We did not visit Sea World while on the Gold Coast. These photos are from our 2003 visit..
<em>Remember, Snoskred is on holiday at the moment. Comments are turned off.</em>
Author: Snoskred
Moose Elk
While I am on holidays, chances are I am taking photos and sending them to my parents with just one word underneath. This slightly blurry photo you see above came to me with the word “Moose” underneath it.
Of course, it is not actually a moose. It is an Elk. This photo was much better.
Remember, Snoskred is on holiday at the moment. Comments are turned off.
Better Photography
And now for some in focus cruise ship pictures!
Remember, Snoskred is on holiday at the moment. Comments are turned off.
Night Photography
These were taken by my Dad in Alaska. No, your vision is perfectly fine. These pics are blurry!
No tripod, just a point and shoot camera. Which is pretty clear from the results. ;)
I actually kinda like them. Especially this last one where the lights have almost made themselves into birds. When we were looking through the pics, these had us laughing till we cried, especially when I said “I did not know they had light up birds in Alaska! Are they attacking the boat?”.
Remember, Snoskred is on holiday at the moment. Comments are turned off.
Snoskred On Holidays – National Zoo & Aquarium
Here is a memory from a past holiday.
National Zoo & Aquarium in Canberra has this great tour called Zooventure. It is not cheap but it does contain some unique experiences, such as having a brown bear lick a gooey mixture of weetbix and honey directly from your hand. You get to see a lot of animals being fed.
Here you see the male lion. I think you can tell, he was super hungry!
Remember, Snoskred is on holiday at the moment. Comments are turned off.
Softsole Express VS Milky Foot
In Australia, it is heading into that time of year again where you might want to get the feet out of their shoes and socks. I like to do a foot peel from time to time in spring and summer. I’ve used Milky Foot before – it is usually $25+ where I live, so when I saw Softsole Express for $8.99 in Priceline, I thought I would give it a try.
I found it to be slightly less efficient than Milky Foot but at that price you can nearly have 3 of them for the price of one Milky Foot. You have to leave it on for longer than Milky Foot. I would buy Softsole again. Weirdly it cannot be found on the Priceline website. Maybe that is a lack of talent on my part, though.
Six tips I would give you –
1. You need to get yourself organised before you put these things on your feet, because walking will be virtually impossible in fact it is downright dangerous. Use the bathroom first. Have everything you are going to need for the next 60-90 minutes handy eg water, your cup of tea, a snack, whatever. Make sure your phone is nearby.
2. If you have a spare pair of older socks which you don’t mind if they get the solution on them, you can put socks on over the booties. This will not enable you to walk safely, but it will keep your toes warm if it is a cooler day.
3. Keep your feet flat on the ground while you have the treatment socks on, otherwise you may notice some solution begin to leak out of the back.
4. After the treatment moisturize your feet twice to four times a day for the first few days as you will get a better result this way. It can take 3-4 days for the skin to begin peeling off. You will probably notice small bits coming off to begin with usually on the underskin of the toes.
5. Once your feet start peeling, if you want to speed up the process a little you can soak them in hot water with some peppermint oil added.
6. Don’t do this treatment if you have a special event coming up in the next couple of weeks where you will have your feet out on display. The peeling can happen for 2-3 weeks.
Here is a review of the product you can read, and also the Softsole website, if you want to know more.
Milky Foot is excellent and worth a try but at the price you will likely only want to do it once over the summer. That is not a bad thing because you don’t want to do a foot peel more than once a month. Here is the Milky Foot website.
Between the two – softsole smells a lot better than milky foot does. The softsole packet is less optimal than the milky foot one is – it is more prone to splitting on the top. I could walk very carefully with the softsole packet on, I could not with the milky foot one. I think there is a lot more liquid in the milky foot packet.
My Korean friend tells me these treatments are super popular in Korea. My Chinese Aunt tells me these treatments are very popular in China. A couple of years back Milky Foot did a big advertising drive here in Australia and that is where I first heard about them.
Counting The Minutes.
This last couple of weeks may well have been the slowest weeks of my life. I can guarantee as soon as Sephyroth arrives, time will speed up enormously and those 3 weeks will vanish before we know it.
The to-do list has been long. As mentioned here, I took this as an opportunity to do some serious spring cleaning. Every surface in this house has been cleaned in some way. We did a clean out of some old furniture which meant a dump run. I also did a clean through of my wardrobe – I have tried on every single piece of clothing and been quite ruthless in donating things that do not fit or suit me.
