Bah Humbug

As I can't figure out what determines the order of photos I shall be dictated by their order this week.

I have been really getting into my kobo lately. It has not done what I hoped and gotten me to read the free classics but I love that it is light and seems almost never ending in capacity. Not awesome is when the battery dies at a crucial moment or today when it combined with a dying laptop cable to drain my battery and so render my laptop useless.

Darwin says hi! He spent a few hours inside yesterday while we had dramatic thunder storms. He wasn't afraid of the storm because he was so much more interested in snuffling and sniffing for tissues and any tasty morsel we may have left.

This week I managed to make it to the gym three times. And here is my bag waiting patiently in the locker for my return. Three times is always the aim but this semester not so successful.

And now season 3 of Merlin is beginning. So I will leave you for another week.

This post is brought to you from my iphone

So I just got to thinking that I downloaded the blogger app and hadn't even looked at it. Really.

And that maybe if I did I would have an easier way of posting photos than our dial up speed Internet.

But now I have the photos but no idea where they are going to turn up in the post.

So photo the first is a square I made today for a friends quilt - all her friends are making a square and then it will be put together in all it's crazy color madness and image mismatching. (I'm also so disappointed by the edges on blocks before they are finished but then I'm really not that neat at cutting out stuff so I don't know why I complain when there is an obvious solution!)

Photo the second is my new shoes I picked up for the bargain price of $11. Go chain store with crazy prices.

Photo the third is a cool scrabble ring my friend made for me.

And the final photo is of my teapot bookend which I got for my birthday way back in March but I love. It is holding up last semesters studious books.

Right so shall we experiment with what order the photos come out in when I post.

Edit: hmmm can you guess the orders those photos should have been in? I shall have to experiment with next weeks post as Mums awesome pork and fennel sausage rolls are calling. And I heard the ice-cream maker going this afternoon so I have hopes for dessert.

I'm back....

.....well I haven't really been anywhere just distracted by the usual uni stuff. Which is actually a lot more distracting when deadlines are not as close and suddenly I am way more excited to post when the deadline actually looms. Yep I'm card carrying proctastinator.

This week I bring you photos from my iphone again
I found this in a pot plant under some wormwood today. It was a definite sign that, despite the temperature and the rain, we have changed seasons and are moving into summer (fingers crossed for a nice mild summer again this year). I spent sometime sitting on the end of the verandah with Darwin and Mopsy watching the birds flittering about. My favourite are the blue wrens who show no fear in landing in the dogs yard and then flit away flashing bright blue.

And of course there was time to snap a new photo of the monster with his newly ungunked eyes (trust me to have a dog that gets hayfever).
Check out this terrifying monster. Apparently a yawn in dog world has gigantic proportions. For a second I thought he might have been auditioning for Terra Nova (which is as family as you'd expect but it has dinosaurs so I can see myself watching it anyways).
And lastly. A few weeks ago we went to a friends BBQ party and one of the people there was a temporary tatto artist. This is my ink. I am still in two minds about the entire permanent tattoo business but the temporary tattoos are very fun.

Sunday Sunshine

I should be writing my essay on the ideology of Augustus's marriage and childbearing laws but instead I am here reading blogs (and writing one) and writing complaint emails. I am really not very good at those as I kind of end up saying look this was bad, but don't get upset it is really not as bad as it sounds. Oh and of course I am drinking tea and eating cake. I am bit concerned about the size of my waistline after this weekend as I haven't had a single ounce of self control (and I have no idea why self-control is measured in ounces it just is).

Apart from complaint emails and cake eating I bring you some iphone photos from this week -

This is a photo wall hanging/ art thingy that I am working on for a friend of mine. I stay at her house a fair bit and she has a cat, a pretty amazing cat which gets into absolutely everything. As I am a bit snap happy with the iphone I have ended up with a tonne of photos of which I have printed out (some) and punched holes in the corners (so much harder than it should have been) so I can string them all together and magnet them onto her fridge. I also had a couple of pens I brought when I was in Japan last year especially for writing on photos, and have written some captions on. I'll try and get a photo of it hanging up at her place this week.

This is a detail from a building along Collins St that I noticed and thought was pretty.

And of course Darwin with his cheeky toothy grin. Taken this morning in the sun and after I had cleaned out his yard which contained an array of bones, pieces of foam, fabric, the handle off a bucket and a piece of chewed plastic pipe. Given that I cleared his yard a few weeks ago I'm not sure where he manages to get all these treasures but they are safely in the bin now. The oddly shaped shadow is me and Mum's dog Mopsy who insists on being in close contact whenever possible.

Now I think it is time to get back to the essay. I have already carefully mapped out my week of work, uni, homework, excercise and social activities and now just need to get into gear to get everything on the list done so as to not be a mess by the end of next week. Onward I go.

In Apology for my absence I bring you photos

Well as you can tell I spend a lot more time reading blogs than I do writing my own but I still have dreams of being this organised being who posts regularly and has lots of awesomeness to show for it.......it may never happen but I can keep hoping right!

In apology for my long absence I bring you pictures from my new(ish) iphone. My new(ish) red gumboots just before Darwin and I went for a walk this morning. (Of course Darwin was on his pink lead so that we colour clashed).

