Happy Snoskred

Sunday Selections Week 34

11 Comments Posted on August 23, 2015August 22, 2015 by Snoskred

Today I will like to share with you our lovely new vast vista of concrete. It will probably look a bit boring to you. I have to tell you, it is most definitely NOT boring to us. This has greatly improved our life. The area we got concreted was formerly gravel and potholes and one heck of a mess in wet weather.

The concrete was done in 3 separate pours because there is a large rectangular area with a side triangle out the back which needed quite a bit of shaping and a drain put in. In the above photo you can see the triangle, and you can see the area which has some of our old gravel there. I am thinking this might be a great area for a cactus garden – inspired by River.

This is the drain side and you can see my Polo is happily chilling out in her new and much improved home.

There were also two pours for the driveway itself – one for the back half, and one for the front half. This photo shows where the first pour and second pour meet, taken from the laundry door facing the back of the property.

The laundry was a room where gravel regularly got tracked in. This meant doing the laundry 99% of the time you would step on a piece of gravel. I can tell you that stepping on one piece of gravel as a surprise to yourself is akin to stepping on a lego with bare feet, which I am sure has been declared a form of torture by multiple governments *and* is almost certainly used in some cultures as a replacement ritual for the ritual of stepping on hot coals..

This view is taken from the laundry door and shows where the second and third pour meet. Our gates had to have some work done as one of the concrete trucks got bogged out there and ended up hitting the fence, sending everything out of square and the gates no longer met in the middle.

The laundry which opens onto this area is the entrance to the house which we use the most. This is the best place to bring in groceries without worrying about a cat escaping, plus, you can pull the car boot (trunk for our US friends) right up next to the door.

Here you can see the concrete sealer shining in the sun. The driveway sparkles like a *Twilight vampire! YAY!

This final shot shows where the new concrete and the old driveway at the front of the house meet. The old driveway is white concrete with one of those colour spray ons over the top. For the new driveway, the concretor suggested adding some grey colour into the concrete itself to match the spray on – it would last a lot longer and work better for everyone. I think it turned out much better than the original driveway.

Every day this week I have gone out to open the gate for the other half when it is his home time, and every single day, I have found myself trying to step *up* to the old concrete because I am so used to stepping up right there. When I go out the laundry door, I find myself hitting the concrete much earlier than my body expects the ground to be there. It is a massive change and it is taking some getting used to.

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.

* No Twilight vampires were harmed in the making of our concrete driveway. :)

Weekly Wrap Up –

This week I was quite determined to stay at home and go absolutely nowhere, after two weeks of “Toodling” and “Gallivanting” with holidays and my Aunt and Uncle visiting. Don’t get me wrong, I loved having them visit – it is just lovely to sit still in one place after so much travelling about.

Last Sunday we did the fortnightly shop, and I settled back in at home intending to write quite a few posts for the blog(s) and chill out with the kitties, some colouring in, NYPD Blue, a little Lumosity game I have become quite addicted to, and catching up on my reading.

The LCN Jig, It May Be Up.

I spotted this in my feedjit earlier today –

I guess we’ll have to wait and see if they keep using the same name. That particular post continues to get a lot of views and comments here on the blog

Did you miss a post this week?

Monday – I told you about my holidays.

Wednesday – Sipowicz Says #1 – quotes from NYPD Blue will be a monthly feature here on the blog for the foreseeable future.

Thursday – I mentioned that 7 would be airing the first episode of Mr Robot. You might want to circle back and read my angry comments that I left on Friday while waiting for the show to actually air, for your own amusement. :) Can you guess how many minutes it was delayed by? Did you catch the show? If yes, leave a comment over there, I would love to know what you thought of it.

Friday – we revisited the Six Feet Under finale.

Over to you –

Did you get up to anything interesting this past week? :)

Aussie Culture, Happy Snoskred, Home

Snoskred Holidays

12 Comments Posted on August 17, 2015August 15, 2015 by Snoskred

So, will you like to know what Snoskred got up to on her holidays? I can tell you more about this now!

We got a new oven installed. We turned the old one on once when we first moved in here, and the amount of stinky smoke which bellowed forth stopped us ever wanting to use it again. We were not bothered, because we had our LG solardom convection oven, grill and microwave. But recently that unit has begun to misbehave, and it was time to replace the oven.

There was quite a bit of writing blog posts – taking a break inspired some new posts.

