Couchy goodness

Our couch is old. I inherited it from my former housemate who wasn't able to give it away to anyone else, and we just happened to need a couch.

This couch was so old and decrepit that you couldn't sit on it without at least two extra cushions, and even then you would get pins and needles in your legs if you sat in it for too long.

It is an old couch.

So, last week, I decided I'd had enough. I wasn't going to sit on this thing which was probably ruining my back and goodness knows which other aspects of my health along with it and I wasn't going to put up with it any more.

Now, we can't afford a new couch, so we took the old, worn and deformed cushions to a place which cuts custom foam and asked them to please replace it for us. So they did.

This couch is now AMAZING. We didn't get the most expensive, bouncy stuff (I think it's called endura-foam or something ridiculous like that and is guaranteed to outlast your couch); we went for the firm, medium-grade foam in the seat cushions and the cheap stuff in the back-rest cushions.

I can't begin to describe the difference. It is a beautiful thing to sit on. It still looks like utter crap without the throw over it, but it is so unbelievably comfortable!

I am utterly thrilled by this, and at the same time utterly freaked out at the gradual realisation of just how domesticated I've become!

Gardening

I think gardening is going to be my new hobby this Summer. I actually have a garden that I can see and that I can use for entertaining, so I have reason to do something with it!

My parents were never particularly creative with their lawn space. They had a verandah which they used for drinking coffee on in Summer, and they had some grass that got mowed and a few plants around the edges. That was about it. Even barbecueing happened on the verandah.

I have no verandah, but I have fenced-off lawn which I absoluely intend to use!

I don't think the previous tenants really looked after it very well. It was mown when we moved in, but a lot of the soil has bare patches that mainly consist of clay (I've added gypsum to it but it may not have been enough) and a depressingly high proportion of the greenery is made up of weeds (those flat, dandylion things that just seem to take over).

So I've been weeding (combination of chemical and manual) and I've sown some lawn seed which I hope will take. I've also made little shelves on legs that I've hammered into the ground, against one of the walls, with the intent of putting lanterns there for evening entertainment.

I want to have a nice garden that I can sit in and have guests in, and I'm looking forward to working on it more :-)

You want to put it WHERE!?

I'm now onto the final of my three dealbrakers for taking a house: Location.

The key piece of property advice that one always hears is: “Location, location, location!” and it's a very important thing. You pay more for a good location, and that goes beyond just suburb (although the benefits of living in a good suburbs are significant).

Even when you've narrowed it down to the suburb you want, you still need to look at some of the finer points:

Is it on a main road? This can have several advantages, though you generally don't want a place that is. You have to consider your individual needs, and some roads are preferable to others. For instance, Oolon and I recently decided against a place on a main road, not just because it's on that road but also because of where on that road it is. The house wasn't near any official crossings and was also in an area with a median strip that included a waist-high rail, so I couldn't cross it illegally either.

Given that I do most of my travel by bike and that I need to cross the road in order to go in the right direction for my work, this rules out any property where it's particularly difficult to do that (at least until I start getting desperate to find a place).

You also need to consider things like ground elevation and drainage (avoiding flooding), whether the area is prone to bushfires (and whether it is worth the risk in your opinion), proximity to public transport and shops, etc etc etc. My rule here is that it be within cycling distance (about 10min by bike) so that I don't feel compelled to take a car. It also needs to be possible for both me and Oolon to cycle to our respective workplaces.

So yes, we are being fussy. You might even think us snobby! But there are some aspects of lifestyle which I'm not happy to give up as long as I can afford them financially.

No bitchin' in the kitchen!

Following on from my previous post about looking for a place to rent, I'm now on to discussing Dealbreaker #2: The Kitchen.

Now, a kitchen doesn't have to take up half the house. It doesn't have to be completely new. But it does need to have a certain amount of bench space. It does need to look like it isn't falling apart. It really needs to not look grimey and like it's just waiting to sprout mould.

