Wordless Wednesday : Colours of Paint

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Piercing Little Kids Ears

As I arrived at school this afternoon to pickup the girls I was greeted by Leah exclaiming "I'm getting my ears pierced today!!!" Well, OK. News to me, but if you want, then that's cool. Abigail tentatively agreed to get hers done too - but reserved the right to change her mind.

We went to our local chemist as soon as we arrived home and Leah proudly announced she wanted her ears pierced and she was going to go first. All was going fine (after about 15mins of choosing just the right pair of earrings) until the first earring was in. Major meltdown time... Leah errupted and wanted the earring out and didn't want to get her other ear done, was crying and carrying on and was holding on to my arm so tightly that my fingers fell asleep!

While she was recovering from her meltdown, with me telling her she was not going home with only one ear pierced, Abigail got her ears done - one after the other, no crying, not even an "Ouch!" No problems - "That didn't hurt!" she proclaimed. Not to be outdone by her sister, Leah braced herself and quietly muttered "I'm ready" as she clinged desperately to me as her other ear was pierced. "That only hurt a little bit!" she announced loudly, causing us all to break out in laughter. I should mention that even when Leah was having her meltdown she had a massive grin on her face and stopped carrying on everytime we showed her the mirror...

Meltdowns over and ears pierced, the next 15mins or so was filled with the girls admiring themselves in the mirror and Leah chatting non-stop about getting her ears pierced, how it didn't hurt much, how brave she was and on and on - what a little drama queen! LOL! The walk home was slow - everyone along the way had to admire the girls' newly pierced ears and hear all about them just being pierced today. Lucky they are cute and the people around here are friendly and mostly parents of young kids!

The rest of the evening consisted of me getting them to listen to newly-pierced-ears-care-instructions, getting it through to them that they had to leave the earrings in for about 6 weeks so we weren't going on an earring-buying shopping spree right now, and assuring them that their earrings were not going to fall out. All the time they were admiring themselves in any reflective surface they came across - so cute!

My New Bear Label

As most of you would already know, I design and handsew teddy bears. I have a seperate blog for my bears and bear-related stuff, but I thought I would quickly mention that I have changed my bear label name (again... but this really is the last time!) to Tarradale Teddies. If you're interested, pop on over to the blog!

My New Friend

I had the greatest find in one of those obscure $2 shops that seem to have everything you could ever think of - know the ones? I found a new friend, who was a bit more than $2 but still a bargain, and I've named him Porridge...

Porridge is a backpack bear, but he is big enough to actually be a functional adult backpack! So cool! Well, I think so... Hubby on the other hand thinks he is a great source of amusement... Hey, he is big enough to fit my essentials and my Kindle, so fine by me :-)

People are the real security threat...

I am reading "The Art of Deception" by Kevin Mitnick, which is all about social engineering - a very important and totally overlooked component of systems security, exposed so well by former "America's Most Wanted Hacker." It is absolutely amazing what people are willing to divulge if you are just confident and know enough of the "lingo" to sound genuine! People just don't realise what is a common-day piece of information to them is a vital piece of information that is essential to an outsider intending on being not so honest...

And as for posting documents on your Intranet - are you sure you haven't just given away secure information to all who have access to the Internet? I would just like to say hello & thanks to a certain university in Hungary... You guys should be ashamed - you are the IT department after all!!! ;-)

Change of tact...

OK, so obviously the challenge of blogging every day for a year didn't quite work out, so I'm just going back to a plain old rambling blog that I hope will be interesting to people out there, if not I'll just be talking to myself!

The girls went back to school today - and they were SO ready and SO happy to be back at school. There was great excitement in Abigail's year as there was a new girl starting this term. There was also great excitement in Leah's year because they are going on an excursion tomorrow - very exciting as it is the first excursion they are going on (they get to go by tram and everything!) The preppies are growing up - the school is taking them out in public! ;-)

So with school back (yes, they started later than other schools... it's a private school thing. You pay heaps and get more holidays... hmmm, am I missing something???) What was I saying? Oh yeah, with school back we are back in a routine - which is so good for me. I need it. I go nuts over the holidays because I don't have a strict daily routine. So girls happy to be back at school and me happy because I'm back into routine. Hubby is just working as per normal, so happy household!

