Author: Renae

Living life as a wife, a stay at home mama of 3 kids under 5, a marriage celebrant, a craft and sewing amateur, a cooked breakfast lover, coffee enthusiast, extroverted socialite, and most recently, someone who is trying to keep a tidy house. It's tough I tell you!

We’re on our way!

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Hubs and I left Brisbane 8 (???) hours ago and we are currently on stopover in Singapore, using their FREE internet!! Did I mention it was FREE????? Singapore Air have my 2 thumbs up so far! We had a few glasses of wine (and G&T and Baileys) which I’ve never really done before (drank much on flights) so I’m feeling ready for a little nap now but there are too many good movies and TV shows to watch on the next leg!! Which leaves in 6 hours 🙁

Singapore airport is also really easy to get around (FREE shuttles between terminals that are run by robots!! Okay. So it’s all automatic, but that’s PRACTICALLY a robot, right??)

Not much more to say other than I had such a great Christmas and it was awesome seeing all the family again. I miss you all already!! And we made a few new special friends who really touched our hearts – you know who you are! Can’t wait to see you again!

Until we get FREE internet again, adios!

3 hours to go!

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We’re due to leave on our road trip in about 3 hours time and we’re almost packed. Sort of. Mostly. Oh well! It’ll happen! I’ll be trying to blog a bit while on holidays, but I haven’t prepared or scheduled any posts for while we’re away, but I’ll have plenty to talk about when we get back.

I hope you all have a really wonderful Christmas and thanks for reading!

See you in 2010!

Take the long way home

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Myself, Hubs and Nate will be starting our road trip back to Brisbane tomorrow night and we’re excited!! This is where we’ll be for the next few days:


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Once we hit Brisbane, we’ll be pretty busy leading up to Christmas, and then of course we’ll be heading to South Africa and doing something like this:


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So as you can see, we have a LOT of fun to get through the next few weeks! Then it’s my 30th birthday! YAY!!! And then we’ll be attending Hubs’ brother’s wedding (double YAY!) and then flying back to Melbs for our last 5 months here before we head to Wangaratta (or to the locals, Wang!) which is here:


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Looking forward to seeing so many of you soon! And some of you not soon enough!
(You can drag and zoom in and out on the maps! Go nuts!)

I’m not like other people

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In fact, no one is like “other people”. I guess that’s what makes us all special and individual and all that stuff. But I’m a slow learner, and I can be particularly dense sometimes. I’m just now learning (in almost my 31st year of life) that I don’t think the same way as “other people”, and other people don’t think the same way as me. And that’s okay.

I have these ginormously high expectations of myself that I’m constantly not living up to. But no one cares about this but me. Instead of just being “me” I want to be the perfect Wifey, the perfect employee, the perfect friend, the perfect body shape, the perfect daughter, the perfect granddaughter, the perfect sister etc etc. No pressure or anything!! And when I fall short of this, it really gets me down.

I know that this is making me sound like a perfectionist, and I’m really not, as I just give up when I’m not perfect! 🙂 I just try and do too much all the time and then when I don’t succeed I fall in a heap. So even though I don’t like to make New Years resolutions, my goal for next year is to give myself a break; to let myself be me, however imperfect.

It’s going to be tough 🙂

My Mary Janes

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No, I’m not talking about this type of Mary Jane. I’m talking about THESE.

Oh, and these:

I have bought all 3 pairs since we’ve been in Melbourne, for a grand total of…. hang on, how about I play another game!? How much you think I pay for each pair? They are all leather (wouldn’t buy anything else when it comes to Mary Janes!), super comfy, and totally sexy! Again, I’ll put the price down the bottom, but I can assure you, you WON’T BELIEVE ME!!!

Another angle? Sure thing!

I love them all, and I promised Hubs I wouldn’t need to buy any more Mary Jane shoes for a long time… Maybe…

Blue pair: were $90, I bought them for $35
Black pair: $50
Pink pair: were $70, marked down to $40, scanned at the checkout at $20!!!
Grand total: $105!!!!! BARGAIN!!!!

The ridiculousness of Melbourne weather

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Friday the 4th of December it was cool
Sunday the 6th my back got sunburnt from sitting out on our patio for a few hours, cutting Hubs’ hair (calm down, it was just a trim)
Tuesday the 8th it was freezing again so I had to wear layers (and on sunburnt skin, this is NOT COOL)
Sat/Sun the 12th/13th was cold then hot then cold again
Yesterday (14th) was freeeeeeezing!
Today it’s getting up to 30
and Tomorrow it will APPARENTLY be 39.

Stupid. Melbourne. Weather.

Day Trippers

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We have been fortunate enough to have access to a car the last few weeks (thanks to Lsl buying herself a Ute from down here, so we have to road trip it back to Brisbane starting this Friday!) so we decided to take it for a spin down to Torquay a few Saturdays ago. The weather was so lovely in the morning, that I insisted we get out of Newman for the day. The thing about Melbourne weather though, is that it seems to incorporate the surrounds as well. On our way down the sun vanished, but we were determined! (Well, I was determined. Hubs was in a making-Wifey-happy mood which suited me just fine!)