I'm talking about the difference between this:

And this:

For the sake of argument, lets ignore the fact that kitchen 1 has people actively using it. In that image, though, you can see that the oven isn't great. You can also see that the wall next to the oven/stove is damaged. The added shelf for the microwave just looks extremely... Cheap. Can't think of a better word for it. The second kitchen also has more bench space and a visible pantry. The surfaces are nicer. It doesn't look grubby.

Now, that first kitchen is not the worst I've seen. I've seen kitches with less than half the bench space and mould visible in the corners of the place. You could still work in a kitchen like that. But these two properties are charging about the same amount in rent.

I think the preference is pretty obvious.

You need a ruddy big shotgun.

So, Oolon and I are on the hunt! For a place of our own! It's all very exciting and the ADHD-part of me that obsesses over things has latched on to one specific property that we viewed. The part of me that knows this is ADHD-related is doing its best to reassure the ADHD part that it's a lovely place while at the same time reminding it that we may not be offered it and to not be too upset if we don't get it.

So, I've now got something to blog about. I have, of course, thought about getting my own place before this week and have done some considering over what I would and wouldn't want in a property. I've narrowed down three or four deal breakers, and I'll talk about the first one today.

A landlord who cares about the property.

Don't get me wrong: I don't want someone who is obsessive about the place and wants everything exactly perfect and as they'd envisioned it from the start and can't handle a place looking lived-in. I wouldn't last a week with a land-lord like that!

But I do want someone who clearly gives a damn about something that they own. For instance, there's the first house that Oolon and I had a look at. It was spaceous, had wooden floors. A bit old, but potentially nice, despite the small kitchen (a topic which I will get to in a later post). What killed the deal for us wast the peeling ceiling. Well, not the peeling itself, but rather the response to the peeling ceiling. We asked the agent who opened the place about it, who reassured us that the leak which caused the problem had been fixed. She also told us that she didn't believe the landlord had any plans to fix the cosmetic damage, but that we could say on our application that we would only take the property "on condition that the ceiling was repaired". And that was just the most obvious problem with the place.


So we decided not to apply for the place. I want a house that I can be proud to live in and where it's easy to care about its upkeep. It's a lot harder to care a bout a place that is grimy and not nice to begin with, and I wouldn't want to live in a house that I don't feel good about at the outset.

Of course, there is the factor of previous tennants (some of whom are still occupying the place while it's being inspected), but I can look past that.

So, Landlords! Here's a tip: Show that you care about a place that you own, or you won't attract the sort of tennants who will care about your property.

Cohabitation

So, Oolon and I have been living together for about a month now. A lot of people have asked me how married life feels, and I haven't really had an interesting response for them. Basically, it's not all that different to unmarried life, except that I get to keep him over night!

It helps, of course, that he was staying over about two nights/week on a regular basis for most of the year leading up to the wedding and for three nights in the last month or so beforehand.

The main difference are fairly minor and come with both going from an all-female household to one that includes a male and just generally from having a third person here. For instance, there's now men's shaving gear in the bathroom. Men's underwear on the washing line. There's even more washing that needs doing on a regular basis, which is making me think that a second clothes horse might not be such a bad idea (if room can be found for it, which I haven't been able to do yet), and there are extra dishes to be done each day.

All fairly minor things which are only vaguely noticeable. And, of course, I get to keep him after dark ;-)

Parenthood

Having a cat is a lot like having a toddler. There are a lot of advantages to the cat, like being able to leave it alone at home all day, but there are many similarities:

Their communication is limited. Cats are very good at communicating. They have a lot of different vocalisations, and you learn to recognise what quite a few of them are. But a lot of the time they'll just be going on and on and on and on about something and you have absolutely no clue what they're on about, or what they want when they're complaining but have food, fresh watter, and a clean litter tray.

They sometimes need their bum cleaned. Even well-toilet-trained kids sometimes have accidents, and so do cats. They get diarrhea, they leave a mess on the floor. If they're really fluffy (like mine), they can even get dags. So, you need to wash their bums. Stinkyyyyyyy!

