Shopping

This article from the Age was posted on Nikkishell, I think it's very true and I know I'm guilty of it. I'm trying to be better though :) I am, I am. Giving up a steady job kind of helped that process along since I no longer have any money!

What I've been up to...

I can't believe a week and a half has passed since I posted properly, I was on a pretty good roll too. But, as always happens when you have lots of things going on, they all converged and everything got really busy at once. My mum and dad returned from a month's holiday, my sister is back for the school holidays from her school on the cape of Queensland, we've been meeting again with the draftsman for the third and hopefully final concept for our house and the shop is now shut for 9 days (starting today) for renovations.

I put this sign up on our cafe door a couple of weeks ago and started getting a bit excited of everything that is ahead for us. Since then I've spent quite a few evenings on the verandah trying to finalise the plans for this week and get together some kind of schedule, this has just made me a bit scared of the week ahead. We have lots to do in a small amount of time. Of course, we're on a tight budget so we're using friends and family to do some of the work and scheduling favours is a pretty hard thing to do, we don't want to put too much pressure on people.



It was business as usual this week though and we tried a new recipe - mango and coconut cakes with meringue icing from a Donna Hay book. These are soooo yummy, so perfect for spring and summer with their subtle mango flavour. Bad photos this week, didn't have time to do it properly.
My sister has some friends visiting from the central NSW coast and they've just had a little baby boy so we're also working on a little spaceboy present for him, from the Wee Wonderfuls pattern. We figure nothing is too bright for a 6 month old. We're going to try and finish him today.


This week is going to be crazy but I'm going to try and take lots of progress photos and keep this updated.. then hopefully (if we get everything finished) there'll be some before and after photos next week to post.

I heart bloglines

Someone who visits my blog comes from bloglines, I'm not sure who it is... but if it's you than thanks! I thought I'd check it out because I didn't know what it was and I love it.

I'm a bit of a clean desktop/toolbar freak and I hate stuff cluttering it up so I have never really subscribed to the blogs I read. I didn't like the feeds all along the top of my screen, it's too little. So I used to go through my favourites menu and just open up each blog to see if there were any updates.

Now I've subscribed to them all through bloglines, and I just log on there each day and it shows me which ones have been updated and you can click on the blog and read it through bloglines. And the best bit... if you see something interesting in one of the blogs you can 'clip' it and save it to your clippings. So I can come back and find it again easily later. I love this feature! I used to have hundreds of tabs open in my browser of things I wanted to go back and read again properly and I couldn't turn my computer off for days until I'd worked through them all. Problem solved, yay bloglines.


I sound like I should be selling things on the morning show with Kerry-ann, but I really do heart it.

Flashbacks

I almost need to do a flashback on how long it's been since I've posted on my little blog.. but I'm back in business now. I've been crazy busy with the shop and I've had some computer issues but those at least are over now. I'll do a proper update later tonight or tomorrow since we have people over for dinner but in the meantime here's my flashback friday picture (on time for once - I get guilty since I haven't posted for so long and then feel like I need to do things like flashback friday on time).

So this week's theme is us and our pets but until I was about 15 my only pets were goldfish or budgies and I don't have any photos of those. So instead I'm posting a picture of my family and the pet I wished I'd had when I was a kid.

I bet my mum wishes she'd never bought that outfit or white sunnies, the big earrings are pretty too.


More soon...

Fickle Friands

I make friands quite often and they only have about 6 ingredients so they are quite easy to cook, they come out perfectly 99% of the time, looking like this.

But every now and then I get a dud batch and I got one this morning. After getting out of bed at 5am to make them and everything! They always go wrong in the same way too, the go a bit sticky rather than springy and the mix puffs up over and in this case covers the raspberries.


Today, friands aren't my friend. No amount of icing sugar could fix these puppies.

Tagged!

So I've been tagged by Emma and as usual it's taken me a couple of days to get around to it, but here we go.

Here are the rules:
a.Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves.
b.The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed.
c.At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people & posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment letting them know that they have been tagged & asking them to read your blog. I think i'm going to ignore this rule because I think almost everyone else has been tagged by now.