The chook pen was cleaned late on an afternoon last week. This is a job we usually do early afternoon but this time our weekends have been too busy with other jobs, so we had to do it after The Other Half finished work.
Our Grande Dame Rosie the Rosecomb was deeply unimpressed with us. She felt it was bedtime, and what were these idiots humans doing to her house? How was she meant to go to sleep? All that fresh new sand to explore, but Rosie did not even stop a moment, she went straight up on the bed perch.
We ordered a chicken feeder and waterer just to make life a little easier for my parents who will be visiting daily, feeding the cats and chooks. I’d been asking The Other Half to make me one of those PVC feed/water systems for a few years now, but there have been so many jobs on his to do list and this never happened. When it arrives and we have used it for a while I will write a post about it. :)
Those chooks want out of their pen to free range anytime they see humans and they are super sneaky, so I didn’t want to tempt fate by needing someone to go in there. They do have backup water and food within the coop that they will eat if all other options are gone.
In the chook pen we have 3 large water containers. Two are old icecream containers, and one is an old salad bowl of mine which is still functional but we lost the lid, so that made it a perfect chook container.
Water in a chook pen is tricky – you will get algae growing in the container, the chooks dust bathe so dust gets in the water, leaves and bugs get in the water, and the water itself evaporates so you need to refill them regularly and scrub out the containers. I usually do this job twice a week – the old water goes on the plants so it does not go to waste. Fingers crossed the new item will work as intended, but I will leave the other containers in there as a backup.
The lawn has now been mowed. The chooks have been having a great time with this longer grass and clover flowers because it is hayfever season and The Other Half gets sneezy when he has to mow the lawn this time of year. Hopefully this weekend we will be able to weed and feed it.
We bought a new container for the kitty litter tray. This is mostly to make it easier for my parents to scoop while we are away. However it has turned out to be one of the best ideas we ever had, because we got a 34 litre under bed storage container, so it gives them plenty of room. We were finding the other container often would have large clumps at the edges, because of where the cats would position themselves when they got in it.
Here on the blog, all the posts have been scheduled and are ready to go. I went through all the books on my tablet, removing the books I have no intention of reading and sorting them into alphabetical directories by author.
On the trip front, all the documents are together and ready. The itinerary has been finalised – with the flexibility of swapping days if the weather is Not Great. I put together a text file with all the addresses we will be going to ready for easy loading into the GPS.
I asked The Other Half which ride he would like to go on first at Dreamworld. He said he would like to wing it. I said no, that is not how going to a theme park works. You need to have a plan! And not just any plan but a plan specially designed to ensure you are doing the things people tend to do at the exact times other people tend NOT to do them. If you can plan it well enough you can shorten your queueing times considerably without the need to pay extra for “fast track”.
I watched Bathurst in preparation for our visit there. We’re planning to walk the entire track, plus drive it (slowly) a few times. We might also walk much of the track for the Gold Coast 600. Sephyroth is quite the car racing fan.
I took a final shopping trip last Friday. I knew it was a mistake to go when I did, because it was 10am on a Friday. We needed a few things and I thought I would pick up the last of the trip items while I was out, like travel sugar sachets, those small UHT milk things, just bits and pieces.
It was like shopping with zombies. We are so spoiled always shopping after 6pm on a weekend when virtually nobody else is around. I think I am becoming less tolerant of other people who are in my way than I have ever been before. By the time I got to the end of the shop I felt infected with the zombie virus myself, distracted, zoning out, and I actually forgot to put a bag of shopping in the trolley. Lucky they called me back, because that bag had all the cat food for the kitties while we are gone.
We packed everything a week ago. We had not intended to pack. We were doing a mock pack, to make sure all our stuff would fit in the car once we add the suitcase of Sephyroth. Fortunately I had a suitcase almost the exact same size here. I started out just making sure our toiletries would all fit in the toiletry bag and got sucked into the temporal packing vortex. One hour later and we were packed.
When it came to packing I was ruthless. I packed for 5 days of clothes, we are on the Gold Coast for 6 nights. I will do a wash before we leave and we’ll be set for our further 3 nights. I find if I pack well before we leave, I will remember everything I have forgotten to pack and be able to put it in before we leave. The day after our pack, I realised I had forgotten socks and camisoles. I have a last minute packing list, to grab all those items we will be using up until go time.
Gold Coast Fridays
Heading back to land at Seaworld.
Awesome Tuna Pasta Bake
You might think – why is Snoskred posting a recipe for something so simple. In the past I would have used tuna bake sauce from a jar to make tuna bake. Then one day I had the idea to use the bottom layer of Fake Lasagne with things added to it instead. It turned out great so I kept doing it.
