Tag: melbourne

October 2022

November 6, 2022 by Katrina·0 Comments

OK well in October I took plenty of pictures! Long post ahead!

We have been playing lots of pickleball again. I even got an upgraded paddle! We have been playing with the Bayside Pickleball Club and have been improving every week.

Another one of Scott’s (belated) #SMAJ activities was dinner at Serai in the city. It’s a fancy Filipino restaurant with a lot of stuff cooked over wood fire. It was all lovely if you didn’t think about the price. We had coral trout, broccolini, calamari, and hashbrowns with peanut sauce. The highlight for me was the dairy free dessert called Taho. It is made with soy ice cream, brown sugar syrup and tapioca pearls. The girl told us to stir it all up. Delicious!

Our friends Jen and Robert ran a private pottery workshop for a small group of friends. It was epic. We started with making some pinch pots, then did a bit of wheel throwing, and then did some large pieces where we painted coloured clay onto newspaper and then transferred it onto the slabs of clay which we layed over big molds. We got to pick what glaze we would like them to put on each piece and they are going to finish them all up for us. I can’t wait to see the results! It was a lovely afternoon.

We stopped in Box Hill on the way home for dinner. We randomly picked this Uyghur restaurant called Dolan On Silk Road because it seemed to be quite busy, and it turned out to be great! We ordered this massive lamb and bread platter which had a nice flavour and lots of vegetables and sauce. Fun to try a new cuisine. Everything the people around us were eating looked great too.

My work did a Medical Imaging Bake Off and it was pretty much the best day ever. I made a lemon blueberry yogurt cake that was decent but not prize-worthy. It was so moistly that the icing sugar I sprinkled on top got absorbed almost immediately.

I tried nearly everything. Even though we took tiny slivers of each thing it still put everyone into a sugar coma.

I went birdwatching with a bunch of oldies in Corinella. It was a weekday outing so I think the age group was extra skewed towards… retired. I didn’t get any good pictures but we did see lots of birds. The highlight for me was the Crested Shriketit, as I had never see one before and they’re pretty cool looking. It was nice to get out on a particularly lovely day.

I thought the birdwatching was going to finish at 12pm like it said on the website so I didn’t bring a packed lunch. Ohhhh I was so jealous of everyone’s delicious looking sandwiches when they stopped for a picnic lunch before continuing on to site number two and three!! Instead I bailed after site two and got Maccas on the way home. This is what a burger looks like if you ask for +2 pickles. Pickle overload!!

I did a quick volunteer session on the computer at the tiny girls session of Victorian Senior Championships. Always inspiring. It rained a lot.

Speaking of rain. Snails absolutely decimated our garden. We pretty much had to start everything again after snails ate all of our seedlings (two coriander, four cucumber, three eggplant…) The snails ate $15 of marigold flowers in one night.

After that we ordered the green garden box tent and these plastic cones which have been helping. Mesh food covers also help. And every night after dark we go out and stomp snails. In one week we killed NINE HUNDRED SNAILS. Our backyard isn’t even that big!!! They were literally everywhere, all over the sides of the garden boxes, the ground, the side of the house, the fence. It’s like the grossest Easter egg hunt ever. If you want to see a disgusting picture of mass amounts of gross snails, click here.

We are possibly winning though, because this week there have only been a few every night. We’re hoping the constant rain has ended and we’ll be able to uncover stuff soon, because we also need to let the bees in for pollination.

Gardening is hard. I can’t believe the first year we basically just chucked everything in and did almost no maintenance and everything grew very well.

I got quite a bit of hair cut off. It’s a bit crazy. But I re-remembered that it actually only takes like 2 minutes to blow dry my hair when it’s this short so I’ve got it semi under control again.

Doreen have me a couple snapper which I attempted to filet with my fish knife from last Christmas. I think i did ok considering they were quite small! I also learned how to gut the fish this time too.

I went to watch Scott play hockey before going to a Diwali Halloween party. Diwaloween.

I tried candy corn for the first time and I thought it was fine? I don’t get the hate. The party had a lot of delicious food.

Rosemarie mailed me some clothing and some cascatelli!!! She is the best! We had it with a sausage pasta and it really did have great forkability, sauceability and toothsinkability! If I lived in USA I would use it as my go-to pasta for sure.

