Rosemarie’s time in Australia continues. We went to Wilsons Prom and Fraser Island in February as well but I’ll save those for their own posts.
We decided to make mu shu pork for Rosemarie’s birthday/Chinese New Year. It turned out ok but not as good as we remembered from the last time making it together, approximately 12 years ago when we all first moved to Vancouver.
They don’t really sell Chinese eggplant here so we tried to grow our own. It kind of worked!
We went out for dumplings (Shandong Mama) and drinks (Eau De Vie) and ice cream (Nitro Lab). Rosemarie’s drink came in a HORN. Mine was spicy. Fun night out.
Typical Melbs.
Lune croissants. We got ham and cheese, spanakopita, black sesame miso cruffin, lemon curd cruffin, pineapple upside down. Spend with reckless abandon!!
I have this amazing friend at the gym named Doreen. Every once and a while she randomly gives me fresh fish. We were already going to have a nice dinner of mom’s hot & sour soup and fried rice, and then she gave me two snapper! We steamed them, covered them with garlic, ginger, green onion, soy sauce, and then poured hot oil over it. It was delicious, this was an epic dinner.
Chilling pre-competition.
Phoenix Open weightlifting comp. I didn’t have the best preparation, I had a week of crippling back pain, which really made me consider withdrawing from the comp. Thankfully that resolved itself after I was finally able to get some physio treatment. But then we also went on two holidays right before the comp too. Anyway my coach helped me through all of that and planned a conservative comp for me where the goal was to get 6 out of 6 lifts. Which I did, although the judges were far too generous with my last snatch and probably shouldn’t have actually given it to me. I snatched 43/46/48(1 kg PB, sorta), and clean and jerked 53/56/58(equal PB, but much more solid than the first time I did it), for a total of 106kg, which was a 1kg PB too. I liked having Rosemarie there to load my warm ups for me and fan me and stuff. :)
Rosemarie went to watch Scott play hockey (I was at a hens party). He looks pro!!
Unpictured:
Sophie came over for dinner and games. We made homemade gnocchi and played Azul.
Lots of Winter Olympic watching.
Trivia with Scott’s work friends. We won.
Gina’s hens party dinner.
An epic last dinner out at Deeds Brewing. Many delicious share plates. Definitely want to go back.
Rosemarie leaving. :( Unpictured because she had to leave really early in the morning and I stayed in bed while Scott drove her to the airport.
OK maybe I should do some blogging again… especially considering we had such an awesome summer!
So around Christmas last year, we realised that instead of waiting for ScoMo to open the border to tourists, we could just buy Rosemarie a Working Holiday Visa and she could come visit right away. After a couple days of back and forth messaging and research, she booked some flights to come visit us for six weeks, starting from the middle of January!
She arrived with an entire hockey bag full of treats!! Best sister!!
Scott for scale.
We weren’t expecting Rosemarie to show up so quickly so Scott and I were quite busy with work for the first couple weeks. But we used the time to get organised (Perkins love a list!) and Rosemarie cooked us lots of elaborate foods. Looking back, we still managed to squeeze in A LOT of fun stuff between all our commitments.
New steamer with 400% more capacity!
Homemade shrimp har gow with garlic Chinese broccoli.
Rosemarie made radish cake! It was delicious. With bbq’d zucchini from the garden and homemade chili oil (unpictured).We also played lots of games, of course. We were excited to play some games, like Orleans, with three players for the first time ever.Rosemarie beat us at everything.We went for a walk in the hills, looking for lyrebirds, didn’t see any. Went for a swim in Lysterfield Lake afterwards.
We got cheap grounds passes for the Australian Open one night, which ended up being quite fun! We watched a couple games in outdoor court 3, walked around a bit, had food truck food for dinner, tried to get in to watch Nick Kyrgios’s match but didn’t realise you had to pre-reserve your seat. The spectators were rowdier than I expected. It was my first time being in crowds for quite a long time, which felt weird, but I kept my mask on as much as I could and that made me feel better.
Rosemarie and I went to Gumbaya World on my day off. It was horrendously windy, which made waiting in lines for the water slides quite unpleasant, but the water was very warm so that helped. They also have animals so we got to see kangaroos and wallabies and koalas and birds and stuff. We went on a swingy ride that was too EXTREME for Rosemarie. She has gone soft. I got a big dent in my car from someone else’s car door.