Personal training tomorrow - always bloody hard work but I enjoy it and find it really satisfying and feel really good after. Hubby had training tonight and it was one of the weights programs (the other thing I like about training - different combinations of cardiac & strength each time) so I guess that's what I'll be doing tomorrow!

The new toy - Boxee - is great! We are "backing up" our DVDs onto a couple of 2TB external USB drives that will be plugged into the Boxee. Then the DVDs will be boxed up & stored (no law-breaking here!) Just to get the hang of things I put a few movies on the network to see how they worked and they are perfect - you'd swear you were watching the DVD - but with a couple of presses of a button, and no getting off the couch, you can change your mind and watch a completely different DVD! Brilliant!

Study is still going well and I'm learning so much & really enjoying it. I need to learn to code properly (again, because I have forgotten everything I leant at uni and did on the job in my early days in IT...) and so the best place to start is with C. And if you are going to learn C then you are going to need a copy of Kernaghan & Richie. There lies the problem - where's my K&R???!!!!

Well, back to the books & DVDs for me! And then a reasonably early night for once... hopefully...

Day 23 - Movies that are safe for Mum to watch

My last post was about some of the types of movies I enjoy (yeah - I'm sick & twisted!) and, as my mother commented, I should talk about some movies that are safe viewing by all.

So, a list of movies from my collection, in no particular order:

• The Princess Bride
• Drop Dead Fred
• The Hours
• Chicago
• Evita
• Step Up 1, 2 & 3
• Centre Stage 1 & 2
• Save The Last Dance 1 & 2
• Star Trek (the latest Star Trek movie...)
• A Chorus Line (my Mum knows this one by heart!)
• One Last Dance
• Dirty Dancing
• The Lion King
• Aladdin
• Girls Just Want To Have Fun
• What About Bob?
• Weekend at Bernies
• Rebecca
• Adaption (you need to be a writer to really understand this one)
• Coyote Ugly
• Bring It On
• Enchanted

And the list goes on...

Day 22 - Movie: The Killing Room

I just watched The Killing Room and, well, yeah. What can I say? Weird... I like these psychological, "WTF?" type of movies but this one I think I'm going to have to watch again as I don't think I completely got it the first time...

Speaking of movies, glancing over at the shelf of DVDs at the "Hubby won't watch" section, not that they are all weird psychological stuff, we have: American Beauty; Arlington Road (quite clever); The Bone Collector; Candyman; Adaption (love it!); Cube; Hannibal (the book was really gross in parts...); Girl, Interrupted; The Gift; Taking Lives; Reeker; One Hour Photo (excellent!); a few of the Saw movies (yeah, yeah, all the same stuff) and, who can forget Hostel - now THAT is a really gross movie! Mum, if you're reading, YOU SHOULD NOT WATCH ANY OF THESE MOVIES!!!!

Oh, and how could I forget Sev7n - that was fantastic - still is one of my favourites! I love the feeling it left me with as I was walking out of the movie theatre... You know, the "What just happened?" kinda feeling. Cool!
This section also includes movies that are perfectly tame that the girls enjoy watching with me, like Step Up 1, 2, & 3; Centre Stage 1 & 2; One Last Dance; Dirty Dancing; Stomp the Yard 1 & 2; Chicago; A Chorus Line and Girls Just Want To Have Fun.

I finally watched The Social Network the other night - this was a FANTASTIC movie - and pretty good at keeping to the truth (as reported by Wikipedia anyway).

I also watched Hackers which bears no resemblance to hacking and systems security (which I am currently specialising in - and therefore am studying atm) but was done in a fun, Tron-like way so the technical ridiculousness didn't matter so much because it was a fun watch. Unlike movies such as The Net; Swordfish; bits in the remake of The Italian Job; The Matrix (but how believeable is any of The Matrix?!); and Sneakers - even though I like Swordfish, The Italian Job and think Sneakers isn't that bad technically. Of course there are tons more movies that involve technical stuff and generally portray it really badly... Annoyance plus, but you get used to it!

Enough blabbering for one night...

