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Rosemarie requested that I write about PBs, books I read, new board game reviews, and favourite recipes of 2019, so here I go…

PBs: snatch 41 kg -> 46 kg (in training), clean & jerk 49 kg -> 54 kg. The bigger accomplishment has been fixing my back enough that I can do all movements again! I think my PB potential is very good for 2020.

Books (TBH I’m not sure if I read these in 2019 or earlier but here are the last few books I read):

  • How To Stop Worrying And Start Living by Dale Carnegie – some of the chapters at the beginning were useful but then it got a bit too religious to me
  • The Secret History by Donna Tartt – a long one!! About the lives of a few students. I love really long detailed books if the story/characters/world is interesting
  • The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt – again, a pretty long one about a boy who loses his mom and ends up with a priceless painting. They made a movie of it but the book is better
  • This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel – about a boy who wants to be a girl, and a family that loves her. A nice book
  • Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman – pretty much the male version of Don Tillman from the Rosie Project, entertaining
  • Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult – in my opinion it’s a corny book about racism written by a white lady for white ladies. :/ I guess that’s better than no book about racism?

New Board Games:

  • Drop It – a very simple but fun game where you try to drop pieces into the right spots to score lots of points
  • Azul – very easy game to teach people, can get brutal when you get stuck with tons of extra pieces
  • 7 Wonders Expansions – fun on the ipad but a bit too much to keep track of irl
  • 7 Wonders Duel – my very favourite two player game, I’m still not tired of it 10/10
  • Agricola All Creatures Big and Small – ok two player Agricola spin-off
  • Camel Up – fun light game, everyone loves the gimicky dice rolling pyramid and the KRAZY KAMELS
  • Jaipur – two player camel betting card game that we got for Christmas… first impressions are good, Scott likes it a lot
  • Puerto Rico – not as hard as Agricola, kinda fun that you get to do stuff even when it’s not your turn
  • Sagrada – quite simple game with NINETY dice, tricky fun
  • Terraforming Mars – very complicated game with lots of pieces, a bit hard to play well but still fun to play even when you don’t really know what’s going on

Great recipes of 2019:

Praline Almonds – I used the recipe in my ice cream book but it’s basically the same as this (except I used almonds). This was one of the craziest things I’ve ever cooked! It magically goes from a pot of watery almonds to a pot of sandy almonds to a pot of candy almonds. Sprinkled with a bit of salt… so delicious.

No Knead Bread in the cast iron pot – so easy!!! I use this recipe. I did try whole wheat once but it didn’t turn out as delicious as pure white.

Dutch Baby! – so visually spectacular, so easy! I’ve made sweet ones with fruit and ice cream toppings, and also savoury ones with smoked salmon, rocket and parmesan. This is my go-to sweet recipe.

Fish Tacos – Coles just started selling corn tortillas so we can make delicious tacos at home, like this easy Pinch of Yum recipe. I’ve made it with basa or shrimp. I love the garlicky sauce.

Adventures:

We didn’t leave the country in 2019. Actually we barely took any days off at all. The good news is we have enough holiday to go to North America in May 2020 AND possibly Fiji for our 10 (!!) year anniversary later in the year too! 2020 is gonna be gooooooood.

We did check out some new places in Victoria/Australia, here are a few highlights:

A very windy 90 Mile Beach in Gippsland.

A relaxing and fun few days of camping/day hiking at Wilson’s Prom.

On platypus watch in the Otways.

Day off at the Peninsula Hot Springs.

Whale watching on North Stradbroke Island.

Final thoughts: 2019 was not the most exciting year of my life, but we put in a lot of good work to our future. We did the hard stuff of finding a house, working hard, saving, rehab… and very very soon we get to enjoy the benefits of that. I feel very good about 2020. 

MORE: art, friends, gains, nice food, pictures

LESS: worrying, Picross

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We bought a house!

We went to SO MANY inspections and SO MANY auctions together over the last six months, and then it turned out that Scott would have to go to this one on his own, while I was doing a weightlifting competition. He did great! It was one of our very favourite places out of the dozens and dozens that we looked at, and we stayed in budget. Yay!

