Here is a whole bunch of pictures of our veggie garden over the last year.

September 2020. Dirt delivery!! Scott did all the shoveling. We still have a significant amount of mulch leftover. I put skewers around all my seeds to keep track of where I planted.

October 2020. Seedlings! Zucchini, spinach, rocket, lettuce. We decided we didn’t have enough space so we ordered one more smaller box for herbs and tomatoes.

November 2020. Things really started growing well. The zucchini got HUUUUUGE!! Tomatoes looking good, carrots and silverbeet growing fine. The bean plants were much shorter than I expected.

November – December 2020. We had a very steady stream of zucchinis going. Never overwhelming. I think next year I will still grow two plants but maybe I’ll start the second one about a month later, rather than at the same time, to lengthen the amount of time we can harvest. Colourful carrots! We never had much success with them other than that particular harvest though.

December – January 2021. It wasn’t all good. I only harvested about 3 beans before the plant got fungus or something and Rosemarie told me to get it out of there ASAP. I also maybe over-pruned our tomatoes and they got crispy and died well before the end of the season should have gone.

February 2021. After I got rid of the beans I planted cucumber. It grew very nicely at first but then also got fungus and died suddenly. That’s rhubarb from Scott’s aunt’s garden.

February 2021. Really nice harvest again. Cucumbers, salad greens, lemons, limes, kale, and tons and tons of basil.

March 2021. Sticky boy. I had no idea what these fungi were. Turns out they’re Bird’s Nest fungi and they spread their spores by putting them in little cups so that when rain drops fall into the cups it splashes the spores out. Cool eh??

May 2021. Herbs!! Basil, chives, coriander and heaps of dill. Way too much dill. Our lemon tree has a few problems but still produces ok.

June 2021. It blows my mind that we could grow things over the winter. We planted sugar snap peas, cauliflower and broccoli and they all grew. The kale and salad greens continued to grow as well, although much slower than in summer.

June – July 2021. The cauliflower started off beautiful but I didn’t know until a bit too late that you should bundle it up so it doesn’t get too much sun, so they turned a bit yellow and funny. Still ate it. Broccoli was great. It grew so nice and healthy and strong. I liked petting the velvety leaves.

August 2021. We pulled out the cauliflower plants and silverbeet plants and buried some compost to prepare one of the beds for this year. We’ll do the same with the close bed but at the moment the broccoli is still producing super cute broccolini and the spinach is still going even though the plants are the OG plants from last year!! (I put a net over the spinach to stop the possums from eating it.) About another month and we’ll start planting again. How exciting!

How we spent our first lockdown. (Besides cooking, I’m saving that for a different post.)

Doing weird household tasks like going under the house to take a look at stuff and thread cables through the floor.

Re-learning how to use a sewing machine so my ears don’t freeze when I’m biking to work.

Finishing crochet projects that I started a year before.

Getting back into cross stitch and re-invigorating my Etsy shop.

Drawing cartoons for my weightlifting club’s newsletter: Isolation Edition.

Playing every single board game we have. I saved all of them to my Instagram stories if you’re interested. A forgotten favourite was Lords of Waterdeep. A forgotten loser was Tsuro of the Seas.

Doing yoga.

Crying that we didn’t get to go to Canada and having to get Rosemarie to mail us all our Arcteryx goodies.

Picking lemons. This doesn’t really fit the post but I’m just so happy with our lemon tree.

For a brief two weeks: Going out for breakfast! Going back to the gym! Having family dinner!

But then cases started going out of control again and we got put back in the strictest lockdown. :(

Everyone loves those emails, right? :P

Well things are pretty crazy aren’t they.

I thought I’d just write a little update about how we’re doing at the moment, in case any one was wondering (probably not)/is really bored (probably yes).

We’re semi-locked down here in Melbourne. They’ve closed schools and non-essential businesses, and are encouraging everyone to just stay home if they can.

Scott’s work is suffering because restaurants can only do takeaway. He still has a job but after the next payday all their salaries are getting cut 50%. Theoretically he should only have to work 50% but I doubt that will happen as he is pretty much always on call.

My work is quiet, but we’ve had to divide into two separate teams to try and avoid having to shut down if one of us gets infected. So some days I will have to work very hard, and some days I won’t do very much at all.

Obviously this could all change any minute.

I’m glad we were conservative with our mortgage.

Not being allowed to go to the gym was a huge change. I got bored of home workouts after the first day (6kg laundry detergent is not enough weight!!) and decided to ask my weightlifting club if they were willing to lend out equipment. At first they said no, but then they came around. I did well in the equipment lottery and ended up with squat racks and all the weight plates I need, plus a bar borrowed from a friend.