True love is Scott making me a tiny container of gravy to go with my lunch tourtiere when he hates the stuff.

Lactose free ice cream with chocolate coated pretzels and a fudge ripple. I just used (expensive) lactose free cream and milk to make it.

Korean gochujang bbq short ribs. They took 4 hours in the oven!! Worth it, this was delicious. Can’t link the recipe because it’s from Nagi’s new cookbook.

Scott says I should have just stopped here.

I finished my sweater!!! It’s super warm and cozy. I just finished blocking it so I’ll take better pictures next time I’m home during the day. The forecast for this week is 25-29°C… so might not get much use out of it any time soon.

Unpictured stuff! This is the post that never ends!

I risked doing three different activities on an on call day: an online CPD seminar mostly about brain PET, afternoon weightlifting training, and post-training pizza with weightlifting pals. Thankfully I didn’t get called in and got to do everything!
That same day Scott went down to Tarwin for his cousin’s wife’s birthday bash. I enjoyed my alone-y evening.
We had a nice lunch at Dean and Ness’s new house.
More trivia with Ash and Charlie.

September 2022

October 25, 2022 by Katrina·0 Comments

Went to the footy twice. Melbourne lost twice.

September was all about footy finals. Melbourne and Brisbane both made it. Melbourne went into the finals in good position, but lost two weeks in a row. Brisbane went into the finals in worse position, but won two times in a row, but then unfortunately lost the preliminary final. Bummer. At least we didn’t have to spend thousands of dollars on Grand Final tickets.

Instead we watched the Grand Final in Boronia with the family. It was a nice chill day.

I went in to the Ian Laurie Cup feeling pretty good. I hadn’t competed in many months so I thought PBs would be inevitable. However they were… evitable. I did quite terrible. I only made my opening snatch and my opening clean and jerk. Yikes.

I am blaming it on my bodyweight, haha. I had unintentionally lost a bit of weight a couple weeks before the comp so decided to go down to the 64kg bodyweight category. I was thinking that if I made the same total as last time but at a lower bodyweight I would go up a grade (to J, LOL). However instead I actually did much much worse, like two years regression. So now I’ve just decided to eat everything in sight and fully embrace the 71kg category.

My next competition will be right before Christmas.

A rare 6 player game. We’ve only played it with Scott and I. First impressions are good but need to play more.

We had a fun Queens Death Day (it’s what she would have wanted). We went to Bis’s place to play Wingspan with some of my Discord friends, and then went in to the city for dumps. It’s always great getting dumplings with big groups because you get to try so many different things.

Scott made the pastry and I mostly followed this recipe for the innards, but I added small cubes of potatoes before baking to bulk it up. I was worried the pastry wouldn’t cook properly because it didn’t say you had to blind bake it, but it worked perfectly. No soggy bottoms.

Unpictured stuff:

I went to a potluck at Bis’s place. It was epic, we had so much food. The highlight for me was Sally’s shawarma… she even found those pickled purple turnips that I miss so so much.
We got the garden ready for summer. It started off well, but then literally everything got destroyed by snails. So we had to start again, with better defences. We’re still struggling with the battle against the snails. Over the past three days we have stomped about 600 of them, not even exaggerating.
The designer came over to look at our house to help start our renovation process. (We want to re-do the bathroom and laundry room, and a small addition to the kitchen.) I told her my ideas, she pointed out lots of problems that we hadn’t thought of. We had to wait until she finished her masters degree so we haven’t gotten anything back yet, but it should be ramping up in the next few weeks. I am excited to see what she comes up with.
We went to a 1st birthday party that had 200 people invited. INSANE. We barely saw the kid hahahah. The food was great.
Scott’s lawn bowls season has started so he’s back to doing stuff every day. Bowls, hockey, running, garage gym, and sometimes filling in on people’s soccer teams. Busy boy.
Oh after about a year of waiting I finally got to see the allergy doctor to find out about solving my hayfever problems. However after a lot of testing I seem to only be allergic to birch pollen (which I already knew), olive tree pollen, and a few other random things that I wouldn’t actually be exposed to. And interestingly, not grass. There are not a lot of birch trees here so it’s a bit weird that I get so many symptoms. The doctor asked if I wanted to try grass allergy shots anyway even though I didn’t react to grass on the skin or blood tests but I decided not to because I felt like I’d spent enough money already. Not entirely sure what to do tbh. For now I’ll continue with my daily Telfast and nasal spray.
Scott is extremely behind in #SMAJ activities. We did do one, I don’t know which month it represented… a delicious feast of a Vietnamese meal at St Cloud after my weightlifting comp. We got the Feed Me banquet because we couldn’t make any decisions and it came with so much food we had two full lunch servings leftover for the next day.
Got the trivia ladies back together for a trivia night. Was a nice evening. Another establishment that has decided to not bother with dishes and serves everything in cardboard though. My enchiladas got served in a cardboard trough.