They want you to wake up at a certain time of day, no matter how late the night before was. Children tend to like life to be reasonably predictable I was like this, and would be jumping on my parents' bed at 6am, insisting that it was time for dad to make coffee even though I'd kept them up until 3am the night before. Cats can be similar, and mine gets quite distressed if I'm not up when he expects me to be up. He also gets distressed if Oolon isn't up early enough as well. They don't cope too well with change.

They often decide they want hugs in the middle of the night. Most people who know parents are familiar with the toddler that wakes up in the middle of the night and wants to sleep in mum and dad's bed. Cats are like this, too. In the middle of the night, you will often wake up to a very loud rumbling in your ear, a furry weight on your chest, and your nose being sandpapered. This is your cat telling you that it thinks you're utterly brilliant and wanting hugs in the middle of the night. Just like a kid.

They are happies when snuggled between you and your spouse.  When Smudge is wanting attention, be it in the middle of the night or early in the morning, he seems happiest if he's between me and Oolon, in the way that kids tend to be. You are snug and warm in a safe place, and getting in the way of any siblings occurring :-p Unfortunately for Smudge, if we decide to get another cat, that will happen down the road at the shelter and no amount of snuggling in between us will help him!

About the wedding

Ok, so it's been long enough since the wedding now that I feel like writing about it. I've been having to tell lots of people who weren't there about it, so it gets a bit tiring to keep talking about which is why I've delayed so long.

So, The Big Day!

Got up at 7am. My lovely housemate greeted me with my cat, who had a blue ribbon wrapped around him. That was pretty awesome! She also got breakfast ready because she's awesome. My other bridesmaid (who flew down from Sydney) had stayed the night, so the three of us went to get our hair done. We actually had mohawks! But only to begin with - she needed to tease it to get it to stay properly.

I got picked up by Oolon's lovely aunt and and she took me to get my make-up done. At home, I was greeted by baked chips and got dressed. Now, the original plan was to take the train to the venue (in Melbourne's CBD), which turned out to be difficult which is why Oolon's aunt offered to drive us. So, while I was being force-fed food and getting my stockings on and trying not to be nervous, a LIMOUSINE showed up. My bridesmaid from Sydney had arranged it covertly, because she's also awesome.

So, limo to the city! We dropped our stuff off at the venue and I was ushered around so that Oolon (who was already there) didn't see me. We took some photos in the parks nearby, and a little girl who walked past us with her mum and sister said "They're so pretty!", which had me feeling pretty chuffed.

We had the most amazing weather, and there weren't too many people about so it was easy to take some nice shots. We got to the venue with a bit of time to spare, so we sat in our little bridal closet drinking chamagne and touching up makeup and trying to keep me from getting too much stage fright. Distracting questions included "Which is your favourite star wars movie?" and "If you had a super power, what would it be and what would you use it for?".

The ceremony was great. Our celebrant did a great job. I blushed bright red for most of it, nearly cried, and Oolon didn't let go of my hands except to put the ring on.

The rest of it was spent being social (hard to do when I had, on average, less than 3min to spend with each guest) and squeeing over the cake. The cake had ladybugs on it. Very important, given we had silk roses on it so we needed to protect them from the aphids... Yes, we're silly like that :-)

After the wedding, we went to the Windsor. The original plan was to take the City Circle tram but, like my original plan for getting to the venue, it didn't quite happen that way. One of Oolon's groomsmen arranged for a horse and carriage to take us to our hotel. Because he's awesome, too.

So, we had a brilliant time :-) That was the run-down of the wedding. I'll write about the honeymoon a bit later :-)

A minor thing that people get wrong (and really shouldn't!)

There are some fairly minor things people don't do for reaons which are not really particularly good reasons, and can result in social inadeuqacy.

The first one of these which I'm going to comment on is not knowing how to make coffee.

Someone I knew, lets call him Bob, was once asked for a coffee, and professed to having no idea how to make one because he doesn't drink it. Another person in attendance at the time also didn't drink coffee, but showed Bob how to make coffee anyway and told him that he had no excuse for not knowing. And she was right.

