This festive season has been particularly trying for us so it has been hard to get excited about Christmas at all. Even the Christmas tree is picking up on the vibe.

I remember when I was a kid, I would get excited about Christmas. Sure it meant that we got some presents but also because we got to catch up with the rest of the extended family. I don’t remember it being as stressful, trying to accommodate everyone’s gatherings on the one day. Perhaps it was because as a child, I didn’t have to think of such things because I simply went wherever my parents did.

I don’t remember stressful shopping experiences….certainly don’t remember traffic jams within car parks just to get to the petrol station. I do remember people lighting their houses to celebrate the occasion but I don’t remember the sense of competition that goes along with it today. I don’t remember my mum getting stressed about whether she had the right table cloth or whether the napkins matched the table cloth.

What I do remember is my grandpa falling asleep on the lounge downstairs after a belly full of food. Playing board games with my sister and sometimes my cousins as well while the adults chatted. I remember it raining most Christmas Days and not caring because what does it matter if it does? Going to the shopping centres and hearing Australian Christmas carols played over the speaker, often sung by unknown artists and delighting in it nonetheless. People smiling, wishing each other merry Christmas without the fear that the other person may not celebrate Christmas because if they didn’t, they simply said merry Christmas in return and did not get offended. The shops shut for more than 2 days and somehow no one complained about the inconvenience of it all. If you forgot something, then you simply did without or went to the “rip off merchants” at the corner store.

Mostly I remember that there was a true spirit of Christmas when I was a child. There was magic in it. Somehow as an adult, that feeling of anticipation is somewhat diminished. I do wonder whether that’s how my parents felt about it as well, even though that time of year was always memorable to me.

Have a very merry Christmas, no matter where you are or what you are doing and may 2010 be even better than the year before.

December 24th, 2009 | Category: Special occasions |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

Almost a month ago, I was staring down the barrel of a whole month off from work. Sure I was looking forward to the break but I was hoping to get a lot of work done at the house while we had our time off. I had the best intentions of having the retaining walls done, plants in, fence up, turf down, clothes line installed, garage kitted out, curtains and shutters installed and hopefully the start of some landscaping along our very long driveway.

Back to work for us both on Monday and the retaining wall is only half finished. It is looking good though and I’m hoping that by the time it is finished, we can say that it was worth the wait. There are two to be done,  one fully along the service side of our house which will be part terraced (left and middle) and the other in the main part of our backyard near the alfresco (right).

Because the retaining is so extensive and covers a large portion of the property, we haven’t been able to do much more. I am a little disappointed that we couldn’t get as much done as I hoped but the best laid plans tend to fall in a heap at times. At least we do have our one little patch of garden finished, although I think it needs something….maybe a budda or some other garden statue in the corner. I’m keeping my eye out for something just right.

December 3rd, 2009 | Category: Home and Lifestyle |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (1)

We moved into our new house in the first week of October and we’ve been busy bees putting our personal touches on the house. Pictures are up on the walls, number is on the door and now we even have a permanent mailbox out the front of our house. Apologies to my postie for putting up with the crappy tin box we had out the front to use as a mailbox until the real thing could be put in the ground. We’re both on holidays for a month now and had the best intentions of working hard at finishing the landscaping for a week before we headed off on a much needed vacation. Unfortunately the recent rain we’ve had put a bit of a damper on those plans.

Rain turned the quarry that our sandstone is coming from into a muddy slush pit – so the truck delivering our rock just couldn’t get in to get it. The sandstone is now here and hopefully next week we will have a retaining wall fashioned around the side of the house and at the side. Until that gets done, we are more or less sitting on our hands. Without the retaining wall, we can’t shift the massive pile of bark that we kept for doing the garden beds. Which means we can’t get someone out to do the turf or fencing. We have done the one garden bed that we can do at the moment and in the meantime, we are keeping an eye out on our massive pile of sandstone making sure no one nicks off with it before they fashion a wall out of it.

The best laid plans and all of it brought to a grinding halt because of the rain. On the upside though, our tank is full and ready to be used for watering the grass – when we have some laid that is.