We arrived and went for a walk down the beach. It wasn’t actually as cold as I expected, and the bay water was pretty nice too.

And now for a game of “how much you think I pay?”

(Back story: My Grandpa is a bargain shopper and becomes very pleased with himself when he saves lots of money, and he likes to pose the question “how much you think I pay?” and is chuffed when we name a price WAY higher than what he paid! It’s good fun!)

So I bought this purpley-pink top from a Kathmandu sale

and I pose the question: How much you think I pay? Now, I SHOULD leave it at that and tell you the price after you guess, but I’m not that patient, so I’ll put the price right at the end of my post and you can tell me how WRONG you were in your guesses 🙂

After our walk on the beach we went and checked out the Rivers clothing store and got a few bargains there as well! (A post for another day.) While we were inside it started pouring down so we shopped until it eased off. We left and dropped our stuff off into the car and as we were doing so it started to pour down again so we ran to the cafe we had decided to eat at, but not before we got quite soaked 🙁

 
It was pretty funny! But it still wasn’t too cold which was lucky!
It was a lovely little hippie cafe with a great view!

We ordered a lamb shank pie, some avo, cheese and tomato toasties and a couple glasses of red wine.
Absolutely delish! It was then time to go home, so we decided to take the “scenic” route. In these here parts of town, this must include some evidence of hooliganism!

(That wasn’t us BTW. Hubs wanted to be a bogan but I’m such a party-pooper!)
We made it home by 5:30pm, ready for some home-made Wifey roo burgers. A delicacy in these here parts of town!



Full price $74.95 (who would PAY that???)
What Wifey paid: $6.95 (yes, I’m a bargain shopper too!!)

Toast just doesn’t cut it

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I’m a cereal girl (living in a cereal world?) and I had toast for brekky this morning and there are so many things I don’t like about toast for breakfast:

1. it takes too long
2. it doesn’t fill me up for more than half an hour
3. too many decisions to be made about what to put on it in the morning (jam? peanut butter? honey?? I’M STILL HALF ASLEEP!)
4. I get distracted very easily so there’s only a 50% chance that I won’t forget about the toast being cooked and burn it beyond recognition
5. I’m hungry now (see 2nd point)

I have a whole week of this!! (we are leaving on Friday and ran out of cereal last Friday and there’s no point in buying a whole new packet just for a week…)

Showtime!

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When choosing a movie, to watch, one question always has to be asked:

“Is this a Wifey movie?”

A lot of the time, Hubs has to think about it. Most of the time he gets it right, but sometimes not. Here’s an example of Wifey movies:

Cool Runnings (I can’t believe that’s the first one that popped into my head)
Moulin Rouge
Lethal Weapon1-4
Chocolat (I think I had a bigger crush on Juliette Binoche than I did on Johnny Depp!)
Die Hard 1-4
You’ve Got Mail
Love Actually
Robin Hood, Men in Tights
Shrek
to sum up: rom-coms, comedies, kids movies, action with a medium level of violence

An example of non-Wifey movies:
A Nightmare on Elm St (thanks for letting me watch that when I was 9 years old, big bro)
Twilight movies
The Exorcist
The Ring
Hostage (learnt that the hard way too)
Anything scary
to sum up: horror, creepy, extreme violence

This rule also applies to TV shows. Some shows that Hubs and I have enjoyed together are Scrubs, Battlestar Gallactica, and more recently, Boston Legal.

And then there’s Dexter.

Dexter is not, never has been, and may never be, Wifey-safe. Hubs started watching a few episodes last year when we first moved down here, and he said it was really awesome, and that I should give it a go, and that he would tell me when to close my eyes (or at least put my hands over my face and peep through my fingers.) So I gave it a go. I think the first episode we watched together was on the weekend I was sick with rubella and it was daytime, which reduces the scary-factor somewhat. It was like a train wreck. I couldn’t look away! I loved it but hated it all at the same time. But not wanting to be narrow minded, I stuck at it, but we were only allowed to watch it in daylight.

So we made our way through season one with a few bad dreams, but I did really enjoy it. So then we moved on to season two, with the same daytime rule. We took a bit of a break from it after that (season two was emotionally exhausting!) but then Hubs acquired season three, so we started watching that a few weeks ago. And we punched it! We were watching an episode most evenings (it’s still light until 9pm!) followed by an ep of Boston Legal. But the other night we watched Dexter, BL, and then ANOTHER Dexter cos it was so good.

Bad idea.

I had the most horrible dreams. There was stabbing and shooting and strangulation, dumping of bodies in the lounge room (“we” killed Dexter then tried to hide his body under the couch) and police cars and stake-outs. It was all there! And I had one of the worst night’s sleep I’ve had for a LONG time. We MUST comply with the daylight rule. It’s not a rule to be broken.

So we are watching the last episode of the season after work today, and the suspense is KILLING ME! I trust it will be as good as they’ve built it up to be. No spoilers thanks!