There was some fun with ice spheres but that is a post in itself.

There was some colouring in.

There was some shopping and eating of baked goods. There was some purchasing of chicken in bulk – 11 chicken roasters, plus a bunch of filos and kievs. Lenards have some new items available none of which we purchased this time but I wouldn’t mind trying the Chicken Cobs.

There was plenty of cooking, and some recipe posts will be coming to you as a surprise soonest!

The Villains were seen and greatly enjoyed. There was dancing, singing, and much fun had by all.

I did not take very many photos, preferring to live in the moment and enjoy each moment when it was happening rather than try to capture moments to share here later.

The concreting was completed and sealed and the cars were finally put away safely. We deeply appreciate the vast vista of concrete we now have to enjoy. :)

What have you been up to?

Anything interesting? Let me know in the comments!

country life, Happy Snoskred, shopping

WW – Sparkly Kitty

8 Comments Posted on July 22, 2015July 21, 2015 by Snoskred

From my keepsakes cabinet seen here and here

Happy Snoskred, Home, sparkly, Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday – New Cards

6 Comments Posted on July 1, 2015August 21, 2015 by Snoskred

New cards and a birthday gift bag

family, Greeting Cards, Happy Snoskred, Wordless Wednesday, yay

Cabinetry Take Two

10 Comments Posted on June 17, 2015June 16, 2015 by Snoskred

Let us take a closer look at the second glass cabinet of keepsakes.

The top shelf is quite full so I’m breaking it down into two parts.

Lots to see here – various ceramic figures two of which I made myself right next to each other on the right hand side, the silver haired lady in the purple glitter gown, and the red haired lady in the green glitter outfit. Multiple fairies of various versions. Plus a Halloween snow globe which I believe Sephy sent to me.

Here we have another Fairy friend, a moonstone Dolphin which I got in Hawaii, another dragon, and a pink sparkly cat which came from a Korean friend of mine.. There is also another Fairy friend hiding at the back there.

This large doll came from the same Korean friend. :)

This large doll I found somewhere in a shop. My parents had a bunch of these dolls which came from Japan and I am trying to start my own collection.

The middle shelf – a couple of glass tealight holders at the very ends of the shelf – an elephant sits next to my very own DeLorean time machine. On the other side is a garden gnome I made myself. In the middle is a somewhat battered but extremely special to me keepsake – a ceramic dog ashtray that belonged to my Grandfather.

The bottom shelf – my Hawaii Domo sits in some glass desk units which belonged to The Other Half’s Mother. The two ceramic cats are from Sephyroth – the ones which were hidden in my new shoes! – a ceramic keepsake holder which has some glitter inside and a special mother of pearl jewellery case.

In future Wednesdays here on the blog, I intend to take a closer look at some of the keepsakes on Wednesdays.

Happy Snoskred, Home, things to remember

SodaStream Saturday #1

15 Comments Posted on June 13, 2015June 13, 2015 by Snoskred

As mentioned in this post – Long Weekending – we recently bought a new Soda Stream from Harvey Norman.

This week, we’ll take a look at my new SodaStream.

The one we bought is this one. It comes with an 2 flavour bottles – Cola and Lemonade – plus a c02 canister which will make 40 litres of bubbly drink and 1 one litre water bottle. It is an incredibly good value deal.

In fact such good value that if you pick up a 60 litre gas bottle while you are there, you can go home and make 100 litres of soda water for just over $100. That works out to around $1 per litre.

Future gas bottles retail at $51.95 – you bring in the old one and swap it for a new one – and make approximately 60 litres of bubbly water. You will then be making your bubbly water for .86 cents a litre. No more lugging soda water home from the supermarket. YAY!

Here is a look at the gas probe that goes into the bottle and fizzes it up, and the place where you twist your bottle into. The machine is super simple to use, and every 60 bottles or so you’ll have to replace the gas canister, which is also very easy to do. You do get an instruction book as well.

The gas canister lives inside the back part of the unit. You just press that button and pull the top upwards.

And here you see it pulled apart.

You can use tap water, rain water, any kind of water – and you can even bubble up things like white wine or some forms of alcohol, though it does mean you’ll have to find a good way of washing the water bottle afterwards. We have a filter tap installed here which I use.

There is an option to hack it and use larger c02 canisters. We have not done that here yet so all I can say about that is you can search for SodaStream hack in your search engine and you’ll see multiple different options.

