Wifey: “whatcha doing?”
Hubs: “Ummmmm…. buying something off ebay?”
Wifey: “Oh? What are you buying?”
Hubs: “Well I could tell you, but then you’d have to kill me.”
Nothing further Your Honour.
Category: Hubs
Wazzzzzzzzzzup…..
What we’ve been up to lately:
I’ve been sewing, making Christmas cards, baking, socialising, trying to find motivation to exercise, working, being a wonderful Wifey (in my opinion!)
Hubs has been studying, putting together a rockin’ media pc (guest blog post to come, right Hubs?), tinkering with various projects, being a wonderful Hubsband.
We attended my cousin’s wedding a couple weekends ago and had an absolute ball! I’m planning on a separate post about that soon. Life is just kind of cruising along at the moment, but this could be the calm before the storm as Hubs starts exams in 11 days and has a LOT of them. Plus, I have committed myself to a few projects and bits and pieces that aren’t pressing yet, but I know how time has a tendency to fly so I need to keep an eye on the calendar. (What do you MEAN Monday is the first day of November???)
We are looking forward to coming up to Brisbane over Christmas, as well as travelling to South Africa early January, celebrating my 20tenth birthday mid-January and attending Hubs’ brother’s wedding at the end of Jan. Then it’s back to business in Melbourne on the 1st of Feb 2010. 2010???? Wha????
So this is just a heads-up to let you know we’ll be up in sunny Queensland soon and would love to see as many people as possible. Well, I would love to see as many people as possible – Hubs would be happy with a few small gatherings over a few beers, in between working on his boats (a couple of Hobie cats he’s been fibreglassing for a little while.) We’ll see how it all pans out.
The weather down here has been just beautiful since Saturday. It’s currently 28 degrees and I can’t WAIT to finish work and get out amongst it. The weekend is looking gorgeous too, and I’m really hoping this is going to continue, seeing as how it IS currently Spring time. Chances are though, (and I don’t mean to tempt fate) it will plummet back down to 10 degrees some time next week. WHAT? It’s TRUE!
Watch this space for posts about a duplo “pyramid”, a giant cookie, a fairytale wedding, a game of “how much you think I pay?” and, as promised, a guest post from Hubs. It’s going to be WILD!
A comedy of errors with a happy ending
Hubs and I try to have a designated “date night” every week or 2 and it usually occurs on a Wednesday night. A few weeks ago, life was hectic and the only day we could do was the Tuesday, so we put it aside. Hubs planned to cook up his famous pumpkin and mushroom rissoto, so before he got home from uni, I got a few things ready for him. I had frozen some leftover stock from the last time we’d made rissoto, so that was all thawed out and ready to go. I chopped up all the mushrooms and put them in the steamer part of our saucepan set to rinse before setting them aside. Then I chopped up the pumpkin and got the rice out ready for Hubs to come home and make some magic.
So Hubs comes home, tired after a long day of studying and slowly gets to work. First of all, he grabs the “saucepan” of mushrooms, puts it on the bench and proceeds to pour the defrosted stock “into” the saucepan, all in one go, before I realise what he’s doing. You can guess what happened to the stock….
(This photo was taken AFTER the mushrooms were put into a “proper” saucepan)
Chicken stock – 1
Hubs – 0
Somehow this was my fault for putting the mushrooms in a saucepan with holes in the bottom and not telling him. I wasn’t so convinced and started to get a bit cranky, but tried to see the funny side.
Not a happy Hubs. So I helped him clean that up while he continued preparing. Now it was time for the rice. As we had some leftover, again, from the last rissoto he’d made, I had rolled up the packet and put it in a re-sealable glad bag, but as he went to take it out, he grabbed the “wrong” end.
And you can guess what happened to the rice…
Rice – 1
Hubs – 0
It went all over the counter, on the floor, beside the oven, EVERYWHERE! And that was my fault too. I was laughing quite hard at this stage, but Hubs wasn’t ready to see the funny side, so I decided it would be best to leave him to it and go and read my new favourite comic book.
We had a couple of glasses of wine over dinner and a DVD and started to relax a little and try not to take it all too seriously. Dinner was absolutely delicious and looking at these photos now (and having the sense to take them at the time) I can’t help but laugh. A lot. It really was a hilarious date night, and we have learnt that Tuesday nights are NO GOOD for date nights any more, and we should stick to Wednesdays from now on!
