Would you like to go to the garden centre with me? Don’t worry, we will look with our eyeballs, not our purses.

These were new to me – lollipop daisies. I am not normally a daisy fan but I love these!

They had quite a range of different coloured daisies.

This bee was a fan.

Out of all the non flowering plants, I deeply love Pittosporum. My parents have this planted down one side of their house and have made it into a hedge of awesomeness.

This little plant is called a Loropetalum. Every year at this particular garden centre they grow something to a very large size and make a feature of it out the front of the place, then they have smaller versions inside for people to buy. This years plant has proved so popular, the local Bunnings are stocking it too.

There is some truth in advertising.. :)

What a gorgeous display of purple and pink! I bought the Aubrieta.

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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While meditating on whether or not I should purchase the Gold Pineapple for my Pineapple Collection, I was wandering through Pillowtalk with a friend and I discovered a couple of items which were considerably marked down. They returned home with me to be added to the candle shelf.

First up, I wanted to see if we could hang up my clock to add some room to the shelf. I was concerned about hanging it up because it is very heavy indeed, and we’d already had an incident where the whiteboard fell off the wall here. The whiteboard is firmly screwed into the wall studs now, and so is the nail holding up the clock.

This tealight holder was $4. I liked it because it was that gorgeous blue glass which I love to collect. However, light a candle inside it, and you get almost a purple effect. The light that shines out of it is a cool white.

The effect of this is quite interesting and makes me want to add more tealight holders in various colours to the shelf.

This gorgeous glass tealight holder with silver accents was $9. I thought it would be interesting to have a candle at a slightly different height, plus the silver fits in with the shelf very well now.

I was right that it is interesting – it allows for some new reflections from the pineapples. I’m still considering the gold pineapple – if and when it gets marked down and I happen to drop in and spot it, I will likely pick it up. Until then, this shelf is looking pretty awesome with the new additions, and I have a few tealight holders which I am planning to rotate onto the shelf regularly.

Of course, there was a copper vase added recently and I also got two new bright red tealight holders. I’ll show you those next time.

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 –

Oops, totally forgot to schedule this post yesterday! I was out to dinner with family while The Other Half went to bed super early. He has gone to Bathurst today leaving at 1am. I am here with a cat who spent most of the night unsuccessfully trying to remove her collar. She is very determined but she has finally given up and climbed into one of her favourite spots to get some sleep.

I get to visit Canberra on Wednesday – just a short day trip. I’m not sure what the plans are but I know DFO is in there somewhere. Next weekend we are dropping my Loopy Uncle off at the airport with all his stuff, and he is going back to Adelaide to live. He has so successfully chewed through my parents goodwill that they are saying they will not take him. Whether that turns out to be the case or whether my Dad will change his mind at the last minute I am not sure.

Fun for all the family! But hey, we’ll make it fun for us with a drop into IKEA, and go to dinner with friends, and probably bring home some Krispy Kremes.

Today I have some shots of a sparkly Swarovski light fitting. :) I will let the pictures do the talking!

Would you like to join in with Sunday Selections?? The rules are very simple:-
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Weekly Wrap Up –

After just over 4 years of owning chickens, I managed to be at the coop at the right time to witness an actual egg being laid this week. It is not for lack of trying, believe me. When you go out there and open the flap and a chook is on the nest, 10 times out of 10, they will decide to put their egg laying off until a later moment.

I think I arrived at the exact moment it was too late to postpone that egg. The chook looked at me, I looked at her, and out popped that egg. It was quite a magical moment.

What the heck happened to the warmer weather? I’ve been feeling like an icicle for several days now. Not cool, weather deities! Brrr!

A couple of songs inspired me to sign up to Pandora Radio this week, which I will be writing a post about in the near future. One of them was Head Over Heels by Tears for Fears, and the other one is a Neil Diamond song which appeared in the pilot of Mr Robot. And here it is – as it appears in the show.

It might surprise people to find out I am a Neil Diamond fan. To be honest I like a lot of music which might seem unexpected.

