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Hehehe. Melbourne played Collingwood in the first round of the finals at the MCG on a Thursday night. I had to quickly squeeze in a training session at home in the garage after work and then rush into the city to meet Scott. It started POURING pretty much exactly when I had to walk run from the train station to the MCG. I showed up to the MCC (thanks Connor!!) looking like a drowned rat. And tried to take a selfie on the escalator. Melbourne lost. And I forgot my backpack under the seat so Scott (thanks Scott!!) had to run back up to grab it and then we ended up on the train with all the super happy Collingwood people (the worst) instead of with the sad Melbourne people.

Then we had the Ian Laurie Cup on the weekend. I did OK, I guess. I snatched 45 kg and 48 kg, and missed 50 kg. I clean and jerked 55 kg, and 58 kg AGAIN, and the missed the jerk on 60 kg AGAIN. That’s the 4th time I’ve missed 60 in competition!! So annoying. However it was a fun day over all.

I went to another Birdlife photography outing at Banyule Flats. It was a small group this time, which was kind of nice. It was a beautiful day and we saw a decent amount of cool birds. We spent a while tracking a Shining-bronze Cuckoo and a Golden Whistler by their calls and eventually found them, which was neat. I saw them well with my binoculars but didn’t get any good photos.

We saw two Powerful Owls as well. Epic. They are huge.

Tawny Frogmouth pretending to be a stick.

Met up with Donna and fam to go for a walk, and give them the GIANT box of Pokemon cards that Doreen prepared. Always a pleasure to spend time with them.

Scott and I entered our first pickleball tournament. We were in the Mixed Doubles 2.5 or Under category, aka beginners. There were five teams in our category. We won our first two games in the round robin, then lost our next two games. This put us in third position going into the finals but we lost again, so ended up 4th overall. Whatevs, it was fun!! My goals for the tournament were: to not lose every single game (check!), and to get some points from my shots (check!). I can’t wait until we can do another tournament!

Sonika had a bunch of people over on FBTAGF public holiday (Friday Before The AFL Grand Final) for some games and food. It was a nice chill afternoon. I played half a game of Potion Explosion, which was quick to learn and has a fun ball dispenser mechanism.

Check out this super strong momma possum carrying THREE babies on her back!! We could hear something rustling around in the backyard but couldn’t figure out what it was.. turns out one of the babies had fallen off and she was trying to do a dramatic rescue mission. Kinda neat, although possums can be quite the pest.

Best messages to receive from Doreen: “I have fish for you”. We were extra spoiled this time, King George Whiting, already filleted for me! She gave us 7 fillets!! What a treat.

I finished the kids jumper from Vicky. I keep forgetting to bring it when we see the nephews! It was originally supposed to have a roll neck but I didn’t like the look of it so I just did a 1×1 rib instead.

Before
After

This was such a fun project. I saw a video on Knitdiet’s instagram and bought the pattern and yarn immediately. Basically I knitted an enormous bag, then put it in the washing machine for an hour and it came out as a sturdy, normal size bag! So fun!! I’ve been using it to carry my knitting stuff around.

Unpictured stuff:

  • A lot more finals footy, but at home. We weren’t able to get tickets to the next Melbourne finals game (which they lost). And Scott’s team only played in Brisbane (which they won). Scott’s team made it to the Grand Final but it was too hard/expensive to get tickets so we watched it in Boronia with the fam. Brisbane lost.
  • Fathers Day/Myles’ Birthday brunch in Boronia. Scott made cinnamon buns.
  • Scott got laid off. Was a shame because it seemed like it was a good job, until the end.

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When we first booked this Canada trip we thought we’d only be able to see Rosemarie on the weekends so Scott and I booked a three day kayaking trip way up at the Northern end of Vancouver Island with North Island Kayak.

The weather and water conditions were perfect. No rain at all. Mostly sunny with one moody misty morning. At some points the water was like glass! I kept yelling out “How is this the ocean???!!”

We saw tons of humpback whales in the distance from the campground but didn’t end up seeing any orcas. The orcas were behind schedule… yay climate change.

The other people in the group were friendly.. we had a Brit couple, a Swiss girl, an older Canadian man, and our guide was a young Canadian dude. We didn’t have to do any of the cooking or cleaning, and our tents were already set up for us with humongous elevated sleeping mats. It was all very luxurious.

I lost my mind a little bit when I found out they made dairy-free Nanaimo bars for me.

My arms definitely got tired, but thankfully Scott is a machine and just kept paddling, while I took FREQUENT breaks. Basically we’d do about one to two hours of kayaking at a time, broken up by meals and snack breaks. And it was at a verrry relaxed pace. Over the three days we went the entire way around Hanson Island.

