A little celebration

I had a birthday recently. It was a quiet celebration, just myself and A. We ate out, watched the final Millennium Trilogy movie and ate super delicious cakes from Flute Bakery. If you are in Canberra and haven't tasted their mousse cakes, I'm fairly confident that you haven't actually lived.

I'll leave you to feast your eyes on them. Mmmmmmmmmmm.

Flute Bakery cakes 

Champagne with Rosella Flowers

Happy days...

Back to that whole idea of stopping to smell the roses, there are some things happening at the moment in good 'ol Canberra that I love.

1. Balloon Festival! I love, love, love seeing the balloons floating through the air as I'm driving to work.

2. Outdoor Art Show - leaves rustling as you wander under the trees and check out the artworks. Such a nice vibe.

3.  Skyfire! Stunning fireworks. I love fireworks, they make me happy. Sorry I didn't take a camera because I can't stand to feel like I'm missing them while I'm trying to take a decent picture!

4. My garden - the plants are growing and I have a 'mohawk' of carrots sprouting. So exciting.

5. Cheap dining chairs as I mentioned last post. Here are the photos...

We've pulled one apart to work out how to fix the sagginess (not a word, I know) and create a pattern for the new covers. Hit a slight bump when we went to check out fabrics. A's choice $158 a metre. Mine, $71. When you need 1 metre per chair, this adds up to, well, I used my maths skills up last post, but the chairs are no longer such a cheap solution. So, still on the hunt for the fabric - know any stores/websites I should check out?

6. Finally, because I can't help but share this with anyone who will listen...a conversation from my classroom last week...

Me: "Ok guys, so next week we're going to start looking at Ancient Greece...blah, blah, blah, make it sound really great..."

Cue massive sigh from girl at the back of the room.

Me: "What's up StudentX?"

StudentX: "Well Miss, it's just that, what is grease apart from the stuff you put in a frying pan?"

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Sometimes I love year 7, they worry me, but they always keep life interesting!

Classic comments from year 7 assignments and a trip to Tiny's Green Shed

Via tvtropes

Here are some classics from my last round of assignment marking that made me giggle...

"He joined the army at 17 so he learnt to fly a plane before he learnt to fly a car."

In response to the question ...Who do you think the people are? How old are they and how do you think they are related to each other?

"The people are my great grandmother and her horse. It's hard to tell how old the horse is but I think my grandmother is about 30."

Sometimes you've got to get your laughs where you can. And everything seems funnier during the deleirum of marking 50ish assignments. They're done now though, just in time for the next lot!

I even had time to visit the tip with A and fit in the obligatory stop at Tiny's Green Shed. Is it a problem if we always seem to come home from the tip with more than we took there?

Leave home - car packed with old microwave and stinky old carpet.
Return home - car packed with 8 dining chairs and a silver and pink BMX*

Could you turn down 8 fairly sturdy dining chairs that just need a touch of paint and re-covering? For a grand total of $40 for the lot? That's $5 a chair**. So even if I spend like, $50 per chair for material, fixing up some of the foam, a bit of paint. That's like $55 a chair*** instead of $150 which seems to be to go at the stores we visited a couple of weeks ago during our "let's buy a new dining table" phase!

Phew. Excited for a new project. Feeling slightly guilty, like I should have finished some of the others off before starting another...I do have some holidays coming up in 4.5 weeks though, need something to do! Any advice on where to get some super awesome fabric would be welcome!

*Apparently it will be useful to go down the shops when you don't want to take your fancy bike. I predict it gets used exactly 0 times in the next year. But I'd just bought 8 chairs, how could I say no?

**Yeah, see how good I am at maths?

***See that again there? I'm on fire. Just don't ask me to do long division!

がんばって Japan

Thankfully friends in Japan are all south of Tokyo and so should be safe but my heart is still hurting. I know that you will rebuild and do it well, as you have many times before. But seeing the airport I arrived at to visit a good friend and the towns I've driven through as they are now and thinking of the kind, loving people who would have lived there. My heart aches.

My thoughts and prayers are with you.

The carpet has arrived!

After a bit of happy negotiation and compromise on colour - would you believe that when we each named our top 5 only one matched? - and some to-ing and fro-ing on price, we have carpet in our bedrooms.

Some of the many colour choices.

We went with the one in the corner of the room. This photo is not a great indication of colour - it's more of a grey brown than the green brown that it looks here. With a fluffy black cat prowling around the place we didn't want a light colour but the pattern in it which I think is best described as 'pin-stripe' gives it a bit of interest.