I have been trying to fuel the other half with better fuel, these past few months. He is a real meat and potatoes guy, because he actually has an allergy to quite a lot of fruit and vegetables where his throat will swell up. Off the top of my head, he can eat potatoes, sweet potato, pumpkin, brussel sprouts, cooked carrots not raw, cooked tomatoes not raw, capsicum / red & green peppers, onion, leek, cauliflower, peas, corn, spinach, lettuce, and I often manage to put zucchini into a pasta sauce but only by whizzing it up in the Nutri Ninja first.
For lunches he used to eat a lot of what I consider to be empty calories. AKA things I will not feed the chooks! He likes the most simple of things – a ham and cheese sandwich. If I did not make him a sandwich, he would have 2 minute noodles or grab a sausage roll from the lunch truck.
Nutrition wise, these things are Not Optimal. And he was feeling Not Great much of the time. I spoke to him about trying to add in more vegetables and make lunch healthier. He said he would give it a try. I came up with a plan.
Now, every Sunday I make his meal for the upcoming week. I have been rotating between five different things in winter. They are – Fake Lasagne – Tuna Pasta Bake – Healthy Chicken Strips – Chicken & Sweet Corn Soup – Vegetable Soup similar to this one. I will probably be dropping the soups in summer.
Most of these things have recipes already here on the blog, so I figured it was time to share the tuna pasta bake I have been making because it is Not The Normal Thing. It is basically a quiche. This is so simple, I make it in a large batch so it makes 6 serves, and it takes me maybe 20 minutes. 15 minutes of that is pasta cooking time.
I buy all the parts for this from Aldi, except the eggs which either come from our chooks or if they are not laying I use Manning Valley eggs from Coles. You may not have an Aldi so you might have to substitute with your own stuff.. I would usually put freshly chopped and slightly fried brussel sprouts in here however they are over for this year and I can only get frozen ones now. We are eating the frozen ones in dinners but I can’t cut them up small enough for The Other Half to put them into the tuna bake, plus there is a large element of danger cutting up frozen things.
You will need –
2 large tins of tuna
2 small tins of corn kernels
1 leek (missed it this time, whoops!)
600mls cream (I choose the UHT long life cream)
6 large eggs (or 8-10 small eggs)
500 grams uncooked pasta
Spices I use.
mustard powder, parsley, paprika, cinnamon, turmeric – you can add what you like.
You could add –
Other vegetables – carrots, pumpkin, potato or sweet potato, capsicum, zucchini, peas, spinach, tomatoes sliced and laid on top would be pretty awesome. I will try a few of these things over coming months to see if The Other Half likes them in this recipe.
You could modify this entirely and not use tuna and corn. Perhaps you want to use this as a quiche, so you could add in broccoli, bacon, ham, mushrooms, feta cheese, olives, all the things that are great in a quiche.
1. Put a large pot of salted water on to boil.
2. Add in your pasta to cook.
3. While the pasta cooks, prepare your additions by opening the tins. I usually like to put the tuna on a plate and attack it with a fork so the clumps are smaller.
4. Place your eggs into a large bowl. Add in the cream. Add in any herbs and spices you might like – I usually put a touch of mustard powder, paprika, cinnamon, parsley, freshly ground black pepper and a little salt. Mix well.
5. Once the pasta is cooked, drain it and then place it into a large baking dish. I do not bother greasing it first, it always seems to come out of the pan well.
6. Onto the top of the pasta, evenly layer over your tuna, corn, leek, and any other additions you want to use.
7. Pour the cream mixture over the top. Mix the cream mixture and your additions through the pasta with a fork. Top with cheese, then bake for 42 minutes at 180-200C.
And here is the cooked version!
This might be super simple but it is tasty and full of awesomeness – protein from the eggs and tuna, dairy from the cream, there are carbs in there thanks to the pasta, and a couple of vegetables when I don’t totally forget to put them in.
And there they all are, packed and ready for the week, with one extra, too! I feel that this is better fuel than a ham and cheese sandwich. The Other Half feels a lot better. That pleases me. :)
I DECLINE THIS, KTHX.
I just say no to Halloween. It is Un-Australian.
The supermarkets will not miss an opportunity to sell us crap we don’t need, especially sugary crap. PS Coles the fact that you have to tell us which day Halloween is on, perhaps this gives you a clue? ;)
I find trick or treating deeply annoying, as well! Join me and just say NO to Halloween in Australia.