Gold Coast trip and goodbye to Ralphy...

Okay, finally updates on the Gold Coast trip a couple of weeks ago! Oh man, :( I can't believe 2 weeks have passed already since the trip. It felt like just yesterday! As always, holidays are never long enough! Anyway get ready for visual overload! I took about close to 400 photos and videos - not bad already, considering I thought I'll take more... hehe... Well I just picked out some of my favourites and the rest are on facebook if you're interested:

Hooters Restaurant - where you get good food and sexy waitresses to entertain you!

One of the dishes ordered by Tubby: Hooter's special steak burger with curly fries.

Sexy waitresses putting on their hourly act - which is chair top dancing

A group shot with Joewiz and Len with the hot waitresses!

The stairs leading up to Hard Rock cafe restaurant and the shop was just opposite us! Of course I had to buy some stuff! :p

Wax Museum: Len me and Ghandi! Tubby said he was a lucky bugger. :p

Wax Musuem: Ah my favourite play-writer: William Shakespeare

BBQ at the apartment pool, us greedy girls digging into the food!

Ladies by the poolside...

Outside Harbour town shopping centre! Shopping there was so good lar! So many great bargains at cheap prices! Cannot compare to Melbourne lor, so expensive...

Anyway to continue the rest of the photos: Gold Coast: Food, Shopping and Sight-seeing

Next is the 2 theme parks which we managed to visit in the 3 days. Due to the showers and thunderstorms, we didn't have time for Dream World.

The 3 chabohs with their rain coast posing! :p

Clever Sea Lion show! Boy he can dance and do lots of interesting tricks! Good trainers!

Loved the Dolphin show! They are so intelligent and cute and it just makes you wanna care about the environment more after the show to protect them.

Check out the heavy and horrible thunderstorm on the 1st day we went Sea World la. It was so bad the park closed half day. But lucky we got return tickets to go back on the friday.

Outside Movie World! Woohoo! The morning was actually cloudy and rainy. But as we were driving past to go down Brisbane then we saw the sun coming out and decided to head there instead.

The 3 chabohs taking the Batman ride! Super fun lar! Could hear Len screaming like nobody's business. Of course we screamed too, but not as loud as her hehe!

The Looney Toons theatre and of course Looney Tunes performance! Love Bugs Bunny!

Looloo and me with Bugs Bunny!

Ah Scooby-Doo Coaster! Super fun as well! You are brought up and then turned around and you thought you're gonna drop vertically down or something and you actually go down a curve back first!

Central Square where the parade starts and also the other shows presented.

Superman Roller Coaster, 0-100 in like 3 seconds. I still can't believed we were too chicken to take the ride. :(

Me and Len with the evert beautiful "Marilyn Monroe"...

Hollywood Stunt Drivers! Awesome show and hot mitsubishi lancers! heehee!

Scooby-doo bee doo where are you? :D

Batman and his Bat Mobile. The car is so cool in real life hor!

Me with my Bugs Bunny Grammy Award! heehee...

Second day at Sea World, nice sunny weather! Looloo and me with Big Bird!

Seasame Street Land I can't remember the actual name, it's as your can see, for the kiddies!

Hehe, find me find me! Classic shot hor! I was actually posing for the camera man!

Anyway rest of the theme park photos: Gold Coast: Sea World and Movie World

Okay that's the "gist" of it. On another note, Ralphy was sold over the weekend. To cut a long story shot, we finally realised we couldn't love any other dog as much as we loved Jasper and it just wasn't gonna be fair. And so Ralphy is now with a lovely old lady living in the rural area. No more new dogs for us for a long while unless it's Jasper's son I guess...

Meet Ralphy the Silky Terrier/Chi huahua, Jasper's new friend...

Last year if you recall, when tubby and I decided to get another dog, we adopted Baxter, an 8-month old Maltese/Shih Tzu from a blond lady. Anyway that didn't work out and the dog was adopted by someone else a few weeks later and you can read the full story here if you're interested. So anyway after that event, we discussed that there wasn't gonna be any new dog until we buy our own place in the next year or so.

