Looking forward to the weekend.

It is the weekend and the semester break, thank goodness! Not that my teaching is particularly onerous but I am feeling frustrated at the lack of progress on my thesis corrections. I basically get two good days a week. I want to power through several chapters over the break and hopefully get all done by mid-October. It is all dragging far too much and making me feel quite down and hopeless. I also need to get my arse into gear and start scanning and sourcing the missing images, somehow I have ended up with about 500 images for my thesis. FIVE HUNDRED. Ridiculous. Every time I try to cull my supervisor ends up saying I need more. Stupid image based arguments, they seemed like a great idea til I had to actually make my image catalogue.

Anyway, enough whinging. Here are some photos from last weekend that I took and meant to post but then forgot about.

Chickens at the Collingwood Children's farm, I went to the Farmers' Market but the chickens were more interesting.

Here is one making what I like to call a fat face, when you pull your head into your neck and make it look twice as big, and self satisfied. My pet chickens used to do it all the time.

Silky bantams. I owned a lot of these over a long period of time. One of mine lived to be over 10 years old. True story.

Lambs.

The flock. They look like little clouds, or fairy floss with legs.

I found this camellia on a back street in Abbotsford and liked the pattern.

A magnolia.

I liked this blue house and its blossoms.

This is the banana cake I made on Sunday, I used double the amount of bananas. Crazy.

Now I am considering some more tea and how to plan this weekend.

xx

Cake,shopping, birthdays, earrings, rainbows

A busy weekend, in some ways. Maybe not in the ways I intended (like thesis and, um, well, and more thesis). I haven't even looked at my thesis... Hang on.


I just looked at it then and it still isn't done.

What I did instead included.

Went for walks in the rain, not by choice exactly. I did see a rainbow and that made it worthwhile. Plus wasn't it strangely warm in Melbourne on Saturday?!

I bought this book finally. Have been meaning to buy it for ages, it is an excellent guide to Melbourne architecture, only short entries but good if you want to quickly find out a date or an architect.

I made a chocolate torte. This is the egg whites being mixed in and it looks rather pretty. You can see the finished product further down. This is the recipe, it worked out splendidly and I highly recommend it. The top of the cake had a crispy melt in the mouth crust and the inside was fudgy.

I then made a spritz and finished making some jewellery. I bought the gold bits of the earrings from sportsgirl but I took them apart to add clip ons and also added the green beads to make them more exciting and dangly.

I also made the yellow necklace, a shop in Melbourne was closing down so I bought an entire jar of the yellow beads, 75 in total and made this very long necklace. I have a thing for super long necklaces. When it isn't looped it comes down past my belly button.

Today we had a family dinner for my sister's birthday, for father's day and to see my uncle whose birthday is next week. Much fun and champagne was had.

Pumpkin tart with goat's cheese. Nomolicious.

The finished birthday cake.

The obligatory photo of Hamish the Wonder Dog. Also the only family member who doesn't mind having his photo plastered all over my blog. He is very clean at the moment as he has a skin condition that means he needs to be bathed twice a week, which is probably like me having to bathe every 10 minutes.

Then I went to look at the garden, which is growing well, weeds and all. I like this multi-coloured silverbeet.

I picked some to bring home.

Lavender

Fennel

Daisies

Some kind of star flower.

Cherry Blossoms

Daffodils, slightly rain damaged.

The Gnome. With his headless squirrel.

More blossoms

Photos from the week

As I am doing more of 'not quite 365 photos' I may as well post random photos from last Saturday(actually the one before as I forgot to post this when I wrote it).
I spent most of last weekend (you know, the election one when we didn't get a government) fixing a wordpress site, which is a huge challenge for me as it involved editing code and moving around files, none of which I had ever really don before. Mostly my skills are about my ability to google the right phrase and find someone who was worked out the solution and written it down in simple idiot proof steps.

 I celebrated my website and it being Saturday with some 'Spritz', which is Aperol and Prosecco and a little soda water. Look how happy this prosecco cork is 'Pop Me!'

Here I am watching election results and tweeting.

Then I got sick of it and watched Dr Who instead, he wasn't happy about the idea of Tony Abbott as possible PM either.

