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Best laid plans

Yesterday I was babysitting a friend of mines wonderful daughter, and I got more done with her than I ever will today because of rain.......

I wanted to do more mulching & was going to wash my car (still probably can vacum the car, if I drive it into the garage) but the constant rain has put a stop to that.

So now to think of somethings inside that need to be done, well there is some clothes repaires that I need to do, the birds tree needs to be cleaned up abit and as always my craft room needs some serious sorting. I am at a real storage blockage in my craft room, no matter how much I put away there is always another pile that doesn't have a place. I suppose that is what you get with a home with almost no built-in storage.

I am slowly adding storage pieces to our house, while surfing the web I found this article (click on the pictures below) I would love any of these storage ideas for my home (the organisation nut in me went alittle giddy at the site of these ideas).

Other than the curtain for my craft room shelves (still havn't found my fabric!!!!!), I am currently working on adding another storage piece to my home. A few weeks back I went to Collectarama with my sister-in-law & a friend. I have never been before so didn't know really what I was expecting. But I am glad that I went! It was at the local showgrounds & there was hundreds of stalls selling vintage, retro & collectables. I bought a few things, including a retro suitcase. I wasn't sure at first what I was going to do with the suitcase (I think I might have bought it because it was only $8!) but after somethinking & surfing I have come up with a coffeetable that will store all our boardgames that are currently taking up shelf space in my craft room.

I just need to find some legs, I will hopefully be hitting my favourite thrift stores & hardware store to see what is my options are for legs.

Oh it has stopped raining! I am going to go & finish hanging my laundry (downstairs in our laundry room).

Wicked Weekend

What a weekend! I am so happy that we finally got to take this little weekend away, it was so overdue.

Firstly the musical Wicked was simply amazing!!!!! Mind blowingly amazing. We did have a couple of issues, we arrived in Brisbane at about 5:30pm and the show was at 7:30pm. Our tickets said that there was a 20min lock out which we thought meant that they shut the doors 20 mins before the show starts (wrong, but we didn't find that out till later), so we thought that we needed to be at QPAC (Queensland Performing Arts Centre) at about 7pm. We went out to quickly find dinner & went in the wrong direction wasting 1/2 a hour & not finding anything. In the end we descided to get ready for the show & hope that we could find something quick & easy on the way to QPAC. Thankfully the bar at QPAC had sandwitchs but only got to eat 1/2 before my WH (wonderful husband) realised that his ticket had fallen out of his pocket inside QPAC somewhere! Oh no!!!!! WH & my sister (who came with us) rushed off to see if they could find it somewhere & I stayed with our food. I ended up asking an usher what options there was for a lost ticket, thankfully since I had the tax invoice with me we could just go to the box office & get the lost ticket reprinted (YEAH!!!). My WH went & got that done & we all took our seats together. Talk about drama! The show was so worth it. And that 20 min lock out? Basically when I was talking to the usher she told me that it meant that they shut the doors 5-10mins before the show is due to start if you were late they won't let you in till 20mins after the show started.

So we didn't get a proper dinner, but made up for it at the buffet breakfast the next morning. Then we headed off to church at my WH's sister's church in Beenleigh, it was a Uniting church so was a very different experience for us. After church we headed back to the city & met up with my little brother. Spend the rest of the day walking around the Queens Street shopping mall with my brother, in the arv we had drinks at a coffee shop & walk back to Southbank & hung out on the grass near our hotel. Quite a relaxed day. Got rained on on the way back to our hotel & we said 'goodbye' to my brother. Dinner wasn't fantastic, but atleast we actually got to eat dinner.

Monday (yesterday) was our last day, we had a late check out (thanks to a special membership card with the hotel that we stayed at) so took full advantage & spent the morning at the Queensland museum & the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). GoMA was so much fun! GoMA was holding an Art in the 21st Centurary exhibition, it was so fun fun & much of it was interactive. There was a slide (yep slide), balloon filled room, pool & fun deck chairs that you could sit in and watch the city go about its business.

We had lunch on our drive home & also grabbed some icecream (we had had hardly any sweets the whole weekend!). Glad to be home but had such a great time!!!!