Darwin himself. Helping me with my uni readings. Not at all trying to convince me to give him treats and let him sleep inside. His belief in his right to sleep inside and my belief that he should sleep outside is a nightly discussion involving Darwin lying down as flat as possible on his mat (making him an impossible dead weight to lift) and me coaxing him to get up and ending up offering him a treat. Poor Darwin falls for the treat everytime and then is lead out to his yard - where he settles down to sleep rather quickly.

The fire has been burning away at our house all day long. Trying to hold back the chill. Only marginally successful. Despite a few days of warmth the other week, winter is still definitely here.

Now I must post this and feed Darwin. He has been giving long and loud yawns to remind me that he is outside and patiently waiting for his dinner and then to be let inside to sleep while we watch tv followed by the completion of the evening with a discssuon about where he will be sleeping.

Sunshine-y Day

Sadly the sun is starting to set for today :-( but the sun today reminds me that winter is beginning to wind to a close and (hopefully) I will have a few nice months before the full heat of summer arrives.

Sunday morning I headed back to Ballarat to hang out with my parents and Darwin (and various other pets). A friend of mine is currently packing up her life and preparing to head overseas. I caught up with her on Fri and Sat and both days we spent some of our conversation discussing spring cleaning and how much stuff we seem to have accumulated over time. I have been thinking about having a good clean out of everything for awhile as our household will be expanding next year. I also remember the ridiculous accumulation of stuff that we had to clean out of our last rental property and I don't want our current place to be the same.

I began by going through some of the stuff stored in my old room at home. I came up with a few items that I can easily part with....looked hopelessly at a pile of things that I am not yet ready to part with but have no real everyday use for.

Then I got started on a project that Mum and I came up with a few months ago when we were cleaning out her fabric stash. The first stage of the process looks like this -

The project is a rag rug. These two balls are made up of cut up strips of old clothes and the un-usable scraps of fabric in my stash that I could never bring myself to throw out. I probably half way through joining all the fabric and clothes that I already have for this project before I start attacking my wardrobe for more items to cut up.......

While I was searching through things I found some VERY OLD craft projects of mine -

This is probably my first attempt at crochet (which I now can't remember how to do) from either the summer before or after Year 12 (which is ten years ago now - yikes). I also found three nice sized balls of wool with these squares so maybe I will finish making something from this.

I also found these squares which I think I started at some point in the middle of high school.

In need of some desperate blocking but I was interested to see that my tension had settled down by this stage in time. Not sure what I will do with them - maybe sew them into the learn to knit afghan that I started at the beginning of the year and put aside in a huff after about four squares.

Well better push on with the rest of the days tasks.

High Tea and other ways to spend election day

I am sheepishly reappearing as I have obviously been very slack!!!!! Here is some pictures of cupcakes I made for my friends birthday on Saturday.

On Friday I made gluten free chocolate cup cakes. Gluten free cooking is something that I have very little experience with and am frankly a little intimidated by it!!!! So to get around this (and as always being short of time) I brought a packet mix (Naturally Good Moist Chocolate Mud Cake Mix) and followed the instructions on the back (too easy :-)). I cooked the cakes for about 25 minutes.

I am pretty sure that my Mum dreads when I call her up and start the conversation with "Mum I've had this great idea." as it generally means I am about to embark on some crazy unobtainable quest. This however is a very rare occurrence where the idea worked perfectly. I wanted to decorate the cup cakes so I piped melted white chocolate on baking paper.

And with the addition of some rapidly setting chocolate ganache and walnuts. I got these -

I also wanted to make Maple Syrup Cupcakes (from Donna Hays Modern Classics Book 2 I think) that Mum and I had made the week before for RSPCA cupcake day at work. So Saturday morning (after I remembered to vote). I got started creaming the butter and sugars together and had walked away for a moment. All of the sudden the kitchen was filled with thick smoke emanating distressingly from our beloved mixer.

This mixer is the mixer that Mum made all of our delicious treats on when we were kids and my brother and I inherited when she got her lime green kitchen aid a few years ago.

After I turned the power off and stamped my foot a little I went and found my brother to rescue me :-). He came in turned it on and off a few times and it stopped smoking and started working again. I was then able to continue on and produce my cup cakes (phew not sure what I would have done if it had died permanently).

I think the break in mixing meant that the butter had time to reset a little as the cupcakes didn't rise as much as last week (and I was missing the trifecta of Mum, her kitchen aid and her oven). I made white chocolate ganache and dark chocolate swirls for decoration.

And if you look closely you can see from right to left the ganache going from runny to almost set as I iced.

My friends birthday party was a high tea with lots and lots cake and cucumber sandwiches and scones. It was a lot of fun and the birthday girl seemed to enjoy herself. I got lots of compliments for both sets of cupcakes. As a present I gave her a copy of the cupcake recipe and the main ingredients in a new cake container (as you can never have enough of those).

After stopping off at another friends housewarming I got home and watched a little of the election coverage to see that Australia has its first Greens seat in the lower house (Yayyyyyyy). (I promise that will be my only political comment ever).

Today I have spent studying, restraining from eating the remaining maple syrup cupcakes (I had one for breakfast), getting a little cleaning done and enjoying a sunny winters day. Oh and drinking lots of cups of tea of course.