Day 21 - The Blog With No Blog

Whoops... Too intrigued in study to blog yesterday... Broke my challenge after 20 days!!! Let's just say it's a little hiccup...

Day 20 - Visiting the Kids

It's the middle of the school holidays, and the girls have elected to stay with their grandparents, just outside of Bacchus Marsh, so every weekend Hubby & I have been coming up to visit them and see if they want to come home - which they never do... I'm not taking that personally... Anyway, today being a Saturday, we hopped in the car and headed up to Bacchus (only about a 40min drive from Melbourne) for lunch. I was a really nice suprise to see Hubby's sister and family there too.

--- interruption - laptop battery is about to go flat & I don't have the charger with me ---

OK, so I'm back home and the laptop is happily plugged in and charging, so where was I... Oh yeah, heading to Bacchus...

We made a couple of stops on the way. First was at Urban Salvage - the place to go if you want wood for flooring, decking - the stuff you use wood for... In our case, for my parent's deck that hubby is helping design and once designed, will be helping build. So, of to choose some wood. As soon as I saw the sample of the wood that, unknown to me, would be recommended for their deck, I knew it would look fantastic for their deck! I took some pics with my iPhone, but with the lighting in there you will have to excuse the crap quality of the photos...

the untreated wood

the sample deck @ Urban Salvage

We then popped in to Officeworks and Rudi bought me a Boxee :) What's a Boxee you ask... well, I asked that too as I have never heard of them before. But they're really cool! A Boxee...

...is a cool looking, mostly cube-shaped "black box" that is kinda pretty much like an Apple TV only (a) a hell of a lot cheaper (iTunes content is so ridiculously overpriced!!!) and (b) mostly Open Source, so two thumbs up from me! Oh, and [a little hypocritically] there is an iPhone app that makes your iPhone a remote control for your Boxee. So, Boxee has been taken out of it's box and that's about it so far... I'm sure it will be plugged in to a huge hard drive so we play all we want :) I  do know for sure that it will get a lot more use than our Apple TV2!

THEN we finally got on the highway and drove out to Bacchus. God I miss my girls! It was fantastic to see them, play with them and just generally hang out and have fun.

the garage - a cave of wonders!

cheeky monkeys!



Days 18 & 19 - Farewell & Hello

I didn't get a chance to blog last night because we got an unexpected SMS during dinner letting us know it was an old colleague's retirement party - so we gulped down dessert, hailed a cab and crashed the party!

Hubby & I had a great time - it was his old bosses retirement, and I knew most of the people there from Xmas parties and other social get togethers over the years. Hubby was cornered by everyone wanting to know how he was and how his new job was going, which left me to my own devices and free to catch up with heaps of people I hadn't seen in a long time! I had a fantastic time and by the time we got home it was very late... or very early this morning if you want to look at it that way... lol!

Today was gym day, so off to the fabulous guys at Fullfitnent...

All was going well until my ankle "injury" reared its ugly head. A "hello" I didn't want to say... I say "injury" because I didn't actually injure it. I had a congenital condition that caused me to require surgery on my ankle when I was a kid, 11yo to be exact. The surgery was a success, but the surgeon had no idea what post-op care was. I was walking again before he took the stitches out and so with the stitches having been in so long, scar tissue had grown around them and one had pinched a nerve.... Long story, but my ankle is still really weak and has some osteoarthritis, as well as a defective nerve. Today it obviously decided enough was enough. So I'm now sitting here in pain with my ankle stapped and stinking up the place with deep heat!



Day 17 - Wordless Wednesday

I'm speechless...

Images from here

Day 16 - Dinner With Friends

This evening hubby & I had a wonderful time having drinkies followed by dinner at a good (but not quite to my taste) Chinese restaurant in, suprise suprise, Chinatown. You know, one of those ones down a dark alley off Little Bourke Street that is so typical of Melbourne? Good food, good friends and a whole lot of chillis. And when I say a whole lot I mean A WHOLE LOT. You could hardly see the food for the chillis! It was more like "I'll have chillis with a dash of chicken thanks" rather than "I'll have chicken in chilli sauce thanks." Unbelievable! And what a mess we made... After the dishes were cleared, our messiness became all to apparent...

