After coming to California in August to marry the woman of my dreams we have decided to make the Bay Area home. I am looking forward to getting settled into married life and making new contacts to develop my career in America. I have already started my next project which is a Timelapse video of San Francisco. Keep checking the website as I will be posting it on here as soon as its done. I am hoping my mid February it will be finished.

Starting my new website in early December, until now has certainly been an interesting time, from travelling to California to spend Christmas and New Years with family to getting engaged to flooding and to cyclones I am finally able to write my first blog.

Wow what a crazy 2 months it has been.. I now have a website for my photos thanks to good mate Harry Sinanian who is a website genius, I asked Harry if he knew anybody that could build me a website and 4 hours later it is up and running. This is something that I had thought about for awhile as I was starting to get quite a portfolio of photos and some really nice comments from all kind of different people, I just didn’t think that it would happen so soon.

Before I knew it Christmas was apon us and it was time to fly to California to spend Christmas and New Year with my girlfriends family in Fremont in the beautiful San Francisco bay area. Any place that is an hour and a half to the surf and 2 hours to the snow is certainly the place for me and at that time of the year snowboarding is certainly on the agenda and what awesome snow there was. We spend 2 great days at Bear Valley Resort where the fresh powder on the ski runs covered the board which made for a nice soft landing. The hour drive up to Bear Valley from where we stayed at Arnold was amazing (see photo)

Just up the road from where we stayed at Arnold is Calaveras Big Trees State Park which was the perfect setting to propose to my beautiful girlfriend (now fiance) Patty. As I had never built a snowman before and Patty being a local we built one together and I was quite impressed for my first attempt, I had been carrying the ring around all day just waiting for that perfect moment and the carrot that we used for the nose on the snowman was that perfect holder while I went down on one knee.

So after spending Christmas and New Year with family and Patty glowing with her sparkly new ring it was time for us to spend (what has been a dream since I was a little boy) a few days at Disneyland and California Adventure Park, man the Americans know how to do theme parks, the detail on all the rides is something that I certainly have never expirenced and totally blew me away. Going back there sometime in the near future is very high on my must do list, after all I am just a big kid still.

Arriving back home in Brisbane to what was about to come was certainly something that I never expected. It was 4 days after we arrived that Toowoomba had flash flooding and Brisbane was about to see the worst floods since 1974. It was amazing to see so much water and debris for that matter coming down the river right past our house, I spent 2 days filming the flooding for the news and got to really see the heartache that people were going through but also the amazing support around the community from complete strangers that may now be best friends.

After thinking that the floods are over and everything is about to settle back to normal Queensland gets hit with the biggest cyclone in history, a category 5 cyclone named Yasi. Having a lot of my family and friends spread from Cairns down to Mackay it was quite a stressful week but thankfully everyone is safe and no damage to any property has been done.

I will be trying to blog every week and adding a photo of the events of that week, because a week in my job can be anywhere with some great experiences.

Until next time…. Have a great one!!!