Horsham Comp

well as you know i had my first comp on sunday. Well the seniors got runners-up aggregate and we got 3 3rds and 3 2nds i thought that was pretty good. thanks to nanny and poppy i got there on time and safely.

Photos from our Victoria trip - lots of Daria, because she's new and little.

Make with the clicky click

Egg-cups and make-up

The origins of the word "cocktail" are murky at best, but it's possible that it was an Anglification of the french "coquetier" (pronounced approximately "cocktay"), meaning egg-cup. Legend has it that in 1795 an apothecary and mason Antoine Peychaud mixed brandy and bitters and served it, in egg-cups, to others in the masonic temple. (Interestingly there is still a brand of bitters called Peychaud's.)

These days, "cocktail" means any number of mixed drinks, usually with an interesting slant on presentation - the colour(s) of the drink, preparation of the glasses and/or interesting "accoutrements" like bits of fruit or little paper umbrellas. Cocktails can be alcoholic (and usually are) or "virgin" (unsullied, unaltered, without alcohol).

Our Cocktail Night started with a long day in Camden looking for costumes - specifically looking for costumes for Marilyn Manson and Emilie Autumn. Camden has such a large - and authentic! - goth following/community that I felt way out of place. Until we bought a couple of studded wrist-bands and belts, that is.



With the sun sinking oh-so-slowly in the west, we headed home for the arduous task of frocking- and making-up. Okay, not arduous - I just had to stand there whilst Dee got to work with "pancake", eyeliner, lipstick and about 3 metric ton of blue eyeshadow. (In turn, I drew the little love-heart on her cheek ... and that's about all she'd let me do!)



In the meantime, Colleen (above) had made all the food and decorated: the light-bulbs in the hallway and lounge were replaced with some pretty red ones (it's not a filter in the photos!) and there were fairy lights literally everywhere.



It was a good night, although it felt like we spent more time on the costumes than the party!

More photos, naturally.

Barossa and art sales

Hey all,

As promised, I've put up photos from our trip to the Barossa with Yuko and Akira on Flickr - check them out yo! We managed to fit in quite a bit of Australiana for the tourists - we had meat pies for lunch, vegemite on toast, feeding kangaroos and holding koalas :) It was an action packed weekend, and we owe big thanks to Cheryl who did all the driving and drank none of the wine.

In other news, the print I have in the Rialto Exhibition has sold! It was the first one to go, and it sold midday yesterday. It cost $300, which after the cost of printing, the frame, and a small hanging fee leaves me with a very tidy $166. It's officially my first exhibition and my first sale from an exhibition all in one :)

Update time

heya everyone i thought it was time i update the bandwagon. well they have finally started demolising the old school. i have my 1st comp on sunday the 17th and schools going well.

Viva la Cuba siempre ...

Not quite Spanish sunshine, but this weekend we went to the Carnaval del Pueblo (which Google Translate tells me means "carnival of the people"). It's a Latin-American festival, and was recommended by Glenda, Mark's girlfriend who lives in Barcelona. (Yes, I love the fact that one of my friends has a Spanish girlfriend ... and they met in Italia! Lot's of places to sleep on people's couches, methinks.)

But not quite Spanish sunshine (yes, I'm jealous ... pronounced "hyealous" in pseudo-Espanol fashion). In fact, so much "not quite Spanish sunshine" that we were rained out and headed to Angel for tapas and cocktails at a restaurant called "Cuba Libre" instead.

Many cocktails later we decided we were having a cocktail party! With a theme! And costumes! So in a couple of weekends we're having the inaugeral "Pop Star Cocktail Party".

But the question is: Who should I go as? (No points for saying "Moby".)

Google Street Views

Hey all,

Google street views are available in Australia.. which means if you haven't seen our house yet, you can see what it looked like in the heat of summer at maps.google.com.. and they've even gone so far as to do the streets of Talbot

How cool is that?

i'm going on holiday!

After days of rain and grey clouds, I'm just about to get on a bus then a plane to head to Spanish sunshine. woohoo!!

I will bring photos back and maybe send some sunshine while I'm away.

*big hugz* to everyone

BellyWatch: Week 15

Just a quick update with a photo of Cheryl so you can all see how she's progressing.

We went to a kid's birthday party today, lots of screaming, pushing, running around.. it makes me glad we're only going to have one baby and not about 6 ranging in age from 1 - 3. It was good fun though, plus we got a lolly bag at the end: Score.