Guess I can now see why they have butcher's paper for table cloths! Don't the Chinese say that a messy table shows you really enjoyed your meal (or something to that effect?)

x

Day 15 - Home Sweet Home

My little "time out" at Castlemaine has come to an end and I'm back home, back to reality. I picked the girls up from their grandparents on the way home - they had a wonderful time there and want to go back! They just adore monkeying around on the monkey bars & swing set!

Have a wonderful week!

x

Day 14 - Maldon & Mulled Cider

Today was the "Maldon & Beyond Food and Wine Festival" and since we are still up at Castlemaine (which is only about 15mins from Maldon) we thought that sounded fun! We woke to rain. Not a good start to a day we were planning to go to an outdoor festival... But we braved the elements and went anyway. I must say it was a huge disappointment. We weren't even tempted to taste any of the tiny range of wine, and found it pretty much a yawn the first time around, so we went to a local cafe and had a scrumtious Devonshire Tea. We did one more lap of the little festival before we headed off and actually were suprised to find some interesting produce! We got a couple of vegetarian tarts for dinner (that were very yummy!), some relish and other bits and pieces... So it wasn't a loss after all.

On the way back to Castlemaine we went via Harcourt, which isn't actually on the way to Castlemaine from Maldon, but let's not get into a geography lesson... Anyway, we went via Harcourt because we wanted some more wine and produce from the fabulous Bress, and some of Henry fof Harcourt's Perry (aka pear cider - but I wouldn't dare say that to Henry's wife!) and premium apple cider so I could make some mulled cider, which I did as soon as we got back to my folks.

I took Henry's premium apple cider...

And Henry's Mulled Cider recipe...

And some spices...

And bunged it all in a pot (in the proportions and methods as described by the recipe)...

Trust me - it tasted WAY better than it looks!!!

After about 10mins or so it was ready to drink. Yummy! A nice, warm mulled cider to take the chill off a cold winter's day :-) The bottle of cider was 750mls, and when you mull a bottle of cider (or wine or whatever you can mull) you do the lot... So everyone had a little try, said their niceties and then left the rest to me... Hmmm... 650mls of lovely warm mulled cider went down very nicely, but I must admit I felt a bit sickly after the last glass!

All in all, a wonderful, relaxing Sunday with hubby topped by dinner with my parents. Back to the "real world" tomorrow...

Hope you all had a great weekend!

x

Day 13 - I'm Grateful For ...

... the simple things in life. Just like this evening, in fact. Good food, good wine and good company - a lovely dinner with my husband and my parents up in Castlemaine. Great conversation followed by a relax and then a yummy supper of soggy toast with butter & vegemite and a hot cuppa.

Oh, and a good book - as you can see in the background!

Pop over to Maxabella Loves to see what others are grateful for this week!

Day 12 - Cider Heaven!

Being near Harcourt (famous for apples) cider is pretty popular up here in Castlemaine... But I was shocked (and thrilled!) when I went to the local Cellarbrations. There were not the usual choice of two or three (if you're lucky) apple ciders that I'm used to finding in your standard local liquor store - there were 3 FRIDGES full of different ciders! THREE FRIDGES!!! Well, that stopped me in my tracks - instead of having to make a quick "which one?" decision, I was faced with a "Wow! I love that, and that, and that... What do I really feel like?" decision!

There was all my favourites (and comments regarding the term "pear cider" will [probably] be ignored!) - Strongbow, a whole range from Rekordering, Henry of Harcourt's Perry, Bress, Kopparberg, Bulmers, Sail & Anchor, Monteiths, and the list goes on! Henry's, Bress & Rekordering top my list, but I came back with a 6-pack of Strongbow Summer Pear because it was (a) mostly cheaper and (b) the others were by the bottle and not in a convenient pack, and (c) in the case of Henry's and Bress, I want to pop in to their cellar doors tomorrow anyway.

I'm going to go have some happy, slightly intoxicated discussions with my father regarding systems security now *hiccup* lol!

x

Another Challenge!

Check out my bear-blog, Julius King Designs, to see the details of my newest challenge! Feel free to join in - it's not a bear challenge & should be great fun!

x