Scott made chocolate shortbread cookies with the wombat cookie cutter he got at the Lost Trades Fair. He made them again another time with a shredded coconut “fur” as well. Adorbs.
I continued to play pickleball three times a week.
And I continued to minorly injure myself at pickleball. This was from my partner crashing his paddle into my hand when we were both going for the same ball. Lesson learned: remember to call the ball.
PS the bruise is gone but there is still a lump underneath the skin from this… several months later… should I be concerned??
I finished one ribbed sock. I think they look quite professional if I do say so myself. My most successful socks so far.
I continued working on my drab sweatshirt. Pretty happy with this one as well.
I went to a board games night at Bis’s where we played Rosemarie’s copy of Finspan. For a first time playing, five player game, it went quite well, it didn’t drag on too long. Finspan is simpler than Wingspan.
Unpictured stuff:
We did a barefoot bowls session at Scott’s club with my work team. Scott came and helped. We had a good turn out and the bbq was great and everyone enjoyed the cheap prices at the bar.
Scott had an interview at UniMelb and ended up getting the job! Hooray!!
So after Malaysia, Rosemarie came back with me to Melbourne to hang out with us for a couple weeks while Scott was still not allowed to BLT (bend, lift, twist). She is a good sister/sister-in-law.
As usual we tried to cram a million things in so we had to have a group meeting about our goals, and a whiteboard, and a schedule. This is normal family behaviour, right? Rosemarie wanted to see an emu in the wild… unfortunately we didn’t find any of the four-legged variety for her.
We checked out Moomba. Saw some waterskiers and some jetpack people and some skateboarders. Got tacos and horchata from Dingo Ate My Taco.
Piccolina vegan pistachio ice cream. Yum.
We made Nagi’s beef rendang and tried three player Unfair a couple times. Still hate it. Scott sold it after that.
Rose and I drove across town so I could play free pickleball and she could have a swim. Then we went to Girls & Boys ice cream shop, the completely vegan ice cream shop I love. The lady scooping our ice cream told us about her explosive diarrhea. But the ice cream was amazing, as usual.
The next day I dragged Rosemarie to my usual pickleball session where we accidentally dressed the same and confused every single person there. They still have not recovered from this.
We went to the new St Kilda Pier to see penguins for free. They haven’t opened the penguin viewing platforms though so instead you have to cram together at the fence and hope a penguin decides to come out into the open. A few did, but I forgot to put the memory card in my camera so this fantastic phone picture is the only photographic evidence you’ll get.
Rosemarie really wanted to use our new mixer to make a pavlova. It turned out great! We brought it to family dinner at Jemma’s house.
My friend Steph told us about a free archery session we could do for International Ladies Day. It was fun to try a new thing and catch up with Steph (unpictured).
White-plumed HoneyeaterMagpie GooseA lot of Magpie GeeseEmu
We went on an excursion to Serendip Sanctuary, near Geelong, to try and find Rosemarie an emu in the wild. It’s a lovely state park, with lots of different short walks and bird hides. The emu was technically in an unenclosed area, however I think it does get its food from the park, so not sure if that counts as wild or not. Most of the emus I’ve seen have been in campgrounds though, so I guess that’s just kind of how they get their food.
On the way back we stopped at Tofu Shoten, where we ordered one of everything. This was something like a strawberry mochi red bean deluxe dessert. It had a lot of elements. I liked some parts but not the others. Rose and Scott got things with matcha and coffee and I can’t remember what else. We also bought some biscuits that I really liked, and some savoury tofu for cooking later.
Cookin’ sisters.
Our final project was to make roti at home. The dough was easy enough to make in the mixer, and once we accepted the sheer quantity of Nuttelex we needed to stretch and form and shape and fry the roti, they turned out pretty good. We made plain roti and egg roti, served with a random curry pack we had in the freezer, and then a dessert course of Mars bar roti. Epic meal.
Unpictured stuff:
Between each of these activities, we played A LOT of board games. We played Everdell, Orleans, Kingdomino, Wingspan, Unfair, Qwixx, Empire’s End, Drop It, Welcome To, Deep Sea Adventure, Concordia and Crokinole.
We did NOT play Finspan because it arrived two hours after Rosemarie left. Womp womp.
We took Rose to the footy and we got drenched by ice rain and had to move undercover but still had a good time.
Rosemarie helped me fix up the backyard that desperately needed some attention. We did some major lemon tree prunage. Thanks sister.
