Category: Photos

Sorrento

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Hubs and I took a road trip a few weekends ago down to Sorrento which is about 90km down the peninsular from Melbourne. We tripped in the kombi which was lovely and stayed overnight at Hub’s grandparent’s house – they own a house about 15 minutes walk from the main street and not much further to the beaches. It was a lovely relaxing time and we hope to visit again soon.

Here are some photos of our trip:

A pretty sunset

It was quite chilly!!

Mmmmmmm…. breakfast….

The view from the lookout. It was lovely up there. We’re looking forward to heading back in summer time, though I’m not sure I’m crazy enough to brave the water!


All you can eat… and then some

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I thought I would share with you all the experience of visiting my Nanny and Grandpa. Since we moved to Melbourne, Nanny and Grandpa have been missing us terribly, and they’re looking forward to our visit in a couple of weeks. I’m sure Nanny has already started planning the menu, which could include any, (or all!) of the following:

Entre
Sledgie (pickled herring) usually served with steamed potato
Borscht (beetroot soup)
Other soup – chicken noodle, barley etc
Pickled cucumbers (what’s with all the pickling??!! Maybe that’s why they’re enjoying such a long life! – Grandpa is turning 90 this year and Nanny is 85.)

Here’s a photo of them:

Now back to the food…
Main course
Pierogi
Roast turkey
Chicken – either smoked or roasted (1 WHOLE chicken, that is!)
Sausages
Crumbed steak or pork
Crumbed Barramundi
Shepherd’s Pie
Polish Sausage
Potato – either fried (yummy!) or mashed and sometimes steamed AS WELL
Carrots, beans, peas, potato salad, seafood salad, cauliflower, pumpkin
Broccolyyyyyyy (thanks for agreeing with me Jenny!!)
Cucumber and sour cream, Coleslaw, Cabbage, Beetroot salad
A mixed platter of ham, boiled eggs, lettuce, tomatoes and cheese

At Christmas she’ll add Fresh prawns!

And then there’s…
Dessert!
Round 1:
Jelly
Ice Cream
Fruit Salad (I get a special one without mango 🙂
German Custard
Trifle

Round 2:
Napolean Cake (it looks a bit different when Nanny makes it) or
Walnut cake or
Cheesecake or
Apple Pie or
Fruit cake or
Plum pudding
and that’s not to say she won’t sometimes make 2 of these cakes for us!!

Round 3:
Tea & Coffee & Aldi biscuits

By this stage, most normal people will be groaning and loosening the belt. Or for those who know what Nanny’s is like, they’ve had the foresight to wear their stretchy pants! What you also may not know, is that Nanny cooks the same for 4 people as she does for 6 or 8, though when she knows another person is expected, she’ll cook more.

Here’s a photo from Christmas:

All jokes aside, I love my Nanny and Grandpa dearly and they are two of the most generous people I know. I just wish I could cook as good as Nanny!!

The Everlasting Gobstopper

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My awesome brother and his gorgeous girlfriend went to Hahndorf, just outside of Adelaide (thanks for the correction bro!) for a wee trip a while ago and brought us back presents!! Everlasting Gobstoppers!! Hubsband’s was about the size of a golf ball, but since (apparently) I have a big mouth, mine was more like a tennis ball. Hubsband finished his off in a week or 2, and the proceeded to work on mine.

Here’s what it would have looked like before (if we’d taken a photo!):


And here’s what happens after a month of sitting in front of a computer, licking a gobstopper:


I must admit, I was very impressed with his persistence! I’m just worried about his next dentist bill… and he’s only half way through!!

Check out the lay-yers!

College Life

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We have been living on college for 10 days now, and if you had asked me yesterday how it was going, then I would have said “pretty good” but today I would say it’s going really well! We had our first SCR (Senior Common Room) dinner last night and it was really great. We now feel like we’re a part of a community, instead of being the newbies. Our room is starting to feel more like a home since we’ve found places for most of our stuff.


Here’s what the place looked like before we unpacked:



And this was during the unpacking: (eeeeeeeek!)

And these was taken Saturday after lunch. Home sweet Home!






We are quite comfortable in our 2 rooms plus bathroom. The meals are all eaten in “The Dome” and we are yet to have our first formal dinner, which take place Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Apparently it’s quite la-di-da! Hubsband has to wear a suit and tie and I can wear pretty much anything except jeans, as long as it looks classy! And we have our first Black Tie dinner and welcoming Mass next Friday which should be heaps of fun too.

There are quite a few people around our age and a few are in the same course as Hubs. I seem to be the odd one out, not currently adding to a HECS debt (I already have one!!) so I feel a bit out of the loop in some ways, but everyone is making us feel very welcome.

I’ll leave you all with the view we have every morning when we step out of our front door. We will be attending our first Mass tomorrow evening and we’re a little nervous about not knowing all the moves (Catholic services always feel like a carefully choreographed sequence, and I forgot to turn up to rehearsals!) Apparently the messages are very good though. We’ll keep you posted!