Winner Winner

Chicken and Lamb Roast Dinner! We went to the meat raffle last night and won a couple of trays. I said to The Other Half, I have a mathematical for you – how can I make two of these roasting pans fit in the oven at the same time? He tested it with the cold oven and the answer is, I cannot. They just do not fit together. So I have to roast them separately.

I don’t eat lamb so that is currently cooking in the oven for The Other Half and once it is done we will slice it up awesomely and use it for his lunch sammiches next week. After that, I will roast the chicken with some potatoes and then steam up some carrot, cauliflower and broccoli to go with it. Happy moments!

How About You?

What is happening in your world?

As I mentioned in this post, I wanted to protect these plants from chickens, moths and caterpillars. We began with chickens because had I kept the girls locked up for a few days. After planting these seedlings one of the English Game Hens had jumped up onto the planter box while I was standing right there, and then looked at me with a face that said, I’m about to eat all your seedlings! She was quickly shooed away. Had I not been there, the seedlings would have been eaten quickly.

My Other Half is a delicate genius as you may be aware. He chose to put this on hinges, to make access easy if required. He knew the box would be completely covered and he thought ahead. Yes, those are the kitties enjoying some backyard time.

You may have noticed, these photos were taken after the box has been covered in fly wire.

The solar lights are those LED colour changing ones. At night this looks pretty funky now. The baby spinach is really taking off.

Here is a shot with the completed box in place.

Some more recycling and some inventions – The Other Half bought a weather station many years ago and some of the plastic parts had disintegrated. He printed out some parts for it with his 3d printer, those are the red parts.

Here is our former cat door, which stands on a layer of brick pavers and then has brick pavers on top holding it in place. This is not a long term solution, it is only temporary while the new plants have a chance to settle in. Otherwise the chooks might dig too much around them and they might not survive it.

We also bought some cat grass and there are some sunflower seeds in this planter box. We’ll see if they grow. :)

Would you like to join in with Sunday Selections?? The rules are very simple:-
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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 –

Not much to report this week. Our main goal for this weekend is to install a chicken treat holder in the chook pen – inspired by this post and some cooling racks we found at Aldi. Click through and watch the time lapse video of the chooks eating the treats, it is super cool. :)

The Emmy Awards

This year the results could be *very* different. Alan Sepinwall from Hitfix has a great post about why that might be so. Here’s where you can catch the Emmys on TV in Australia.

It has been quite a rainy week here on the South Coast.

That was our rain total on Wednesday afternoon. Monday we had 107.2mm – Tuesday 254.5 – Wednesday 45mm. I suspect on Tuesday quite a lot of rain ended up not being counted because we had strong winds as well and several times I looked out there to see that it was raining sideways instead of down. Our rain gauge is not equipped for such shenanigans.

The stormwater drains were so full, the water was flowing out into the street rather than into the drains.

The front yard had a swimming pool next to the rubbish bins.

It is times like these I am really glad we put the chook coop and run up on stilts. We did that initially because of our drainage problem out there, but it has been a blessing in more ways than keeping their feet dry in wet weather.

The space underneath is on slightly higher ground and the chooks hang out down there in summer because it is super shady and cool. When it rains a little, it remains dry and they can dustbathe there. When it rains a lot like this, even that area gets soaked but it is from water running across not from being rained on. They still like to venture down there and chase bugs and worms swimming by and have another place to visit without getting rained on.

Their water bowls live under the coop partly to protect them from stuff being blown in when it is windy, partly to protect them from rain and also because they do spend so much time hanging out there, I really want their water to be where they are.

The grassy area is a swimming pool when it rains a lot here. I am writing this on Saturday and all of this area is starting to dry out. When I visited the chooks this morning, I saw they’ve already made themselves a new dustbathing area in the slightly higher ground in the garden bed you can see in the very top left of this photo.

I’m happy to say the concrete is doing very well and in particular the drain by the shed door did a lot of excellent work during these torrential rains. I’m very thankful we had it done before this happened because the driveway would be a soggy pothole covered mess by now.

We certainly did not have the same kind of issues that people in Sussex Inlet, St Georges Basin, Shoalhaven Heads, Callala Bay and around some of the other areas near waterways. There was a lot of very bad flooding in those areas. Here are some pictures taken from a helicopter.