Maybe I should have learnt from last time, although, this might be another one of his ploys to do things “enthusiastically and badly” in the hope of not being asked to do it again!!
Little Book of Calm
In the past, I have blogged about getting in touch with my nerdy side, but the problem is, most of the time I just fluke it when I get technical things right.
I was having a particularly non-nerdy time the other night when I was trying to watch Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith on our big screen and I couldn’t get it to work. To be honest, I didn’t try THAT hard, and I ended up just watching it on the laptop, when Hubs came home from his tutorial and wondered what on earth I was doing.
I explained (in an appropriately whiney voice) that I, once again, could not work the awesome technology that he had set up. He set it up for me, stating very nicely that I’d seen him do it a hundred times, to which I (whingely) replied “but I don’t have to pay attention when you’re around!!!!”
The next day, Hubs had a present for me:
Seriously? This is one of the most thoughtful, wonderful presents I’ve ever been given. And it’s not only step-by-step instructions, but it also has explanations about how things work and how to fix problems.
Hubs is a problem-solving kinda guy.
Problem: Wifey is getting upset that she can never remember or doesn’t know how to work gadgets and gizmos.
Solution: Write Wifey a guide to help her to learn new things and feel useful around technological things.
Hubs, you always know how to help me out. Even if it’s just listening to me whinge, you always know what to do and what’s best. I am in awe of you. x x x
(Oh! And I can’t WAIT for Part 2!)
Happy Serenity Day!
Since Hubs and I finished watching the Battlestar Galactica series, we have moved on to Firefly. We LOVED BG. And that’s a big call coming from someone who doesn’t generally like sci-fi, but that’s the good thing about being married to someone with certain different interests and tastes to my own. I get to try new things! It took a little while for me to get into it, but I really started liking the characters and the writing got better as the show progressed. We got through all 4 seasons in about 8 months and as we were running out of episodes, we started considering our next show to start watching.
Enter Firefly. A friend who likes BG recommended it to us, but said not to get to attached as they only made 1 season due to low ratings. We gave it a go and we LOVE it! We only have 2 episodes left to watch (only 14 in total) so we’re savouring them. There’s also a movie that was made after the show got canned called Serenity that Hubs tried to get me to watch about 2 years ago but I thought it was boring. Now that I know all the characters, I’m keen to give it another go! I also like to think I’m a bit more open-minded than I used to be…
Often when we watch a TV series or a movie, Hubs likes to do a Wiki search and read all about the cast and characters and back stories. We were reading about Joss Whedon and it turns out that he and Hubs share the same birthday! There was cheering and excitment all round when Wiki informed us of this fact!
If there was ANYone that Hubs would be happy to share a birthday with, it’s a famous power-nerd!
Echoes of Them
Every year at Newman College, they hold a visual art competition. The theme of the competition this year was “Echoes” so Hubs did a photo composition. He spent some time practicing the execution of the photo, and then the final product took about half an hour to complete. (i.e. taking a number of different shots, changing the lighting, the positioning, the shutter speed etc.) Then on the way home from the pub one Friday night, Hubs stumbled upon some hard rubbish that the uni had discarded. There was a cabinet there with 2 glass doors intact, and Hubs decided that one of them would make a great photo frame!
Hubs had the photo enlarged to poster size and it looked amazing.
The prize of $500 is awarded at one of the fancy-pants dinners around this time of the year, so we got all dolled up (as usual) and attended. And then the winner got announced.
“And the winner is, Echoes of Them.”
And I went nuts, but Hubs had forgotten what he had titled it!
“By Hubs Hubsband.”
And then it sunk in. He was beside himself. He was in shock. And I had tears in my eyes. My goodness I was so damn proud of him.
There were 24 entries and his was chosen out of all of them, as being the best. And it was. Here’s the award-winning-photo with an award-winning photographer.
And the description that accompanied it:
“The humble couch is part of the fabric that brings us together. Each person who sits on a couch leaves an echo of themselves in the room, on the lives of those who share the couch.
The memories of those who have been before combine with the memories of those who are present in an echo of the past, present and future.
The theme of ‘echoes’ is central to the piece – the echo of the past in the photos on the wall, the ‘echo’ of the present in the man on the couch, and the echo of the future in the friends who are with him.”