Here's my 8:

1. I sometimes over-think things and make them way more complicated that then need to be, eg getting tagged, which is why it's taken me almost a week to do this post.

2. All through high school and uni I thought I wanted to be a big career woman, turns out I don't.

3. If I didn't get into the course I wanted to at university (I studied political science) I was going to go for an interior design course. I think maybe that would have been something I would have been happier doing. Having said that, I don't regret studying political science at all. I did and still do find that kind of thing interesting plus uni was really fun.

4. I hate the taste of beer. I can drink Belgian cherry beer but that's as far as I can take it. Wine on the other hand...

5. About 2 months before I started this blog, I had started another one. I did about 2 posts and then deleted it.

6. The first time I drove in Melbourne I crashed my then boyfriend, now husband's car into a tram. Oopsies. I didn't drive near trams for about another 2 years after that.

7. My favourite cartoon when I was a kid was Mysterious Cities of Gold, I actually still think that it's great. Because of this cartoon I developed an almost obsession when I was about 11 with all things South American. Then when I met G and found out he was Chilean I figured it was kind of meant to be. That's a bit nuts really linking a childhood interest based on a cartoon series to picking someone to spend the rest of my life with.

8. I feel sorry for Britney Spears, really. Why doesn't anyone help that girl? (Can this count as one?)

I have a few people to tag, but not eight. I'm going to tag...
Catherine
Angelique
Sarah
Cherryskin
Sorry guys!

Flashback Friday

On Saturday again, early Saturday though so it's still Friday in some parts of the world and that's close enough.

This week's theme is 'say cheese' and we have plenty of cheesy family photos. This is a photo of mum and all of us kids I think before going to church, with no shoes on like proper QLD kids. It was taken in 1985 and like all of our 'formal' family photos it was taken in the front yard of the house we grew up in. I think the three of us big kids have cheesy grins down although my sister probably wins the cheese prize in this photo for the whole head on the angle coy look she has going on.

Bummed about building

We had a call from our draftsmen for another appointment because he had done our "concept sketches" of our house. We were a little excited to see what he had come up with but by the time we were left we were just depressed! Our original ideas for our house didn't work - we wanted split level but the slope of our land wasn't steep enough to split where we wanted, we need to re-orient our living areas so they aren't on the hot side of the house and our original ideas were about $100k over our budget. So it's back to the drawing board for us (which of course costs more money). I hope we can work something out that gets us something we want.

The cafe renovations are going better though, we put the sign on the door today to let everyone know that we'll be closed for the first week of October to get everything finished and then we'll be re-opening with a new name. I can't believe how close that is now, so much work to do before then.

We're going to stock a few kitchen/homewares in the cafe so I've been looking for a sideboard/buffet to display some stock in and on. I've got two to choose from and I don't know which one I want to go with. Which one do you think?

The first one is from my grandma's so it's free (good for the budget) and I could slide one of the doors open to display stock in the two shelves and on top. I also might be able to put a couple of hooks through the door on the closed side to hang something on. This one will need a paint job before it's ready to go, but I do like the fact that its old like the table we bought.


The second option is a new one but it's pretty cheap so we could afford it. It also has the benefit of the drawers in the top that we could leave out a little bit to display things in as well as the cupboards below. Decisions decisions.


Apart from that, I've been shopping again - so much fun but such a bad habit. After seeing the apple fabric from Spotlight on Three Buttons, I had to go and pick some up for myself. and I can never leave Spotlight with just one thing. So I bought a few bits and pieces. I really do need to start doing something with all this fabric.


I thought the green one might make a cute pair of pants for one of my friends little girls and I just bought the yellow one because I thought it was pretty. My brother told me it looked like an apron and I kind of like that idea so maybe I'll make myself an apron from it.


I was also excited to find this ticking and I bought some black linen. I always end up buying prints and then when I get around to trying to make something I need plain material to go with all the prints I have and I've got nothing suitable. This weekend I will do some sewing! And I'm going to try really hard not to buy anymore until I've worked my way through some of my existing stash.


