The week that was

You know the little joke that goes "What is worse than finding a worm when you bite into your apple?" and you answer, "No, what?" and the person telling the joke says, "Finding half a worm".

Well, I came to think about that when I had lunch with my friend A in Glebe the other day. We had a great meal in a very small Thai place and afterwards we just wanted to use the bathroom before leaving. It meant going through the kitchen area and I felt happy that I had not seen it before eating. It was pretty grotty. While waiting for A, I stepped outside into the little alley way and this is what I found there just outside the kitchen.

Maybe being a vegetarian isn't such a
bad thing.

Anyway, other than that we have had the usual intensive house search going on every weekend and we have managed to narrow it down now both concerning the area that we both prefer and other criteria.

The weather has been very hot and sometimes very windy. Just this morning I heard that a friend of our son lost her property out in the bush in the bushfire. She had made it into a real little paradise far from civilisation, way out in the wilderness. I hope she has the courage to build it up again.

Australia Day is coming up and as always there is a bit of controversy about it. Indigenous people are not happy with celebrating the day that their country was invaded and their children taken from them and that is totally understandable. I am including a calendar of significant aboriginal events in the year.

My home country, Sweden, also has a fairly large group of indigenous people in the north. I am a little ashamed to admit that I know very little about them. However, I watched the Swedish annual film festival this year and there was a movie there that I would love to see called "Sameblod". It was nominated in eight categories and won the Guldbagge (the prize in the form of a large chafer) for best script.

Sweden is a relatively small country but very long, so for people like me from the south west it is a very different land up north and also not so common for people of my generation to have visited. However I would like to visit during the time of the Northern Lights.

Another thing I would like to visit is the big Sapmi market in Jokkmokk.

 

I have to leave you now and get some chores done. It doesn't look so good when hubby comes home from work in the evening and the bed isn't made and I am still in my night gown.

Have a good rest of the week!!!!

Pantry moths

Hubby has an on-going fight with pantry moths. Every morning I hear him cursing and opening doors and hitting the walls with a newspaper to kill them. We don't have tons of them but enough that it is annoying. He read on the web that when you buy new products you should put them in the freezer for a week or so to kill the eggs that might come with the packaging, so now we do that. There is no room in the freezer for anything else though. We also have everything else in sealed glass jars so I think we will soon be moth free.

Yesterday was very hot and today should get up to the +36°C they have forecast. It is even worse for Melbourne where it was up to +40°C yesterday and I think it will be the same or even hotter there today. It is a little bit too hot for me; I prefer a nice 25-27° with a slight breeze.

The house we sort of fell for in our house search yesterday has a pool and is also a short stroll from the beach. There are a few negative aspects though, so we are weighing up the pros and cons before maybe putting in an offer.  I'll let you know how it pans out.

Naturally we had to have our weekly oyster lunch and this time we drove up to Mount Kembla and had lunch in the only pub there which we had always wanted to try. It was a little gem. So if any of you readers come to visit we will take you there. The only thing was that the cicadas were so loud that we had to sit inside, otherwise you couldn't keep up a conversation. It was truly deafening.

Otherwise it has been a nice peaceful week brightened up by a lunch date with our daughter on Friday. We had tapas in Glebe. In this one street we could have had Japanese, Vietnamese, Mexican, vegan, French, and much more, you name it. It is incredible how the food scene has changed since I came to Australia the first time in the early eighties. I would go shopping with my mother in law in the High Street and we might lash out and have a cuppa (Australian for a cup of tea) and a sandwich.

Speaking of the eighties or more the nineties, I received this photo from my friend in Sweden who lived in Grenoble when we did. Their son and ours played together all the time and we saw lot of each other, lunches, dinners, picnics etc.  As always, when you look back, it is with a little melancholia and longing for the times gone by. Anyway here it is!

From the right, me and my father in law and mother in law and my friend M. Behind is hubby.
Stretched out on the grass is our elder daughter and then our son and our younger daughter, and
then barely visible A, my friend M's son, who now is a father of two himself. Life is wonderful!

I have to leave you now. Wishing you health and happiness.

2018

Hello everybody, I told you I'll be back in 2018 and it is already three days into it.

We saw some fireworks on New Year's Eve from our front balcony but the most impressive ones we saw were on TV from Sydney harbour.  They always put on a good show.

Not my photo

We had a lovely time over Christmas down in a place called Dalmeny on the South coast five hours from Sydney. Hubby's sister and her husband and their two adult sons came up from Melbourne and our two Sydney-based children with three friends came too.

Glasshouse rocks in Narooma

The first day when the "kids" went down to have a swim they didn't dare to go in because of all the sting-rays swimming around. After that they found some other beaches that were more accessible for "humans".

Growing up on the west coast of Sweden we didn't have any problems with stingrays but certain summers we had great problems with orange jelly fish. I mean, sometimes it was to the point that you just couldn't get in. This didn't stop our swimmings instructors from persevering with the swimming lessons though. So the bigger kids had to stay in the water and try to sweep away the jellyfish and make a 'free zone" for the younger kids. Unfortunately jelly fish leave burning strings in the water so we had to rush up after our lesson and have cold showers.

.                                         

Actually when I go swimming here in Australia I prefer to go to beaches that have rock pools i.e. saltwater pools on the beach where water flows in from the ocean constantly but there is no surf or rip tide or sharks or box jelly fish. I guess I am not a very adventurous swimmer even though I love being in water as you can see by the photo below.

This was taken in NZ a few years ago.

Next week-end will be taken up with house hunting. In fact every week-end will be until we find something suitable. Spacious, but not too big, with a small garden with a pool. Nice big garage with a workshop, two bathrooms, three bedrooms and also preferably a nice view over the ocean, near a train station. Oh, and not too expensive. Do you think we will find something like that? Well, wish us luck. I will keep you posted.

Have a nice week!