Shoshe - Best brekky in the world

Raspberries from your own berry patch.

Dan - Too much stuff

It's getting a bit too busy, with lots of changes at work, study ramping up to me actually having to do some work, and kids getting bigger and bigger. But it's keeping life interesting.

(this journal looks like it's feeling a little neglected; thought I'd give it a poke :)

What I did on my Christmas Holidays

I had visitors, they rafted for 10 days in the wilderness, ate loads of chocolate and smeared litres of sunscreen on themselves... they returned, we saw art, Serious MONA art, With arty wine... I realised I missed Hive chats so am now reading Hive blogs.

Shoshe - On another world

Today's to-do list:

Get stat info for Tetl
Check MIPL pairs
Measure Peace, etc.

(Tetl and Peace are rocks on Mars. MIPL is the Multimission Image Processing Lab, and is pronounced "mipple".)

Becstarr - Smuggling watermelons

Officially freakin' huge. Baby theoretically due in about 4 days. Joel has suggested we just go to hospital and wait in the waiting room, which sounds tempting in some ways! Everyone keeps telling me to "enjoy the peace while it lasts". Working on it...

Ben - Still making things

My sister asked for a DVD cabinet in the shape of the TARDIS for Christmas.


It took longer than I expected. The outside was easy, but the inside took a lot of doing.

Ben - also making things

Everyone's making maple syrup, balaklavas and babies. Well I made a clock!

Bec: Getting big

From baby 2011

falsedan - making stuff

It's been cold lately so I learnt how to knit. My thanks to Diamond Face McGlinty for agreeing to model for me.

Shoshe - thief!

Someone -- or more likely, something -- stole our butternut pumpkin! This year's pumpkin crop consisted of one small orange-and-green Halloween-ish pumpkin, one large-ish but funny-shaped Halloween pumpkin, and one little butternut. But when we went to harvest yesterday, there was no sign of the butternut! No deer-chewed bits, no stem, no sign of it down the hill :(

Kit: binary day! 101010

Shoshe - Sugarshack!

We made maple syrup from our very own maple tree! We started with about 20 gallons of sap, and ended up with a bit over half a gallon of syrup (about 2 litres) -- we were hoping for "more than a few tablespoons", so we, or rather our tree, did really well. It's generally between a 20:1 and a 80:1 sap:syrup ratio, depending on the sap's sugar content. It's late in the year to be making syrup, but we decided that it's much more pleasant to boil sap in your turkey fryer on the patio in August than it is in March.

Jen - Off we go

Bags are packed (Thanks, Dan!), taxi's booked and will arrive in five hours to take the lot of us to the sunnier climes of Cairns and the Torres Strait. The kids are ridiculously excited. See you in a couple o' weeks!

YL - job application period closed!

The NSW state wide online job application period for jobs starting Jan 2011 has closed. Thank goodness! Each job application has a online set of questions to answer with 1000 character word limit. No two are the same!! =( Argh. I'm glad that pain is over.

Now to wait for the interviews you might might get and then find out which jobs you might might get offered.

(This all assuming the people haven't preselected who they want and are interviewing you for numbers sake.)

Jen - I runned it!

Amazingly I managed to complete the City2Surf today! I jogged the entire way - took about 103 minutes I think. So very tired now.

Ben - Academics of the Carribean

I am writing a history essay about pirates! The main primary sources are Alexandre Exquemelin (who will, I hope, help me get to know Captain Morgan better than I do) and Captain Johnson's legendary General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates.

In further news shiver me timbers, ye scurvy swabs, etc.

Kit is not bakeoff champion

Some friends and I had a bakeoff competition. I made lemon meringue pie (all or nothing - I had never made this before), drove carefully to work, heard some sliding noises from the backseat. Once @ work, I  found that the curd hadn't set, and I had to scrub bits of it off the backseat. 

Then, after taking the competion pie into the arena: remembered that I had had to brake suddely on the freeway en-route, and I realised was missing a pie. I had no idea where it had ended up. 

Sticky date pudding won, dammit. 

Jen - school holidays again

Half the year's gone by - the kids are in the mid year holiday break now. Boy have they needed it. Last term (Term 2) was 11 weeks long and they were absolute wrecks by the end of it. Slowly recovering now. As are their parents.

Shoshe - Berries-R-Us

We finally finished planting our berry patch. We've got six red Heritage Raspberries, six Anne Fall Golden Raspberries (though we think 2 of them died while waiting to be planted) and six Arapaho Blackberries. And last week we discovered that we have feral black raspberries along the creek!

Shoshe - Guardian of the Compost

We have a Compost Snake. He (or she) likes to curl up on the top of the compost, under the brown paper bag that we left at the top of the bin. We also have a Front Step Snake, which seems to live under our front step and may or may not be the same snake.