Tonight, tonight, it all happens tonight!

Queenslands big wet which we experienced at the end of last year & begining of this year. Put a huge dampener on a planned little holiday to the City. We had a great long weekend planned, tickets to Wicked the musical, going to the Art Gallery, Museum, Science Centre, Botanical Garden, etc.... Everything went underwater :-(

After weeks of waiting we finally hear from QPAC (where Wicked is being staged) & got our tickets rescheduled.....for tonight! I am in the midst of last minute packing & preparations. My WH & sister (who is coming with us) have been talking about nothing else for about 2 weeks. As much as I am sure that I am going to enjoy Wicked I think I am more looking forward to getting away from home for the weekend & hopfully doing some actual exploring around the city.

Other than our Wicked tickets we have nothing planned, which could prove to be a bad thing or a good thing. Bad if all we do is stay at our hotel & do nothing, good if we just go out & go with the flow. Hoping that the later happens, fingers crossed!

I love visting the city, I like the atmosphere & the way things look. I don't know if I could live in the city (not enough breathing space for me) but I would visist every weekend if I could. I watch weekend shows that show you things that you can do in the city, whole streets of amazing stores, exciting activities & yummy looking food. That is what I want this weekend to be. Hopefully I am not building things up too much in my mind only to get very disappointed & not enjoy our weekend away at all.

Have a great weekend!

Weather

Can't pick it at the moment, we have been having some really H.O.T days. I mean seriously hot & humid, the type of sticky weather that makes it hard to sleep. Then along comes March......and rain. Yep more rain. To be honest with all the rain we had at the begining of the year I am little depressed by the sight, sound & smell of rain (rain smell has always been one of my favourite smell!!! So sad). So to make myself feel better I have been going over the pictures that I took during the last weekend of Summer.

Me, my WH (wonderful husband) & our friend went to a local waterhole for a picnic lunch & swimming. To be 100% honest the water was too cold for me to swim in, that is definatly the risk you run when you swim in a freshwater waterhole in a gorge. But I still really enjoyed releaxing by the water, enjoying the last few moments of offical summer.

Oh yeah and then there is the playing with our underwater camera! Still feels just so weird to be putting our camera underwater. Sooooo wrong!!!! But the results are always so much fun.

Don't know what WH is doing, but he can cause our camera is waterproof (feels sooo wrong!)

Now what would be a perfect end to a day of relaxing & hanging out together? Gelato!!!! Yummy! I did meantion the gelato in a previous post, but I can't say enough about how much I enjoyed this Gelato. Definatly going to drag my WH back to the store & get me some more. Probably wait until the rain stops & the sunshines, gelato tastes better when the sun in shinning.

My nails look great!!! Little weird statement :-)

Goodbye Summer

Though we haven't really had much in the way of summer, except for the last few weeks with some exception hot days. But the weekend just gone has signaled the official end of the summer months & the beginning of Autumn.

Love this photo of the two of us

We took the chance of the hot weather and went to a local swimming hole. It was a lovely day, we had a picnic, swam, then went into Maleny to have Gelato (we had chocolate & berry great combination!).

Still feels wrong putting our camera underwater! Love our underwater camera!


As much as I have enjoyed the few hot summer days that we have had I enjoy the cooler months much more than the warmer months. So I am looking forward to the changing of the season (probably has something to do with our trip to New Zealand being in winter & I just can't wait!).

So it's goodbye summer & welcome autumn!

First for me

If you are a regular reader of my blog then you will already know that me, my WH (wonderful husband) & little Sis are going to be going to New Zealand together on a skiing/campervaning holiday. And today the news broke that Christchurch was hit by another earthquake (they got hit last September as well), unlike the last earthquake where no one lost their lives & there really wasn't any major damage, many lives have already been confirmed dead & buildings have completely collapsed.

I have never been in a position where a place that we are planning on going on a holiday in having something like this happen. We are planning on spending the last night of our holiday in Christchurch (where the earthquake hit). The pictures that are coming through are just frightening & I will admit to tearing up watching people stagger around outside crumpled buildings.

My heart & prayers are going out to the people of New Zealand & specially Christchurch. I pray that those that are missing are found safe & sound, and that there aren't anymore after shocks.

