty more I know). We had plenty of political performances to keep us entertained or enraged. We saw plenty of fashion hits and misses. We saw Rove quit his television show after 10 years and we saw veteran channel 7 newsreader Ian Ross retire after too many years to count. Oh and we can’t forget Oprah’s announcement that she too was ending her talk show at the end of 2010 after 25 years.

Most of all though for me, there was family, friends, lots of food, lots of drinks and lots of laughter.

So now we look to an exciting 2010 with more babies and an overseas trip!

Goodbye 2009, and thanks for all the memories. It’s been fun.

Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope you all have a fantastic time with family and friends, filled with love and laughter. All the best for a safe, happy and healthy 2010! Look forward to many more online chat’s with you all in 2010!

What do you remember of 2009, and what are you looking forward to in 2010?

A slap on the wrist

Last night, or I should say early this morning, at 2.30am to be exact I was woken by some people walking past our house.

Not that big of a deal around here as we get a few drunken stumblers finding their way home from the local pubs on a regular basis. Then I heard an odd noise right outside our window.

At first I thought it was our dogs name tag jiggling, then my Husband took a look out the window to discover we’d just been graffiti’d. The bonnet of his car and our front fence. Merry Xmas they said. Yeah well you know where you can stick your Merry Xmas kids.

Yep that’s right I said KIDS. We called the cops and so had the local servo down the road to report some kids loitering. The corner house on the next block caught them graffiting one of their cars and chased them. Caught one red handed with eggs and a spray can. Oh yes I forgot to mention they egg’d our car too.

So one got caught and one got away. The coppers came to get our details and inspect the damage all while telling my furious husband that there isn’t actually much they can do with a 14 year old. Yep, folks a FOURTEEN YEAR OLD.

They hopefully scared the crap out of him when they were yelling, “Get up against the van. Spread your legs.” Then chucked him in the back. But realistically apart from maybe, yep MAYBE talking to his parents and organising for him to clean the shit off our fence, he’ll get nothing but a slap on the wrist, under the young offenders act. And frankly I wouldn’t want them anywhere near our house again anyway.

So naturally, our reaction was that our legal system is f*&@ed. We have to cop the cost of getting the car bonnet no doubt re-sprayed and having to re-paint our front fence. Which might I add is all of about 10 weeks old.

It shits me to tears that these little bastards with nothing better to do, who should be asleep at 2.30am do all the damage and then get told, Ok now don’t do it again and off you go. I don’t care how old these ‘kids’ are. If they’re old enough to go let’s go destroy someone else’s property then they’re old enough to cop the consequences, plain and f&%@ing simple.

Oh and I forgot to mention that the other car damaged was a young girl’s. They spray painted in her headlights, all around her bumper. What’s the bet she can’t afford to have all of this repaired. And only a few days before Christmas. Makes me sick.

So failing our crap legal system making them pay for what they’ve done, and short of us going around and trashing all their belongings, I guess we’ll just have to rely on karma. And one can only hope that when it comes to them, it’s a bitch.

What do you think about the Young Offenders Act. Is a slap on the wrist any sort of punishment for wrecking other people’s property? What do you think is a good punishment for crime’s such as this?