Friday, February 28, 2014

Buzz feed Quizzes

Totally unrelated to everything else and a time killer - this is my life -


EMMA WATSON


              You got:                Meowth

Cash rules everything around you. You’re also ten thousand times more articulate than everyone else around you, due to the simple fact that you are the only one who knows how to say something other than your own name.


 Grey Line with Black, Blue, and Yellow, by Georgia O’Keeffe

You’re deeply in touch with your feminine side (like, SO DEEPLY) and not afraid to show it. You’re able to find beauty and power in even the smallest things. You’re also most likely excellent in bed.




Capybara
Via imgur.com

You’re a sweet, dignified person with a love for adventure and new people. You are the wisest but most comforting of your friends and need a pet to drive that point home.







Which Celebrity Couple Are You And Your Significant Other?

Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield
Sean Gallup / Getty Images


Aka “Stonefield.”
 If there is a relationship ideal, you two would be it. You and your partner are the best of friends, lovers, alliances, clowns, companions, and teammates. You guys don’t make up for each other; you only add to each other

(if only I knew who these people were....)

Which Biblical Heroine Are You?

Sarah
Via lds.org

Strikingly good-looking with a world-weary air!!, you somehow make everything you do look easy. You’re practical, grounded and have a wicked sense of humor that keeps your friends and loved ones laughing. You have an exceptionally curious nature and love learning about new things, traveling, and meeting new people. It takes a lot to make you angry, but once you are, you’re the worst enemy anyone could imagine. Family is incredibly important to you — you’ll go anywhere and do anything for your loved ones, no questions asked. Good-natured, loyal, and hilarious, you’re basically the stereotypical perfect girlfriend and you own it!

.

Which Classic Author Is Your Soulmate?


Jane Austen

Ever so genteel, you are in need of a woman who is your equal in rank and temperament, a woman who is financially independent but who still appreciates being taken care of. As romantic realists, both you and Jane realize that your imperfections make you perfect for each other, and that it is a combination of reason and emotion that makes a happy marriage
.










And that is me, damn I AM perfect - although I was unaware Jane Austen wanted to marry a woman, who am I to go against completely accurate quizzes???



Monday, February 17, 2014

Mentally shot

New house exhaustion has set in. One of the upsides of having a bigger house is that friends and visitors come and, well, visit. Combined with the summer holidays, this week is the first time I've caught my breath. Since Christmas, we have been away from home for about 20 nights, had  visitors for 10 nights and had our friends and the kids friends drop by on the few spare days we have had left. My last 6 weeks has consisted of packing and unpacking and washing sheets, towels etc ready for the next wave.

Am now very appreciative of my nice quiet house, although I have absolutely loved catching up with people. Just need a small break.

Until the builders and landscapers come back again.

This week.

sigh.

In the meantime, Geoff and I are about to start on a new diet, will let you know how that goes. Even without the diet I have pleasingly lost 3 kgs since Christmas, so all those visitors are doing me good!

And one of my Fav scrapping sites has restarted. Another Freaking Scrappy Challenge is up and running again, and although I am currently not on the team, was very glad to play along, loved this sketch by Anne.


And I have gone for the chalk board look - bit of fun.


Henry is a vanilla ice cream connoisseur. Every place we go, he tries the local fair (the best we have found so far was surprisingly in Cambodia, which also had the worst btw). He was horrified on our first night in Auckland when we went to a boutique ice cream place and they didn't have vanilla. What sort of ice cream shop is that!! (pretty bloody good actually, Giapo's in Queen st, mmm).

Anyway, the next night we ended up at Movenpick, a Swiss based ice creamery - Most excellent as well and the vanilla rated 10/10 by Henry. Too bad they don't have a store in Canberra. Or probably a good thing for my diet.

That's all for now x



Friday, February 14, 2014

New Zealand part 1

Well, after procrastinating about it over Christmas (do we go to NZ or Nth Queensland for the last part of January) we decided NZ was the way to go. Unfortunately I had been less than organised before Christmas - I know, unusual - ha - and the kids passports needed to be renewed. So After New years - everything in Canberra shuts down until then - we hurriedly put together the applications, and waited. (I won't mention that a certain DH used to work in Passports and knew who to call to hurry things along..). Anyway, after Henry and I spent a week sweltering in Mulwala, we came home, picked up his and Meaghan's passports on Friday, booked the flights Sunday and flew out bright and early on Wed morning. Phew..

We had only booked two night accommodation in Aukland and winged the rest. And it turned out ok mostly, internet is good!

And now I have more photos to scrap - yay! These are fairly random though.

On our first day we went to Kelly Tarlton's Aquarium in Aukland - Penguins - coolest animals ever -



In the middle we went to Henry's favourite place Hobbiton, possibly only behind the yet to be visited lego world - The quality of the craftmanship here was astounding. Although the hobbit holes were only for the most part doors and gardens, all the indoor filming happened elsewhere, the location and the settings were just perfect.

The only possibly downside was that you have to leave your car in the carpark and catch a bus with a guided tour - all fine until we returned to the car and realised that I had left the boot/trunk open for the 2+ hours we were away - all our travelling stuff was on display for the world to see. Luckily it was also entirely intact - Geoff was not amused...

This was the most famous of the hobbit holes - Bilbo's home. The actual bench were Bilbo and Gandalf sat and chatted - eep...

 Many more pages about Hobbiton to come, I promise!

And related but on our second last day, we had a tour of the Weta Studios in Wellington, where they make all the models, armour etc. Again, highly recommended!