Last weekend Scott and I built a mini weightlifting platform in the garage and now I’m pretty much set. The platform is big enough to do all the things I need to do, but because it’s against the wall (so we can still park the car in there) I will have to be quite conservative with anything I might miss behind (ie. snatches). I should be able to do about 90% normal training though, which is great for my body and my sanity.

Other than setting up the garage gym we’ve been entertaining ourselves by cooking elaborate foods (cinnamon buns, homemade bread, perogies etc.) and playing A LOT of board games. We’ve even been playing games with Rose and Lauren over the internet.

The house is already pretty clean and organized but Scott’s been working on pulling down the ivy on the back fences and yesterday I cleaned the gutters. I’m trying to be semi productive and not watch too much mindless TV but we’ll see how it goes. Scott got the entire ER series for me which I’m saving for if I have to do full quarantine. Oh yeah we also did pub trivia on FB live the other night with my friend, and this morning I watched Ben Folds do a live show from his hotel room in Sydney, which both may end up being weekly activities. Kinda neat.

Anyway hope y’all are doing OK. I’d love to know how you are keeping busy too.

The week after we moved into our house was exhausting. Working and unpacking and trying to fix things up the way we like, while realizing that we don’t have any of the right tools… the place was a mess.

I wanted to change all the locks in the house, as you do when you move into a new place. So we unscrewed all the knobs and locks that we wanted to replace and did an inventory and headed off to Bunnings. Only to realize that locks are very complicated and they didn’t have the right combinations of what we wanted. And that one of the holes in the door was the wrong size (not the one in the picture).

So we investigate buying locks online (much easier!) and borrow a hole saw and try to cut the right size hole. And fail. And borrow more tools. And fail. And every day the front door is just flapping in the wind while we’re at work (we could lock the screen door at least). After a week or so we give up and hire a locksmith.

A bathroom tap broke off on like Day 3, lol. Lucky real estate agents. I had intentions on changing it to a lever style tap until I realized that there are about 80 million different types of tap spindles. After three trips to Bunnings I ended up just replacing the knob with the exact same type of ugly knob. At least it was just a couple of dollars.

It took us a whole night and some minor fighting to put up a whiteboard (on a hollow door, had to use weird anchors) and anchor two bookshelves to the wall (multiple trips to Bunnings for a drill, drill bits, stud finder (that didn’t work) and drywall anchors). Scott built those two garage shelves by himself one morning though, which has really tidied up the garage.

I went to Ikea three times to get two more shelves, two bedside tables and a stool, then return a stool, then return the returned stool and get a different stool. I was not aware that bar stools came in different heights. Scott built most of it. Good job Scott!

The dishwasher that came with the house was hilariously named Silencio. One night we turned Silencio on before bed and when I woke up in the morning IT WAS STILL ON. Also it was leaking. So we ordered a new dishwasher.

They were supposed to install it for me. Just as the dudes were leaving he was like “So I have to show you something” and proceeded to show me that he had only actually screwed in the dishwasher on one side because the other side was too far away from the cabinet, and that I wouldn’t be able to use it as is. UGH. So I spent the whole rest of the morning trying to get a piece of scrap wood that I could use as a spacer, sawing it in half with a 10cm hacksaw to double it up because it was too thin, unscrewing and pulling out the dishwasher, rigging up the spacer and then reattaching everything. Thankfully it all worked and it’s secure and running very nicely and very quietly now.

This lil’ buddy also involved borrowing tools, and two trips to Bunnings (drill bit was too dull). Scott’s whole body is sore from doing the drilling but the hose reel is nice and sturdy and very handy for watering the garden. Our plan is to get like four big veggie boxes.

A miserable morning of cleaning the exterior of our old house on a unexpectedly cold and rainy day. :P

So yeah, we made a lot of mistakes. The learning curve was steep. I do have a new appreciation of all the building stuff dad taught me as a kid though, thank goodness I have somewhat of a base knowledge of tools and construction and houses from all those days at the cottage. We wouldn’t be able to do anything on our own without that (and Youtube).

Short term plans:

  • a small shelf in the laundry room to put detergent and stuff on
  • some kind of medicine cabinet in the bathroom for more storage
  • new power point on wall with tv OR thread power and tv cords through crawlspace/roof
  • clean eavestroughs
  • make some kind of bracket for weather station
  • go all the way under the house and take a closer look at everything

Long term plans:

  • fix the water damaged floor in laundry room/kitchen/bathroom
  • ditch carpet and redo floors
  • ducted heating???

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.