The details: it’s a 2 bedroom villa about 3 km from where we are now. The living room/dining room/kitchen area is nice and big and open, and it’s got a 1.5x size garage. Scott can walk to work in 15 minutes, and I can go by bike or a short drive. I can’t wait to see it again irl because all we have at the moment is the real estate listing photos. We move in about a month!

I did not have a very good competition. I was very distracted. I snatched 40x/40/43, and clean and jerked 50/53x/54x. I missed my opening snatch for dumb reasons, which meant I didn’t get to try for any comp PBs even though I’ve done several more kilos in training. And then I got red lights on my last two clean and jerks due to pressouts on the jerks. :(

Besides my mediocre performance it was still a fun day, as the Ian Laurie Cup usually is. My weightlifting club organises it so almost everyone from the club competes, plus some surprise special guests. This year one of the guest lifters was Eileen Cikamatana, a phenom from Fiji who has now switched countries to Australia and is breaking world records left and right. She’s loud and powerful and really nice! It was really cool to see how easily she throws around big weights.

My coach forced me to take a rest week after the comp. I tried to sneak in and train and he told me to go for a walk!! Rude! :P

A friend from weightlifting invited me over to do lino printing. It was fun and he gave me a bunch of tools to do it on my own. Great, another hobby. :D

Us at Kathrine’s wedding in Emerald. It was a lovely day and check out that dessert plate!!

Other unpictured things:

  • Scott’s work put on a screening of Frozen 2 so we took April and Rory (and Jemma and Donna). I thought it was funny how much the kids in the theatre were laughing at the Olaf bits, like literally ROFLing hahahahaaaa.
  • I got to have a fancy spa massage where the lady exfoliated my back and stuff. It was nice and relaxing although maybe not as useful as the grit-my-teeth type remedial massages I usually get haha.
  • Scott got very sick again kinda like in France. He was given antibiotics and ate nothing but boiled vegetable soup for quite a while and eventually got better. We still don’t really know what it was though. :(
  • We had my work Christmas lunch at a restaurant in Kew. I got to have calamari, steak, both the brownie and the pavlova desserts, and a bit too much wine.
  • We went to the Malvern wine festival and saw lots of dronk Malvern ladies.

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The last couple months have really revolved around trying to get a stupid house. We’ve upped our pre-approval amount, expanded our search radius, re-evaluated our criteria, checked out about 9000 apartments/villas/townhouses, but no luck so far. Some auctions go 200k over the listed price and we don’t even get a bid in, and a few times we’ve come second, which is even more heartbreaking. This weekend we inspected eight places! A few of them are good. Please cross your fingers for us.

I decided we should take a day off work to do something fun. We drove out the Peninsula Hot Springs and had a lovely time floating around in various hot tubs. I really love the cold plunge pools! It was excellent going on a weekday because it wasn’t very crowded. If anyone wants to go there please let me know because I’m down.

We went out for dinner at the Red Hill Epicurean. There are not that many places open for dinner on weeknights near the hot springs but this was still a good option. They had a nice roaring fire in the fireplace and our food was nice. We got the brisket special and a fancy margherita pizza. The crust was nice and thin and the brisket was nice and tender.

Red Hill Epicurean Menu, Reviews, Photos, Location and Info - Zomato

I competed in a VWA Open comp. It went pretty well, I got 4 out of 6 lifts. I snatched 40/43/46x. The 43 was a 1 kg PB and the 46 was very nearly a huge PB but I stupidly let the bar drop behind me which is automatic red lights. I was very very annoyed with myself about that. I (power) cleaned and (power) jerked 50/54x/54 (1 kg PB).

Training has been pretty good lately. We’ve been re-introducing a lot of things that I stopped doing because of back pain and they’re not causing any problems this time! My main problem these days is that I’m weak AF and can’t stand things up. For example I can power clean much more than I can full clean. I have another comp in 3 weeks and then I think the plan is to not compete for a couple months and just work on all my weaknesses for a bit.

I got my hairs cut. Should have done it a long time ago tbh. Short hair is much better than a ratty ponytail.

We went to Scott’s friends house to watch the Grand Final. The game was a blow out but half time kick to kick was fun.