November 11th, 2009 | Category: Home and Lifestyle |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

It has been a crazy couple of weeks in my little corner of the world. We bid adieu to our old house, spent a short amount of time living with relatives and we are now starting to settle into our new home. All the things that drove me nuts about our former house are not a problem here because we have learned from our previous mistakes. Of course, in a new estate and newly constructed, we have landscaping to do all over again. Fortunately this time, we don’t have to do all the hard yards ourselves and can get some professionals in to do the stuff that took us f-o-r-e-v-e-r at the old place. A fresh new landscaping palette to work with and the possibilities are almost endless! And what’s better – this time we have side access to get machinery in! Woohoo!

It was a little strange saying goodbye to somewhere that I have spent a great deal of my adult life so far. It was my first real home that wasn’t shared with a relative and I enjoyed putting my stamp all over the place, inside and out. So goodbye no. 96 – it may have provided its fair share of challenges to us over the years in terms of getting it to be how we envisaged it but it was a good home. May the new owners enjoy the dividends of our hard work there for many years to come!

October 10th, 2009 | Category: Home and Lifestyle |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (2)

And so it is September and the official start of spring!

Here in south-east Queensland, we have been cursed blessed with the return of warmer weather in late August and even some storms. One even knocked out our power which is a rare occurrence even in the height of summer when the storms are usually at their peak. I love spring for the sole reason that it reassures me that my pot plants only look dead and given a bit of a haircut and fertiliser, they resuscitate fairly well from the brink of death. I am trying to be a better parent to my pot plants….I often forget to water them for weeks days at a time so it is a miracle they survive at all.

I’ve found that impatiens can survive my neglectful ways quite well….as does anything which I have planted in the ground. Our grevilleas have taken off wonderfully and are attracting loads of birdlife to the backyard. The rosemary plant in the rock wall often grows up to the same height as our roof and no matter how severely pruned, it always takes off again. The oregano is loving the clay soil and has taken over the lower section of the rock wall. Even the dwarf callistemons are out in flower and the tree fern which I had pruned before the winter has shot up again.

So in this pile of photos, there’s a lot of photos of plants. There’s also a heap of photos of our new house being constructed. To think that when I started this batch of photos, it was just a frame with a roof on it. Only a few weeks later, we’re almost ready to move in. Correction. We are more than ready to move in, it’s just that the house is not quite ready for us to do that. As far as building a house goes, the experience has been pretty painless. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been frustrating moments but it hasn’t gotten us to the point where we are tearing our hair out.

Of course, we haven’t moved yet so I’m sure there will be plenty of hair-pulling, teeth-gritting moments to come….of that I am sure.

September 14th, 2009 | Category: Home and Lifestyle, Phoney Photos, Photography |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

When I was a kid, I spent quite a bit of time on buses on long trips back and forth to Brisbane for various extra-curricular events. While all the cool and hip kids passed the time away on their Nintendo Game Boys playing Tetris, Donkey Kong or Mario Brothers, I passed the time sleeping, trying to read a book or listening to a CD. If only my parents had known then what valuable skills I was missing out on, I might have been able to build a business case for the purchasing of one Nintendo Game Boy.

At first, you might not think that Tetris is the be all and end all. Certainly it can get to be a very frustrating and time consuming experience if your reaction times are slack and you have  little to no spatial awareness. Late last year, Leigh posted about how packing a moving truck isn’t that dissimilar to a game of Tetris. I remember her writing those words but can’t find the original post so you will just have to take my word for it that my memory is correct.

I’m finding that packing moving boxes is a similar experience. Good Tetris skills are essential otherwise you end up with all these gaps which are big enough to put something in but not the something that belongs in the box. I’m no Martha but I get extremely irritated if like cannot be packed with like. CDs MUST go with CDs or at the outset, DVDs. Books are not to be packed with CDs or DVDs because they are not electronic media. Kitchen goods under NO circumstances are to be packed with anything from any other room. So you can understand how packing all our stuff up to shift to our new house could get a little frustrating for me. I know I probably could be a bit more leniant on the packing rules but of course, then it makes the unpacking process at the other end that much more difficult.

Dammit! I knew I really did need that Game Boy when I was a kid.

August 30th, 2009 | Category: Ramblings |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

I can’t believe it’s been more than six months since I posted anything on this blog. I could have sworn I did a few more posts since we adopted Warrego Martin. Not long afterwards, we adopted two more koalas through the same koala hospital – Bermuda Barb and Tuffy Tuffin.

