Holidays are Over

Today marks my return to work, after four weeks of blissful holiday fun. We opted not to travel during our time off, partially because we went south in November for a wedding, partially because we are trying to pay off a mortgage quite quickly, but mainly because our house is still new to us, we haven't had any significant time off since moving in, and we just wanted to hang out here.

I did only a little bit of work during my time off - work that I have wanted to do for a while, but keep putting off because the idea of starting it, amidst all my usual work, was too daunting. Thus, the holidays were a good time to get a start on turning my thesis into a book with no other work distractions, and now that I have a good start I think I will have the motivation to keep working on it.

What made up the bulk of my vacation?

I did manage to blog a lot more regularly. I won't promise to keep it up throughout the teaching semester, but I'll try. I updated and added to the pages across the top, too.

We took Tika for plenty of swims.

I read a lot of books. I went to the library maybe 6 or 7 times during my 4 weeks at home, to pick up books I had reserved.

We painted the toilet and the hallway.

This line between living room and hall is gone. I call the colour "soy chai latte".

I did some bigger cleaning projects that I don't do normally, like dusting off the blinds (a big job, since we always have our windows open) and moving furniture to vacuum under it.

My dislike of these blinds is now more than aesthetic.

We planted a few more things in the garden - a peanut butter tree, jackfruit, another papaya, some more pineapples.

We harvested many huge piles of basil and filled up the freezer with pesto.

Gnocchi with pesto, spinach and broccoli.

(Seriously, our freezer is so full right now, between pesto and mango and reduced-to-clear tofu and veggie burgers.)

Future smoothies.

I took many, many naps.

Like this, but on the couch.

We watched series one of The Killing, a Danish crime drama. It was really good - a little bit like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but less polished. I am looking forward to watching series two!

I made a pretty good dent on organising my craft room.

Before.

After.

And used it for the first time, to sew a Go board.

I rediscovered my love of cooking and had time for more complicated recipes, like Mochi, Bacon Cheeseburgers, or steamed buns filled with Lamyong beef, cabbage and 5-spice BBQ sauce.

We made mango chutney and jam, and did a few more things that will get their own posts in the coming weeks.

Mango pancakes with mango jam.

But sadly, the holiday fun times are over. I didn't tick off everything I wanted to get done - cleaning behind the oven was never really a priority, I guess - but it was so great to have a few weeks off to play, to relax, to tinker.

Long Weekend Pie

A few weekends ago, Andy and I bought this acceptable but scuffy old table & chairs from a garage sale around the corner.

Then, two weekends ago, we had a long weekend. The public holiday on Monday was Townsville Show Day - for American readers, the Show is the equivalent of the County Fair, and I *love* that it gets its own local public holiday. I haven't ever actually been to the Show (though I did once enter the baking competition). But who doesn't love a free day off? We used the long weekend to refresh the table and chairs. Andy had sounded down the top, which was a lovely light coloured wood. But those curvy, turned chair legs were not going to be easy to sand. And I didn't want to restain the nice-looking wood to that bland brown. So, how about bright blue?!

Painting was stupid and not fun. For three days, we primed and painted. My back was sore, my legs were sore, my bum was sore. But, at the end of the three days, we had a beautiful new dining set!

While the paint was drying, I used some of the time to cook. I made some pie filling, so later in the week we just had to put it into pastry and bake and dinner was done.  The filling was mainly eggplant, with a few other veggies and a thick vegemite gravy mixed through. It was thick and wonderful and very tasty.

And when we baked it up, it got all golden and flaky and beautiful.

And, served up with some easy roasted radishes, mushrooms, and corn, it was the perfect meal for two tired people on a cold night.

But we must have been bitten by a painting bug, because this weekend just gone, we used one of our work-free days to turn our bathroom from this...

To this.

It is the first room we've painted in our house, and it feels good! I've got big plans for the rest of the place!

New House!

We were supposed to settle on our house last Tuesday. Planner and list-maker that I am, I had a very specific idea of how the day would go. We'd pick up the keys Tuesday afternoon, do a bit of cleaning in the new place, move a small load of stuff in, and then the next morning moving would begin in earnest. And we needed to be in by Wednesday, because we were handing over the keys to our flat on Friday - and we had carpet cleaners coming Thursday morning, and fumigators Friday morning. So, carefully timed, extensively planned operation.

