Wednesday 23 March 2016

A few changes...

So nothing big has been going on in the past few weeks. Nothing major. Only a few tiny changes.

I now live in a new house, in a new city, with my new Husband and our new puppy. Nothing major at all.

So lets start with the new Husband and our wedding. Our wedding went beautifully - it really, truly did. Thanks to the hard work of a large group of people who love us (and a small group of people that were paid) we had everything we wanted in our Wedding Day.





Now, my advice to other crazy brides like myself that want to do ridiculous things like make their own veil...

Do their own flowers...

Get married in the middle of a bushland clearing...

And make their own wedding cake (well, decorate a cake that their Mum made)...

Is to GO FOR IT!
But only if you have a very understanding fiance and a wonderfully supportive, dedicated, and helpful group of family and friends to help you pull it all off. I had a wonderful time planning, organising, and doing all the things we did ourselves. As I sit here 6 weeks later there really isn't anything that I would do differently if I could do it all again.

Now, for the other exciting news. Martin and I adopted a beautiful puppy. We encountered some issues with the real estate so it was quite a long process, but we were finally able to bring home Sierra and increase our little family. Sierra is a 1-year-old mixed breed and she has the loveliest temperament. Her training is only just beginning (she came from the Dog's Home and had no training at all), but she is doing pretty well at adjusting to her new home.





But don't worry folks, I definitely haven't forgotten about my beautiful Fidget either

Monday 16 November 2015

Of Lion Kings and Wedding Dresses

I have had yet another birthday. I really should stop having them because they are starting to make me feel old. I got quite a few lovely things for my birthday, but among my favourites was a trip to Melbourne with Mum and Dad to see the Lion King Musical.

We really went to Melbourne on an expedition to buy a wedding dress, but while we were there we spoiled ourselves with lovely cafe breakfasts (and the other meals as well) and a trip to see the Lion King. The Lion King was spectacular! The costumes and puppetry were really beyond description, so I will just put this photo here instead, although no photo can do it justice either:

Note: This photo has been stolen from www.simonparrismaninchair.files.wordpress.com

Our trip was extremely successful. Not only did I have a lovely time, but I also found a wedding dress. Wedding dress shopping was actually easier than I thought it would be. I tried on 8 dresses, and one of them stood out as a winner as soon as I tried it on. I tried on a couple more after the winning dress, but I was pretty sure I had already found my dress. I was able to walk out of the shop with the dress and bring it back to Tassie with me. We had planned ahead enough to make sure that we had a spare suitcase for the dress to travel home in so everything went very smoothly. The dress only needs a couple of minor alterations to be absolutely perfect so I'm pretty happy. I won't describe it or put a photo up so you'll have to wait until the wedding to see what it looks like, but I love it.

The last couple of weeks have been all about getting the wedding invitations done. We struggled to find invitations that we liked and eventually we decided to DIY the invitations. Usually I'm all over DIY projects and I intend to do quite a lot (and have already done several) for the wedding, but the invitations were never on the list of things I wanted to craft. I found choosing the invitations to be the most stressful choice I have had to make so far, but I'm quite happy with the way they turned out so I think it was probably all worth it.

Things seem to be slowly falling into place for the wedding and I think we are on track, which is good because the wedding is now just under 3 months away.

Wednesday 21 October 2015

Important Things

Two important things happened over the last week or so. 

Firstly, Martin and I had a lovely engagement party. We had 119 people come all the way into the middle of nowhere to the picturesque village of Ross just to celebrate with us and wish us well. The hall looked gorgeous and the food was amazing (and trust me there was plenty of it!) thanks to my parents, soon-to-be-parents-in-law, and our army of helpers. If the wedding goes as well as the engagement party did, I am going to be very happy. Our amazing amateur photographer, Alister, did a wonderful job and here is one of my favourite photos from the day. 

And secondly, I received my result for my first Diploma assignment. I had been very stressed about the assignment because it is worth 20% of my overall mark for the Diploma and I wasn't sure if I knew what  was expected of me. It took me quite a while to psych myself up enough to write up the report and send it in, but it turns out that I had nothing to worry about. Not only did I pass the assignment, but I got 98% for it! I couldn't have been more thrilled. If I can do as will for the rest of the course, I will be very pleased with myself.


