Scott made chocolate shortbread cookies with the wombat cookie cutter he got at the Lost Trades Fair. He made them again another time with a shredded coconut “fur” as well. Adorbs.
I continued to play pickleball three times a week.
And I continued to minorly injure myself at pickleball. This was from my partner crashing his paddle into my hand when we were both going for the same ball. Lesson learned: remember to call the ball.
PS the bruise is gone but there is still a lump underneath the skin from this… several months later… should I be concerned??
I finished one ribbed sock. I think they look quite professional if I do say so myself. My most successful socks so far.
I continued working on my drab sweatshirt. Pretty happy with this one as well.
I went to a board games night at Bis’s where we played Rosemarie’s copy of Finspan. For a first time playing, five player game, it went quite well, it didn’t drag on too long. Finspan is simpler than Wingspan.
Unpictured stuff:
We did a barefoot bowls session at Scott’s club with my work team. Scott came and helped. We had a good turn out and the bbq was great and everyone enjoyed the cheap prices at the bar.
Scott had an interview at UniMelb and ended up getting the job! Hooray!!
So after Malaysia, Rosemarie came back with me to Melbourne to hang out with us for a couple weeks while Scott was still not allowed to BLT (bend, lift, twist). She is a good sister/sister-in-law.
As usual we tried to cram a million things in so we had to have a group meeting about our goals, and a whiteboard, and a schedule. This is normal family behaviour, right? Rosemarie wanted to see an emu in the wild… unfortunately we didn’t find any of the four-legged variety for her.
We checked out Moomba. Saw some waterskiers and some jetpack people and some skateboarders. Got tacos and horchata from Dingo Ate My Taco.
Piccolina vegan pistachio ice cream. Yum.
We made Nagi’s beef rendang and tried three player Unfair a couple times. Still hate it. Scott sold it after that.
Rose and I drove across town so I could play free pickleball and she could have a swim. Then we went to Girls & Boys ice cream shop, the completely vegan ice cream shop I love. The lady scooping our ice cream told us about her explosive diarrhea. But the ice cream was amazing, as usual.
The next day I dragged Rosemarie to my usual pickleball session where we accidentally dressed the same and confused every single person there. They still have not recovered from this.
We went to the new St Kilda Pier to see penguins for free. They haven’t opened the penguin viewing platforms though so instead you have to cram together at the fence and hope a penguin decides to come out into the open. A few did, but I forgot to put the memory card in my camera so this fantastic phone picture is the only photographic evidence you’ll get.
Rosemarie really wanted to use our new mixer to make a pavlova. It turned out great! We brought it to family dinner at Jemma’s house.
My friend Steph told us about a free archery session we could do for International Ladies Day. It was fun to try a new thing and catch up with Steph (unpictured).
White-plumed HoneyeaterMagpie GooseA lot of Magpie GeeseEmu
We went on an excursion to Serendip Sanctuary, near Geelong, to try and find Rosemarie an emu in the wild. It’s a lovely state park, with lots of different short walks and bird hides. The emu was technically in an unenclosed area, however I think it does get its food from the park, so not sure if that counts as wild or not. Most of the emus I’ve seen have been in campgrounds though, so I guess that’s just kind of how they get their food.
On the way back we stopped at Tofu Shoten, where we ordered one of everything. This was something like a strawberry mochi red bean deluxe dessert. It had a lot of elements. I liked some parts but not the others. Rose and Scott got things with matcha and coffee and I can’t remember what else. We also bought some biscuits that I really liked, and some savoury tofu for cooking later.
Cookin’ sisters.
Our final project was to make roti at home. The dough was easy enough to make in the mixer, and once we accepted the sheer quantity of Nuttelex we needed to stretch and form and shape and fry the roti, they turned out pretty good. We made plain roti and egg roti, served with a random curry pack we had in the freezer, and then a dessert course of Mars bar roti. Epic meal.
Unpictured stuff:
Between each of these activities, we played A LOT of board games. We played Everdell, Orleans, Kingdomino, Wingspan, Unfair, Qwixx, Empire’s End, Drop It, Welcome To, Deep Sea Adventure, Concordia and Crokinole.
We did NOT play Finspan because it arrived two hours after Rosemarie left. Womp womp.
We took Rose to the footy and we got drenched by ice rain and had to move undercover but still had a good time.
Rosemarie helped me fix up the backyard that desperately needed some attention. We did some major lemon tree prunage. Thanks sister.
We went to trivia in the boonies with Ash and Charlie and we won!
Rose did a bit of work, Scott did a couple job interviews.
All in all, it was an excellent visit and we were sad for her to leave. I wish we could spend time together all the time.
It was a busy month, this is going to be hella long!!
Carrying on the gingerbread house tradition with new friends. :) Carrying on the tradition of having WAY TOO MUCH candy! Building gingerbread structures in very high humidity is not ideal.. there were some struggles. It took a while to figure out which icing would work. But in the end we got there, mostly. Fun was had.
Poor Ash’s house already collapsed by the next morning due to moisture issues.