New pages

I have been forcing myself to stop just reading scrapbooking magazines & actually do some scrapbooking. I struggled with both these pages and to be honest one is still unfinished & I need to print some more photos for.

This is a page from our nephews 2nd birthday (can't believe he is 2 already!), this is the unfinished page as I didn't have enough pictures printed. The extra photos will go under the main photo in a flip up hidden section (sorry no photos of the hidden section!), this layout took weeks & in the end I had to ask my WH (wonderful husband) for help to finish it to this point.

Though I really feel that this layout is finished it doesn't totally sit with me. I think it's probably because of the colours, I am not really a pink girl & there is alot of pink in this layout. But I really like the string of lanterns, I actual cut them out of the photos I had taken.

Feels good to do some scrapbooking, still have plenty of photos to go & I haven't even started on this years photos!

Time to stop thinking & act!

For I think would have to be about 6 months I have been thinking & planning about putting curtains on my metal storage shelves in my craft room. The space as never felt 'right' & 'organised'. And I have come to the conclusion that it's because I can see everything that is in the shelves & they are packed shelves.

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In hindsight a couple of bookcases would have suited my storage needs alot better, but these shelves were the right price (one 50+% off & the other totally free!). So I am going to work with what I have got & make these shelves work better for me.

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So I have taken the necessary measurements & am now in the process of descided on the look that I am going for. I have a slight green & black thing going on at the moment, so I was thinking of a black fabric with white spots (used a similar fabric in our bedroom onto of the painted dresser) but the fabirc scares the heck out of our bird Curios. Seriously he takes on look at it, squarks & runs away as fast as he can (made for some interesting moments when I was sewing with the fabric!

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Or maybe I should go with a green? I have these Ikea storage boxes (in green) as well as some green metal storage containers that I use to store my stamps & stamping supplies, so I could ekco the colour. At this rate it will be another 6months before I have made a decision!

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Today was the day.....

It has still been raining here :-( but it has only been showers (very heavy showers at some points) so I have been able to get into the garden. Everything has needed to be fertilised, but with the rain my normal liquid seaweed fertiliser would be totally useless. So I have been using a slow release fertiliser. It has been a great success, particularly with the herbs that we grow on our back verandah.


But this morning I started weeding the last half of our main garden area. It is going to be a big task. I have to remove all the weeds, turn the soil over (removing any roots that I find), dig up & separate some plants that are going alittle crazy, replant those plants & mulch. I am very hesitant to begin, because if we get rain again that makes it difficult for me to get out into the garden then the weeds just take over again. But since we are coming to the end of summer & entering Autumn it is a slow growing season so it is my best bet for getting on top of our jungle before next spring.

Wish me luck!

On Saturday I looked down from our back verandah & I saw some plants growing in our lawn. On closer inspection it was confirmed that we had sunflower plants growing in our lawn. Why do we have sunflower plants (seedlings to be exact) growing in my lawn? Our bird Curios is to blame (thank probably a better word), why? His seed. Lately our Curios hasn't been too interested in the sunflower seeds that come in his seed mix, so they have been just thrown out onto the lawn (with the thought that some other bird would eat the Curios uneaten seed). Right where the seedlings are now growing.


Only 1 problem.....I realised that since it was Saturday my WH (wonderful husband) was going to come home from work in the afternoon & is going to mow our lawn! Oh no! Now our lawn on Saturday was is desperate need of a mowing but those seedlings weren't going to survive!

Side note: I have been trying all summer to grow sunflowers. The first lot of seeds got completely eaten by birds, the second lot I built a bird proof cover for that worked great and I germinated all of the seeds. Only to have them eaten by more birds & caterpillars (only one survived & it is growing in a pot on our verandah where I can keep a close eye on it) once I planted them in my garden :-( So finding a whole lot of seedlings in my lawn that I could try again with was so exciting.


So began Operation Rescue!