Monday 5 October 2015

Cradle Mountain


Last weekend was a long weekend for Martin as it was Burnie show day so we decided to do something different and fun and go up to Cradle Mountain on the Friday. Despite having lived in Tassie his entire life, Martin had never been up to Cradle Mountain and he thought it was time he saw what all the fuss was about. I hadn't been to Cradle Mountain until I was at uni, so I only beat him by a few years. It turned out that Friday was an absolute stunner of a day so it was a great time to make the trip. My highlight of the day was that we saw 24, repeat 24, wombats! We also saw 3 echidnas.




All photo credits to Martin this week.

Monday 7 September 2015

A big week...

Well, the last week and a bit of my life has brought some big changes.

Firstly, I'm now engaged! Martin and I are getting married next summer and I have to keep reminding myself because it is taking a very long time to really sink in.

I love my beautiful sapphire and diamond ring!!!

Obviously this is very big and exciting news for us and everyone has been very excited and happy for us. My life can now consist of bouquets and tulle and bomboniere for a while which sounds like great fun.

Secondly (and slightly less importantly, but its still a big change for me), I have bought a new car. My dear Barry the Barina has been my chariot on all my adventures for 9 and a half years now, but sadly his days as my noble steed have now come to an end. After our little incident, it was going to cost enough to get him repaired that I was forced to consider my options and buying a new car was the most practical way to go. So, my new travelling companion is Henry Ford. Henry is a good little car, but it is definitely going to take me a while to build the kind of relationship with him that I had with Barry. Its going to take me a while to even manage to recognise him in the supermarket car park.

Tuesday 25 August 2015

Update

 Something happened yesterday that is worthy of an update, but that I don't really want to dwell on too much. I and my dear Barry the Barina were involved in a minor car accident. I got out of this basically unscathed except for a bruise from the seatbelt, a jarred wrist, and the inevitable shock, but poor Barry fared a bit worse. I was headed to Latrobe to meet up with a couple of friends for some bushwalking in search of a platypus to photograph when a large tractor merged back onto the road from where it had obviously been driving along the edge of the road to let people past it, this caused a line of about 8 cars to all stop quite hurriedly. Unfortunately, my brakes locked up and I didn't stop in time. The car in front of me was towing a dog trailer and I hit the spare wheel mounted on the back of the trailer, doing no damage at all to his vehicle, trailer, or dogs. The driver of the vehicle was very understanding, having only just managed to stop in time to avoid the car in front of him, and was happy to declare that there was no damage to his vehicle and leave as soon as I said I would be ok. Being only a few minutes from Latrobe, I was able to call Rob to come and get me and was very well looked after by everyone. Unfortunately, Barry will need to be taken to the doctor for another round of plastic surgery to recover from the incident so I have very kindly been loaned one of Rob's cars for the next couple of days.

Now that is dealt with, on to pleasanter things.
I recently learned how to 'flood ice' biscuits with the help of a youtube tutorial and have now practiced the skill twice. I made a small batch of teapot biscuits for a friend's birthday (which I didn't photograph so you'll have to imagine) and then this batch of cutesy owls.
Its the first time I have used the owl biscuit cutter which I have actually had for quite a while, but now I think it will be one of my most used ones because the result is so darn cute.

Also in domestic diva news, I have been harvesting ridiculous quantities of lemons from Rob's lemon tree and turning them into lemon cordial. I have previously made 2 quite small batches, but on my last visit I picked a very large bag of lemons which after a considerable amount of effort yielded nearly 3 litres of juice. This in turn made 5 litres of cordial syrup and I have to say that it is very tasty and worth all the effort of juicing them. Rob's tree is still loaded with fruit and as soon as enough ripen, I'll do it all again.

In unrelated news, I have now joined the track pants and ugg boots brigade. Yes, that's right, I'm now on Centrelink. My Austudy claim has been approved which means I'll be able to keep paying rent and feeding myself while working on my diploma. I'm so glad that filling in all that paperwork didn't turn out to be fruitless.