We went to the South Melbourne Market to try Agathe pastries. Verdict: very nice, but I think I like Lune better because they have savoury options as well.I also had a fancy oyster.
Rosemarie and I deciding which family pie to buy, we decided on Beef Burgundy and it was great.
Rosemarie learned how to do weightlifting! She came with me almost every single session. My pal Bach coached her. It was cool to have her there and I think she enjoyed it quite a bit.
Rosemarie took a sneaky pic of me doing my squats.
More games.
Australia Day beers with some of my Discord friends.Scott prepared classic Australian birthday treats to celebrate Rosemarie’s birthday at his parents house. Top left is chocolate crackle, top right is fairy bread, with a slice of Vienetta (he didn’t make that).
Brunch at a nearby cafe, Jake and the Beans Talk. My breakfast gnocchi put me into a coma.
Unpictured:
Went out for parmas with more Discord friends.
Phoenix Weightlifting AGM where I got elected Ordinary Committee Member.
We crashed Scott’s cousins’ camping site in Walkerville for a night after Christmas. We weren’t there for long but had a lovely time hanging out with the cousins and their kids. We hiked up to the lookout, looked for crabs in rock pools, identified birds. I love that area.
Sophie and Scott and I paid a ridiculous amount of money to spend approx 4 seconds ziplining across the Yarra. It was silly. We went for ice cream after.
I took Scott out for a fancy meal for his birthday. We had the seasonal menu at Gimlet and it was amazing. We had mocktails and bread and radishes and asparagus and seafood pasta and an epic rib-eye with fries and salad, and two types of dessert. Everything was great. We also enjoyed sitting at the counter and watching everyone cook.
Garden is doing ok. We have two types of zucchini: the regular Black Beauty type, and another paler type that has grown a three meter long vine but only one actual zucchini. We have harvested one lebanese cucumber… hoping the plant keeps going. And we have heaps of green roma tomatoes but none have actually become ripe yet. Silverbeet and other salad stuff still growing fine, and I’ve planted another round of carrots. Hoping for good harvests soon.
Scott actually hates this pasta maker. He was probably swearing while I took this picture.
I did another weightlifting competition, the Phoenix Christmas Hit Out. I never posted any videos because I don’t like how I lifted. I snatched 45/47x/47, and CJ’d 53/56/58. My snatches were gross and I’m annoyed I missed my second attempt because I was very confident that I could snatch more than 47 (my old PB) and I didn’t get to try. Clean and jerks were better, and 56kg was a PB and 58 is a 3kg PB, but they were doing a bit soft judging and I don’t really think they should have given the 58 to me because the jerk was a little press-y. So that’s that. Hopefully next comp is better. Should be the Phoenix Open in February.
I got a haircut! I liked it at the time but actually it is extremely incompatible with having to wear n95 all the time at work now. My hair is too short to put in a proper ponytail so bits fall out all over the place and then my goggles pull more bits out around the sides so I just look even more disheveled than usual all the time. My coworker says this makes the patients feel sorry for us and treat us nicer so maybe it’s ok.
My friend Jen made this.
I finally got around to making reusable fabric gift bags this year. I remember mom and I making tons of these to sell as a fundraiser for one of my Girl Guide trips! I hope we can use them for a long time.
Ava and charcuterie.Harry using his glasses to see what was over the fence.Da boys and their presents.Christmas lunch on Vicky and Pat’s new deck.I’ve got the whole family hooked on Nanaimo bars.Boxing Day/Christmas Day video chats with the fam.
We had a nice Christmas this year. We spent the afternoon playing with children and eating lots of delicious food. It was a pretty chill day. I got Scott a video game and that polar bear, and he got me a fish fileting knife and two more bird shirts.
Unpictured stuff:
I went to my Melbourne Discord Christmas party. I made my secret santa person a custom Kick Ons hat. I think he liked it because he wore it for the whole rest of the night. My secret santa gave me a cute little Australia-Canada hybrid cross stitch and some knitting accessories. I had some good chats and managed to get away with only having 2 drinks and Scott picked us up afterwards so all in all a very fun night.
I got my booster. I’ve had AZ x2 + Pfizer booster. I felt ok after however I got a nasty cold a few days later (not covid, was tested twice), not sure if related or not.
