Burning Down the House!

Because we felt we had fallen away from our Kiwi and English roots we decided to attempt a good old fashioned roast on the Sunday just been. Well, things couldn't have gone worse!

Firstly, Jamie Oliver has a lot to answer for. We took his advice and put the spare piece of granite we had left over from our kitchen renovation inside the oven to act as a cooking tray (as he does on his show) and let it heat up. Jamie does this all the time when cooking meat and he never has any problems so how on earth were we to know it would turn into the towering inferno!

Not only did the oven catch on fire from the heat of the granite (it was contained inside thankfully), Alana managed to burn two of her fingers, the spuds were dropped to the floor, the pork was accidentally cooked (not defrosted) in the microwave, hot oil dripped everywhere, red wine was splashed over the walls and the white feral cat dropped a live mouse into the mix.

The lesson we have learned from all this? Don't try to go back to your roots, embrace your new ones and order good old fashioned Canadian pizza!!

Picture of Alana standing outside in the freezing cold (in her PJ's) hosing down the smoldering granite.

There is now a lovely big hole in the lawn. Funnily enough, the mouse made out completely unscathed!

A Quick Catch Up

Because we have been here in Toronto for two years we thought we should post a couple of extra pictures showing a snippet of what we have been up to during that time. We seem to have lost most of our pics thanks to a major computer crash, but we do have a couple that survived. Anyway, here they are.

Here is the house we bought and renovated as soon as we arrived. Most of the 'pre-renovation' pics are lost, which is fine with us as they were too awful to view anyway. As you can see, houses in Toronto are strange looking things, especially when compared to the large spralling homes in NZ . This is a fairly common style throughout east North America though.

Mum and Dad Lynch visited in the first summer we were here (2005) so we had quite a few barbecues and consumed many many glasses of wine......aaaaah the good times! (we also thought Ma Lynch would love having her photo on here...hehe)


For Alana, moving to Toronto has been about going back to school fulltime to study Interior Design (school pics below) which, when you are in your thirties and all your school friends are in their early twenties....things can get interesting........

.....take the picture below for example, lets just say it becomes a little too easy to get corrupted into partying like you did ten years earlier! Its fun and you get to be a big kid again, although you also very quickly realise that the stamina you once had is long gone...and even worse...the next day these young friends of yours will be wide eyed and bushy-tailed absorbing everything the teacher says, while you will be happily snoring away on top of your school computer keyboard!


This is just a quick example for those of you who are interested (we definately aren't anymore!) of some of the work Alana does in the design program. This is a pic of one of the small models that get built for each new assignment and act as design aids. In this case the assignment was a retail space selling tea, so the model was helpful in observing how the layout would work in 3D. It doesn't make much sense when looking at the photo, but in reality it helped to see whether or not the large atrium in the centre would add light to the basement level. Anyway, thats the kind of torture the school puts you through!!


Mum and Dad Lynch (Anne and Terry) joined us again for christmas in 2005 and we had some more laughs. The red wine flowed freely and so did our hangovers. There were even a few squabbles over monopoly. Here are some pics of us all feeling merry.


And finally, just for interests sake (and because we have lost most of our photos) for those of you curious about what a raccoon looks like (we get asked this all the time) here is the raccoon that lives (uninvited) in our chimney. Don't let his cute looks deceive you though, when they walk black tar all over your deck and eat out of your garbage can you realize looks really don't mean anything!

So obviously alot more has happened in the past two years than what we have shown here. For a start, we have no pics of Matts work and we have lost most of the ones of our renovation and our first white winter. So this is really just a tiny snippet. But still, we had fun looking back!

Fall is here in Toronto

We decided to start posting some pics and info about what we are up to here in Toronto so our poor neglected family and friends can keep up to date with our ever-changing lives.

So to start things off, here are some pics of us and the zoo out enjoying the stunning colors of fall at a park by Lake Ontario. Its about 5 minutes from where we live and is really beautiful at this time of year. It is also the first day in many where it wasn't raining...so we ran out of the house as fast as we could!