I know many native animals perished in the Victorian bushfires earlier this year but there is something particularly endearing about koalas. Perhaps it is their human like face – eyes facing to the front, ears at the sides and prominent noses. That is one of the reasons why Sam, the koala rescued from the blackened scrub, managed to warm the hearts of a nation. Sam has since died but I am certain that her carers would have ensured there was no suffering.

I’m hoping that this year brings milder summer weather for the southern regions of Australia which were so devastated by the bushfires. But it is heartening to know that even in the face of that kind of destruction, nature always fights back. It’s hard to believe the photo below was taken only one month after bushfires swept through Kinglake VIC.

August 28th, 2009 | Category: Adoption Programs, Wildlife |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

Image courtesy of Threadless

When I saw this shirt on Threadless, I just had to buy it because it sums up fairly well how I feel about the whole weight loss thing. Women  who are overweight can be their own worst enemies at times and I suppose I’m no different. Permit me a few generalisations here. We see photos of other people, pass them in the street and we tend to compare ourselves to them in some way. We play that “do I look that fat” mental game quite a lot and it’s to our own detriment.

When I first decided that I needed to do something about my weight, it was because I felt incredibly unhealthy and it was stopping me from doing the things I liked to do. I’m now able to do a lot of those things again and even though I have a fair bit of fat left on me, I feel quite good within myself. To a point.

I don’t loathe clothes shopping nearly so much as I used to but I’m still frustrated  about the attitude that clothes designers seem to have about larger women. Again, permit me some generalistations. They seem to think that larger women all want to wear gaudy, flouncy clothes that accentuate their size rather than slim it. They also seem to think that if you have a plus size tee shirt, then it’s because you have a hideously big neck and thus need a massive hole in the top of the shirt to fit your head through. And they also seem to think that if you are a size 18, you still only have a B cup bra size and the only reason why you take an 18 is because you are so ridiculously fat. So consequently, it’s hard to get a fitted business shirt that neither gapes at the front  from going up a size to accommodate my bust nor looks like I’m about to explode out of it.

Like it or not, I’m always going to be a rhino. I’m always going to have an hourglass figure with wideset shoulders and hips. I’m never going to be the unicorn that has graceful slender long legs with the perfect proportions that allow for miniskirts and shorty shorts. I’ll just settle for being a slightly thinner, fitter and hopefully in the process, a healthier rhino.

August 23rd, 2009 | Category: Health and Fitness |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (1)

I had a feeling that this year….the year of being 30….was going to be a good year. Towards the end of last year, things just started coming together for me.

I scored a new job.
I started losing some weight and surprisingly I’ve managed to keep it off. Although I do keep weighing myself every week to make sure that the winter kilos are not creeping back on.
I discovered a new enthusiasm for some exercise and realised that it wasn’t going to kill me and could actually be enjoyable at times.
I got back on my bike and found I could still ride it – although not without some significant degree of buttocks pain afterwards.
We found our perfect block of land and our perfect house is getting built on it.
My “skinny” cat has gained a little weight and my fat one at least hasn’t got any fatter.
I learned how to cook a few new things and surprisingly they are edible.
I’m working my way through a self-study CD and getting some nice results from my time out in the great outdoors.
I’ve managed to stick to a 365 photo challenge (that astonishes me more than anything).
We finally finished installing our spa and it looks great!

Our house is coming ahead quicker than we possibly could have imagined we quite possibly could be in it in under two and a half months from the time construction started. It still has a way to go but it’s getting closer every day. We finally got ourselves a bedroom suite – how grown up!  But the best part of the new house?? Three words – polished wooden floors! I can just see myself skating across the floor in my fluffy bedsocks a la Tom Cruise in Risky Business. I even have a pair just suited to the job.

In the meantime, can I be 29 forever?? I suppose not but if the lead up to the 30s are as good as the 30s themselves, I’m sure I’ll be happy even if I have to turn 31 at some stage.

PS – If you love the look of my bedsocks as much as I love wearing them, check out the range at My Socks Rock. I can vouch for speedy service and comfy, warm socks!

August 4th, 2009 | Category: Home and Lifestyle |  Print This Post |  Email This Post | Comments (2)