I grabbed my gardening gloves, filled a spare pot full of potting mix & my gardening spoon. Sitting on the lawn (in the hot sun I will add) I carefully pulled up pretty much all of the seedlings that I could. A couple didn't survive being removed from the ground, no roots. But a few casualties were not a problem with the number I was actually able to 'rescue'. Once I had filled the pot & and apologised to the plants that I just couldn't take (yes I actually said 'sorry'). I brought the pot upstairs onto our verandah & gave them a good watering.

Do you think them know how close these little seedlings came to being destroyed by the lawn mower? Do you think they are appreciative? Or maybe I had too much sun? Later more likely :-)

All you need is love

Happy belated Valentine's Day!

To be completely honest me & WH (wonderful husband) haven't done Valentines Day is years. It might sound corny but everyday is Valentine's day for us, we don't need a day to express how we feel about each other. Corny!

Anyway, we did go out for lunch on Monday & just had a lovely day together. My WH has Sunday & Monday's off from work so Monday is always generally always 'date day'.

But I hope that you had a lovely Valentines Day!

Treasury Thursday

Ok I know that Thursday is almost over, but I just wanted to share some of my favourite finds from Etsy.

Today my finds are a extension of my last post about the vintage cameras my WH's (wonderful husband) Grandparents gave us. I really would like to make the collection larger & I am loving anything with a vintage camera picture on it. Check out my whole treasury!

Food for thought

Just before Christmas last year me & my WH (wonderful husband) made a trip to see his Grandparents, they would normally travel to where we live at some point around the Summer months but they couldn't this year due to health. It was a real quick trip, we left after my husband finished work on Saturday at 3pmish & came home on Sunday in the afternoon.

While we were with my Wh's Grandparents me WH was showing off the pictures that he had been taking, his Grandmother said she had some cameras that she wanted us to have as she thought that we would like them. She was right, three lovely vintage cameras. I personally love them, especially the stories that come with each of them.

But having these cameras does cause alittle problem, how to display & store them? Storage in itself isn't a problem......a box in our storage space downstairs would fix that. But I don't want them somewhere where they are never seen. So we come to how to display vintage camera?

I have been collecting images of vintage camera displays using VisualizeUs, here are a couple of my favourites.

Image from Unplugged; love the idea of each camera having its place but not sure how to make this work in our house.

Image from my VisualizeUs collection; I love this print & the simplicity of the display.

Travel Treasury

It has been a while since I have created a treasury, and our up coming trip is a great excuse to search through my fav site Etsy for some great stuff that I would love to take with me. Check it out here.

It's my birthday!

Today I turn 28, yep 28.....getting close to the big 30! I have had a pretty quite day today, it has been soooo hot so sitting in the shade with a big glass of water is all I have been doing. And since it's my birthday I think that I am allowed to.

I have been so blessed with all the wonderful birthday messages that I have received today & my WH (wonderful husband) gave my a couple of beautiful birthday presents

I l-o-v-e lanterns, and these ones are sooo cute. My favourite part is that I can pull them apart & store them flat (love a good storage solution!).

Isn't this a gorgeous mousepad, it has actually inspired me to do an artwork for our house (more on that another time).

This has been a very eventful week, Queenslanders have been watching two cyclones (Anthony & Yasi), both have hit the topical north coast with Yasi doing the most damage. It seems that Queenslands moto 'beautiful one day perfect the next' needs to be changed to 'flooding one day cyclones the next'. Don't really know if our state can take anymore natural disasters. My prayers & thoughts go out to those who Yasi hit. I know that the road to recover has only just started and will probably be quite long but this will get better.

Happy Australia Day! This is a day when there is a great swelling of national pride, especially this year with all the natural disasters that have been occuring around our country (floods & fires). I love Australia Day, it is a total excuse to do very typical Australian things; BBQ's, eatting lamingtons & pavlova and most of all spending time with family.

This year we had a BBQ in our local park with my parents & younger sister. It was great to sit & catch, also enjoy the weather. For the last few days we have been having beautiful weather, which has been so refreshing from the months of rain that we have been experiencing & were the cause of the flooding that we saw. The sunshine has dried things out around here & I have been able to get into our garden & fix some of the damage that the rain did.

