new zealand

A two week trip anti-clockwise around the South Island of New Zealand, returning home on the evening when Christchurch had been hit by another earthquake. Unusually for me, I'm going to try and tell the story of this trip without words. Click on the link below to see all.

ageing, kitten speed...

The other day, the radio played a song by the band 'Hungry Ghosts', local to Melbourne.

It was amazing- instrumental, full of feeling and prettiness and awesome.

Unfortunately I think they disbanded, but anyhoo. I actually bought their album in itunes (I tend to download... er... moving on) and a song is playing at the moment with Eastern European influences, full of guitar and accordian and violin. This song could be the soundtrack to a movie. Possibly a sad, Nazi-era movie, but a movie none-the-less!
Oo! Look. Here's the song they played on the radio:

I do love me some 6/8 time music.

In other news! We decided our colours were too nautical and changed, again. We were tossing up some possibilities, and I was at school today where the kids were colouring in their 'life-cycle of a whale' diagrams... and two girls had used green, blue (the colours I wanted originally) and purple. And it was -pretty-. So. Two more tubs of paint later, books have been painted, and I think we might be getting somewhere.

Also, you guys... Darcy is nearly a fully sized cat now. He's 7 months old. It breaks my heart- they grow up so quickly. :(

Look! (you can click 'em to make 'em bigger, if you want)

I think he's very handsome, though.

More pictures of semi-grown-up-kitten below the cut.

random picture sunday

...because who doesn't like a new feature? Ha, not that it'll be lasting, but I feel like saying something, and don't have much to say,

That being said, though, Nic and I went to the Melbourne Zoo yesterday to check out their wedding bonanza, and it's awesome. The room which would fit our guests is small and intimate and has a beautiful 'rainforest' outlook and MONKEYS. Yes. We will dine with monkeys. The room felt a little dark, but it was done up for a cocktail wedding at the time and not decorated or anything so might be 'brighter' when there's tables and candles and flowers and stuff....
Also, the ceremony would be in a pretty little grassy area with a tree and bushes all around, and they're apparently going to make it much much prettier between now and our wedding date, so YAY. And they fence it off to the public while you have your ceremony. PLUS, then you get to waltz around the zoo with your photographer and get photos with animals in the background, and trees, and Japanese gardens, and climbing a massively old fig tree and pretending to ride elephant statues and all sorts of things, PLUS imagine the puns!!! Oh, the puns. PLUS, you can pay more for an 'animal experience' so rather than standing around drinking and eating canapes, you can stand around drinking and eating canapes with SUMATRAN TIGERS IN THE BACKGROUND GETTING FED. Yes. And if all that hasn't EXPLODED your brain by now (and my use of caps, italics and bold is surely about to), if we book before the end of the year I GET TO FEED AN EDIBLE BOUQUET TO A GIRAFFE. Yes. A giraffe. "Don't stick your neck our for us- we'd love you have you at the wedding" (This chick doesn't look so thrilled about the giraffe, but I will be.)
So... the challenge for Nic and I will be balancing the right amount of cheese and hilarity, with the right amount of not-going-over-board. So far I want everything to be animal/zoo themed, which, having had a look around the internet last night, people seemed to think would be 'tacky'. I know I'm not meant to take the advice of the internet so, friends- is there such a thing as over embracing the zoo theme?
Also, the cost of the zoo is a bit more than we had wanted....
But...

I bring your attention back to the giraffe, and the sumatran tigers.


Finally, here is the random picture for today, because it always makes me laugh, and I don't understand who, in this tiny little fishing town on the north cost of Washington state, thought this was a reasonable idea.

There is also a female version in a bikini. That might be next time's photo. 

hey there, Bright eyes...

So
In Australia, this was a super-long weekend as we had Anzac day, which meant from Friday-Tuesday, Nic was off work. Huzzah.
As I mentioned, I'd discovered the grants awarded to graduate teachers going to rural areas, and remembered these beautiful little towns up in the mountains, which we decided to go visit for the weekend.

Of course, it being a long weekend, in a town known for its beautiful autumn trees (remember, it's autumn/fall here, and we don't generally have trees that drop their leaves), the place was packed out. Still, we walked around Bright and quickly loved its little cafes, tree-covered hills in the background, quaint shops, and slightly-larger-than-hodunk-town feeling. On the last day, Nic stopped in at the police station to chat with them about the transfer process, if he does end up applying and going through training to be a cop. Apparently the Bright police station is the one that everyone wants to go to, and you could wait years to get posted there. Awesome. It seems strange, since they have to lure teachers there with money incentives, but police are lining up to be posted there. I suppose if you're a cop at a country town, you have a kind of quiet life amongst the mountains, booking people for speeding, not really dealing with much of the 'hard stuff'... where as a teacher, all our teaching courses tend to be metropolitan, we tend to do our rounds in the suburbs, and teaching bored country kids in tiny schools seems harder than maybe a middle-class anglo-saxon school in the 'burbs.
Anyhoo..

Wandilligong Primary School: 28 students.

The first day there we did a lot of driving. Lots of little towns with funny names (Wandilligong, Yakandandah, Tawong, Porepunkah, Stanley). Towns we judged based on the number of pubs they had, or whether they had a large or small supermarket, or none at all. We formulated criteria for prospective future towns we'd like to live in- cafes, mountains, a supermarket, and within a certain distance of the nearest cinema in Wangaratta. We drove away from the mountains to the flat plains just north of the apline area, and although those mountains loomed in the distance (as well as Australian mountains can. Having seen the Pacific Coast range, I refuse to believe anything in Australia can loom quite as well as them), we decided that it was too flat: we wanted to be in amongst it.

tomato festival pt.II

More tomatoes!!
There's probably at least this many again out there still so I'm pretty excited.

