I have to get serious about going through the old photo folders next week – this week I only have the one shot for you. It was taken in 2006 at Ulladulla.

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Weekly Wrap Up –

Over the past few weeks here, we’ve had what seemed to be an explosion of white tail spiders in the house. They always seem to crawl along the cornices on the ceiling. At one point I recall three within 24 hours, and that is three too many for me. So we came up with a plan for Christmas Day.

As we were going to my parents house, we decided to take the kitties with us and insect bomb the house while we were gone. This might seem like a simple concept but it is a huge task for a lot of reasons. First you have to put all food preparation items eg toaster, kettle, plus anything edible away safely, plus pack away anything you don’t want exposed to the insect bomb fumes, eg your toothbrush. Then, packing up the cats, their water fountain, their kitty litter tray and tent, and ourselves. It took us an hour and a half to get out of here.

Grumpy had a super great time exploring my parents house. She especially loved the staircase. Happy was quite a scaredy cat and hid away in the kitty litter tent for most of the time.

Returning home after several hours involving many prawns, lobster, ham, pork, turkey, and eventual pavlova and coffee, we locked the kitties away in a safe room while we did a lot of cleaning and vacuuming. All the exposed surfaces needed to be wiped down. We worked for a couple of hours with music playing, then I somehow managed to cut my hand in a deeply inconvenient spot – the back of a knuckle. The Other Half finished up the cleaning soon after that.

We were not planning on going anywhere for the next 4 days, however this morning I said I would like to get myself a new laptop lap desk and a mouse, so we went to Officeworks. They only had one lap desk but it was exactly the right colour.. YAY!

Just one photo this week – of a group of Portulaca blooms which I found beautiful.

Would you like to join in with Sunday Selections?? The rules are very simple:-
1. post photos of your choice, old or new, under the Sunday Selections title
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Weekly Wrap Up –

It has been a pretty shit week here thanks to saying goodbye to Red Comb. I’m trying really hard to build a bridge and get over it, and I am making a big effort to super spoil the left behind girls because I know they are feeling this loss too. I bought some cherries so they will receive quite a few of those this next week, pitted, because I am a good chook owner and also a sucker. ;)

All of the girls have gone into a moult – if you look closely at the pic you can see someone is missing *all* her tailfeathers at the top there – compare her to the game hen at the bottom who still has some – I am making sure they get plenty of protein plus it has been hot, so they also are receiving cold lactose free yoghurt and blueberries.

Rosie is out of shot – she has never been great with hand feeding. Usually I throw some stuff her way and let her find it herself. However not long after this shot was taken, she walked right up to me and started taking cherries right from my hand. I suspect this means Rosie has a new favourite food!

Pest Control – Flies

I don’t know if you are aware of this, but chooks poop. There is a creature that loves chook poop more than any other creature and that is the fly. This season has been a particularly fly-full season. I’m not sure why, but so it is.

We’ve been using the Envirosafe fly traps for a few years now. Seriously, these things work like you would not believe. Currently we are cleaning them out once a week, because there are so many flies in there we have no choice! You may catch a whiff of the smell occasionally – it smells to me exactly like chook poop.

The one downside is having to clean them out – it smells really bad once you take the lid off. We usually bury the contents in the small area behind the shed, but on the website it says you can use it for fertiliser. Hmm, I think I will say no thanks to that, anyway!

This time next week, practically all of the green area will be black with dead flies. I won’t post a photo of that here, but if anyone does want to see the end result let me know in the comments and I will put a link to a photo in next weeks post.

There are a lot of flies in general where we live, if I go shopping there is a 99% chance one or more of them will be bothering me on the way back to the car. I wish more people knew about these fly traps and used them – there would be less flies around in general if everyone had a couple of these traps in their yard.

A couple of weeks ago I visited the local plant places – today I want to show you a couple of photos I took while there. Above you see Hydrangea – Strawberries and Cream. These were a little up money at $22 but I did like the look of them. I have never grown Hydrangea – if I were going to this is the one I would try. :)

This is Abutilons – also known as Chinese lanterns – I actually have three of these here. I do not have an orange one, though. This is gorgeous but also $22. So it was a no.