I don’t use syrups or cordial with my mineral water very often. I find them to be too sweet and I have grown to love that tangy bite of plain mineral water. When I feel like I am coming down with a cold, I might do half orange juice, half soda water over ice. This makes a fizzy awesomeness and the super coldness of the ice soothes my throat.

From time to time, I put fruit in just to make it a treat. The fruit takes on that tangy bite, and the mineral water takes on the flavour of the fruit. You can use any fruit and even some vegetables like carrots if you are so inclined.

I’ve written one post on the blog about cutting up an orange the fancy way and putting it into my mineral water. I’ve also posted about making sparkling ice tea here, just scroll down past the cinnamon muffins.

For the next few Saturdays, I am going to write a post about the different ways I use the soda water – or Mineral Water, if you’re posh – that I create with my SodaStream. After that, I’ll post one every now and then when I try something new.

Citrus is in season right now, and I’ve been citrus-ing it up just lately. Next week I’ll show you a fruit which people would not normally think of putting in their mineral water.

Happy Snoskred, Home, SodaStream

Cabinetry

7 Comments Posted on June 10, 2015June 8, 2015 by Snoskred

As requested by Fish Of Gold on the Long Weekending post, here are some closer shots of my collectible cabinet.

First I should mention that the cabinet itself was purchased several years ago at an imported furniture sale. It is similar in style to my other glass cabinet which we had purchased in Adelaide..

Second I should mention, I did a little photoshop in this next pic because the flash reflected on the wood and it hurt my eyebulbs. I did not wish to inflict same on your eyebulbs. So please excuse my dodgy bucket filling. ;)

At the back is my Take That Mirror – I had all kinds of Take That merchandise – In front on the stand is a ceramic jewellery box which I painted myself. The large blue puffer fish sits in front of my paperweight. There is a pink crystal triangle, another paperweight with fish and coral, a green crystal triangle, a block of glass with a dragon etched inside it which is designed to stand on an LED light stand, and though you can’t see it very well, a metal snake attached to a green crystal.

This is my China themed shelf. It has a special folding Panda screen given to us by my Chinese cousin. In front is a ceramic Buddha that The Other Half made at ceramics, and then some other Buddhas I have collected over the years many of which sat on my work desk in various call centres. They have Feng Shui uses. Also there is a Green Malachite cat which was brought back for me from Africa by my Dad.

On this shelf – Many of my glass snow globes. I don’t know why but the water inside seems to be receeding – they all were completely full when I got them and I can’t find any leaks.. There is also a moon lander bought from Aldi, a ceramic keepsake holder, a ceramic pig figure, and a copper pencil sharpener boat.

And the final shelf – – At the back is my ceramic castle which I made and painted. Also at the back you can see my Gruen Transfer mug, which I won in a competition. In front are some of my glass items including 3 glass tealight holders in green, blue and red, two glass globes which are used in a tealight holder that I’m not using right now, a crystal bell, and my gorgeous cobalt blue and gold glass container. I love cobalt blue things. :)

Drop back next Wednesday for Cabinetry Take Two! ;)

Happy Snoskred, Home, things to remember

Sephyroth Is A Genius

9 Comments Posted on June 5, 2015June 5, 2015 by Snoskred

I mentioned here on the blog a while ago that I was going through my old posts – updating links, making sure videos still worked, and removing some overly negative posts about an old workplace and about one particular family member.

As a part of this process, I realised that my categories were.. not brilliant. Not at all optimal. They really needed someone with a pedantic flair to take a look at them and completely re-do them. Hmm. Who do I know with a pedantic flair? This seemed like a job for only one person on earth – my excellent friend Sephyroth.

So I sent off an email on February 28th..

And on March 23rd, I received me a reply! Parent categories with child categories. This seemed like a good plan.

For some reason I thought I would wait until I finished going through all the posts in order to make the suggested changes. That was a bit of a mistake to be honest. But on the 1st of June I finally finished reviewing all the posts and so I sat down today to begin making the changes.. half an hour later, I sent off another email..

The Other Half helped out by adding the little + and – so that all you will see to begin with is the parent categories. Like this –

If you click on the parent category, you will see all posts for that parent category. I may still do some tweaking in the weeks to follow, but for now I’m happy with the results. YAY! ;)

In Other Blog News

I made some changes to the right hand sidebar, adding more articles and putting them in different categories.