We had a week-before-Christmas lunch at Shaun’s house. Shaun told all the kids that there were no rules at his house, so they had a lot of fun pounding juice boxes and walking on the top part of the play structure.
I had the days off in between Christmas and New Years this year for the first time and it was great. Unfortunately Scott still had to work so we were only able to squeeze in a quick one night camping trip away (I’ll make another post). But it was still a fun relaxing time for me and actually filled up with quite a few activities so I’m glad I didn’t have to work. Plus I only had to use two days of annual leave to get 10 days off so it was extremely leave-efficient.
Steph and Soph had birthday parties. Nice to see Steph again and catch up with my old coach Adam, and splash around with Sophie’s kids in their kiddie pool.
Not really the best year… we spent at least part of 7 out of 12 months in lockdown here in Melbourne. I got pretty depressed, especially when I thought about how long it had been since I saw my family, and how much longer it was going to be.
However we have really learned to take advantage of what you can do when you can do it and still managed to squeeze in a fair amount of fun stuff.
Some good things that happened in 2021:
We still managed to find new places to explore in Victoria. We went to Bright, Echuca, Pyalong, Warburton, Little Desert, and Walkerville (post to come). I think the only corner of the state we haven’t visited yet is Mildura… maybe next spring? There’s a good birding area near there.
Work has been fine. We were pretty busy, but I am lucky that my hospital is a “clean” hospital and we don’t actually have any covid patients. Occasionally we have to put on all the PPE for unvaccinated patients, or lung scans, but in general I have it pretty easy compared to many other healthcare professionals.
Same questions as last year:
PBs: snatch 47kg -> 47kg, C&J 55kg -> 58kg. My back squat also improved a fair bit. Not bad for mostly training alone in the garage I guess. I’m glad my clean and jerk improved but I wish I didn’t waste a snatch attempt at my last comp and didn’t get to try for a new snatch PB. I knew I could do it! Hopefully we get to compete more often next year.
New board games: Only one… Caverna. Thank you to Vicky and Pat for mailing all their children a gift card to buy something to cheer ourselves up during the darkest part of lockdown 6.
Books: I didn’t read that much this year. I spent most evenings trying to get dopamine from endless Instagram scrolling. I have lots of books on my list to read next year though. Here’s the few I did read:
Sins of the Brother: The Definitive Story of Ivan Milat and the Backpacker Murders – Les Kennedy and Mark Whittaker – disturbing, interesting, not the best to read right before bed
American Dirt – Jeanine Cummins – page turner, people hate this book though?
Anxious People – Fredrik Backman – hard to get into at first because writing kind of weird I think – didn’t finish
Boy Swallows Universe – Trent Dalton – writing a bit funny and hard for me to follow but then got good, Australian
Nothing To See Here – Kevin Wilson – strange one, i liked it
The Midnight Library – Matt Haig – corny, predictable
The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller – someone on instagram tricked me into a reading a mythology book! I wish everything I had to read in school was written like this.
Great New Recipes: Again, didn’t really cook that well this year. Just didn’t have the energy. But here’s a couple:
Pinch Of Yum Crunch Bowl – not actually a NEW recipe but probably the meal I cooked the most last year.
Oh and a cheddarupdate for Rosemarie: I just cut open the bag, which had a disturbing amount of liquid squishing around with it… and NOOOO… it smelled like winey-cheese-barf. Did not try. I put it in the bin.
2020 Thoughts: Super grateful that we had our own comfortable house to lockdown in. Grateful that neither of us lost our jobs. Grateful for my home gym and remote coach. Grateful that the hard work all Victorians did during the winter lockdowns paid off and we actually get to enjoy our summer Covid-free (so far). Come on vaccine. I would really like to see my family again.
Well we got the vaccine at least… Scott and I are both triple vaxxed as of a few weeks ago.
Last years goals: Whatever man. Just survive. (yep, accurate.)
2022 Goals: I dunno. Not get covid?
2021 Final Thoughts: This year is finishing off pretty nice… the weather is great, we got to have a normal Christmas, and it’s summer fun times all the time. The government has completely changed their stance on covid and now we’re just letting it rip? We’ll see how this goes. I’m just hoping it lasts because we have a few big things planned in 2022 and I REALLY hope they don’t get cancelled.