You can possibly imagine my stress when we got a call from the solicitor on Tuesday lunch time, telling us the sellers couldn't settle. We ended up being allowed to move in early anyways, and the place finally settled on Tuesday this week - 7 days late. Everything went smoothly, despite the legal hiccup, and luckily I had cupcakes to absorb some of my stress levels.

Vanilla bean cupcakes, with the last of the rainbow sprinkles stirred into the batter.

Now that we're in, this place definitely feels like home. Nacho didn't think so when she first got here. She walked around, hissing at no one in particular, crouched low to the ground and jumping at Every Little Noise. But after about a day and a half, she relaxed and claimed the space as her own. Now she spends every evening and most mornings running around, full of beans, up and down the hall. She especially seems to love losing her footing on the slidy wood floors as she scrambles around corners.  She also managed to sneak into an awful lot of the photos I took of the house last week, so it kind of looks like she's giving you a tour. So I will let her do the work!

Before we moved, all of our stuff piled up in the garage.

The living room is nice and bright and airy, and the dark wood floor is a perfect canvas to show off all the cat hair.

This is what it looks like from the living room into the rest of the front space. Behind the dining table is a cat-access to the kitchen. The room with the lino flooring is currently a junk room, full of empty boxes purrfect for playing in.

The kitchen is a bit squeezy, and the cabinets are almost too high for a kitteh to jump on top of. Almost. That room you can see into at the other end of the kitchen is Andy's room.

The epic hallway of happy-fun-times! Look at all the doorways a cat can hide behind!

Theresa's room at the end of the house, which is full of empty suitcases at the moment but will become a craft room, a guest bedroom, a yoga/pilates room, and a room full of lovely things.

That's about it for the inside, and since Nacho doesn't go out of the house, I'll have to show you that another time!

New Home Resolutions

Today is moving day - the removalists are scheduled to arrive at the moment this post goes live (whether they are early or late remains to be seen, however) to haul our biggest furniture items 5km down the road on our behalf. We'll be following with boxes and bags and bins full of all our stuff. Now seems like a good time, better than the New Year even, to make some resolutions for life in our new house.

Waste less
I'm keenly aware of how much stuff we just threw away in the process of moving - even though we donated all we could, there were a number of things we had that just weren't give-away-able. This is mostly because we have a habit of using things to death, which is kind of a good thing. But I would also like to take the opportunity of moving house to make an effort to reduce the amount of stuff that comes into our house, and the amount of garbage that goes out.


In our regular, not-moving-house life, we don't throw away too much, thanks to the worm farm we've kept for a few years now. And with 770 square meters of yard, we will have space for a big compost pile as well - which will accommodate our weekly kitty litter dumps (we use recycled paper litter). So this will reduce our weekly trash already. But I'm also going to try to adopt strategies to avoid buying things with excessive packaging, short life spans, or things we just don't need. Suggestions in this area are more than welcome.

Grow All the Things!
Something I've been looking forward to since the remotest possibility of getting a house has entered our lives has been the future things we will grow. My dream, perhaps unrealistic, is to have a garden in which everything is edible. The house we are moving into has a few established plants, but plenty of empty space to play with. The things already growing include a hibiscus, which makes me happy because I love hibiscus tea. There are some things we'll need to take out - like some small clumps of palms that will get big and annoying. I've also got short-term plans for papaya trees, pineapples, and herbs of all kinds. And down the track we'll branch into ginger and turmeric, citrus, bananas, and of course a veggie patch full of wonderful produce. To maximise our space, I am going to try out this rocking vertical garden for herbs and greens. We're lucky to have some very handy gardeners within our circle of friends, and have been promised seedlings and cuttings and small plants already, so that will be a good way to kick things off.