But then, me being all bored at work one day, I started looking at ads on the trading post again. It was there I found out about Puppy Centre, kinda like a puppy warehouse at Ringwood, in the eastern suburbs. That Saturday, 28 March, we promised ourselves that we were only going there to have a look and not decide on anything. But I think we or (more me) didn't keep the promise and we went home with Ralphy! He's a Silky Terrier/Chi hua hua mix and is currently about 11 weeks old. As we had bad experieces with an adopted dog, so we decided to go back to getting a puppy this time. So meet Ralphy:

All cuddled up nicely in between the pillow and tubby's stomach. :p

Trying to be naughty and biting my slippers.

Super sleepy after a "a hard days of running around and playing".

He doesn't pose too well (yet), so had to carry him and attract him with the phone.

So far the toilet-training is going okay. He does have his favourite spots and initially we put the training pads on those places as well. But then we realised that in order to train him properly, it should be teaching him to do his business wherever the training pads are and NOT where he likes to do it. He usually follows Jasper and does his pooping at the same place, but the hard part is his peeing, he still does it anywhere he deems fit sometimes and very rarely at the training pad.

Tubby figured that it was easier to train Jasper because Jas only had a small place to run around (we were hiding him in the South Units on residences at that time, heehee! :p) at that time. But Ralphy has too big an area to run about this time. In the day when we're not home, he has a caged area and he does his business on the training pads. It's only when we're home and let him out then he likes to do his peeing around places. But at least as compared to the adopted dog, Ralphy's like an angel really. It just takes time to get him properly trained and I hope, with patience, he will be grow up to be as smart as his brother, Jasper. :)

Hello and goodbye to Baxter, some work stuff and the new Batman movie.

I think it's about time I tell you about Baxter. It's was a mere few weeks before it was "hello" and "goodbye" to him. Don't worry, nothing bad has happened to him, it's just that he has gone off to another family who can love him for who he is. That was the main reason why we didn't want to tell people when we got him; cause we weren't sure if he was gonna remain ours.

Baxter's an 8 month old maltese / shih tzu. His owner listed him on trading post that she was selling him as she was going overseas. When we got to the house to see him, it didn't matter that the feeling didn't feel quite as "right" as when we picked Jasper up, but Tubbs and I were just excited that we were gonna to get a play pal for Jasper that we just decided to take him anyway. Now of course we did mention that our dogs are kept in-house and asked if he was house-trained and she said "yes", which we found to be totally otherwise in the next couple of weeks.

In the first few days, peeing and pooping everywhere was fine, we could understand; it was a new house and environment. But then when days turned into weeks and he got from bad to worse, we realised we just got ourselves a troubled mutt. He could pee and walk at the same time (totally oblivious that he's peeing), he shit at any corner/place in the house, even on our floor mats and carpets(once on our new doona and mattress!), totally refusing to do his business on the pee/poo soaked training mats. Those were the last straw, and we knew we didn't have the time to train him properly cause he was usually an outside dog and at that age, trying to re-train him to be an in-house dog was like trying to tame a bull. So he was up on trading post again and in a few days, another couple who had a maltese/shihtzu of their own adopted Baxter. And it was good cause they kept their dog outside as well. Anyway here some shots of Baxter, together with Jasper (below) as well.

We felt a little sad (especially tubbs) who is really sentimental about dogs, but it was better that Baxter had gone off to people who would love him more. This is especially true due to the fact that any other dog that comes is always compared to our smarty Jasper (which isn't fair we know), but like tubbs said, Jasper's sort of set a benchmark and we can't seem to accept any dog that falls below that benchmark. So we are always biased towards Jasper. So we have resigned to the fact that we either get Jasper a GF to mate and get his puppies or buy a puppy and train it from small. I guess adopting older dogs that are sort of used to their way of life and trying to re-train them again is not something we are actually prepared to do.

Apart from that, work is usual for me and Tubbs though he was previously stressed by the company audit last week. Then the health dept in CFA held a pilates / health check session last week. People can go for a 1-2 hour pilates class during office hours, how cool is that! I missed out on the last session cause I didn't bring my sports outfit, but I will certainly try it out the next session. I'm also going for an IT certification course (also organised by the org.) in a few weeks which includes a mini exam after that, boy it's like going back to uni again.

We also went to watch Batman - The Dark Knight in IMAX Theatre last night. It was awesome, what with the huge screen and the acting of the "truly evil" Joker played by Heath Ledger. A pity though it didn't seemed right that Katie Holmes wasn't acting as the main "girl" this time. They got someone who looked like her. I shan't spoil the story for those who haven't watch it, but don't expect too much action. It's more about the plot and menacing conversations between Batman and the Joker. Go watch it !