Snoskred Is Superstitious

The whole time my Aunt and Uncle were visiting, our cars needed washing but I was all.. no, lets not do that because it will rain. So I got the car washed, and then we have these huge rains.

And then, I think I jinxed Mr Robot, because leading up to the finale being aired this week I was so excited and the day before I said to The Other Half “This time tomorrow we will know more”. And then they postponed it due to the shooting. On the one hand, good on them.

On The Other Hand –

If television episodes with shootings in them were postponed regularly in the USA whenever there is a shooting, those episodes would never, ever be aired. Seriously, the second amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791. I think perhaps, back in those days, there might have been good reasons to be carrying a gun, like wild animals roaming and in order to hunt.

Wonkette wrote this great piece – Here’s How The Second Amendment Has Prevented Tyranny Lately – remember they are a sarcastic satire site however that article says everything that needs to be said.

Well, almost everything. How about the fact that so far this year, on average 35 Americans every single day have been killed by gun violence.

There is even a site that keeps count – Gun Violence Archive. But hey, it doesn’t matter what I think – I’m not American and there is nothing I can do other than feel deep sadness from afar.

Weekly Wrap Up –

This week I did a lot of writing for the blog. Posts are pre-scheduled into October, at this stage. I also did a lot of drafts – eg I did all my Sunday Selections drafts with the dates and categories for the rest of 2015, all ready for me to put the photos into.

Bloglovin

This week I had set a goal of adding as many of the blogs on my blogroll into my Bloglovin’ as possible – most of them were already on there. If they were not already listed, I did not add them, though as a reader you always can do that. You can check out who I am following via this link or via my Blogroll page, plus new follows and blogs I am test driving get added at the end of each month in my new feeds post.

Have you claimed your blog over at Bloglovin’? I’m writing a post on how to do that, which I am hoping to schedule for Tuesday this week as all the other days are already taken.. :)

Rewatch Breaking Bad

Also this week, I wrote the final posts for Rewatch Breaking Bad. I’ve given one post to Sephyroth who of course picked the best episode ever – Ozymandias – and once that is loaded in, the blog will be complete.

I do not think I anticipated the huge amount of work involved in putting those posts together when I started out. I figured it would be copy and paste the text in, add some screenshots, add a couple of links. The truth of the matter – each show had to be watched and screenshots taken which was quite time consuming.

On average I took around 60 screenshots per episode though I did not use anywhere near that many. A 45 minute episode paused 60 times blows out to about an hour and a half. I know the commands to edit screenshots in Photoimpact off by heart now..

Then I would re-watch the episode to grab extra favourite lines. Then I would watch the episode with the commentary track if it had one, and listen to the podcast. Plus, Sephyroth was proof reading my work, so he’ll probably be glad to see an ending as well! ;)

Finishing that blog is a huge relief and there were times when I thought I would give up and quit. Today it is a year and one day since the first post was published there. This is a huge happy moment for me. :)

Mr Robot

For fans of Mr Robot, you might love this interview with hoodie tidbits and this interview. There is this SAG interview as well. And the people behind the Facebook page are *awesome*. You can get to know Rami Malek some more here, and did you know Rami has a twin brother?

If you can stand Chris Hardwick, there is the Nerdist podcast with Christian Slater and Rami Malek. The interview starts at 5:02 and the first five minutes was *more* annoying than I expected so trust me, skip ahead.

Apparently the finale will be 75 minutes long. It is important to keep watching till the end of the credits. I don’t know if it is apparent or noticeable :) but I am *obsessed* with this show. My apologies for writing about it so much! Never fear, one more episode and it is over for 2015.

Over To You –

Anything interesting happening in your world this week? Let me know in the comments!

Ilikai Hotel & Condos – where we stayed on our last visit to Oahu in 2013.

A beach photo from our last visit in 2013.

A rainbow over the same beach.

Would you like to join in? 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.

Snoskred Returns Tomorrow

Snoskred returns from her holidays with a new post tomorrow. Comments are turned off for this post but tomorrow they will be back on and Snoskred will be keen to hear from you..