August 2022

September 11, 2022 by Katrina·0 Comments

I did not take many pictures in August. But it was a pretty good month!

Of course I got to go on my Solo Trip, which I already blogged about.

I also got to have a half price spa treatment at Endota, which included a massage, a facial, and a pedicure. It was extremely relaxing and nice.

We finally stopped procrastinating and got someone to replace the door on the back of our garage that was disintegrating. Now we have a proper exterior door. I painted it, I think it turned out pretty good.

Scott got covid, which is obviously not the best… but I thought I had mild covid… Scott’s covid was even more mild. He didn’t even cough! So that’s pretty good.

He had to isolate at home for seven days but felt fine enough to work from home, and I was still allowed to do my normal stuff as long as I rapid tested every morning before work.

I went for a spicy Indonesian meal with Sophie to get me out of the plague house. She’s fun to eat out with because she always suggests ordering something very random and weird and sometimes they turn out great.

The last AFL game of the season was my team vs Scott’s team. In Brisbane, so we didn’t go, but we watched on TV. The Dees crushed the Lions so badly that it actually bumped us up into second position on the ladder going into the finals (which should have been a great advantage but today as I am writing this post I know that we wasted it, lol).

We went to Belgrave for Myles’ 4th birthday. He really loves those Bakugan ball thingies.

On the way home we bought some horse poo to tumble into compost for the garden. Scott was not very happy tipping the bag into the composter because it was definitely still very poo-y. Hopefully it pays off.

Sophie and I went to Sally’s for dinner, and to convince her to come back to the gym (post babby). We got Indian takeaway and it was nice. The baby is cute too.

My work colleague had a “Sensible Weeknight Birthday Potluck”. I brought seven layer dip. I also got to have lasagna, butter chicken, tuna bake, roasted vegetables, miso soup, ice cream sandwiches, and lots more. I LOVE POTLUCKS. And then I went home at a responsible 9:30pm. Delightful.

I made Alvin’s Drunken Chicken. It uses a lot of bottles of liquid. It did turn out nice though. The chicken was very nice and soft. Mild flavour, but I was able to save the poaching liquid and extra chicken to make chicken and corn soup later which came out really tasty. The bruised salad with the drunken chicken was easy and good though, I’ll make that again soon.

Knitted sweater progress. If I quit now I could have a knitted race bib for skeleton. :P Only 9000 more rows to go (to fit my extra long torso), and the sleeves. I’m hoping the sleeves don’t feel quite so boring as they should work up a lot quicker than the body.

May 2022

June 12, 2022 by Katrina·0 Comments

This will be a short one.

We got back from Canada, had a few days extra holiday at home, and then I ended up going back to work on Monday instead of Thursday because everyone at work had covid and they were desperate for help.

We went to Dean and Vanessa’s wedding celebration in Mornington. I rented a dress that was like a blanket and it was actually great. Lunch was very very nice, and we got to catch up with some friends that we haven’t seen in a while. It was a very nice afternoon.

The Tuesday after the wedding I started to get a sore throat at work. I get sore throats from hayfever all the time, and we still wear n95 masks at work, so I still finished my shift. When I got home I did a rapid test and it was negative.

Wednesday is my day off. I still only had a sore throat so I still went to the gym (it’s not busy in the mornings), but I cancelled my dentist appointment.

Thursday I was coughing a bit in the morning while getting ready for work so I did another rapid test and it went positive immediately!! Isolation begins.

Friday – Sunday I didn’t do much. Although I didn’t feel tooooo bad, just sore throat and cough. Energy was fine. The sore throat was relieved by eating things so I just snacked all day.