Scott and I decided that instead of getting each other Christmas presents we would finally get ourselves a stand mixer. I did some extreme couponing and we ended up getting a great price on a fancy Kenwood mixer on Black Friday. It is AWESOME. It has a scale built into it!! I made strawberry cupcakes to break it in.
We had our work Christmas lunch at the Espy this year. There was so much food this year it was ridiculous. I screamed when they brought out an entire dairy free pizza for me as a substitute for the little pieces of deep dish pizza, hahaha. We all brought so much stuff home.
I went to SO MANY Christmas parties. They were all great! Christmas BBQ at Sonika’s, Christmas pool party brunch at Naomi’s, Christmas dinner at Scott’s bowls club, and English Christmas lunch at Maz’s. So much eating. So much fun. I especially liked playing in the pool with Sonny’s kids, and duck fat roasted potatoes at Maz’s.
Some delicious party meals.
Pre-Christmas crochet time with Ava. #summeroflyingdown
Maybe a new Christmas tradition… cinnamon buns for Christmas morning. Next time I’ll use yeast that didn’t expire 4 years ago. They still turned out pretty delicious though!! I stood next to the dough being kneading in the mixer in awe for the entire 8 minutes.
Luca seemed to like the mimic that Scott made for him! He was going around chomping everyone’s limbs.
Christmas Day was the usual in Boronia, an insane amount of presents, an insane amount of food, backyard cricket, chats with family, pictures. No waterslide this year as Shaun’s family had gastro and no one wants that combination. :D
Our December #SMAJ was going to Day 2 of the cricket with Da Boys. I did enjoy the Boxing Day Test this year but I found it hard to see the ball and follow what was happening in real life. Plus it was very crowded. Scott did bring us thermos hot dogs though! We lasted four or five hours before both of us really needed to leave, and we got to see both teams batting and several wickets, so overall a successful outing.
Still playing heaps of pickleball all around the city. I checked out the Eastern Indoor Sports Centre which has actual pickleball lines, for a drills and structured play session. It was good!
Churning out Lake Reed cable knit hats. Fun to learn a new technique! I finished the pink/burgundy one in 2 days for a Kris Kringle gift.
Lake Reed cable knit hat, before and after blocking. Makes a big difference, doesn’t it?
Rosemarie’s sweater, finished! Before and after blocking. Really pleased how this one turned out.
Vacuum packed Bingo and sweater for travel to Squamish. I don’t think Bingo has fully recovered yet.
Unpictured stuff:
Scott has had many MRIs and doctors appointments. The good news is that he’s not concussed and at least we know what the problem is now, and it’s fixable, the bad news is that it’s going to take a little while to get through all the steps, and he might need surgery. He’s still uncomfortable but I guess he’s learning more how to balance lying down time and doing some activities. We’re hoping that we’ll get some updates this week or next week, after all of these public holidays.
We went to trivia at a new place, which is always a novelty, but it was very loud and the seats have no backs and my (vegan) pizza was very wet.
Our belated November #SMAJ was going to see the new Wallace and Gromit movie at the theatre with the Lonard’s. Ava was giggling the whole time. I loved it too.
We had a really fun Saturday where we did a pickleball tournament in the afternoon, then went out for dinner in the city, and then went to a concert. And the only picture I took was our food. Typical.
The tournament was the Maroondah Classic and we did the Mixed Doubles 3.0 and under category. From memory we won three and lost three games, and ended up in 4th place. Classic. It was fun and we saw lots of pickleball friends at the competition.
We had Roule Galette for dinner. I had a breakfast-y one with ham and eggs and swiss cheese, and Scott had something with apple and camembert. A delicious quick dinner. Then we saw Lior at the Melbourne Recital Centre (my new favourite venue since going to see the Wallace and Gromit thing). It was a nice concert, very relaxing.
I mentioned in my last post that I stopped doing weightlifting. Instead I started playing pickleball three times a week, swimming, and signed up for a sewing class. If I finished work early on a sewing class day I figured out I had enough time to drive to Fitzroy, go for a swim there, get plant based ice cream, and then go to the class. A very productive and fun day.
The sewing class was good, it was nice to get some guidance and learn the proper way to do things. I made a jumpsuit and a pair of shorts in the three classes.
Spontaneous momo lunch (and fabric shop). We also had pani puri which was so fun! And a “salad” that was definitely not healthy haha.. it seemed to be made mostly of crispy noodles and rice krispies. I don’t know what spices Nepalese food uses but it’s so neat to eat a different flavour profile than we are used to.
It was really hot this day, ok.
Unfortunately this is when things started to go bad for us.
Scott got a really bad headache after playing hockey, which everyone decided was concussion. More about this later. And then in the same week, he got laid off from work. So no more sewing classes. Scott spent a lot of time lying down in the spare room in the dark.
A concussed guy harvesting garlic. And French braiding garlic is easier than hair, haha.