I am so thankful for the wonderful country that I am blessed to call my home, even in the midst of disaster Australians step up & do what needs to be done to help their fellow Australian. Whether its giving money or mucking in to help someone clean up their home. I don't know anywhere else in the world where I would rather live, especially today.

All good things......

It is that time again, the end of holidays. My WH (wonderful husband) has been on holidays from work for the past two weeks & tomorrow is his last day before he goes back to work on Tuesday. Yes I am sad.....I have really enjoyed the time that we have been able to spend together.

Things havn't worked out as we had planned, with the floods that our state has experienced. But hopefully in the next week we will be able to reshedule our tickets to go & see Wicked the musical.

I don't really mind that this did really work out, we still had a great time & did some great things together. Particularly going to help with the clean up in Brisbane, felt so good to know that we were really helping people.

This week we are going down to Brisbane again, this time for a compleltly different reason. On Australia Day (Woohoo, public holiday) we have tickets (along with a few people from our church) to see the 'Indescrble Tour' with Louie Giglio & Chris Tomlin. If you havn't heard about 'Indescrible' google it, get yourself a copy & watch it is breathe taking & life changing. I am so looking forward to going, it is going to be a great event! Even better for going with people you know & love.

Life is going to go back to 'normal' with my WH going back to work, it has been a wonderful holiday to me as well. My WH has been doing all the cooking, cleaning & laundry which has been absolutly wonderful for me. And makes things extra sad that it is coming to an end. LOL!!!

Oh, well I will make the most of tomorrow.

Count Down Begins!

We are off to New Zealand!!!!! This weekend me, my WH (wonderful husband) & my sister started planning our holiday to New Zealand that we will be taking in the middle of this year. This trip has been in the works for a couple of years now, since we came back from our trip to Cairns in 2009. At that stage I was working part-time & we thought that we could save up enough money pretty easy & go to New Zealand in 2010. We of course didn't know how our circumstances would change, and that I would lose my job & we would become a one income family.

Despite a reduction in income we decided that we still wanted to go, so pushed the holiday back a further year to give us twice as much saving time. And here we are......beginning of 2011 and officially planning & booking our holiday. So exciting!!!

Neither myself or my WH has been overseas, so we are also going through the process of getting our passports. We got the paperwork on Friday, had our photos taken on Saturday (they were awful photos!!!! But aren't all passport photos? Something about not smiling) & our wonderful Pastor signed our photos & paperwork as guarantor today. Worked out that I have known our Pastor for about 9years, wow!

We nutted out a rough plan with our Travel agent on Saturday, he was great loads of suggestions and ideas. We are using a travel agents that we used to book our Cairns holiday (though different branch), we weren't happy at all. When we arrived in Cairns we had nothing booked, airport transfers, rooms, tours...nothing. Thankfully I had our paperwork that proved that we had in fact paid for everything so the lovely people at the place we were staying booked everything for us. People told us they were surprised that things went so wrong, and that they had never had a problem with this travel agent but had used a different branch (the one that we are using to book this holiday). So far a vastly different experience (yeah!).

So our basic plan is the fly in Dunedin, drive to Queenstown, ski, then day trip to Milford Sound, back to Queenstown get a campervan (yep we are campervaning!) go to Fox Glacier, up to Greymouth, then into Hanmer Spring & into Christchurch which we will fly out of. That is the very basic plan, probably add a few more stops as we have alot of flexibility with having a campervan.

Now none of us have ever skied before, never even seen snow! So we are also shopping around for what we are going to need for the skiing portion of our trip. We are going to do a combination burrow, hire & buy. Our travel agent suggested investing in a jacket (one with a removable liner), and I have a friend who does a bit of snowboarding that I can burrow gear off, and we will hire what we can't burrow or justify buying just incase we don't like skiing.

It is funny, now that things have gotten rolling my mind has been turning to my travel journal. For our last couple of major trips I have kept a travel journal & also done a whole album about our holiday. This trip I will definatly be doing another travel album, not sure about another separate album (maybe digital!?) but we will see. Can't wait to share what I have descided upon travel journal wise.

Can't wait for this trip!!!!