Monday – Wednesday I actually felt fine, and if it was just regular sickness I probably would have gone back to work. Instead I just hung out at home and did some chores and finished up some projects.

Scott managed to stay healthy! He was allowed to keep doing whatever he wanted as long as he did a rapid test every day and wore a mask while out of the house. The first few days he worked from home as we just assumed he was going to test positive soon, but by the end of it we figured he might as well go back to work. He’s feeling pretty invincible now.

At the moment I feel fine. Not coughing much. I think I had very mild covid. We’ve been very cautious with my return to weightlifting and it seems to be going well, slowly coming back to normal levels.

I finished my scarf! My first knitting project. Many people had to help me with it. I’m working on a basket-weave circle thingy at the moment, and have ordered yarn to make a sweater next. How hard can it be?? :)

Unpictured stuff:

I voted for the first time in Australia! Voting here is very different than Canada. It’s mandatory, and also preferential voting, so you have to rank every single candidate. Which meant I had to do quite a lot of research to figure out which parties are actually secret racists/crazy people. We had 8 candidates on our ballot, and then the senate one was the length of about 4 pieces of paper and probably had 100 people on it? That one you just had to pick your top 12. Anyway it was a pretty successful election, in my opinion. The good guys won.
Scott’s aunt Kathy had a bbq, which was supposed to be at a park, but then the bbq wasn’t working so we impromptu moved it to Scott’s parents house. So many children running around. Maybe one of them gave me covid.

Canada Week 1

May 31, 2022 by Katrina·0 Comments

Kind of old news at this point but for posterity…

I think I was still a bit dopey from the flight…

Had to wake up though because Rosemarie and Lauren picked us up from the airport in Vancouver and we went directly to Liz’s house in North Van to host a party. Rosemarie prepared lots of Canadian treats for us like perogies, Smartfood popcorn, Canada Dry, party mix and lots of our Vancouver friends showed up! Thanks Liz for letting us stay there!

The next morning we headed back to the airport (via Duffins Donuts ofc) to fly to Ottawa. This is the last picture with Lauren for a while because we had all sorts of problems.

First our flight out of Vancouver was delayed. The lovely Westjet agent tried to help fix up our flights for us but since we had booked on three different tickets he was only able to get Scott on I on a new route via Calgary before that flight filled up, and had to keep Rosemarie and Lauren on the original flight to Toronto that might not make the connection to Ottawa. He offered to switch us back so that we could at least stay together but Rosemarie told us to go ahead and we’d just cross our fingers. Amazing Race style.

The way the flights were staggered we wouldn’t find out if they made it until much later. Poor MEP and Paul had to stay up all night waiting for us and didn’t even know how many of us they would be picking up from the airport.

Scott and I got to Calgary no problemo. But then we saw messages from Rosemarie saying that they didn’t let Lauren on the plane in Vancouver because his ID was expired and that he had to go home. Team member down! And that her connection in Toronto was looking TIGHT.

Scott and I got to Ottawa late but relatively successfully. But then we found out that Rosemarie didn’t make her connection, had to stand in line for hours to get her free hotel, and had to wake up very early to get her new flight the next morning. Which also ended up being delayed because they couldn’t close the luggage compartment door. Poor Rosemarie. Her team definitely lost Amazing Race.

Anyway eventually we all (well… three of us) made it to Mary Ellen’s and dad came over and of course we played some games. Yay.

That night we went to the Haberl’s for a good old fashioned sleepover. It was great. We played lots of games and ate lots of food and laughed a lot. A very lovely time.

3/4 Ace Gang Reunion. Unfortunately Cassia didn’t make it because of Spanish bureaucracy. We got lucky even seeing Helenka… she ended up having her twins very early, a few days after this brunch!!

Scott trying to catch some maple sap to see if it tasted like maple syrup (it does!).

Things relaxed (a bit) after the first few days of the trip. We spent some time hanging out at MEP and Paul’s.

I managed to keep up my training while away. My coach made me a commercial gym friendly leg strength program that was basically max squats all the time. Sometimes Rosemarie and Scott came with me, and sometimes they did other random classes or played pickleball. I am glad they get along so well.

Jill had another memorial party for Joe that just happened to fall when we were in Ottawa. It was nice to see a lot of people I hadn’t seen in ages. And the canapes and cookie favours were delicious!