We’d been growing this garlic for months!! One morning Scott told me to come outside and look because he thought the garlic had been trampled. Every single plant was now lying down on the ground instead of growing straight up like the day before. Apparently this is how soft neck garlic tells you it’s pretty much ready for harvest. Exciting! We got a decent harvest, although some of them are pretty tiny. We still haven’t actually tried any of it because we keep getting given a new bulb of garlic in every food delivery box, although as I’m writing this now I realise I think we need to just use it anyway.
Games night as Bis’s featuring crazy snacks that Bis and Yay brought back from Europe and Japan. Including… PLANKTON chocolate. I’m not even joking. Now I know next time I go on a trip I need to find the absolute weirdest food ever to bring back as a gift for Bis, lol. Yay brought back the most delicious fluffy soft fruity pillow mochi that I love soooooooooo much.
We played Zoo Vadis, which I hated because it involved loud negotiating, and Habitats which was good except everyone got too distracted by trying to find the exact right animal token even though it didn’t actually matter which token you used.
What pepperoni oil stain?
Lunch time jellyfish socks are coming along. I made a mistake though and accidentally knitted the whole foot part without switching back to the larger needles so they are very narrow. Who do we know with size 8ish, but very thin feet?
Rosemarie’s sweater almost done. I had to do all sorts of knitting math to try and maximize every meter I had of the yarn because I only had JUST enough to finish. Thankfully Rosemarie doesn’t have quite as freakishly long torso as I do.
Unpictured stuff:
We had a family lunch at Brett’s on Melbourne Cup Day. Love a public holiday that no one cares about the reason for having the public holiday any more.
Played games at Maz’s. We played Lords of Waterdeep (classic) and Quadropolis (simple planning type of game).
We had brunch out with Scott’s friends’ family that live very close to us but we don’t see very often (well actually I haven’t seen them since our WEDDING PARTY, lol). Scott made their daughter a crochet Pokemon thing that was a hit. They started playing pickleball so maybe we will see them more often now.
We started the month with a belated #SMAJ. He took me to the Accidental Wes Anderson exhibit in the city, which is an art exhibit with lots of people’s pictures that look like Wes Anderson. Like, wide angle, colourful, symmetrical. It was cute. I was really really tired that night for some reason. We had ramen for dinner.
We went to the one year anniversary Palestine rally, which had a nice big turnout. Can’t believe it’s still necessary. At least we get to catch up with some friends at the same time.
I went to the Finders Keepers Market and spent too much money on cute things. I got an olive oil bottle, some bird pins, a beeswax sandwich bag, a patch to put over the pepperoni oil stain on my favourite hoodie, and a bunch of random stickers.
I was really craving a big ass sandwich (BAS) afterwards. It took me a while to find somewhere that was open for lunch on the weekend but eventually ended up with this rare beef sandwich from Hector’s Deli, which really hit the spot.
I was planning on competing in the Ian Laurie Cup in November, but it ended up being cancelled and instead I ended up doing Victorian Championships. Normally I wouldn’t even have qualified for this competition, but this year they decided to not have any entry requirements so it was kind of a special opportunity, which made me feel excited and nervous and also awkward. They were running quite behind schedule so I had a really long time to wait after weighing in before my session would start so I lay outside on the grass for a while. The ear of my headphones broke off, which was annoying.
Anyway despite having a shortened prep and a week or so off while I was sick, the competition ended up going well for me, nearly perfect really. My friend Pitty came to coach me and he was great. I didn’t really care how I performed in the snatches so of course I got all three attempts easily (45, 48, 50). Not a PB but very happy to get 50kg again.
I clean and jerked 55 and 58 pretty easily but missed 60kg for the millionth time. Frustrating. But that’s still a 1kg PB total so yay. And I got to have these cool photos taken so that’s neat as well.
The next day I went back to volunteer/watch Steph/help Nic. Big weekend.
I actually haven’t been back to training since the comp. Instead I’ve been playing tons of pickleball and swimming and doing some quick squat sessions in the garage. Still just as busy as before but it’s really nice not to have to be so strict with everything, and it’s feeling fun.
I finally cooked the frozen garfish that Doreen gave me a while ago. They were already cleaned so all I had to do was roll over them with a rolling pin, pull out as much of the spine as I could, then I breaded them in flour and panko and shallow fried. They were delicious. It’s great that you don’t have to worry about the small bones, they’re soft enough to eat. Served with some dense bean salad.
This is my lunch time knitting project. Jellyfish socks! I usually get to do about 20-30 minutes on it per day and it’s a nice calming part of my lunch break. Socks are the best portable project.
Two of my coworkers have the same birthday and we ended up with three cakes at work!! Best day ever.
Unpictured stuff:
A few of my coworkers and I went bowling one night. It was something ridiculous like $42 for 2 games of bowling or $44 for unlimited bowling so of course we picked unlimited and REALLY tried to get our moneys worth. I think I played 7 games? And two of them stayed for ages and played 15 games hahahhaa. I was truly terrible at it, like mixing up which arm is supposed to swing with which leg.. but it was a good chance to try and work it out. We were all very sore the next day.