We went to trivia in the boonies with Ash and Charlie and we won!
Rose did a bit of work, Scott did a couple job interviews.
All in all, it was an excellent visit and we were sad for her to leave. I wish we could spend time together all the time.
I watched a lot less TV this year and instead started listening to audiobooks, which works a lot better with knitting as I never used to look at the TV enough to follow what was happening. That plus bed time reading.. I got through a lot more books than last year! These were my favourites:
Solito by Javier Zamora – intense true story of a little poop-obsessed kid trying to get from El Salvador to USA
In Memoriam by Alice Winn – man, WWI really sucked
Know My Name by Chanel Miller – the world is so exhausting and unfair
Five Little Indians by Michelle Good – another pretty sad book about kids that had to go to residential school in British Columbia
Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin – at times frustrating, but interesting story about friends that make video games
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi – multi-multi-multi-generational story about a family from Ghana to USA, my favourite part: when they said segregation wouldn’t have been so bad if the white people just left them alone
Greenwood by Michael Christie – another Canadian book, makes you grateful for nature
Educated by Tara Westover – shocking, fascinating story of a girl with insane Mormon parents
In summary, the more depressing or disturbing the better, especially if also set in Canada.
Board games:
I played 21 games this year, with 26 different people, in 11 locations.
14 were new games! Everdell, Unfair, Empire’s End, Scribbly Gum, Inis, Pollen, Brass: Birmingham, Disney Villainous, Portrayal, Quadrapolis, Habitats, Vivid Memories, Zoo Vadis, and The Fuzzies. Definitely not all of those new games were good. Brass was so confusing, Villainous was torturous with 6 players, and Zoo Vadis was SO annoying as a quiet person. But I really enjoyed Empire’s End, Pollen (going to make my own travel version), Quadrapolis, and even The Fuzzies (Jenga with pompoms).
Our most played game, by far, was Wingspan. Mostly on Steam with Scott and Rosemarie on the weekends. I played 39 games with Rosemarie over the year! (Of which she won 48% of them!!!)
PBs:
No snatch PBs. Clean and jerk 58kg -> 59kg in comp. Total 108kg -> 109kg. No other PBs on squats, deadlifts or presses. No wonder I felt like retiring.
Pickleball game has improved heaps but not as easy to measure.
Year of the beanie, apparently! Learned colourwork, continental knitting, intarsia and cable knitting.
2024 goals: Use camera more!!! (That dusty thing in the corner?) Design bird sweaters. (Started this, then abandoned after I realised designing clothing patterns is an extremely difficult task due to people coming in many many different sizes.) Be more comfortable being me. (Maybe a bit TOO comfortable, jk.)
Last years thoughts: “Hopefully Scott ends up getting a new job soon so that we go back to traveling and doing more fun stuff again.” HA HA HA. :(
This years thoughts: While it mostly didn’t seem that bad at the time, upon reflection, 2024 wasn’t our best year. Unemployment x2, injury, chronic illness, saving up for trips that might not actually happen, and leaving weightlifting. But alas, we truck along. Hopefully we can get things back on track again in 2025.
We had a really fun Saturday where we did a pickleball tournament in the afternoon, then went out for dinner in the city, and then went to a concert. And the only picture I took was our food. Typical.
The tournament was the Maroondah Classic and we did the Mixed Doubles 3.0 and under category. From memory we won three and lost three games, and ended up in 4th place. Classic. It was fun and we saw lots of pickleball friends at the competition.
We had Roule Galette for dinner. I had a breakfast-y one with ham and eggs and swiss cheese, and Scott had something with apple and camembert. A delicious quick dinner. Then we saw Lior at the Melbourne Recital Centre (my new favourite venue since going to see the Wallace and Gromit thing). It was a nice concert, very relaxing.
I mentioned in my last post that I stopped doing weightlifting. Instead I started playing pickleball three times a week, swimming, and signed up for a sewing class. If I finished work early on a sewing class day I figured out I had enough time to drive to Fitzroy, go for a swim there, get plant based ice cream, and then go to the class. A very productive and fun day.
The sewing class was good, it was nice to get some guidance and learn the proper way to do things. I made a jumpsuit and a pair of shorts in the three classes.
Spontaneous momo lunch (and fabric shop). We also had pani puri which was so fun! And a “salad” that was definitely not healthy haha.. it seemed to be made mostly of crispy noodles and rice krispies. I don’t know what spices Nepalese food uses but it’s so neat to eat a different flavour profile than we are used to.