One of the most memorable parts for me was when we kayaked through this little crevice at low tide. The rock walls on both sides were covered with super droopy sea anemone and urchins that were now out of the water. The looked like snotty testicles. Never seen anything like that before!! We went through twice. That’s where we saw the giant morning sun star fish as well.

While we didn’t see any orcas or bears we did still see tons of wildlife. I loved when the eagles flew over us, and kayaking past the rock sausages (seals).

BC is great.

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You’ve probably already seen most of these pictures on Instagram/FB but I still wanted to recap the trip again for posterity. It was super fun!!

July 12th was a mammoth day. I went to the gym, then knitting club (Scott came too! The old ladies thought that was a hoot), and then we headed to the airport the cheapskate way via walking+train+train+bus. There was a horrifingly outgoing singing tween at our gate who of course ended up directly behind us on the flight. THANK JEEBUS for headphones omg. I requested vegan food on the flight to avoid dairy and it was ok! Lots of snacks! I only ate one of my emergency pepperoni sticks. (However it sounds like Qantas does it better than Air Canada, from Rosemarie’s report.) I quite enjoyed getting my food first too. I watched three movies and slept a bit.

We arrived in Vancouver still on July 12th, picked up our rental car, which was thankfully not as tiny as I paid for. Stopped at Duffins Doughnuts as per tradition but accidentally got PLAIN DRY old fashioned doughnuts, rather than PLAIN GLAZED old fashioned doughnuts which made me very sad. Thankfully the sadness was short-lived because we had THE BEST YAM ROLL OF MY LIFE in North Van at a randomly picked sushi restaurant. It had two layers of yam!! Everything else was great too. We over-ordered because we forgot how cheap Vancouver sushi is. Then we finally arrived in Squamish and hugged Rosemarie and finally got to lay down horizontally and sleeeeeeeep.

We crammed a lot into the next day as well. No meal left behind, so breakfast sausage and bagels for breakfast, Kululu for lunch. Check check check. Rosemarie and I went to the gym. We hit a wiffle ball around. And tried to stand up paddle board but it was too windy. Scott made it exciting by dropping our waterproof camera into the lake and later finding it.

The next day was big as well. Sense a theme here? We all got up early to catch the ferry to Nanaimo and then drive the rest of the way to Victoria. It looks like a highway on the map but actually it has 900 stoplights and isn’t the most fun drive. We ran a few last minute errands and then finally made it to Leslie and Kyla’s out-of-towners BBQ at their house. It was the first time the Ace Gang had been together in like a decade. It was so fun to hang out with Cassia, Helenka, and Leslie. And tons of others I hadn’t seen in ages like Catty, Monica, David, and their families. We used to spend so much time together.. it still feels so comfortable to hang out even now. We had hotdogs and sorbet and then later a few of us went out for sour beer slushies in the city.

PS Happy 13th Anniversary to Scott and I.

July 15 – Wedding day! We went out for brunch with Cassia and Helenka, then Rosemarie and I got blow outs while the others went sightseeing. We got Korean-Chinese dumplings for a pre-wedding snack and then we headed out to the venue. The ceremony was in a very pretty garden. Again it was fun to hang out with old friends and get pictures of everyone dressed up all fancy. Dinner was delicious and the wedding cake was lactose-free!! Scott and I bailed a little bit early because we are old lol. But Scott got MVP status because he still went to pick up Rose and Lauren later. Best bro-in-law.

We still hadn’t managed to play any pickleball yet so we squeezed it in before post-wedding brunch. Canadians are so lucky that there are free courts everywhere!! Minus one star for these courts being a bit slanted, but plus one star for having a splash pad right next door to cool down! Brunch was massive and it was great to spend more time with Jinnie, who I’d not actually spent much time with in person ever, but still feels like a long-time friend. Rosemarie and Lauren had to head back to Squamish after lunch, and Cassia, Helenka, Scott and I spontaneously decided to check out Butchart Gardens. I thought it was nice but expensive!! On the way back we heard that Leslie and Kyla were having one last gathering by the water near their house so we dropped by to chill and eat more wedding cake. Then finally Scott and I got takeaway Red Fish Blue Fish which we ate in our hotel bed before passing out from exhaustion.

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We caught up on three #SMAJ activities this month.

Our April #SMAJ was go karting at Le Mans. I have been suggesting this for ages!! We each invited a few friends and it was very fun. Actually way more extreme than I expected.. the karts went very fast and I was skidding and screeching around the corners. Afterwards my hands were shaking so bad I couldn’t even check the results on my phone. I felt like I could clean and jerk 150kg. SO MUCH ADRENALINE.

Nosebleed section.