At some point in your life, you will have someone in your house who is a coffee drinker. You don't have to have the finest quality roast on hand or know how to operate a fancy machine, but you should at least know how to stir some hot water into instant coffe and to add some milk.

Similarly, if you don't drink tea, you should still have some plain old black teabags in the house, just in case someone comes along who does drink the stuff.

But in all seriousness - what kind of idiot can't figure out how to make instant coffee???

Hooray!

First thing's first: Happy Birthday, Oolon!!! XD You totally rock!!!

We're just over a week out from the wedding. There has been a LOT of work going into getting Oolon moved in with me. Back at the end of March, we spent an entire Sunday morning working on getting my room tidied. Here are some pictures of what it looked like afterward (I was too ashamed to take "before" pictures):

Freshly-emptied shelves! In a new location!

Sorry it's a bit dark. The wardrobe on the right is where the shelves used to be, and the wardrobe was at the foot of the bed. there's a lot more space this way!

Slightly different angle so you can see the details. That wardrobe is currently for Oolon's things.

The tallboy is finally neat!!!

The wall you can't see is a wardrobe with mirrors as sliding doors. So, this is what I've been up to! :-) Very productive, very tiring, and very satisfying work.

Snapshots of my world (part 1)

I'm not dedicated enough to do something like Project 365 or A Day in Pictures, but I do want to show  you a bit more about the world I live in, so I'll be taking and posting pictures of various parts of it. No idea how many pictures, no specific deadline.

So, here is the first one: My desk at work.

It includes:

• My Dr Who lunch box
• My personal electric fan
• My laptop and its accessories
• Stationery
• Teacup, coffee mug, tea
• Sunglasses
• Safety goggles

It doesn't look very neat, but this is actually after half an hour of tidying and rearranging. The textbooks are on a shelf which is on the adjacent wall, as is more stationery. I don't have a lot of room for it, because directly above where the photo ends is a window looking into the classroom, which I can't obscure.

This is my basket:

I use it to transport stationery to class. I got this big basket because carrying everything in a smaller basket last year didn't work. So, I'm trying something different! I consider this to be part of my never-ending quest for neatness!

Quincy's Cooking Adventures: Pasta Sauce Recipe

This is seriously the best pasta sauce EVER. In my humble opinion ;-) Once you've done all the chopping, the rest of it takes about as long as cooking up the spirali does, so it's convenient in that respect :-)

Ingredients

Oil or butter
1 brown onion, finely chopped
1 red capsicum, finely chopped
200g champignon mushrooms, sliced
1 can of diced tomatoes
2tsp crushed garlic
500g minced beef
2tsp paprika
Shiraz
Tasty cheese
Salt

Method

1. Heat up the oil (or butter) in a saucepan and add the onion and capsicum. Start boiling water for the pasta itself at the same time as you put the oil into the saucepan, and add the pasta as soon as the water starts to boil.

I decided to use butter this time. This was a day before I discovered that I couldn't have dairy any more.

The onion is sitting in my Kambrook thingy that came with a hand blender. Oolon's mum was wonderful and gave it to me for Christmas! :-) That thing makes chopping onions an absolute breeze.

2. Once onion is brown and capsicum is softer, add the mushrooms and brown them. You can add the mushrooms and capsicum at the same time; it won't make much difference.

3. Add the garlic (though this can also be added after the beef, if you want to avoid burning it to the bottom of the pot)

4. Add the minced beef and add salt to taste. Stir until beef is brown.

I bought too much meat.

5. Add the diced tomatoes and allow to simmer until the pasta is done.

6. Once the pasta is strained, add paprika* and a dash of wine. Stir well.

It should be a nice earthy red colour. The wine darkens it, the paprika reddens it.

7. Simmer until the sauce is thick, particularly if you're planning to freeze any of it.

8. Serve with tasty cheese and a glass of that same wine.

So, there it is! My favourite pasta sauce recipe! :-) Enjoy!


*If you are making a tomato-baseed sauce and the recipe says to use any kind of sugar at all: DON'T. If you wish to sweeten a tomato-based sauce, use red paprika. That's what it is for.