Nic and I have a friend who recently had a cancer scare. Since then, he resolved to turn his life around, get fit and healthy, and generally look after himself more. One of the ways he decided to do this was to try and eat everything organic. Which is fine, aside from the fact that it's exorbitantly expensive in this country. Oh, and the fact that he seems to assume that organic=healthy.
Example:
"Oh! I got this great organic apple pie the other day! She used only organic flour and butter in the crust! And it was only $20!"
(Ok, pies aren't the worst example, but he said it in such a way that seemed to suggest he could eat five of them and would still be healthy).
Anyway, my point is this: These tomatoes have been pretty much hassle free, and as such, I've never had to spray them with anything- natural or otherwise (unlike my stupid raspberries and strawberries. Camelot is still holding up though, y'all.) and so I can say with (complete?) confidence, that my tomatoes are organic. Ha.

So I'm gonna bombard you with some photos again, because I like trying to get better at photography, and I don't know if I am, but hey, it made me wipe down the kitchen benches before taking the photos, and that has to be a good thing right? Anything that makes me clean in the name of doing something fun can't be a waste of time.
I ended up getting a whole little bucket worth of tomatoes today. And a strawberry. And some basil for artistic effects.

I made them small so you can click on them to see my 'artistic effects' if you want. Plus the yumminess of our tomatoes. I don't know if I wrote about why these tomatoes are so exciting, but basically we Nic grew them from seeds, had the seedlings all up along our kitchen window through the last of winter, and JUST before the trip we dumped them in the ground, asking our neighbor to come and water the garden, but not expecting much from them. I expected to come back to see scraggly little dead things... little did we know, Melbourne had a strange, wet and humid spring that turned out to be perfect growing weather, and we came back to a jungle. I thought they'd be dead, but here they are, giving us fruit!


Today we're off to do the V-Day things, and then we can relax tomorrow. I'm being given instructions on what to wear and still can't deduce what's going on or where we're going. Also, Reya has discovered how to pop the bubbles in bubble-wrap.

(Nic, standing in kitchen and listening to me type away on this post:
"Are you blogging it up?"
Me: "I'm just about to post one."
"Ooooo.... you're like a post-master demon!")

some wedding details I love...

So I stumbled across this amazing wedding on GreenWeddingShoes, which I only go on so very occasionally.

There are so many details I love- these two photos for one thing..

{via}

Check it out. It's awesome.

And then as I went further and further into the post, it got more and more awesome.

if it's 30 degrees out...

...why not have the oven on for a few hours?

Today my mother came around for lunch. Which was nice, I suppose. We went for a walk up to the little park near by so, as Nic puts it, we could have some 'mother-daughter bonding time'. Really it was just an opportunity for me to suss out some important things such as - car insurance. Who is it with, and why can't I get my car fixed with it. Evidently she knew as much as I did.
Which is nothing.
Also, about whether the family business will pay for my health insurance when I turn 25 and can no longer be on her policy. No, they won't. So, until next year, no health cover for me, probably.
Also about wedding budgets and plans, which she seemed generally disinterested in, and still seemed to be of the opinion that having a wedding in one's backyard (we don't have a backyard) with a catered spit-roast was just as an acceptable way to go as any. Which it probably is. For some. But not for me. So we sussed out budgets a little bit, to which she likened the 5k she hesitantly said she would contribute to 'paying for a whole year of Uni' for me. Is that meant to be a guilt trip? I'm trying to do this wedding as cheap as I can. Put it this way, we're working with a 10k budget, total. My cousin is getting married this October and her dress is going to cost between 10-15k. Um. Yeah. So how about we don't complain. Also I found out she threw away her dress. Which is probably ok, cos it's a probably a little too vintage, stained, and informal for me (even with our super informal wedding, I'd still like a -nice- dress.)... but still, I would have liked to have seen it to have the chance. Then again, I guess if your marriage ended and you were unhappy with the marriage, then you don't keep the dress forever and ever. Maybe. That might be sometime to discuss later: The weigh-up between getting a second-hand dress vs. new, and also: what to do with the dress when I'm done with the dress. Being as I don't plan on having kids, I don't imagine a daughter I'll be able to give it to... but we'll see. (At 10k, I can imagine you'd not just get rid of it... but at $700, I'd be more inclined to donate/sell/whatever it).

Anyway! We had lunch, then played a game of bananagrams with her, which was fun. Then the left.
And we started baking.
We baked a new nut-bar based on last-weeks tasty-delicious-omg-can't-believe-we-ate-boxed-museli-bars-from-the-supermarket concoction. We also baked an apple crumble, and Nic is about to begin some granola.
Under the cut are some approximate recipes. We tend to abide by the If It Looks Like Enough And Tastes Or Smells Good, It's Probably Enough measuring system. Ie: Throw in stuff. Taste. Throw in more stuff. Or not. But, I'll try my best. Also, there are pictures!!

 

Top of the apple crumble once baked.

All it was, condensed.

 

Our first mountain views...

 Sunsets, mountains, ocean and pebble beaches...

 A story I told for the whole trip about high-5ing a raccoon. So out of my world; this was the first time I'd seen raccoons, and here I was with one grabbing at my hand.

 

Pulling faces, making inside jokes...

 

Falling in love with  mountain scenery...

An otter winking at us on our second last day.

I suppose I'm just feeling a little sad that it's all over. I think that's understandable.