*sigh*
Now Hubs is trying to decided between a “new” camera lens or a “new” laptop.
Congratulations Hubs, from a very very proud Wifey.
Strangers in Paradise – a graphic novel
As you’ll see in an upcoming post about the San Diego ComicCon, Hubs is often encouraging me to read comic books, or moreso, graphic novels. (In fact, the Graphic Novel featured on that Wiki page was one that Hubs had me read, but it was actually a little too “graphic” for me!) So he borrowed out a copy of Strangers in Paradise from the library and I started reading it, and I gotta say, I really like it! Hubs read the forward for the book and it was about a staff member who said similar things to me like “I hate comic books, I don’t read them.” But she read the first SiP (as it’s commonly called… apparently) and after that she waited impatiently for every issue to come out. Hubs thought this might be the book that changes my attitude towards comics.
I can’t even remember which one I’m currently reading – I think it’s Volume 2. And I really want to read Volume 1 (hint hint Hubs??).
I’m finding though, that I get so engrosed in the dialogue that I sometimes forget to look at the pictures. The artwork is quite impressive, and the pictures do really add a great dimention to the story. I mean, even without the pictures I’d be pretty hooked, though, a little confused as to who was saying what!
I’ve always liked “comics” like Peanuts (my very very favourite) and Garfield (my bro’s fave) and really just the newspaper funnies on a Saturday and Sunday, but this is the first time I’ve ever read these graphic novels, and I gotta say – don’t knock it til you try it!
How long do you need it?
A conversation I had with Hubs last night:
Wifey: “Do you have a ruler I could borrow?”
Hubs: “How long do you need it?”
Wifey: “10 or 15 minutes?”
Hubs: (looking bemused) “No, what LENGTH do you need it?”
Wifey: (laughing very hard) “Oh! 15cm should do the trick.”
I laughed about that for the rest of the evening.
Diamonds are a girl’s best friend
I was just sitting here at work and I noticed that my engagement ring was a bit dirty so I gave her a bit of a clean and now she’s sparkling once again. I think Hubs did a brilliant job choosing my engagement rings.
The first one, with which he proposed, is a Puzzle Ring. For those of you who don’t know the story, Hubs took me aside while we were on Day Camp, where we had met 7 years prior, and gave me the ring, and after proposing, said “Life with me is going to be full of challenges.” He then took the puzzle ring apart and said “and here’s your first one.” It was a LOT of fun putting it back together again (after declining kind offers from the 12-year-olds in my group to “help”) and I wore it proudly. I was engaged to the most amazing man on earth and he had given me a beautiful ring that was gorgeous and nerdy. Just like him. What more could a gal ask for?
A few days later, he presented me with this:
A platinum, tension set diamond ring. It is stunning. It really blew me away then, and I still catch myself admiring it. A lot.
Again, it’s a bit nerdy, with the tension setting, and Hubs chose it because it was so different and because it is, I’m sure he would say, “teyodally awesome”.
And it is. I love it. Thanks honey x x
The Stars shine again
Last year I talked about how Hubs was playing Stars Footy. Well, he’s at it again! They have played 2 games so far. The first game was against Kendall College – these poor guys have to travel an hour to get here, they only have enough players to run on (no subs) and they get beaten (not as convincingly as you might expect) by a mob of Newman players who think it’s funny to do the “Braveheart Run” at the start of a play.
It was a fun and exciting match and the lead was shared by both teams before Newman came away with a win. There were a lot more kicks and marks (where you catch the ball on the full after it has been kicked at least 10 metres. I think that’s right) taken which made it a good spectacle. I won’t mention how freezing cold it was on the sideline, as I’m sure the players felt the chill in only their singlets and (short) shorts. Like last year, they had more players on the bench than on the field, so Hubs only got about 15 minutes of game time. He had a great time though!
The next game was a bit less thrilling for Newman unfortunately. We were up against a very strong Ormond team and even a goal off a Braveheart run couldn’t save it for us. There were fewer subs this game and Hubs had a really good run. I was so proud! A “brawl” at the end finished the game 1 minute and 34 seconds prematurely (I was timekeeper) but it may have been for the best!
I took some photos at the first game, but they pretty much looked the same as the ones I took last year! I’ll try and get some more at another game. There should be a couple more to come.
Go the Stars!!