This is what I ended up buying – Portulaca Tropicana. The tag says that the flowers will be the tropical fruit colours of coconut, guava, watermelon and strawberry. This was $4.99, for 6 plants. Much more down money! Of course they are seedlings but my experience says they won’t be for long..

Would you like to join in with Sunday Selections?? The rules are very simple:-
1. post photos of your choice, old or new, under the Sunday Selections title
2. link back to River at Drifting Through Life, somewhere in your post
3. leave River a comment so that she knows you’ve joined in and can come over and see what you’ve posted.

Weekly Wrap Up –

A couple of weeks ago, finally after a long wait, Hungry Jacks opened up within 15km of where we live. Previously, we would have to drive an hour to get to one. The place is being absolutely hammered by locals and tourists at the moment, every single day it is packed at both lunch and dinner time. We went for dinner the second day they opened and I have to say the food was really great for fast food. It was super fresh.

Locally here, there are not a lot of fast food options – most of the things that are here eg chicken shops, fish and chips, hamburgers, they all usually close by 6:30 or 7pm. After that it is pretty much Mcdonalds, KFC or Oporto. There is something in Oporto which I do not react well to, so we removed that from our list of options a while ago. KFC have provided uncooked chicken on more than one occasion, so that is also a huge NO.

We do have a Dominos and an Eagle Boys, neither of which we like, we gave up on them a long time ago. There are a couple of decent wood fired pizza places.

We did have a great sushi place but the owners have become very unreliable. Often it will be closed when the opening hours say it will be open, sometimes with a sign on the door, sometimes with no explanation at all.

Last weekend we drove to Warrawong to buy chicken in bulk. I thought the new Hungry Jacks would have organised to put a sign up on the way into town by now but we did not see one.

Christmas at Domayne can be very sparkly!

It can also be somewhat costly. This Christmas Deer was $34.95.

I really love the whole look, the white tree, the gold sequin balls, the sparkly pastel teal leaves.

The deer jars were quite awesome. The small teal feather wreaths would be awesome on my front door. In fact my Mother who strongly dislikes Christmas almost bought one.

Who would not love a sparkly deer?

These peacock feather Swarovski crystal tree ornaments are stunning!

It is worth remembering, this time next month, Christmas will be over for another year. :) Are you looking forward to Christmas? Got any big plans?

Sunday Selections

Would you like to join in with Sunday Selections?? The rules are very simple:-
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2. link back to River at Drifting Through Life, somewhere in your post
3. leave River a comment so that she knows you’ve joined in and can come over and see what you’ve posted.

Also Linking Up With

Sunday Snap @ JibberJabberUK

Today I will like to share some photos of the current state of the candle shelf. The first and most obvious change – there are now 3 fake flowers in my vase. One of them is an Apricot Rose. I’m not sure what kind of flower the two purple things are, but I like them. I wrapped them together with some jewelry wire. I left the stems long because I did not want the flowers too close to the flames but the flowers have now developed a significant bend, so I might have to reconsider this.

But wait, did all the colours just change? What the?

I found these submersible LED light changing tealights at a local shop. At 4.95 for 4, they were great value. They are the kind of thing you would put in a table centerpiece for an event and they are seriously awesome. Depending on how long the batteries last in the first 4, I plan to pick up at least 2 more sets this week.

When we last visited this shelf, there were 7 candle holders. Now, there are 16. That is a significant increase! But wait, Snoskred. Have you been burning 16 candles every evening? No, I’m not. That would be pretty wasteful.

Along the front of the candle shelf there are 10 candle holders which sit on a ceramic tray from IKEA. The other 6 candle holders sit behind those. Out of the 16, there are 14 candle holders I most enjoy using..

Before I got the new LED tealights, at the start of each week, I would place one candle in each holder. Each night I would choose 4 candles to light. That would mean you got a different effect each night. On one night – either a Friday or Saturday, I would light up 12 of the candles.

With the new LED tealights I’m going to be able to put on a bigger light show each night without wasting too many candles.

When buying the candle holders I have tried to make sure there is a wide range of colours – there is a green crystal skull, a red and orange mosaic candle holder, yellow, green, pink and purple candle holders. There are also some reflective metal holders with shapes cut into them. You can see the stars being thrown onto the wall from one of those, which has an LED tea light in it.