We didn't get any bags of lollies or chocolate after Cheryl's birthday but we did go out for pizza and ice-cream on Friday, and shopping on Saturday.. so all up, it's been a good weekend. We even found time to clean up the house, because next weekend Yuko and Akira from Japan are visiting Adelaide.. that should be a lot of fun, keep an eye out on flickr for the photos :)

That's all from me, we'll post another photo in a few more weeks or so i'm sure

Happy Birthday Cheryl!

Happy Birthday! I hope you think of something fun to do before tomorrow ;)

Happy Birthday Trin!

Happy Birthday Trin!

Happy Birthday Mum

Happy Birthday! See you in a few weeks!

Where's our header gone?

I can't find it.. and I don't know the code to put it back.
Damien? Glenn? Can you put our header(s) back please?
and I don't know how to put the comments back to inline either.. not sure why it's all changed.. i didn't change it.. did someone?
hmmm...
mysterious and vaguely annoying.

The Cat is officially out of the Bag

Well, we've reached the end of the 13th week, meaning the first trimester, and so we've begun telling the world our news about the tiny person growing inside Cheryl. If like me you've been itching to tell someone, now it is officially okay to do so. Hooray!

A hydrocarbon- and hydroxl-fuelled weekend

Ah, back at work on a Monday morning. I'm enjoying my new job, actually - we even do things that could be considered ethical: enabling a micropayment economy in some of the poorer parts of the world, therefore boosting the economy and giving humans access to funds which they've never had before (e.g. in parts of Africa it's only something like 5% of people who have a bank account ... and we complain when they shut down our country branches!!).

Certainly better than letting rich people move their money around the world in order to let them stay rich ;-) and avoid the taxes that the rest of us poor working chumps have to pay. But enough subversive prosthelyitising! The point of this blog entry is to tell y'all what we did with our weekend - and it was all about friends, fermented grains and fossil fuels (and future fuel-cells, ahah!).

On Friday night we went to Chris's work drinks at a dingy little bar called the King's Arms in Holborn. Now, if that's where the King's soldier's spend their time, I'm surprised that Scotland didn't conquer England years ago - okay, a little unkind, it's a fun place to hang out but it's certainly shabby. Made all the more shabby-looking by Chris's entire office standing outside with pints of beer!

Strange phenomenon - when the sun comes out everybody is at a pub somewhere. And there are enough sprinkled throughout the city and surroundings, but they're always so full that people are spilling out the door, around the building, across the road in the local park. Strange, strange, strange.

So we had a couple of drinks and met a few new people Friday night. (Chris later went out clubbing with our mate Stolly, but Dee and I headed home for an early-ish night.) Saturday we caught up with another Aussie named Mark for lunch at the Union Tavern nearby. Bangers and mash for me, yum! After lunch we took Mark back home, and found Chris, Tina, Colleen and her friend Murray all having a wee party!

So many people in the back-patio area that we picked up the couch and took it out with us. Highlights: big chats about everything; more people turning up randomly; Chris bringing out a fern from his room, "because Planty was missing out"; yummy take-away Indian food (and lots of it).

On Sunday we got up early and headed to the British Motor Show (by way of Giraffe for pancakes and smoothies). So many cars! Trucks! Vans!



I walked around with Mark, a rev-head from way back. The coolest things in the first half of the building were the concept cars - with brightly glowing ninja-headlights, doors that swept up and back like wings and dashboards that looked like they belonged on the Starship Enterprise.

There were also a bunch of "green" cars - from low-emission petrol to hybrid (petrol and electric), diesel to biodiesel to other biofuel, fully electric with batteries or hydrogen fuel-cells. There were cars with recycled plastic bodies and solar panels, cars you plugged in to the wall at night, even a solar-powered bio-diesel Lotus Elise sports-car (in fetching brown-and-green forest colours).

I like seeing the electric cars, but most of them looked either a) ridiculous (square boxes on wheels, or bubbles that made the smart cars look sleek) or b) like something out of a Japanese cartoon (much better, but will they actually mass-manufacture them?).

Then it was onto the other side of the building for the petrol- and diesel-guzzling supercars -- Ferraris and Zondas and Lamboghinis and manufacturers I've never even heard of (but Mark's eyes glazed over and he drooled like Homer Simpson when he saw them). Lot's of things for going really fast - there were even a couple of motorcycles, so I was happy.

(Chris apparently sat in a Mini Cooper-D (for diesel), pretending that he really might buy one to the person minding the stand. Then when we finally caught up with him in the afternoon, he was genuinely considering it as a car to get sometime in the future! So I guess they did their job.)

Home to a barbeque (it's great, that patio!) and then we watched The Castle (classic) to try to introduce Colleen (Scottish) and Tina (English) to Australian culture. Not sure they got it :-).