It was really hot this day, ok.
Unfortunately this is when things started to go bad for us.
Scott got a really bad headache after playing hockey, which everyone decided was concussion. More about this later. And then in the same week, he got laid off from work. So no more sewing classes. Scott spent a lot of time lying down in the spare room in the dark.
A concussed guy harvesting garlic. And French braiding garlic is easier than hair, haha.
We’d been growing this garlic for months!! One morning Scott told me to come outside and look because he thought the garlic had been trampled. Every single plant was now lying down on the ground instead of growing straight up like the day before. Apparently this is how soft neck garlic tells you it’s pretty much ready for harvest. Exciting! We got a decent harvest, although some of them are pretty tiny. We still haven’t actually tried any of it because we keep getting given a new bulb of garlic in every food delivery box, although as I’m writing this now I realise I think we need to just use it anyway.
Games night as Bis’s featuring crazy snacks that Bis and Yay brought back from Europe and Japan. Including… PLANKTON chocolate. I’m not even joking. Now I know next time I go on a trip I need to find the absolute weirdest food ever to bring back as a gift for Bis, lol. Yay brought back the most delicious fluffy soft fruity pillow mochi that I love soooooooooo much.
We played Zoo Vadis, which I hated because it involved loud negotiating, and Habitats which was good except everyone got too distracted by trying to find the exact right animal token even though it didn’t actually matter which token you used.
What pepperoni oil stain?
Lunch time jellyfish socks are coming along. I made a mistake though and accidentally knitted the whole foot part without switching back to the larger needles so they are very narrow. Who do we know with size 8ish, but very thin feet?
Rosemarie’s sweater almost done. I had to do all sorts of knitting math to try and maximize every meter I had of the yarn because I only had JUST enough to finish. Thankfully Rosemarie doesn’t have quite as freakishly long torso as I do.
Unpictured stuff:
We had a family lunch at Brett’s on Melbourne Cup Day. Love a public holiday that no one cares about the reason for having the public holiday any more.
Played games at Maz’s. We played Lords of Waterdeep (classic) and Quadropolis (simple planning type of game).
We had brunch out with Scott’s friends’ family that live very close to us but we don’t see very often (well actually I haven’t seen them since our WEDDING PARTY, lol). Scott made their daughter a crochet Pokemon thing that was a hit. They started playing pickleball so maybe we will see them more often now.
We had a fun board game day at our house where we played Lords of Waterdeep with all the expansions and had a mega sandwich buffet with good bread from Baker Bleu, and Golden Soup with crunchy chick pea topping.
We were going to have another boardgame night the following weekend with different friends but ended up having to cancel because I got mega sick. I thought it was just a bad cold at first, then started to feel better mid-week, even well enough to go to training on Wednesday morning, but then I got much much more sick after that and ended up taking the entire week off work. I completely lost my sense of taste and smell for about a week as well. But tested negative on several different covid tests! Weird.
Luckily I was well enough to go to watch the Geelong-Brisbane finals game with Scott and Donna and her whole family. (I mega bundled myself.) We had great seats. The kids were a bit devo when Geelong lost but Scott was elated as that meant his team was making it to the Grand Final again (and he had a connection to get a ticket).
Then Scott started to feel sick! I was worried for him because it took me a full 9 days to feel well enough to do anything and he had just spent $800 on a Grand Final ticket that was about 5 days away at that point. But out of sheer will and determination, he seemed to have cured himself in time and he had a great day at the Grand Final (Brisbane won, by a lot).
He did not feel well enough to go to the showing of Wallace and Gromit Wrong Trousers with live brass band with me during the week, so I took my friend Charlie instead and we had a great time. The band played a a bunch of random amusing songs at the beginning, and then they played the whole soundtrack along with the movie on the big screen. I LOVED IT SO MUCH. And then we got Japanese food for lunch near by and it was an excellent day overall.
Rosemarie’s sweater progress! That thin blue tubing (barber cord) can attach right onto the ends of your needles so you can make the circumference big enough to try stuff on as you go. I ordered it for a few dollars off Amazon. Neat! I decided to do the neck and sleeves before I continued on with the body, which is different to how the pattern is written but I think helps with keeping motivation up by getting the harder parts out of the way sooner.
Unpictured stuff:
Scott took Myles to see Transformers One at the movies for his birthday. I was still sick so I stayed home, which deeply concerned Myles at first… until he remembered that I could watch it on Disney Plus later. Hehehe.