Courage & Other thing in 2011

My word for 2011 is Courage, this year I want to take that leap, do things I wouldn't normally do, live without excuses. Which is a great follow on from the word I choose last year Believe, which was all about believing in myself (my abilities, talents & passions) & in believing in God (that he knows what is best for me & on strenghtening my relationship with God).

I have been thinking about how to put in to actual practise the word Courage, I mean it's all well & good saying these words but they mean nothing if you don't do anything about them. Right? Right.

So here are my thoughts:

1) Stop dreaming & just do it

I am a dreamer, an imaginer & a planner. This year I am going to do the things that I dream about. There is no time like now.

2) De-clutter

I come from a family of hoarders, not anywhere near as bad as those people that you see on current affairs shows, but still clutter piles up in parts of our home very quickly. I am going to be courageous and throw out alot of the clutter & really organise the rest.

3) Speak up

I am a quite person, I don't like to make myself heard no matter how passionate I feel about an issue or situation. I have a great fear of speaking in public and by public I mean anywhere outside of my home & family circle.

Our wet week

This has been an amazing & heart breaking week. The floods that Queensland has experienced has done so much damaged & has taken people lives (in some cases entire families). We are lucky that where we live has not been affected by any sort of flooding. Behind our home are ponds that did break their banks, but the water didn't come as near to our backyard as we thought might happen, the worst that has happened was the two drains at the start of our road blocking causing about foot of water to cover the entrance of our road doing quite abit of damage to the road service.

Me & my WH (wonderful husband) took a few walks around our neighbourhood to see what the amount of rain that we had was doing. Pretty much all the creeks were full & ponds had well & truly brocken their banks.

We are hoping to be able to go down to Brisbane and help with the clean up, but you don't want to be in the way so we are just being patient. The best thing that we can do is donate to the flood appeal, which we have a couple of times. I have a link to the Flood appeal website in my previous post, please donate people in Brisbane are going to need that money to help rebuild their lives.

This shows how fast the flash flood in Toowoomba rose & was flowing. Scary. There have been 9 people confirmed perished & 66 people missing. My thoughts & prayers are with the families who have lost loved ones & those who don't know where their loved ones are.

If you would like to help the victims of the Queensland Floods please donate to the Queensland Government Flood Appeal, people are going to need all the help they can get.

New art

I have been using a social bookmarking site for the last month or so, and I think I have become ever so slightly addicted. I use a site called vis.ualize.us, basically when you are surfing the net and come across a picture or photo that you like you can bookmark it using this site. Which is great for me, I am a very visual person and have a collection of pictures and photos on my computer that I have come across while surfing some of my favourite home decroating & lifestyle websites. Problem being that when I want to go back to the website that I originally found the picture (particularly if it is a picture of a craft idea or decorating style I want to replicate) it is almost next to impossible.

But using vis.ualize.us remebers for me where I got the picture from. Today I was on the vis.ualize.us and came across a picture that someone else had bookmarked in their own account, and I just hand to link it to my own account.

I am thinking of printing this image and framing it. For anyone who knows me this is sooooo me. Not sure if I will hang it in my craft room, bedroom or in our lounge.......leaning towards craft room or bedroom.

Alittle damp around here

It has been raining almost none stop since October, as alot of you would have seen on TV most of Queensland is underwater. We are now getting hammered by wind and very heavy rain, which has caused flooding to my local area. Fortunately we live on a hill so are not in any danger of flooding, but flooding in the surrounding areas does make moving around quite difficult.

Though we are pretty same from the major flooding, our home does back on to lilly ponds, which have raised alot over night. But we don't really expect the water to come near our house (hopefully!!!!). Because we live on a hill, we are living in the clouds at the moment, we can't see the rest of the coast. I am really praying for a break in the weather & for some typical Australian summer weather to make an appearance.

Last night a Telethon was held to raise money for the 'Flood Relief fund', they raised over $10million, on top of the $10million that had already been raised. Which is amazing! Australians always come to the aid of fellow Australians who need a helping hand.

On another note my WH (wonderful husband) is taking a couple of weeks off work (yeah!!!) so my posting will probably be quite lazy (not that I have been doing a particular good job of blogging lately any way!!!). I am so looking forward to spending some quality time with my WH, weather isn't great but we still have some fun plans.