Just quickly:

1) I now have a Twitter feed in my side bar! =D Might encourage me to tweet more often.

2) I hate endometriosis. It hurts. I couldn't walk yesterday from the pain.

3) I love my housemate for letting me use her computer, because mine's in the Apple hospital. She rocks!

4) I'm very glad I have a backlog of entries, so lack of computer is no problem.

5) My parents are totally weird.

Seasons Greetings!

Happy Holidays to everyone! Whatever your religious views, I hope you have a wonderful time with family and friends. There is so little time to spend with family in this day and age that we should take the opportunities that come our way, no?

So! Jingle the bells, hang the holly and have a roaring good time with the mulled wine! =D

Hooray!

Well, it's the first day of the Summer holidays and I've survived my 2nd year of teaching :-) And I'm staying at the same school next year, which is kind of awesome!

This year has been HUGE. A lot has changed, all of it for the better (even when it was painful). Now I'm starting the Summer holidays, a week out from Christmas, and with new-found freedom! I'm looking forward to many things:

• Weekend picnics
• Time to read books (thinking about getting some Tad Williams; I hear he's good)
• More frequent cooking (tiredness gets in the way)
• More sleep (to get rid of the tired so I can cook!)
• Spontaneous dinners out
• Spontaneous trips to varous parts of my city
• Regular cycling 
• Attempting to ride all the way into the city from my university (roughly 20km)
• Successfully riding into the city my university (it may take an entire day, and I may need a thorough wash afterward!)

Basically, I'm looking forward to spontaneity, fitness and relaxation :-)

Also, this is my new bike! =D Innit pretty???

I have added a rack at the back, mudguards and a basket at the front :-) I call her Arien, a Sun angel invented by Tolkien. Had there not been a kid in one of my classes called Marko, I'd have been extremely punny and called the bike "Marko Apollo". Arien is nicer, though.

Quincy's Cooking Adventures: Cooking with Quincy (and friend)

I have a friend I used to sometimes cook with. These days, we don’t get to do this very often. We both have unusually busy schedules which results in conflicting dinner times and locations.

But when we do cook together, we’re like a well-oiled machine. Things just kind of flow, and I’ve had a 3rd party try to join in and be both mesmerised and utterly lost by the way things usually go.

For instance, one of us, call her A, will be stirring while the other (B) is chopping. B will say “Utensil!”. A will look over, see what B is trying to do, figure out which utensil is needed, figure out how safe it is to leave her stirring. She will then either leave the stirring or figure out the best way to get utensil to A without stopping. Within 2-5 seconds, the correct utensil will get passed to A, cooking will resume.

It's not so easy when you insert a 3rd person, but a lot of that might have to do with how tiny the kitchen is.

I guess this is one of the advantages of having ADHD: You make seemingly impossible connections and you make them fast, particularly if you are working on something that you are comfortable with (as opposed to being put on the spot, where your brain freezes totally). And when you get two ADD-ers together, performing a task that they are both good at and comfortable with, you end up with something amazing.

I like cooking with my friend.

Pop Quiz!

Question: How many flat surfaces can YOU see?
Bonus Question: How many have I already taken advantage of?
Answers at the bottom of Monday's blog!

What I've been doing!

So, I'm back from my break :-) I have not been sitting idle! Here's a brief rundown of what's been happening:

1) Writing reports.

Report-writing is boring and painful business. It's as bad as marking, quite frankly. The worst part is when you think you're finished and then discover that you have to read through all the reports you've written because the comment bank you used included stuff about topics you haven't actually covered...

2) Marking.

Kind of has to happen before you can write reports... Also painful and boring.

3) Weekend away with my sweetheart

We went to Bendigo in country Victoria for a weekend :-) It was lovely. Totally unstructured, so we did as we pleased. Read books, walked around the town, relaxed in the spa. Pure romance :-)

We also stopped in a smaller town called Malmsbury to see a village market. There were jams and preserves, wines, beers, hand-crafted jewellery. The gardens were also amazingly beautiful.