I am on the lookout for a couple of Christmas related items here over the next couple of weeks – maybe a sparkly and reflective tree.. (see update below!)

I think the shelf is at maximum capacity now, and I may start rotating the candle holders on a weekly basis if I find more items that I need to buy.. So there you have it, the current state of the candle shelf. :)

Would you like to join in with Sunday Selections?? The rules are very simple:-
1. post photos of your choice, old or new, under the Sunday Selections title
2. link back to River at Drifting Through Life, somewhere in your post
3. leave River a comment so that she knows you’ve joined in and can come over and see what you’ve posted.

Christmas Cards –

I was at Kmart doing some wandering while The Other Half had an eye test – turns out he has almost perfect vision, of course! – and I saw these beauties. In past years I never sent Christmas Cards but this year I am more into cards and I will be trying to send one to everyone in the family. I also thought if any of my readers would like a card, I would send them one.

If you want a card from Snoskred, drop me your postal address via my contact form, and I will post them out soonest to make sure they arrive by Christmas. It may not be one of these cards pictured above, I might surprise you with something different, it depends on how many I need to send. You might find another surprise inside, as well.

I also picked up a couple of these for my candle shelf at the massive price of $2.50 each. They are at the back inside the metal IKEA candle holders. :)

I have to give a big thank you to River for having a succulent garden and making me think I might like to try growing succulents. I have never grown them before. You may recall, I chose some Portulaca. In the photo above you can see how they looked on the 20th of September.

And here they are just one short month later on the 20th of October. They have taken off like mini rockets.

Above you see them on the 21st of October – as you can see, each day can make a huge difference in the flowers that appear. Some days there aren’t any but there are always loads of buds growing and so the suspense of when each flower will open is lots of fun to watch. :)

I had no idea how much I would enjoy watching their progress. These Portulaca plants have been an absolute revelation for me. Every morning the first thing I do after putting on my glasses is head to the back door to see whether they have any new flowers for me today.

You can see two of the plants are reaching out branches to each other..

I do have a routine of watering. Every second day, I give all the plant pots a good drink of 1 litre of water poured into each pot from some 2 litre milk carton friends I kept and drew a line on.

I am very careful not to wet the leaves, just the soil. If it is a hot day, I will usually do this about 3:30pm because around that time it is pretty shady out there thanks to a tree in the right spot. Around 20-30 minutes later, the sun peeks out from behind that tree and things get hot again.

On the alternate days, once the sun is on the way down, around 6-7pm, The Other Half waters with a hose – not a long water or a soaking, more like a sprinkle.

The flowers are truly gorgeous and there are many different colours. So far a lot of pink, yellow, and two different apricot shades have appeared. I’m sure this plant has many more lovely flowers in store for me this summer.

Would you like to join in with Sunday Selections?? The rules are very simple:-
1. post photos of your choice, old or new, under the Sunday Selections title
2. link back to River at Drifting Through Life, somewhere in your post
3. leave River a comment so that she knows you’ve joined in and can come over and see what you’ve posted.

I’m also linking up with Sunday Snap over at JibberJabberUK –

And the Maple Hill Hop.

Weekly Wrap Up –

It has rained almost every day this week. Sadly when it does rain, the portulaca flowers do not open! This has caused many sad moments here. However the chooks are having an absolute blast out there digging for bugs in this weather.

I discovered some submersible LED colour changing tealight “candles” this week and I’m a huge fan, they are gorgeous. I will have to update you urgently on the state of the candle shelf soon. :)

This is the first Sunday of November, it is Garden Update time. I’ll throw in a chook update because it is relevant to the garden this month. The sunflowers and catgrass are doing well –

The portulacas are a constant riot of colourful flowers. I’ve got a post just about them for next weekend. :)

One of the new nasturtiums is very very happy.

The other one was looking a little straggly. Then, the chooks found it. More about that below.

Chooks Are Good

Chooks love to eat spiders. So they have been getting a lot of free range time since we discovered we have funnel web spiders on the property. They do not stop with spiders – they will eat any kind of bug or moving thing. This past week, I saw Rosie chasing a cabbage moth across the yard, jumping into the air trying to catch it.

