My childhood: here I learnt to be creative, enjoy life, the importance of family…

Married life (current season): Here I’ve learnt, and am still learning, about patience, love, forgiveness, responsibility, joy.

Pepper (current season): Here I’m learning about responsibility, helplessness, unconditional love, happy tears.

Uni (the first time round): Here I learnt about resilience, teaching, passion, eLearning, adaptability, friendship.

1. Walking with Pepper.

Flowers near our house…

2. Powderfinger! I’ve just finished listening to their live webcast where they performed their new album- Golden Rule. It’s released tomorrow, and by then I will have listened to the album through at least 10 times, including twice live! They are seriously my favourite band EVER, and they make me so happy.

http://powderfinger.com

3. Christmas Decorating! Yep, I’ve started already! But I still need some suggestions on how to decorate this part of the house:

The baby Yeshua from our nativity scene…

Do people think you’re hard to buy for or are you constantly dropping hints? What’s on your ultimate gift list? If you were to write a list of 5 things that would be on the list of perfect presents for your next birthday what would they be? Would it be a particular thing or anything from a particular store/shop? An
experience or something with pretty bows? Practical or whimsical?

I’m going to be heaps practical about this. Not cause my birthday is any time soon, but because CHRISTMAS is just a few short months away. My FAVOURITE time of year!!

1. Spotlight voucher. Yes! fabric, craft supplies, scarpbooking, knitting… it’s all there! A few hundred dollars would be perfect…

2. Embroidery threads. I know that sounds kinda boring, but didn’t you hear?! Embroidery is my new thing!! I need to stock up on some more colours…

3. Walls. Okay, so this one isn’t so practical, but I have heaps of stuff I want to put on the walls, and just no wall space really left! (P.S my newest thing I’m doing is framing small embroiderries and putting them up on the wall!

4. Photos Printed… you know I love scrapbooking? And I’m working on my travel scrapbook from Jan/Feb at the moment, but I have HUNDREDS of photos that I need printed from post-schoolies week (2004) to well, now. The earlier part of my life is already scrapbooked. So if all those could just get printed out for me, that’d be great!!

5.  Suprise me! As much as I love getting what I want, I really, truly, madly, deeply (Oh GOD, Savage Garden moment…*shakes head in shame*) love SUPRISES!!! They’re my favourite, and really make an gift giving time special!!

Click the picture of Pepper (below) to see all my Christmas photos from last year (there’s not too many- I promise!)

My best girl stuffed after all the unwrapping on Christmas Eve "08

Quite Pepper...

Because of that (and because we’ve been putting together all our new furniture and cleaning up  the various areas of the house) I haven’t had a chance to edit any photos to show you, or to blog about the quilt show I went to on Saturday or ANYTHING!! Here’s a slideshow of the Quilt Show. If you’re viewing this in a reader, then you might need to click on the actual post link so that you can view the slideshow.

Also, have you had a look at my new blog, Cooking For Two? If not, I’d really appreciate you having a look and leaving me some feedback!

Hope you enjoyed your long weekend if you were in Australia, and if you’re part of the Commonwealth, then I hope you have a great Queen’s Birthday holiday when it comes around!

For those parties that I did last week I got to get 15 Tupperbucks at Sales meeting last night! So I got $15 worth of free product, which is excellent. I’m going to save it up until after January, when I will get lots more Tupperbucks for my parties then.

And last night I was in the top 5 sellers for the week (out of people that were there that night), so that was exciting and I got a set of 4 free tupperware cerial bowls! So I was pretty glad that I went. Sales meeting is inconvenient cause it’s a Monday night, when I’m meant to have home group, but I think I will only go when I have had a party the week before.

At the moment I just have boxes and boxes of Tupperware at my house that I have to put into the right sections and drop off to people! It’s fun and exciting, and I am wishing I could just keep it all myself! But like Mum said, I have to find a rat proof place to keep my Tupperware, at the moment it is just in a few boxes on the dining room table. Not a good look!

The rats we have seem to be oblivious to the rat sack out, and Harry, our carpet snake has left. So he won’t eat them up for us. Come back Harry!! Luke thinks he left because Amon and I accidentally ran over him one night… but we went back and looked and he was totally okay. Seriously, he is like at least 3 meters long, and thick as your neck, so he was totally fine with the car running over him and all… he was up hissing at us we even watched him catch a bug that was unfortunatley flying near him… See! We were doing him a favour- our headlights were on the bug!!

But anway, hopefully Harry, or a cousin or something will come back to live soon, and eat all the nasty rodents, but not Pep Pep. She is ours to keep.

Good news on the Israel front as well- cheaper plane tickets then last time we were looking! And my passport has been processed, and is in the mail today! So I should get it by the end of the week! Pretty good turn-around seeing as I only applied for in on Friday! Though I did pay for the priority…

Check out this video of Pepper anyway. She is growing up, but still as cute as ever trying to eat a fly/ native bee!!

Some of my own stuff has made its way on there. Here are some of my top ones, and a link to my deviant art page.

I roll over to Luke and wake him (he doesn’t like it). “Can you see that?” I ask, and point out the window. The grey there behind the two trees, on the other side of the gully. He sees it, and thinks that it’s water.

I get my phone and call Dad, and then while I’m getting ready for school, Luke and Pepper investigate. They discover a BIG hole in a BIG pipe, and heaps of water IS spurting out everywhere.

Anyway. Dad gets the water turned off, and fixes it at lunch time. So by the time I’m home from school it’s all fixed!!

Oh, btw, my first ‘proper’ day of school today- teaching the whole thing. It went pretty well! I’m blogging my reflections using pretend names etc. over here. Check it out. I’ll probably just blog the exciting and fun things here! Like the HUGE big ‘tv’ I made them today out of a fridge box. Will post photos tomorrow when they’re in it!!

My potatoes are sprouting up REALLY well, and so Pepper and I did some gardening this morning- putting more soil on the potatoes so they continue to reproduce, and also watering all the herbs, and other vegies. We also dug up some new soil for the next vege garden, and found some old sleepers to make a herb garden with. Pepper was pretty excited about the shovel… she liked to try and bite it.

We’ve also done a bit of cleaning, and I made zucchini and basil soup for lunch. It was (suprisingly) VERY yummy. Luke loved it (!!!). I will post up the recipe some time soon (remind me). I’ve also done a bit of wii fit, which Luke is forcing me to do an hour of seeing as I ate a dominos pizza last night (not the whole thing, just half).

I also spent a bit of time cleaning up my work area, and setting up the G4. I am planning on sifting through that and putting all the content I want to keep on the external hard drive. Then Luke said something about setting it up as a server… or something like that. I was distracted at the time. I also want to set up a windows/ ubuntu machine, so that I can test the things I make in different operating systems. It’s always good to have one of each. not to use as the main computer though- only my baby mac mini for that.

You can look forward to seeing more Pepper videos in the future, as she’s getting a few comments on viddler, which is making me happy (comments always do!). Of late I am also enjoying watching pixar short films on youtube- something I don’t usually do, but it keeps away any signs of boredom (unless you count that as an actual sign of boredom).

We were going to hang out with Rachel & Aaron tonight, but they’re busy. So I think we’ll just watch a movie and chill. Kebab skewers for dinner, yum!!