Having said that though I would really like to buy some of this and this. Buit I will try and be good (especially since the house we want to build may end up being $100k more than our budget, eek!).

I got tagged by Emma (my first tagging, I feel like a real blogger now), so tomorrow it will be eight facts about me which will probably be very boring for everyone to read but too bad :)

Tables from Toowoomba

I'm so excited, we've been looking for an old country kitchen table to use as a communal table in the cafe but we have a very small budget so I didn't know if we were going to find one but we found it today. This is it, we found it after hunting around in second hand and antique shops in Toowoomba all day.



It needs a bit of work, but I think it will work and the best bit is it was cheap and within our budget. We're going to sand back the top to the wood but leave the legs as they are. There was a second table at the same place that we also liked but it was a little out of our price range. When my brother picks up the first table in a couple of weeks we'll see if the owner is up for some bargaining yet or not.


Another table we saw at a different shop, this one was a cool $12,500. I'd love it for our new house, it has 4 extending leaves in it so normally it would just seat 6-8 but you'd be right for Christmas dinner too. A little out of our price range unfortunately.


I also found a few good craft books and a book on how to make kids costumes which I'm going to give to my little sister, a primary school teacher. We need to work out a reason why her class needs to dress up like tomatoes. I love this monkey too, I'm going to have to give him a go.




We decided we need to have a portable herb garden until our house is built so we bought a few at the Toowoomba markets today to start us off – sage, vietnamese mint and thyme. These are harder to come across in Brissie so it seemed like a good place to begin. And we got some pretty gerbras, just because. More photos on flickr.



What else did we do this weekend.. hung out with my brother and his wife in their cute little Queenslander, ate some good food, got tickets to see Sarah Blasko and Spicks and Specks live and baked for the cafe. I ran out of time for any sewing though and I have so many things I want to try at the moment including this scarf tutorial by Nora, maybe next weekend or one night this week.



Back to work again tomorrow and I'm still feeling ok about that!

Flashback Friday

This week's theme is weddings, formal or Sunday best. So this is me in my Sunday best at my Aunty's wedding, I think in 1981 (just in case you couldn't guess 80s from the outfits). I'm in the yellow dress in the front. I vaguely remember going up in the church with my cousins to give my Aunty a satin horse shoe at some point but that's about it.

I'm off to Toowomba tomorrow to visit my brother and his wife and hopefully find a few good second-hand shops. Have a good weekend!

Vessel Wednesday

I added this photo to the vessel wednesday flickr group today.


My grandpa made this bowl from a mango tree.

It's funny the things you don't appreciate as a child - the creativity in my family is one of these things. My grandpa was also a pretty good painter as was my grandmda, both my mum and grandma were great cooks and my mum has always been good at sewing and crafts. I appreciate it now.

Progress

A few months ago when we bought our block of land I was very excited about what lay ahead of us, planning and starting the building process. Then we found out that the draftsman we wanted to use couldn't start for a few months and that kind of put a dampener on things. It wasn't very exciting to own a block of dirt and do nothing with it. But that's over now and we have finally started to make some progress.

We had our first meeting with the draftsman today, he met us at the block (we couldn't stay there too long because it's raining in Brissie, yay!) and then we went to a nearby cafe and talked about the kind of house we wanted (light, open plan and good for entertaining) to build, how we live etc etc.

He'll have initial concept sketches back to us in 2 weeks. I'm excited again now.

Brownie for the shop, my grandma's recipe -


Just before the rain started to fall and it hasn't stopped yet -

Happy Spring and Happy Fathers Day!

Spring time already, yay! This year is going too fast though.


We've had a busy weekend painting the cafe, we're almost done now, 1 more Sunday and we should be there. Now it's time to bake a few cakes for the shop, get the banking organised and get our house ideas together in time to meet the draftsman on Tuesday. No father's day activities for us though, G's dad is in Melbourne and my dad is on holidays somewhere up near the Cape York - out of mobile range.

We are busy bees.

(flowers from teleflora.com)