Week 27 at Chez Stutters

This last week both of us have been on holidays: I got in early at work and demanded annual leave during school holidays, and I got it. We'd initially been planning to go to Canberra for a few days (in July, I know!) but the costs associated with the dishwasher and the heater put paid to that idea.  Instead we essentially had a staycation.

It also meant that we could move up getting our cats by a week, and I am so glad we did that. As you may have noticed from photos and Facebook comments and Catterday posts, we love and adore our new kitties: Bishop Bion and Bard. A great deal of time this week has been devoted to getting to know them and spoiling them rotten. 

Elseweek, we went to two movies (How to Train Your Dragon 2 on Tuesday, and Jersey Boys on Friday), introduced various people to the cats, had one teenage boy over to play Xbox to get him out of his mother's hair, and went to Wangaratta to buy an exercise bike that we haven't yet assembled. That may be tonight's job. 

I did lots of crochet (finished another UFO) and Project Life, and then there was the Weekend. 

On Saturday, we took a group of 45 school kids to Melbourne for OzComicCon. Country school kids. Some of whom had never been to anything even remotely similar, and certainly not something with the volume of crowds of an OzComicCon that included a Dr Who companion (Arthur Darville), an X-Man (Shawn Ashmore), MacGyver, Freddy Kruger, and a Veronica Mars star (Jason Dohring) among the guests. Some of them were a little overwhelmed. Some of them coped fine, and we had to break up sword fights on the bus on the way home. I got to chat to Aaron Ashmore from Warehouse 13 and get Darville's autograph, and took advantage of Madman's lower Con prices to buy up three more volumes of Ooku, a Tiptree-winning Manga that I bought the first four volumes of at Supanova back in April. 

On Sunday, thanks to the good offices of Jaime Schmidt, I had been informed that the Craft Alive fair was on in Wodonga, and I managed to convince M to go with me.  I honestly didn't buy that much: just three paper pads, 14 rolls of washi tape, some brads, and two ink pads.

Finally, the Tour began on Saturday evening, and even without Cadel Evans riding, and with Simon Gerrans nasty crash on the first stage, I'm really enjoying it.  I've watched a good stretch of both stages so far, although with going back to work today, who knows how I'll go hereafter.  I must remember to put in for the day after the final stage off work, however.

And that's been our (very full, apparently) week.

Where I write (or don't): BEDiM Day 7

I had planned to write this post at lunch time, when my answer would have been different, but I got distracted by the arrival of four sets of stamps from Kelliestamps.

So, here I sit, on the sofa at home, typing this on my iPad while I watch Spicks and Specks for the first time in the new house, because we finally have TV reception (just in time for Eurovision, yay!) The GF is sorting our ridiculously large DVD collection by movies vs tv, and then alphabetically by title. 

The two Jamies (and the one and only Indira)

Yesterday afternoon was a tale of two Jamies; Jamie Oliver and Jamie Durie.

We went out in the afternoon to Trade Secret to pick up the Jamie Oliver 3-in-1 peeler (with julienne and soft-fruit blades) which we'd been looking at for a while and finally bought because summer is coming on and we want to have salads to eat during the week etc).

We also went to Big W to buy an additional wall planter, having bought two Jamie Durie 3-pocket planters on Saturday and planted them up early Sunday afternoon.  They look and seem to work well (so far), and we were impressed enough to decide we wanted another one.  Knowing that we eventually want to move back to a city at some point in time, and knowing that we're both happier in Inner City rather than suburbia, I'm keen on thinking about gardening in small/confined spaces.  It's not as though we've got unlimited space now, of course.  Comparatively, we have a fairly small growing space (although it's a lot more than we had when we first moved in - a story for another time) and these 12 (two 3-pocket and one 6-pocket) planter pockets give us more herbs (mostly) than we could otherwise have.

So, to keep up the garden stocktake begun in this post - we've now added (in the Jamie Durie wall planters)

The first two Jamie Durie planters,
hung from our fence with hooks
from Bunnings

• Vietnamese mint
• Chives
• French tarragon
• a Strawberry plant
• two petunias
• two nastursiums
• lettuces
• marjorum
• chives (transplanted from last year's attempt at home-made wall planters - I think that deserves its own post)
• mint
• coriander

The six-pocket planter.

I must point out that part of the inspiration for our wall-hung gardens came from Indira Naidoo, who I remember as a newsreader from from my youth.  I thought she was awesome then, and now that I have her cookbook/patio garden book, I only think her even more awesome.  She'll no doubt feature later in this blog (we keep saying that we'll choose a feature cookbook each week to menu plan from, but we haven't quite gotten there yet.)