Despite being all "let's polish the floorboards" for the last year or so,  I'm really pleased with the carpet. It's so nice to get out of bed in the mornings and stand on soft, warm carpet rather than the rough, cold floorboards.

So, here's a before showing the cold, bare boards...

Study - any chance to show off the wardrobe!
It is all painted now.

And some afters...

Master Bedroom

Bedroom 2

And again with the bed back in!

So now we can do some unglamorous things like crawl under the house and install some underfloor insulation, plane the bottom of the wardrobe doors and two of the bedroom doors and re-hang them...it is a long weekend here so you just never know what we might get done!

Garden progress

Finally, after about a year of talking about it, the added inspiration of a visiting veggie gardener (my father) and the yummy beans and zucchini our lovely neighbour gave us we have built a proper veggie garden! Yay, we've crossed something off the wishlist! 

Here's the story in picutres...

Delicious veggies from W's garden

The area before - we chopped down 7 trees without feeling too guilty as 5 of them were considered pests

Dad provided the brains of the operation (and a lot of the brawn too)!

Laying out the garden beds and bolting on the sides.
We may add another 1 or 2 thin beds either side of the lemon tree...

One bed built - looking good!

All finished and ready to plant - like my beautiful 'zen' rakings on the front bed?
Yes, the fence is most definitely on our 'hit list'!

Planted with peas, leek, carrots and basil.
Cauliflower and broccoli to come this weekend!

Strawberry/ Herb planters given to us by A's mum.

A close up so hopefully you can see the great herb stake label thingys she also bought for us.

We're very pleased with how they look but there is still a bit of work to go. Going to look into putting some weed mat down around the beds and paving them or putting down pebbles so we don't have to worry about the mowing.

Other than that, it's just a matter of waiting - Grow little veggies, grow!

Mirror

Picture via Jeannie Baker's website

So last week after our "stopping to smell the roses" discussion at work. I excused myself from a two hour, after school, language teachers meeting an hour early. A little bit cheeky, but not too naughty. Instead, I went to a talk at the NGA by Jeannie Baker, author/artist of Where the Forrest Meets the Sea, Window, Belonging, and a handful of other beautiful books.

I remember looking at her early books as a child and poring over the collages. The creativity and detail  was inspiring and still amazes me. I was not surprised when she said it had taken 5 years to create her latest book Mirror. Nor was I surprised that, when asked which of the artworks she liked best in Mirror, she answered that there wasn't really one as after working on her projects for so long, she doesn't want to look at them anymore!

When you open the cover of Mirror you come across two stories that open outwards. One follows the life of an Australian boy in Sydney and the other the life of a Moroccan boy living near the Valley of Roses in Morocco. While the lives of the boys seem so different on the surface, at the heart of the story is the fact that there are also many similarities in their lives when it comes to family and values. It really is a beautiful book.

It was an hour well spent as I came out relaxed and inspired with a new book under my arm which always makes me feel good!

4 months on...

Mum left for 3 weeks in Vietnam and Cambodia on Friday and as Dad had to take her down to the airport he also jumped on a plane up to sunny Canberra for the weekend. A weekend in Canberra is a pretty poor second best to a 3 week overseas holiday but it was great for us! Dad's a bit of a gardener and spent all saturday helping us build two raised garden beds and then, to top it off, he mowed the lawn for us too!

After all that work we thought we'd take him out for dinner. While we were there we realised that today would be our 4 month anniversary. So in honour of that (and the fact I can't find the camera cord to get the carpet and garden photos) here are some from the wedding ceremony....

Hope you've had a lovely weekend!

Busy, busy, busy...

We talked about this clip this morning in our team meeting. The fact that this year seems to have started like all the people who didn't stop. The fact that we get so swept up in the start of year craziness of setting assignments, planning lessons, marking and providing feedback for parents that we don't have (or take?) the time to stop and appreciate the really beautiful, good things that are happening.

So the rest of this week I am consciously trying to stop and appreciate. Take a second to stand back and watch. To really listen when people speak. Right now, this seems like a difficult task. It shouldn't be and it makes me a little sad that that's the first thought that came into my head!

I really want to tell all about the new carpet and the backyard developments but I think doing so today would take away from what I've just said. I'll save it for the weekend. And by then I'll have some photos ready to go too.

Hope you are all well.