Become a more sophisticated Saver
Andy and I have been pretty good at saving money. First on two PhD scholarships, and then on one scholarship + 1 half-time salary, we managed to save a fairly sizable down payment.  We did it by not spending much - buying very little, getting things second-hand, eating out almost never. This suited our lifestyle, and didn't feel like we were being deprived in any way. But the fact is, for the last 5+ years, we have been saving for just one thing, and our only regular expenses were food, rent, electricity, and the car. When we needed to spend more than usual, for a trip, or for a vet emergency, or a new washing machine, we could just take it out of our pot of house-money.

Now, though, we have entered the world of regular fortnightly mortgage repayments. And annual home insurance bills. And bi-annual rates. And maintenance and home repairs. So although we'll be saving $13,000 a year in rent, we won't be $13,000 a year richer. And now, in addition to spending most of our money on paying back our home loan as quickly as possible, I would also like to have other pots of money working towards the odd holiday, home improvements like solar panels (and maybe a new kitchen, long-term plan), and things of that nature. So I think I'll need to learn about budgeting and being deliberate with money in more depth.

Talk to the neighbours
In the flat where we have spent the past five years, we barely say hello to the people in the same unit block, let alone people in houses next door and across the road. When we moved in, some of our neighbours would avoid eye contact when they bumped into us in the driveway, making it hard for me to say "Hi! Let's be friends!" even though I sometimes wanted to. After a while there, though, neighbours change and we have at least said hello to everyone, even though we're not chummy with anyone.


In our new house, I'd like to try to be a bit more social and community-minded. This will be easy with at least one of the neighbours, who I already know from work. And hopefully she can ease the introductions with other people nearby, so I don't have the constant tension between wanting to know and like (and especially, to be liked!) by everyone, and also being terribly shy around new people.

Get a dog
We're already working on this one...

These are the things I have in my head before we even get our stuff into the house.

The Tropical Vegan Home: Happiness = Colour!

I've read a few blog posts recently about happiness -- The Little One is back(!!) with a post about her happiness project,  and Wayfaring Chocolatarian Hannah discusses various forms of happiness, such as goblins and cake. These posts are a good reminder to me that I need to be happy!  I have been, for the past few years, sometimes obnoxiously optimistic and upbeat and happy, but succumbed a bit to the drudgery of my first few months of actual work.  But I'm determined to be a happy person again, and one of the things that makes me happy is bright colours.

A little while ago, I was starting to feel pretty down on our current rental unit.  Probably because we've lived here for 4 full years now, and it was just starting to feel a bit samey-samey.  And because we rent.  This means that we can't paint walls, install shelves, and our real estate even gets funny about hooks getting put into the walls.  In addition to the limitations to personalisation, we have never been able to sign a lease for longer than 12 months, so there is always a chance that we'll be moving out "soon".  As a result of that, we have resisted accumulating much furniture, because we (well, Andy) don't want to have to move much stuff.  So anyways, the off-white walls, tiles, and ceiling started to feel oppressive and I had to do something about it!

Also, our bookshelf was a bit overflowing.  I had several trips of bringing anything remotely work-related to my shelves at uni, but we still had stacks of books on top.

So, when I saw a freecycle ad for a bookshelf, I said OMGYESPLZ!  I was a little bit meh to find that it was white, but thought that would be easy to overcome.  Originally intended for the spare room, this shelf ended up finding a home in the kitchen, instead, housing some cookbooks, and Nacho's food space.

And after a few weeks, some painting of previously-white goods, and some getting my craft on, these shelves provided an opportunity for some colour.

Only, this didn't solve the problem of our over-stuffed bookshelf, because none of those stacked on top made it to this one.  But a few weeks later someone was selling two small shelves for only $10 (not each! for the pair!), so we finally got some more breathing room for our books.

Another easy-pants way of splashing some brightly-coloured cheer around involved yarn, and crocheting, which I enjoy - so this project had a double-happiness factor.  I covered over our white throw-pillow with a straight-forward granny square.

It's double-sided, so we can swap it around depending on our mood.

And we pushed some thumb-tacks into previously-existing holes to spead out our collection of trinkets -- a Welsh love spoon, from my trip to Conwy in 2009, a cowry-shell turtle that a friend brought back from Micronesia, and our wedding hand-fasting cords, made of PNG shell money.