May #SMAJ was the Kings Birthday footy game. Melbourne v Collingwood with 80k+ spectators. I expected Melbourne to lose, but we didn’t! And Scott brought hotdogs in a thermos so we had a hot snack.

And June #SMAJ was a steak dinner. I had eye fillet and Scott had beef ribs. A good fueling comp week meal.

I competed at the Alby Dutton comp. It had been a long time since I last competed and I have gotten a bit stronger since then so I was feeling pretty confident. It started off really well, I snatched 46, 49 and 51kg. I’ve never even tried 51kg in training so that was a fun surprise! A 3kg comp PB. Then I clean and jerked 56, and attempted 60kg twice but didn’t make the jerks. Overall it was a good day, but I do with I made another clean and jerk because that would have been a very very good day. It’s hard to put it all together at the same time though I guess.

I took everything out of my craft station, reorganised it, and put it all back nice and tidy. A satisfying project.

More footy! Scott got given a few tickets to the Brisbane v St Kilda game at Marvel so we took Charlie. I brought my knitting. The seats had cushions and we were very close to the St Kilda coaches box, which Charlie enjoyed.

We finished painting the bedrooms and the kitchen cupboard. The house was a real disaster area for a couple weekends. It wasn’t very fun… those two rooms felt like equal as much work as the whole rest of the house. It was very cold so the paint didn’t dry quickly and the closets have soooo many different surfaces. However it is all done now and I even managed to sell some of the extra Aquanamel on marketplace. Everything is back in place now and we have no plans to touch anything else in this house for a long time. Hopefully.

Unpictured stuff:

  • Again lots of pickleball and knitting club.
  • I sold my broken down e-bike and bought a new secondhand e-bike off marketplace. The lady who was selling it was delightful. She used to do comedy in Melbourne, Scott recognized her from TV! Now she makes sourdough and she gave us three delicious loaves of bread with the bike, haha. Having an e-bike has really helped us get away with only having one car for so long.
  • Jess came for a visit and we went to see Spiderman with Brett as well. That movie seemed like it was really fun to make. Made me want to draw.

I am vowing to make the second half of the year more exciting. We’re off to Canada in a few days, which will be great. And now that we’re done all the house stuff we should be able to do more fun stuff again when we get back. Looking forward to it.

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The main event in February was the start of our renovations. I thought it was very interesting to see the guts of our house. Note the complete lack of insulation!

We were pretty lucky to only have a few hiccups. The biggest one was that after they laid the new tile in the toilet I realised I hated it. To me it looked dirty and water stained… except it wasn’t. After a lot of anguish we decided to make them rip it up and switch it for a different tile. Thankfully they had only tiled that small section, the tile store took the ugly tile back (minus a %), the designer helped me pick a better one, and Serge didn’t end up charging us anything extra. They did end up accidentally breaking the new toilet while taking it back up because it had been so well silicon’d to the floor, so I had to buy another base… but ah well. I am muuuuuch happier with the new tile and am definitely glad we decided to switch it.

Multi-purpose bumper plates.

We had some success in the garden this summer. Lots of roma tomatoes, with less butt-rot than previous years. We also got a lot more Chinese eggplants than before, however they were quite small. Lebanese cucumber grew pretty well, and salad greens were all fine too. We did not have much success with zucchini this year and we don’t know why.

February #SMAJ was dinner at Parcs, a restaurant that ferments lots of stuff and makes their food out of scraps. It was pretty nice.

I went out for Filipino food with some Discord friends and was suuuper excited to order taho after having such delicious taho at Serai last year. However I should have not gone in with such high expectations because this one wasn’t nearly as good. Sigh. The fancy one made the tofu into a soft serve consistency which had great temperature contrast with the hot tapioca pearls. The cheaper (probably more typical!) one just had blobs of plain silken tofu and the whole thing was warm and kind of bland.

Recipe Tin Eats quick ramen from her cookbook, with marinated eggs. Was kinda proud of this meal!

Sock progress. These socks ended up making me quite angry. Will post the finished project later.

Unpictured stuff:

  • We finally got to have our car fixed after The Wombat Incident. The timing was terrible. We had to stay in an Airbnb for a few days because at one point we had no toilet, no car, and no train.
  • Thankfully I have a great coworker who ended up lending us his car that he wasn’t using so we could get around a bit again.
  • We’re not having great success negotiating our new EBA at work so we’ve had a few strikes. It was kind of fun getting people to honk their horns in support although I’m not really sure it accomplished anything.
  • Jess came to Melbourne for her 40th birthday. She had a ladies dinner out in the hills that was nice.. I shoulda got more dressed up.
  • Still training. Still trying to help with Phoenix… with the committee and helping out with competitions.