It was a fantastic weekend, and just what we both needed.

I'm now back in the real world and hopefully blogging regularly again!

Housework sucks.

I posted recently about why things get messy, now I’m posting about why they tend to stay messy.

Nobody likes cleaning and tidying. It’s a chore which takes time and effort, and which everyone wishes would just do itself. It’s a bit of a pain.

For me, tidying is even more difficult than for most people. For one thing, I have no idea where to start. When I see a messy room, I don’t see messy sections, but rather I see the whole mess. I have actually been in the situation where I stood in the middle of my room, trying to get to all corners at once to tidy the whole thing, and the result was that I didn’t actually move for about a minute while my brain started crashing. It looks kind of like this:

Apple have ruined beachballs for me. Forever.

If I do manage to, eventually, pick a starting point, I will zone in on that section and tidy it to  absolute perfection. I will then step back feeling exhausted and proud of my work. I will then look around the room, see just how much more mess there is, and lose all hope of ever getting the whole lot tidy again and give up.

The other thing that makes me lose hope is not knowing where to put things while I’m tidying. There are multiple places that they could go, and there are multiple items which could go into any of these multiple places, meaning that I overload on all the possibilities, put everything that I can’t immediately sort into a new pile, and try not to think about it. This means that I will have several piles (in boxes if I’m lucky) of “miscellaneous items” which get forgotten and I often wonder where these things go. I find them again later in this pile, try to sort it, and panic again.

It’s easier when I have someone there to help, partly because things get cleaned more quickly and thoroughly. This means that I don’t get disheartened about the fact that I’ve expended all this time and energy for no apparent reason.

Clearly, I must never live alone. Or I will have a breakdown.

Enthusiastic kitty is annoying. But CUTE!

I own a 6-month-old cat. He’s grey and fluffy and gorgeous. He was a rescue - I got him when he was 11 weeks old and weighed 600g (any smaller at that age, and the vet would have euthanised him). He had worms, and only didn’t have fleas thanks to the the careful care and nursing of a couple of good friends who looked after him for a week before I was able to take him in. They're also the ones who got him up to 600g in that week.

He now weighs around 2.5kg and is well-adjusted, and he thinks that I’m just the best human ever. This is absolutely lovely, until he decides to tell me so at around 4am.

You see, he purrs. Loudly. And he’ll often decide to purr at me. Right next to my face. Once, he found that there was some space between my face and the pillow, and that it was the perfect-sized gap for his little purring head. This meant that he was not only purring ON my face, he was also resonating through the pillow so there was no escape, particularly when I was trapped by the cuteness of it all!

He also seems to think that I’m filthy, bedraggled and unable to take care of myself as, soon after the purring starts, he’ll also randomly decide that I need some serious grooming. So I’ll not only have DabDabDab of him walking on me while trying to get the best angle and the rrrRRRrrrRRRrrrRRR going on right in my ear, I’ll then also have the ScrapeScrapeScrape, both in sound and feeling on my nose and chin and just about any other part of my face he can reach (I’ve taken to keeping my mouth covered by the blanket so he can’t get to that). 

The funny part is if he tries to groom my hair - the length of it just perplexes him and what he does with his mouth reminds me of Mr Ed the talking horse. Apparently they used peanut butter to make the horse do that. It seems that they don’t like getting it on the roof of their mouths. Humans have a name for that when it happens to them - arachibutyrophobia, It’s like another rule 34, but not of the internet; if you can think of it, there is a phobia of it. Humans are weird.

My darling little Smudge.

Anyway.

“So why does she let him on her bed?” - I hear you ask. Well, for starters, because he’s cute ♥. But he is generally good for most of the night, and these grooming and purring episodes are becoming less and less frequent. He’s being trained to know that, if he does anything while I’m in bed at night, he doesn’t get a reaction.

There is just something so lovely about a little creature, who’s not even of your species, thinking you’re awesome and snuggling up next to you or on top of you and falling fast asleep because it’s so very comfy and content in your presence.