Sephyroth helped me out once again with the padding on the posts because we had to do a theme update and lost a lot of our changes to the theme as a surprise. This will not happen again as we are now using a child theme, long story and way too technical, but it means things like link colour, text size, and teeny little settings on the blog that readers are not even aware of, like 10 pixels of padding around paragraphs, headings and photos, are in a separate file so future updates to the theme will not cause those changes to be lost.

On the right hand sidebar, The Other Half coded a thing, which means my comments no longer appear in the most recent comments stream. This is great because I often go through and reply to comments in one sitting, so you tend to see a lot of comments from me suddenly.

Yesterday..

Wow, what a huge day here on the blog yesterday! Just 3 minutes after the scam warning post went live, on average there were 120 visitors every hour. Interestingly, there was a very Australian skew to the people who were sent this email. Here’s a screenshot taken at midnight AEST..

People from 22 more countries than you can see here dropped by, which makes 32 countries in total. Many of the people who arrived were good enough to take the time to leave a comment with the name and email address and in some cases the email they were sent. Plus, a lot of people sent me emails via my contact page with that info.

I’ve sent an email off to outlook.com to let them know what has been going on, because every email address used was an outlook.com one. Most troubling, they seem to be bot generated.

What’s Happening At Yours?

Let me know in the comments! :)

blog housekeeping, Happy Snoskred, Sephyroth

Something Arrived..

8 Comments Posted on June 2, 2015June 2, 2015 by Snoskred

Last week Sephyroth received a surprise package from me, which you can read about at his blog – I can haz Krudd Tea?.

Today a package arrived for me – this one I knew was on the way because my Dad had wanted specific Calvin Klein underwear from Macys. His present underwears were actually literally disintegrating. Originally Mum said get 6 pairs, and I said no, get 12 and put 6 away for later.

So we’d sent some money via paypal to Sephyroth and he did all the buying and shipping. They don’t sell this particular underwear in Australia and we’ve even been in contact with Calvin Klein Australia. Likely due to some kind of licensing arrangement, Macys will not ship it directly to Australia and you need a US credit card and address to order.

Thanks for sending the package Sephy! I will deeply enjoy these chippies and this chocolate! ;)

Also many thanks for the Costco Connection and the files on this thumb drive – this contains some photos which we lost in the server meltdown.

And I will respect these wishes. I will *not* mention the Genius of Sephy, that is a post for another day.

food, Happy Snoskred, Sephyroth

Zen Moment

4 Comments Posted on May 6, 2015June 2, 2015 by Snoskred

When you have two kitties both of whom like to get up close and personal with, well, everything, finding a place to burn candles can be a bit of a problem.

This location is very high up and there are no places where the kitties can make their way up here, no steps to make a kitty ladder. In fact, it is probably less than half a meter from the ceiling. Tealights can be safely burned here, and this is the location where I burn my wax melts.

I also burn a tealight in the Dusk Spinning Butterfly tealight candle holder. It puts a gorgeous spinning golden glow on the ceiling which is somehow comforting to me. The thermals that the candle throws out magically turns the turntable and it spins. Depending on the candle you use and the heat given off, it can spin at different speeds.

I tend to use two brands of tealights – I like the assorted 50 pack from Dusk – and I love the extra excellent value tealight packs from IKEA. 30 tealights for $2.49, you really can’t ask for any better than that.

You might ask – why two different kinds of tealight candles? Well first of all, they have different burn times. The IKEA ones are regularly 4 hours or so, which makes them perfect for an evening burn eg 6pm-10pm. The Dusk candles are 6-8 hours which is a good daytime burn time. Combine the two and you cover the entire day – 10-6pm or so, then 6-10pm or so, and I can light them and forget them, because they will burn out before I have to think about snuffing them.

The spinning butterfly tealight candle holder can still be purchased from Dusk, though I do not see any purple ones or the teal green which I really wanted to get as well. I will cross my fingers that maybe our local store has one in teal when we next visit – we are nearly out of chicken, so we will be heading to Shellharbour and Warrawong next weekend. If no teal, maybe this gold owl version might come home with us.

Below I have put a couple of videos – they are just 10 seconds long each, you get a closeup of the spinning butterflies in the first one, and you can see the reflection the spinning holder puts on the ceiling in the second.

About Snoskred, Happy Snoskred, Home, Snoskred hearts, yay