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Pat turned 70 and the whole family got together for a succulent Chinese meal in Boronia. It’s always nice to have the family together (only missing Michael and Luca), and I think Pat really liked it because he teared up a bit when he thanked us all for coming.

We had the girls over for a sleepover before Ava and Jess’s flight back to Sydney. We played some games and watched a movie and had snacks. I heard a lot of thumping and bumping coming from the living room over night!!

An elder millenial giving up her skinny jeans (for now). Ava is my style inspiration.

Geared up for an excursion into and onto the roof. A lot of the insulation had been thrown around during the renovations so we spent some time nestling them all back in place. It felt like doing every single hip mobility exercise in a row. I think it’s worked though (along with some of our other draft reduction projects) because this winter hasn’t felt quite so miserable as the last few.

Michael and Gina had us over for an excellent lunch. I felt like we were at a Japanese restaurant! We played Critter Kitchen and Nekojima. Critter Kitchen is really fun! Lucky that we won that from Sonika’s raffle.

Dumpling dinner in the city. Scott was very brave wearing his brand new hoodie, I definitely would have dropped something on myself.

Scott organised for us to do a printmaking class in the city for one of his #SMAJ activities. It was fun, although I felt very rushed, but maybe that is good for me, to not try to perfectionize every activity.

Scott and I did a pickleball tournament at Eastern Indoor Centre and managed to come second! The tournament ran very far behind schedule and we had to wait AGES in between games so it was a weird evening of warming up and then getting cold and having to warm up again. We only finished second in our pool to make it into the semi finals, but played very well in the semis to make it into the final! And then we got smashed in the final, haha.

We had a family birthday dinner at Jemma’s. Myles and I made lots of origami shuriken, which he later combined into a ULTIMATE SHURIKEN. Love it.

Tiny bit of progress on the cable knit blanket.

Unpictured stuff:

  • So much pickleball. Social sessions, drills, and private lessons. I also did a DUPR session at Eastern Indoor with a random old man partner to try and get used to the courts/balls before the tournament. Good thing I did because I was hitting everything out of bounds that day. Sorry partner.
  • Scott worked hella overtime running exams. Very long days for him. He has a lot of TOIL.
  • I went to a Discord meetup. Was nice to see everyone again and meet a few new people as well. The highlight was the apple caramel slice that one person brought. Delicious.
  • I started doing Bodypump classes at the gym near my house. It’s a bit silly and I spend a lot of time flailing around, but it’s also fun and at least I am doing something. Gym motivation is very low these days.

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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 flooring got done! You’ll see a bit here, but I think I’ll save the actual pictures for its own post.

    Breakfast of champions: Chiko roll (like a giant Australian spring roll) that Scott chucked in his parents air fryer for me before I got up, tropical juice with creatine, magensium and Telfast. Lol.

    Sanding and wiping between coats of paint. The worst.

    This is just like the cottage photo album… mom often took pictures while Rosemarie or I were actually doing work so it looks like we did everything.

    We managed to get the baseboards painted in one weekend and then we were finally able to put our furniture and stuff back to normal. Felt great.

    Snooping on the auction next door. It ended up getting passed in but it’s sold now and we have neighbours again.

    We hosted Mothers Day brunch at our house. Terrible picture but it was a feast. Especially because we incorrectly thought Brett’s family was coming, so we had tons of extra food. We made cinnamon buns, bacon, a hashbrown egg casserole thing, and fruit.

    Then MEP and Paul arrived! They stayed with us off and on in between various side trips to Sydney, Great Ocean Road, and the Rotary conference.

    I took a day off work and we went to the new spa on the Mornington Peninsula, and then had Red Gum BBQ for lunch. A pretty good way to spend a wintery Melbourne day.

    We went to Philip Island one weekend, which I will make into its own post as well.

    Met up with some more distant family for a meal at China Red. I think everyone enjoyed the Melbourne dumpling experience. We got to order on a touch screen!

    Of course we played games. We taught them Wingspan, Azul, and Agricola. I had been weary to teach people Agricola for a while but actually it was totally fine and they picked it up quickly.

    Post-pickleball tourist stop at the Brighton Beach Boxes. We were not dressed properly. I think a group photo exists, but I do not have it.

    I think they had a nice time however I don’t think they liked the temperature of our house, haha.

    Finished a pair of Halfsies socks. They work up pretty quickly! However they’re not super comfortable tbh. Inside socks, I guess.

    Unpictured stuff:

    • I poisoned myself with a soy milk bubble tea. I think I can add soy milk to the list of things that give me hayfever mouth and face symptoms (along with raw apples, carrots, stone fruits.)
    • Got our 5th covid jabs.

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    April mostly revolved around painting our house.

    We used to have this big crack in our living room ceiling, and the whole ceiling was sagging down quite a bit. Apparently the drywall was too old and damaged to push back up any more so Scott arranged for some plasterers to come and replace the whole ceiling in the living room area right before Easter. The plan was to buckle down and get tons of painting done over the long weekend after the ceiling was fixed up.

    Unfortunately once they pulled the old plaster down they found that the ceiling joists were all coming apart. Some of them were only held on by the last centimeter of nail. Terrifying.

    So the plasterers left and we had to find someone to help us push our ceiling back together whilst living in an extremely drafty, dirty, scary house. Thankfully Serge, our bathroom builder, was free on Easter Monday and thankfully the beams were able to bend back into the right place. Finally the plasterers came back and finished the job the following week.

    After that whole ceiling debacle it felt like we spent every single spare moment of the rest of the month catching up on painting. I did a lot of the prep and cutting in, Scott did all of the rolling, including the living room ceiling, which took I think 4 coats all together and nearly killed him.

    It was not the best time.. but we were trying to finish before the flooring people were booked to come.

    Grey hair or paint? Who can tell?

    The trim was the worst part. Hopefully it doesn’t all peel off.

    We managed to get everything done in time. Well we still have to do the bedrooms. But all the main areas are done.

    Still managed to fit in lots of knitting time. So many WIP pictures… but no pictures of the finished pieces. Will work on that.

    Takeaway momo meal from Momo Shop in Hughesdale. Everything was delicious!!! We had four different types of momos (brisket, pork, chicken, and mushroom) and a really tasty side salad (sprouts and fermented greens). Would totally order this again.

    Finally it was time for the flooring people to come. We moved all the furniture into the garage and bedrooms, and then headed out to Boronia for a few nights at Hotel Jorna.

    Unpictured stuff:

    • Still keeping up with the usual stuff like knitting club, pickleball, trivia.
    • We went out for a friends birthday dinner at B’Churrasco, one of those Brazillian restaurants with unlimited meat. It was overwhelming, fun, and pretty delicious. I definitely had enough protein that night.
    • Met up with old work friends for dinner and comedy. We saw Wil Anderson. He talks very fast! We got good value out of our tickets, haha.

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    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.

    Much concentration.

    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.

    New game! Viticulture.

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

    Wingspan with new friends.

    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.

    Sweater progress.
    Scott’s footy themed tourtiere.

    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.