Mondate

Matt and I have struggled with not having as much time to ourselves for date nights and nights out with friends away from the kids.  We were so lucky to have both sets of grandparents in KC to help watch the kids.   So we came up with the idea of a Mondate – we both take Monday off and have a day date.  After we dropped the kids off at school, we went hiking through Mosman.  Mosman has about 10 different hiking trails that connect to different parts of the city.    We grabbed our water bottles and left about 9AM.  We walked through bush land, along the coastline and through some neighborhoods with some pretty extraordinary homes.  I love that the homes here are all so different.  There is a mix of very old 1900’s renovated homes, California style, modern architecture and everything in between.  Before we knew it, we had hiked about 7 miles through some pretty steep hills, but the views were amazing.   It was a great morning until I got hit by a van while we were trying to cross the street.  He was stopped trying to enter traffic onto a busy road and was paying attention to the traffic flow and what was in front of him.  He took off when I was almost past his van (Matt was just in front of me - how do you not see a 6’4” dude? The pressure of the van and my arm pushing off the car rolled me off to the side.  I was fine, just really shaken up and my arm hurt for an hour or so.  The driver realized what had happened and once he saw that I was still standing, he just took off – what a nice guy!

After our hike, we went to this cute grocery store/restaurant called Fourth Village near our house for wood-fired pizza (it is like Dean and Deluca with more of a grocery and cheese room and is full of friendly Italians).    We observed how many people were enjoying full bottles of wine with their lunch and how slow people are when they dine out.  Dining out is more of an experience here, not a quick in-and-out event. Unfortunately, wine did not even sound good to me.  We went through three very large bottles of water as we were so dehydrated from the hike. 

Matt has taken over the role as President of the Australian K-State Alumni Association.  There was a delegation from K-State in Australia, and we invited them over to our house for dinner while they were in town. The group included the Dean of the School of Agriculture, the head of Marketing and Communications for the University, a Professor of Plant Pathology and the Australian Liaison for K-State. They kindly brought us Australia/K-State pins and we talked about the research work they are doing here in agriculture and bioscience developments.  Pretty interesting.  (Yes, I had a few glasses of wine to participate in that conversation).  K-State has an ambitious goal to be ranked in the top 50 of all universities for research by 2025 – global partnerships are a big part of that endeavor. 

We will be organizing a few alumni events this year and Kirk Shultz, President of K-State will be visiting in November.