The Chapel

First Days

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It’s been such an eventful week that it’s hard to know where to start, so I’ll begin with our “First Days” of uni and work. Hubsband started his 2 week bridging course for Medicine last Monday and had a pretty full week. He has met lots of new friends ranging in age from 23 to over 30. They had a pub session on Friday that started around 2pm and ended with last drinks at 10pm! I joined them at around 6pm after work (someone’s gotta earn the beer money! They seem like a lot of fun and I’m sure he’ll enjoy getting to know them over the next few years.

Here is a picture of Hubsband on his first day:


So now it’s my turn. I registered with a recruitment agency and immediately found a job they were advertising that I thought would be great. So while I was there for my interview, I mentioned the job to my recruiter and she arranged for me to meet the person in charge of filling that position. That was on the Monday. I then had an interview for the job on Thursday at 2pm and the job was offered to me at 5:30pm! It’s permanent part-time as the Memberships Administrator for Chemical Engineers in Australia and I’ll be working 5 days a fortnight (Thurs, Fri and every 2nd Wed).

I had my first day there last Thursday and very soon realised that I was going to be working with the most difficult database known to mankind! The lady whose job I was taking over did 2 days of training with me which was really great but it’s SERIOUSLY complex. She could tell that I was having a little freak-out on Friday morning and said to me that when she first started it took her quite a few weeks to feel comfortable with it and not to worry if it wasn’t making sense just yet. That made me feel a bit better. I just hope I remember everything when I go back on Wednesday!!

Here’s me on my first day of work:


So all in all, we both had successful first weeks in our new positions. I’ll be looking for another part-time job to help pay for the beers (and the wines we just bought at the Yarra Valley this weekend, but that’s another post to come!) so until then we’ll just be drinking cask wine… AS IF!!!!

Nerdy McNerd

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I got in touch with my inner-nerd last week and attended “Game On” with Hubsband; “Melbourne’s must-see exhibition of 2008 – the action-packed celebration of games culture that has thrilled over one million players of all ages around the world. Game On tracks the development of videogames from the first computer game to arcade-era hits and the very latest from today’s billion dollar industry.” Make that one million and two players!

I was a little skeptical at first, thinking it was going to be another nerd convention like SupaNova but I was pleasantly surprised at the number of normal people there! (Ha ha. Sorry honey. Just cos you’re a nerd, doesn’t mean you’re not normal.) But seriously, there were children, girlfriends, wifeys, mothers (mostly carrying around jackets and sitting around waiting for hubsbands and kids to get tired) and everyone in between. And the games! We got to play quite a few different games including:

Pong
Frogger
Mario Cart
Star Wars (the arcade game with the vector images)
Tron arcade game
Puzzle Bubble
Gravity
Donkey Kong (game and watch)
Indy 500
Adventure on the Atari
Populous
Chillingham

… just to name a few! There were quite a few people there but there were also quite a few games to play so there was always something to do. We even ran into Yahtzee, but we almost didn’t recognise him cos he wasn’t wearing his trademark hat.

We also checked out the game consoles that had been made over the last 36 years which was actually quite interesting. We finished off with about half an hour in the theatre watching the “Machinima Showcase” which is a “new kind of filmmaking that uses computer games technology to ‘shoot’ film.” Yeah, I found it boring too but Hubs enjoyed it. It gave me a chance to have a rest, so I was happy.

We were there for 3 hours, then I decided it was time to go home. I was all nerded out for one day!

Hubsband playing Populous

Wifey posing with Lara Croft. Yeah, I think I’m heaps better looking too…

The Hickey. Friend or foe?

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The thing about being married to a 22 year old (or someone who’s 27 who still THINKS he’s 22) is that every now and then Hubs thinks it’s HILARIOUS to give me a hickey. When we first started going out, I was mortified by this, however I soon got in to the spirit of things and started giving as good as I got:


I was actually pretty good at it! This was one I gave him for his birthday last year just before we were leaders on a kid’s camp! (Actually, I think there are 2 hickeys there!!! Yeah!)

And here’s Hub’s most recent handy work at our going away party in June:


But I reckon he’s losing his touch. (Can you even see it?) Although that might mean he’ll want some more practice. I know I’ll probably regret saying this, but hickeys don’t really bother me that much anymore, as long as I don’t have an interview or a special occasion coming up. Plus Hubs gave them to me so often at one stage that it was normal to see Wifey sporting a new hickey at church each week!

So thank you, dear Hubsband, for keeping us young and completely unclassy!

(To learn how to remove hickeys, click here, though I’ve never bothered with anything other than make up!)

One day I went a-walking

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I went for a wee walk the other day to post a letter to my Nanny and came across a rather odd sight on the footpath:

At first glance I thought they’d taken the advertising for the new X-Files movie to the suburbs, but after a closer look I realised it was just a jelly-fish! After some investigating (i.e. looking into the yard that it was sitting outside of) I noticed a fishing boat and came to the conclusion that Jerry the Jelly Fish was a stowaway, looking for greener pastures. Unfortunately for Jerry, the grass was not greener on the other side.