Chooks Are Bad

On Thursday my afternoon peace time was interrupted with a lot of trumpeting – when I went out to find out what was going on, one of the girls had a small lizard in her beak and one of the other chooks was chasing her around the yard trying to get it.

Then they took a fancy to eating one of the new nasturtiums, because it is right next to a spot they love to dustbathe in. That one was looking a little straggly to begin with, now it looks.. bad.

Also, one of the girls decided it was time to build a nest among the flowers – she laid an egg in there too – and consequently my lovely planter box now looks like this –

The girls were not let out on Friday at all. Saturday morning, we did this –

That is 10 photos, which is my limit for a post. I’ll update you on the planter box with baby spinach, brussel sprouts and silverbeet next month.

Would you like to join in with Sunday Selections?? The rules are very simple:-
1. post photos of your choice, old or new, under the Sunday Selections title
2. link back to River at Drifting Through Life, somewhere in your post
3. leave River a comment so that she knows you’ve joined in and can come over and see what you’ve posted.

Sunday Snap –

I’m also linking up with Sunday Snap over at JibberJabberUK –

Weekly Wrap Up –

I’ve been recovering from an injury this week so I have been taking things super easy. You’ll get to read about my injury on Friday this week.

I also ordered and received a new phone – the Samsung Galaxy s5. My old phone was struggling a bit to find a signal and the battery lasted less than a day, so it was time to upgrade.

Sephy sent me a package as well. When we were in Hawaii in 2013, I bought some antihistamines I had never seen in Australia from Costco which have been fantastic for me, they work really well. I ran out of them right before allergy season started here this year and it is a bad allergy season. Within 2 days of the drugs arriving, I am like a human again!

Here are some photos from our Canberra day trip. First up a bit of a photo fail – it may be out of focus and difficult to make out, but that is a reflection of my sparkly watch in the window as we were driving home in the afternoon.

These pineapple bookends would be an awesome addition to my collection, however they were Up Money at $199. A lot of things in this particular store are Up Money.

Like this glittery skull for $179. The photo does not give you an idea of the size – we are talking large bowling ball size here. I think I could probably recreate this with papier mache and glitter for considerably less $$.

This “diamante” skull was more reasonable at just under $35. It was still fairly large, probably just slightly larger than a real human skull would be. They also had a skull shaped liquid soap dispenser which I exclaimed out loud when I saw it, much to the amusement of a nearby staff member, which made me shy about taking a photo of it. I wish I had, in fact I wish I had bought it!

This copper toucan would be amazing on my candle shelf. Now that I know how candle light reflects from these kinds of items, I have to refrain from buying All The Things That Look Like This. Copper, Gold, Silver, Bronze, these things are my Kryptonite. After all, my candle shelf is now completely packed with items, there is no room for anything more!

Christmas at this store is also very beautiful. A few years ago they had a white feather Christmas tree which retailed for just under $900. It was a thing of great beauty. Well, it would want to be for that kind of money!

Would you like to join in with Sunday Selections?? The rules are very simple:-
1. post photos of your choice, old or new, under the Sunday Selections title
2. link back to River at Drifting Through Life, somewhere in your post
3. leave River a comment so that she knows you’ve joined in and can come over and see what you’ve posted.

Weekly Wrap Up –

Happy Moments for our Grumpy. Friday morning she was returned to the vet for another eye check up. Her eye is almost healed. She will receive eye cream for another week, then nothing more.

A not quite so happy moment – on the way there, The Other Half said to me he seemed to have lost the power steering. It turns out the return hose has a crack in it, so that will be difficult to fix. We’ll have to share the Polo until it is fixed.

Television Update –

You may recall that The Other Half and I watched Mr Robot together a few months ago and we decided we wanted to keep watching something together.. After the first season finished, we chose 24 which we had never seen before.

This turned out to be a terrible mistake. Maybe 7-8 episodes in, we personally wanted to strangle 99% of the characters ourselves, and we would be screaming at the teevee – usually TELL HER or TELL HIM, because the characters on that show had a – wonderful for storylines but terrible for actual people – habit of keeping stuff to themselves!

We gave up at the end of the first season, and I suggested that we try watching Breaking Bad, which The Other Half has not seen. We are 7 episodes in and he is enjoying it thus far, plus it is wonderful to *finally* watch it together.