How to make bland veggies taste nice...

Add a touch of carcinogens...method - Char grill.

(veggies tried so far - Zucchini and eggplant)

And then there were 5...

Tents, that is.  First, we bought a tiny little First Light Shadow bushwalking tent.  Then, with Ben on the way, we bought a palatial two-room Sportiva thing (something similar to this).  That was too big for weekend trips, so we got a smaller 5-man Coleman tent (similar to this).  The Sportiva was still too big, but we wanted something slightly bigger than the Coleman for a few days, so last year we got a Freedom Invert 6.
Now, we're thinking of going tramping as a whole family, so we needed a second tramping tent to fit all of us and still be light enough to carry.  Torpedo7 had this Kelty on special this week, so #5 has been acquired:

PS.  Yes, we should sell some of them, specifically the Sportiva and the Coleman, neither of which we will probably use anytime in the near future.  If anyone is coming to visit and wants to go camping, maybe you should come soon before we sell them!

Curse of the sweet tooth cook

If you've been reading this blog for a while will know I'm into food - growing it, cooking it, and eating it. I also have a sweet tooth. These two things create a dilemma when eating out...especially when I get to the dessert menu. Most restaurant's dessert menus rarely have options on them that we haven't cooked at home and I am usually unmotivated to choose something that we have cooked at home because it rarely tastes any better and for the cost of one (very small) serve at the restaurant, I could eat a whole dish of it at home!

True complementarianism

So we played Scrabble tonight as it was our wedding anniversary and we remember playing it on our honeymoon (it was one of the boardgames you could borrow from reception)...we managed to use all the tiles (a first for us) AND had tied scores at the end of 260!

(We're not that into Scrabble - we can't remember the last time we played - but it was also given to us as a wedding/engagement present)

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9 years

It's our wedding anniversary today.

(These are my wedding shoes which I still wear)

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Great morning at the park

It was nice and warm and sunny. I had a nice chat with the mums and the kids had fun playing together.

Last day of holidays

Ben goes back to school tomorrow. So yesterday I asked what he would like to do for his last day of holidays...he asked to go to a park in the morning and then watch a movie in the afternoon (that means a movie DVD at home). So that's what we're doing. A couple of his friends are going to meet us at the park too.

Hedgehog rescue...again

On Saturday evening, we had to rescue another hedgehog from the bird netting that is over our strawberry patch (here's the one we rescued last time). So I had to cut another hole in our bird netting (which actually right next to where the previous entrapment had occurred). And then had the painfully slow task of trying to untangle the netting from the spikes, legs and head of the hedgehog (because every time you touch it or pull on the netting, it would curl itself into a tight ball which meant I would have to put it down and wait for it to relax and uncurl enough so I could gain access again). This hedgehog was a lot bigger than the last one and was perfectly healthy (the other one had mange and was fly blown), so after I'd got all the netting off, I took it down to the gully which is further down our street and let it go.

Culinary milestone

I cooked my first whole salt water fish last week. It was a whole snapper and it was delicious. This is only the second whole fish I have cooked - the first was a rainbow trout in Brisbane last September. I usually just buy fillets of fish as it is quicker to serve and I don't need to stress as much about there being bones in the kid's fish.

We also had an impromptu fish anatomy lesson as the kids (Joanna especially) were very interested in the carcass of the fish - eyes, teeth, tongue, brain..

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Furniture construction

Because we couldn't paint the house over Christmas/New Year because of the wet weather, Peter made a shelving unit for Ben's room. After it was all put together, Ben helped Peter put the undercoat of paint on. And that is as far as it has got for now, as the fine weather has meant we have been concentrating on outside the house jobs - cleaning and oil the deck and painting the house.