We really enjoyed New Zealand, very easy to get around, and I got to catch up with Louise F my long time scrappy friend, has made me want to do a round the world tour of all my scrappy friends. The instant easiness and friendship after years of sharing a hobby was just wonderful!

The tale of the bad back and broken glasses can wait - am now going to rest as we have more visitors - apparently if you have a new house your visitor numbers skyrocket - we are constantly welcoming friends and family, which is fun but I am looking forward to downtime next week.

have a good one. x


Sunday, January 12, 2014

Explanation (finally)

Nothing too exciting but my last post had this Lo


all due to the fact that I was in a bit of a hurry to post on The Lilypad's forum and could not remember my Flikr account password and I couldn't put it in my normal gallery for various boring reasons...

The Lilypad is having a month of challenges, which I  love but have already acknowledged that I will not  come close to completing, so I am picking an choosing at a nice relaxed pace. The above Lo was part 1 in a do over challenge - this being one of my first digi efforts. I gave Matt a complete makeover and finished with this -


more my current style (and at least I have some vague idea of how to use Photoshop now!)

A couple of others I have completed came from our quick trip to the mountains just after Christmas


 (yep, be impressed, I walked to the top of Australia's tallest mountain - ok, so maybe 5 yo's were skipping past me and my knees gave ot on the way home, but hey, tallest mountain people!!!)

 and an Arty page (which I really like)



Lots of fun.  I'm off to Mum and Dad's tomorrow - forecast of above 40C every day - but they have aircon and a pool, so all sweet. Possible last minute holiday may be planned when we get back, madly trying to organise kids passports just in case.

So Lizzy and Mitra, sleep well now I have explained my odd boring previous post xxx

Friday, January 10, 2014

temporary

Ignore this, will explain later...

Friday, December 20, 2013

The Undie Tree

The elder two children really dislike putting up and decorating the Christmas Tree - Matt's girlfriend Alex was far more enthusiastic about the whole thing this year than the other two - Henry still enjoys it although is very easily distracted by just about anything really.

Anyway, when Alex bought her chrissy presents around this year for us (including my guaranteed best present for this year, which she insisted I open - more of that later), Meaghan whipped up an impromptu tree with anything she could lay her hands on. I'm not sure how long I looked for the duct tap she had in the infrastructure before I gave up and fixed my slowly dying vacuum cleaner with sticky tape - not ideal!

Anyway, to get the lush green look, she delved into the pile of clean washing i had yet to sort (ok, nearly a permanent fixture in the family room) and came up with Matt's undies - and so the Undie tree was born. It's shelf life was limited by the inclusion of a real banana- but it did last for quite a few days. The kids were very disappointed to have to pull it down.





Inspiration for this Lo came from Em's Page Drafts Blog - so many great sketches to choose from - go check out what the talented bunch of Girls did for Christmas!


And these are the great presents Alex made for me for Christmas -

She has Matt's crossed arms attitude just right - I told Matt that if they ever broke up, I may very well kick him out and adopt Alex instead...

Coming into summer, this is the first house we have been in since Matt was a baby, that does not have Air Conditioning (it deserves capitals!). And with limited blinds, and very limited greenery outside, it seems so much hotter. Upstairs is unbearable, downstairs slightly better. Matt landed home with 5 friends yesterday and Meaghan turned up with 3 more. At least two of these had pools at home but chose to swelter here instead - crazy...
Geoff is trying to arrange air conditioning to be installed as soon as possible - although this is the worst possible time, hopefully we will get it before the end of summer..

Anyway, as my blogging has been less than stellar this year, I will take this opportunity to say Happy Christmas, hope you get all you need and have a peaceful New Year! xx

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

You May have Noticed...

or not noticed really, (silence from my long departed readers) but I haven't been a big presence on the net lately. I have kept my hand in at The Lilypad scrapping and checking out Facebook but that is all I can be fussed doing at the moment.

The reason boils down to our new house I think - ok I know. Don't get me wrong, I love our new house, it is  all we could hope for(almost - no pool- sorry Jo..)  and I was afraid that if I blogged before this I would just be complaining and I have absolutely no right at all to do that. I will say only this my life now consists of waiting for plumber, builder, blind installer, telephone/internet or just about any other tradesman you would care to name. Just about all good guys but waiting for someone between the hours of 8-2:30 or 12-5 which is the closest most can get with appointments - eats up most of my days. Tree men coming tomorrow to charge enormous amounts to clear power lines of branches.

But all worth it for our new house, more importantly or new way of life which actually involves socialising here - at home - anytime- with friends - anytime. It is so cool.  We have never been able to do that before.Our neighbours, who moved in while we were renting, are proving to be a bad influence with a steady flow of alcohol and children for Henry to play with.

 Downside is I've had to actually do housework - who knew it could take up so much time??

Anyway, here are some pages I've sort of done about the house -

                                                             the front entrance lights
 


Henry walking through the kitchen -
 

Henry in our spa bath

which is in our ensuite that looks a bit like this
 (with Henry apparently holding Meaghan Hostage in the bath..)

Yep, gives you very little idea what our house looks like yet - sorry. I have been neglecting photos lately, unforgivable. 

And on a happy note (@!#$!!) this is the second attempt to get enough tiles to finish our flooring, only had to wait 8 weeks for them - right near our entrance -


Not quite enough - again - and that may be the last batch that match the rest of our tiles - fun times ahead sorting that not so little problem out. 

So to any readers I have left (possibly none) thank you for coming back, I will try harder (but don't hold your breathe)  - I may just be saying that to myself though...