So overall, I'm feeling happier with the space.  And less antsy to change things and move to a house (though still a little antsy for those things).

The irony is that the lease we've just signed is only for 6 months -- at our own request -- so we currently have the least certainty since moving in back in 2007!

The Tropical Vegan Home - De-cluttering the hallway closet

One of the (many) things I don't like about renting is the lack of good storage space in our unit.  We have a store room for big stuff, like empty luggage, but since we don't own our place, we can't do things like build cupboard/shelving units into the walls, like I would like to.  And since we're in a unit, there isn't heaps of space for furniture like cupboards/shelving units.  And we don't like buying things, generally - partially because we don't like to spend money, and partially because we know we won't live here forever, so it seems silly to buy lots of heavy stuff that we will need to move.

But we've lived in the same place for almost 4 years now, so we've managed to accumulate lots of stuff that needs storing, even though we haven't accumulated any place to store it.  The result of this is that our hallway cupboard has become a catch-all - it is a pantry, a tool box, a craft cabinet, a place to stash cleaning supplies and cat food and anything else that we can't find a home for.  It looked like this:

The top shelf was mainly tools, some craft supplies, and some food.

One level down was a medicine cabinet, of sorts - sun screen, panadol, insect repellent, bandages, etc. And our main 'pantry' items.  And our cookbooks.

Below that was gardening stuff, paperwork, and some more food.

Second from the bottom was linens and cat stuff.

And on the bottom we had the vacuum cleaner, dive gear, and some electronic stuff.

And don't be fooled by my simplified descriptions - there was lots, lots more than this on each and every shelf.  It was a mess.  And, it was a cockroach heaven.  When I had first moved over here, I had the North American mentality that cockroaches are an indication of a filthy lifestyle.  Eventually I realised that they are just part of life in the tropics, and there is little you can do about them, really.  But that doesn't mean I want to make their lives easier by giving them a comfy mess to live in!  And anyways, clutter gives me the heebie-jeebies.  So, I set about fixing the problem.

First, I took out all the paperwork, and filed away things that needed filing.

Then I took out everything from the closet.  I got rid of a fair chunk of stuff, but it was pretty amazing to see just how much stuff we've managed to amass - especially considering that when I moved over here, all of my belongings fit into two suitcases.  This is just the food, and just the food from the hallway closet.  You see, we have a tendency to buy food en masse when it's on special, and we pay no mind to such trivial matters as expiry dates.

We also have a giant plastic box hidden behind the dining table that stores extra bags of flour and spices and so on.

When the cupboard was empty, I cleaned and cleaned every shelf.  I cleaned with bicarb soda, and with vinegar.  Then I wiped with eucalyptus oil, which is a disinfectant and hopefully a cockroach deterrent.  Then Nacho had a final check to make sure everything was sorted as I started putting things back.

Except instead of putting things all willy-nilly, like we had done before, this time there was a method to my madness.  I'll shamefully admit that I even mapped out every shelf on paper to make sure that things fitted properly.  With a bit of careful planning, I could squeeze all of the food, booze and cookbooks onto a single shelf - instead of spread across three or four.

Finally, a few hours later, I had everything that was going back put away.  A lot of stuff was re-homed to more appropriate places, like craft stuff in my craft box in the other room.  A lot of stuff was thrown out, or set aside to be donated.  What went back in, then, was the cream of the crop.  On the top, I put the tools and electronic stuff - Andy uses those more than me, so the fact that I can't really see the shelf isn't such an issue.  I also moved our filing system to the front of the top shelf, because that's easy enough for me to grab.  Below that is all of our food, and then the next shelf down has garden and random household stuff (extra toilet paper, candles, etc).  And our medicine cabinet supplies - with plenty of room to grow.  Further down, linens, office supplies, and cat stuff.  The bottom shelf changed the least - it still houses the vacuum cleaner and Andy's dive gear (which I hadn't yet replaced when this photo was taken).

It's still not perfect, and I still long for the day when I can build a shelf into a wall without forsaking my bond, but at least now I can find the things I am looking for!