TGFIO

That stands for thank god Friday is over. Tres busy day. Got to uni at 8:30, taught till 10:30, which included an altercation with the rudest ever IT guys who kicked me and my students out of class in the middle of their test despite me saying we would only be another 15 minutes at the most. no please, thank you, sorry. I feel a complaint coming on. Anyhoo. I took some photos from the classroom, it has a pretty good view.

The city skyline from a kinda unflattering angle.

The architecture building, possibly one of the least attractive buildings at uni. Which is a worry really. And I say this with my most open minded, I respect all periods of architectural design, kinda hat on. Still fugly.

This arvo I worked like a (slightly confused) demon and (almost) sorted a wordpress site for one of my projects. Helped by the lovely shilo of yikes machine I now have a much much better understanding of what is going on behind my easy as pie wordpress admin panel.

I then madly emalied english art collections about some reproduction rights that I am hopelessly behind on.

That all called for two enormous glasses of wine and pizza at my local.

Behold my zinfandel and behind my recently finished chablis. My local has both these by the glass, which is one hundred kinds of brilliant in my mind. Plus it is 5 minutes from my door. Win.

Now I need to get some sleep so I can have energy to deal with whatever tomorrow brings election wise.

Winter Flowers

I was super impressed yesterday that a friend had almost done a whole 365 photo blog. I would love to write more often here in my personal blog. I used to write almost daily in another online journal, but that was semi-private so I think it made it easier. It isn't just a privacy thing though, not exactly, I think because this blog is open and because so many people have such lovely blogs I get worried that my posts are boring or amateur or pretentious and so on. Today I figured that I can either wring my hands over all those things, or I can just write something, or post a photo and say pish pash to those who would judge me.

So today I took some photos in the hope that maybe I might start writing something (almost) every day.

I am feeling completely and utterly OVER winter. My apartment is antarctic and I just got a huge electricity and gas bill. I am a little cheered up by all the late winter flowers that have started to bloom though. I can't have them at home so I just enjoy them in the gardens. Here are some rust and purple coloured irises in the Carlton Gardens. The colour is amazing, sort of not a 'proper' flower colour, more like a dried flower that has been hand-coloured by a granny with too much time on her hands. Or something.

And some magnolias. These are everywhere at the moment, the pink kind, the yellow kind and the loose petalled white ones. There are magnolia trees planted along Gertrude St in Fitzroy. When I was a little girl I thought they must be homes for fairies and spent hours taking them apart looking for said fairies, and destroying mum's flowers in the process. Sorry mum.

Sunday

Went to visist my sister and Hamish the Wonder Dog. We had soup, and apple and apricot crumble and caught up with my great aunt. Hamish is a bit sad as Mum has been away for so long, but this is not his sad look this is his 'is your camera food' look.

These are the tomatoes for the roast tomato, onion and capsicum soup. Despite the time of year the tomatoes are pretty good, I got them from John at Tomato City at the Vic Market, he gave me a few extra. I also got a free banana at another stall, I obviously had my market mojo going on.

The roasted stuff, the soup is very nice you just cut the tomatoes, capsicums and onions (with skin on) in half and roast with some garlic cloves and then take the skins off and bung it all in a saucepan with some stock and blend tills it's smooth. I was thinking today that I would probably like to add some chilli to it at some point...

Here it is all ready to nom on. I didn't eat all the bread, it was to share.

This is the apricot and apple crumble, I poached some apples and then added some tinned apricots. The crumble had some golden syrup in it, my sister's suggestion via someone else. It was nice, made it sweeter but in a tasty way. If I used golden syrup again I would probably add a bit less sugar to the crumble.

I ate this in front of an open fire, with dogs sleeping in front of it and a cup of early grey tea. Perfect winter's afternoon.

On another topic I bought some new Mimco hair accessories yesterday and the week before. I like them a lot. The hair combs are usually so spensy but these were hugely reduced. I like Mimco but a lot of the barrettes are so blinged up and heavy that they won't stay in my hair as it is so thin.The combs work much better. When I bought them yesterday the sales assistant said 'OMG these prices are crazy' like she had only just realised they were on sale. I felt like replying 'No what is crazy is that your plastic hair combs are normally $50'. But I just smiled an said 'yeah OMG WOW.'