And speaking of my diploma, I have made an attempt at starting it. The first thing I have had to do is convince my lecturer that the study site I have chosen will be suitable, by tromping around it and taking lots of photos to send her. That was actually quite fun. I always enjoy tromping through bushland and even found a couple of Tasmanian devil footprints which were quite fresh, indicating that a devil walked that track in the last couple of days.

Monday 17 August 2015

The Break Ins

Over the last few weeks, I've had trouble with something breaking into my apartment by chewing holes in my flyscreens. The problem first started with something chewing through the flyscreen of my partially opened kitchen window overnight and evidently sticking its head through to eat the little coriander seedlings that I had been growing on the kitchen windowsill. There wasn't any clear evidence of exactly what kind of animal had broken in, but with all the problems I have had with possums coming into my garden and eating my seedlings, I was prepared to believe that it was one of the sneaky little blighters learning a new trick.

I patched the hole in the flyscreen, replanted the coriander and moved it to the other side of the windowsill away from the open area, and resolved to shut the window at bedtime every night to prevent further incursions. I also smeared some peanut butter on the window ledge outside and put my wildlife camera on it to see if I could find out what had been responsible for the break-in. After 3 nights, without any visitors to the windowsill, however, I decided that nothing was planning to visit the ledge again.

How wrong I was. One night, I got home late and surprised something making a large amount of noise in the vicinity of my bathroom windowsill. The problem was that by the time I had entered the bathroom, there was no sign of the intruder and I couldn't be sure exactly where it was. I have a custom installed (I have a very clever Dad) bathroom fan on my windowsill and my bathroom window is always open behind it, but it appeared that something small and agile had climbed up to the window ledge, chewed through the flyscreen and let itself into the space behind the fan surround. What I was unsure about was whether the invader had made it any further into the bathroom than that. There is only a very small gap around the fan surround, but there were two small scats on the bathroom floor that had either been flung there by the intruder thrashing around behind the fan, or the intruder had made it as far as the bathroom floor. The scats looked very much like rat poo, but several of the very small marsupials have similar looking scat so I still wasn't exactly sure what I was dealing with. If the intruder had made it into the bathroom, the only feasible place for it to be hiding was in the cupboard under the laundry sink where the door was sitting slightly open. So, being very tired and unwilling to search the cupboard that night, I shut the cupboard door and placed a chair against it incarcerate any visitors and shut the window in the hope that it had made it back outside. The next morning I searched the cupboard with my friend, Christie, as back-up (I really dislike rats in confined spaces), but there was no sign that there had ever been a rat or any other animal in there.

I patched the bathroom flyscreen and for the next week I dutifully shut all my windows at night. I also put a small live-capture trap in my garden to see if I could capture whatever the problem animal was. The only thing that the live capture trap managed to do was startle a very bewildered looking brushtail possum who was far too big to fit in the trap, but had evidently reached a paw inside to get at the peanut butter and chocolate. After a week of no sign of any would-be housebreaker, I decided I must have given the intruder enough of a fright that it had decided not to come back.

I went away for the weekend with my family, having left the window behind the bathroom fan open, and when I got home on the Sunday evening, Dad accompanied me up to my apartment. Once again, on coming home there was a noise in the vicinity of my bathroom windowsill, but this time Dad immediately went outside and was quick enough to see a rat escaping out of the hole it had chewed in the flyscreen and high-tail it across the garden.

So, I was back to making sure that all windows were shut at night. This annoyed me enough that I decided to fortify the window in the hope that it wouldn't be necessary. Now the window looks like this, with flyscreen to keep the insects out and wire mesh to (hopefully) keep the rats out.

I never thought that I would have rat problems in my apartment, as I didn't think there was any way for them to get inside what is really just a concrete box. Apparently, the temptation of tasty coriander seedlings and snowy weather was enough for them to prove me wrong. I really hate being outsmarted by rodents, so hopefully I have now managed to foil their dastardly invasion plans.