We made shortbread cookies dipped in white chocolate with pistachio to bring to the party. YUM. They were a hit.

I crocheted this bag. What do you think of Scott’s modelling?

Canadian election ballots are hilariously simple compared to Aussie ballots. I’m not sure our votes made it back in time. Next time I’ll get organised a lot earlier… if I’m still eligible to vote?

I decided to start practising drawing. I actually find it really hard because my hands are so shaky it’s hard to draw straight lines. I’m very curious to see if this project will make my hands get better or if it’ll just stay the same. Perhaps that will be my drawing style… wobbly.

October #SMAJ was a visit to the Cheese Festival with some of Scott’s work friends. Similarly to last year there weren’t a lot of actual cheese vendors there, but there were lots of food trucks serving cheese-centric meals. We had perogies (that weren’t really perogies imo, since instead of having potato in them they had halloumi + cranberry, vegetables, and chorizo fillings), and that pasta where they swirl the hot noodles in a cheese wheel. I enjoyed both. And we bought a lump of cheddar with those awesome crunchy bits in it.

Unpictured things:

  • Caught up with the old gang from my last job. More and more of them have also moved on. I wasn’t even there that long ago and it’s almost a completely different department.
  • Scott went to Sydney for work so we had a gym ladies night drinks at my friends house.
  • We had afternoon drinks with Scott’s work friends in Richmond. I got to eat tater tots.
  • We occasionally get the gang together for trivia.

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Here’s a whole bunch of things we did in May and June 2019, non-chronologically.

Made a bunch of ugly dumplings. They tasted good but the filling in the chicken and prawn dumps was too runny so I was having a hard time forming them. Scott’s pork ones looked a bit better. After this Scott signed us up for a dumpling class for June #SMAJ, which was fun but we didn’t really learn anything new besides how to make the dough, which I’m not sure I would bother doing.

I learned how to make no knead bread. IT’S SO EASY!!!

Just wanted to show off this tasty sandwich on homemade bread.

Myles being adorable at family dinner.

House hunt update: not much. This was us at an auction, ready to bid. But it ended up going for more than our budget. Shrug. The place had spongey floors anyway. There hasn’t been a lot posted lately. We’ve gone to see a few places but none of them have been really speaking to us. We’ll just keep being patient and waiting.

This is the window in our toilet. It has glass slats but it’s just open to the outside, for ventilation?? This is ok in the summer, but in winter it goes down to like 3 degrees!! It made using the bathroom miserable and even with the door shut it still made that end of the house very cold.

I asked for help on Facebook and we figured out I could remove the slats and seal up the window. I used a pillow at first until we could get to Bunnings to get a piece of styrofoam. That beige buddy is wedged in there so well we’ll have to break it to get it out I think. It’s helped A LOT.

Crocheting for warmth.

A fun quick crochet project. Scott thinks I should have left a head hole in the middle.

There was a nurse at work who loves to braid hair. Lucky me! I got so many compliments on these ones at the gym. I think they added 5 kg to all of my lifts.

Auntie Hsi mailed me a quilt! It is extremely bright. It’s very well made and the perfect size and shape to use while sitting down because it covers all the way to your feet. She actually sent another one a couple weeks later too but I haven’t taken a picture of it yet. It’s purple and geometric and really pretty. Thank you so much Hsi!!

I got to go to a dinner meeting with the company that makes the radioactive spheres treatment I help with at work. It was at the Sofitel, which if you have visited me in Melbourne I have probably taken you there, because they have the best bathroom. The view was great and the food was super fancy! I got to try freeze dried mandarin! Not bad for a free dinner and a couple hours of CPD! :)

It’s not all blood, sweat, and tears at the gym.

I had a good comp last month. I made 5 out of 6 lifts. I missed my second snatch attempt which was really frustrating because I had done that weight several times fairly easily before in training. I got it on the third attempt but I wished I had made it on the second attempt so I could have tried something heavier after. Still a 1 kg competition PB though. And then I got all three of my clean and jerks, the last one being a 2 kg PB. Not bad considering I had only been doing power jerks in training for weeks and only switched back to split jerks the two light sessions before the comp. I’m up to a 95 kg total. I really want to get a 100 kg total!!