And the next day, all that remained of Jerry was a puddle. Perhaps this is a case for Mulder and Scully after all…

Dread Head

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One of my goals this year was to learn some new skills. Some things I had in mind were to do a sign language course, to get back in to some sewing, and to perhaps try my hand at a new sport. What I DIDN’T have in mind was learning how to give someone dreadlocks.

Hubsband: Honey, I’ve wanted dread locks for a while now, can I get them?
Wifey: Sure, how much are they?
Hubsband: $500 to get them done at the salon….
Wifey: $500??????????
Hubsband: or $150 for a DIY kit that you can buy on-line which means you could dread my hair! Wouldn’t that be tee-yodally awesome?
Wifey: Ummmmmmmmmmmmm….. sure, okay….

So the kit was ordered, and on ANZAC Day 2008 (a Friday) we began.
Before we begin: Say goodbye to Hubsband’s beautiful, untangled, luscious hair (sniff)

Step One: Section off the hair in to 1 inch squares and put them in rubber bands. I made 70 sections, a perfect 35 on each side. (2 hours)


Step Two: Spray the hair with Locking Accelerator – stuff that knots your hair up good and proper (5 minutes)

Step Three: Backcombing. Now on the instructional DVD, it takes about 5 minutes to explain this process, but takes a lot longer to do. Basically it’s teasing the hair, but in a gradual way so as not to create big messy clumps of hair. It takes about 100 strokes per inch of dread, and some of Hub’s hair was 14 inches long!! I managed to get it to about 20 minutes per dread which I was quite happy with. Here are some of Hub’s first dreads:

Now before I go on to Step 4, let me give you an insight into our “dread week”:
Friday: 12noon til 9:30pm – Sectioning, backcombing, finished 14 dreads (my hands were like claws when I went to bed – I could hardly move them. But they were okay on Saturday)
Saturday: 8:00am (Hubs made me a cooked brekky to start the day off) til 3:00pm – 15 Dreadlocks. Then I went to a hen’s night!
Sunday: 7:30pm (late start) til 10:30pm – 7 Dreadlocks
So by this stage Hubs had half a head of dreads. AND he had to go to work on Monday morning! Tee hee! We really thought I’d be finished by now, but we were only half way through.
Monday: 4:00pm til 10:30pm – 17 Dreadlocks (and Wifey was getting a little tired of this by now!)
Tuesday: 5:00pm til 10:30pm – 14 Dreadlocks. I only had 3 to go but just couldn’t do it that night
Wednesday: BLISS!! Finished the last 3!! Or so I thought….

Step Four: Waxing the little friggers. Each dread had to be waxed and rolled which took about an hour. Then they had to be blow dried so the wax really soaks in. That took another half an hour. And low and behold, Wednesday night my Hubs had dreads. Total time physically working on them (excluding breaks): 33 hours.

And since then he’s had heaps of comments on how awesome they are (not just from me!) They do look really great actually. And because all the hair gets caught in them (eew) it doesn’t fall out all over the place! Hooray! I must admit that I feel a sense of pride when Hubs tells people that I did his hair for him. It’s certainly a new skill that I’ve learnt! Oh, and I NEVER want to do it again!

You look good in my genes…

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For all those Miles From Nowhere fans out there (I know there’s a few of you!) no, I’m not talking about a comeback tour (rats). I’m talking about the denim variety of the gene… er… jean. Up until a year ago, jeans and I didn’t get along. In fact, there had been NO jeans-lovin’ since I was about 11 years old and hadn’t yet developed hips. (They came at 11 and a half and the jeans were put in the back of the wardrobe)

I was really okay with this arrangement to be honest, as I got along famously with skirts and three-quarters. Even when I lived in Scotland for a year, I survived without jeans. Instead opting for the “pant” or “trouser” to keep me warm, as well as a few under-layers of course.

And then along came my Hubsband-to-be. He couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t wear jeans. Nay, would HATE jeans and not even consider wearing them. The thing is, I had TRIED to buy jeans at places like Just Jeans, Jeans West, Jay Jays etc (alliteration is huge in the Jean industry) but I ended up with pint-sized sales assistants insisting that I couldn’t POSSIBLY need a size that big and handing me a few pairs of jeans that would barely fit over my calves. So really it’s their fault that I was scared away from this super-versatile item of clothing for so long.

Enter a friend from church who also had a few curves. She suggested this shop at Chermers where she buys all her jeans. And 8 months later, my sister-in-law-to-be, along with a bit of courage, went shopping and voila! Wifey’s first pair of jeans in a lonnnnnnng time!

Not bad hey? Now I’m not saying I put these bad boys on and all of a sudden I was a convert. It did take me a few more weeks before I wore them in public. Funnily enough Hubs-to-be didn’t even notice the first time I wore them! After a couple of months however, I became very attached and we have now been going strong for 12 months. I even bought my second pair a few days ago in Melbourne (from the same chain as my first ones) and I like them even BETTER!

Hooray for jeans!