Carter used to like sitting in the recliner but he decided it would be cooler to hang out with all my favourite knick knacks.. I don’t think this would be a comfortable place for your regular human but Carter does not seem to mind.
Carter
Carter Gets A New Hat
A couple of months ago, we were sitting down at our local bowling club watching a band (sadly not The Villains) play and there were these kids with sparkly sequin hats. I said to The Other Half – I would like one of those for me!
On a trip to Warrawong to get my car washed and pick up chicken from Lenards, I handed over the car keys and was told to return in 2 hours. We did some serious wandering around and in a shop called either Smart Dollar, Hot Dollar, or some other word I can’t recall in front of the Dollar, hats with sequins were discovered. For the low price of $5, I picked up this gorgeous purple number, and for the time being it resides on the skull of my excellent and quite silent friend Carter.
He was already wearing this purple tee, it is just coincidence that the hat matches it. I had considered a few other colours, silver and pink, and decided that purple would go with the most outfits of mine.
A profile view. Carter suggested keeping his beanie on, and the hat fits better that way. :)
Carter Models Again
I found this years Winter Knit! YAY. It is a gorgeous knit from Millers. It cost the enormous sum of $15. It is a long cardigan – or perhaps a coatigan – which reaches around my knees. Wearing it is taking some getting used to, especially getting into the car. :)
This is a closeup of the fabric which has a gold metallic thread running through it.
I found this years knit at Wollongong on a recent shopping excursion. As part of Wollongong Central, they have opened up a new shopping centre across the road from the Crown Street Mall which contains such awesomes as Grill’d, Max Brenner, Guzman Y Gomez, to name a few. There is a new food court up the top with things like Schnitz and an amazing salad place called Soul Origin with a huge range of delicious fresh salads.
I also picked up this lovely poncho. Many happy moments were had by all on this shopping trip. :)
Carter & Happy – WW
Carter has new headgear and a lap rug
Millers Knits
Carter modelling a Millers Knit.
Millers is a weird store. It has gorgeous maxi dresses and sparkly things, but mixed in with that, there are some Clothes Reserved For Older Ladies. It has quite a bit of what I can only call “Fluffy Wear”. Which is sometimes exactly what you want when you are looking for your one great knit.
At least three of my past winter knits have originated from Millers. This purple and black fluffy knit has been a lot of places with me and was my first ever “hunting season” knit, which I bought in the winter of 2007. I can still wear it now, but mostly I use it around the house and wear my most recent knit for going out. It is still going pretty well for an 8 year old knit.
I have already dropped into Millers this season and I can tell you two things – they have some gorgeous long line cardigans at incredibly reasonable prices. The one that caught my eye in store was this Taupe Stripe Cardigan – it is much better in person and it has a metallic gold stripe.
It is entirely possible I might also go back for this Textured Coatigan which seems very Duchess of Cambridge.
And they have plenty of fluffy wear, too. For example this gorgeous popcorn coatigan.
Carter The Knit Model
Leah over at Just Me, Leah, posted this post – Pattern Mixing – a little while back. It inspired me somewhat, and I left a comment accordingly, because Autumn has just begun here and I’m on the lookout for that *one* great knit.
Every year in autumn, I declare Knit Hunting season open. I only want one knit for each winter, and sometimes it takes me all of Autumn to find it.
I thought perhaps Carter could model some of my past season knits and I could share the photos with you here on the blog. Carter is a little on the stick thin side whereas I most certainly am not..
I think the worst part of Carter is his bony shoulders. Sadly I do not have any 80’s shoulder pads handy in order to bulk them out a little. Also, it is super hard to put his arms into things. So we’ve gone for a cardigan draped over the shoulders look with these outfits.
This particular knit was found one Autumn in Canberra, just when I had almost given up looking for that years knit. It has a gold thread that runs through it which is difficult to see in the photos. It has been one of my favourite knits of all time, even after it lost the buttons. It drapes and sits beautifully on me – and also on Carter, as you see in the above photo.
Meal Planning
This year, I’ve been using this great free meal planner found at #4 on this post – High Five for Getting Organized! – from kelly’s kinda crazy.
The meal planner comes with a grocery list – Above you see Carter – my trusty skeleton friend – holding it. I’m thinking from now on he will get to hold the grocery list each fortnight so if I need to add something he will remind me to add it when I walk past. :) Here is a closer view with this fortnights shopping on it.
When I write my shopping list, I mentally walk around Aldi in my mind and I write things on the list in the order they appear in the store. Thank the deities, unlike Coles and Woolworths, Aldi rarely changes their floor plan. Both Coles and Woolworths have recently re-arranged their stores and now I can’t find anything in there. :(
I also sit down with my laptop and the shopping list and go through the Coles and Woolworths brochures and write down any items which are on special that we need to stock up on. I’ve been doing this for so long now that in general we never run out of things that we regularly use.
I’m loving the cute design of the meal planner. I used to do meal planning on my whiteboard which was not so pretty, nor could I take it with me to other rooms of the house which, on occasion especially when writing the shopping list, was mildly inconvenient. It also means I can keep copies of the old meal plans on the clipboard and review them when making the next meal plan. This way, I tend to notice meals we have not had for a while and add them back in.
Just be aware the file prints out an entire year worth of meal planning – you can choose to print just one or two pages at a time but you’d have to do it manually. I printed mine out at the start of the year and I’ll have enough to last until the end of this year..
This meal planner runs fortnightly and so we have been planning our menu fortnightly and shopping fortnightly as well, with just a quick stop at the shops on the second weekend if we need to pick up something fresh. Most of the time we don’t need to, because I am getting very good at planning meals which have the fresh ingredients closest to the shopping trip – and also very good at freezing things we need for later.
This past weekend we made our regular trip to Lenards at Warrawong which is roughly an hour or so drive from here, depending which way you go. We took a little detour past Albion Park to catch a glimpse of the Grand Old Lady VH-OJA at the HARS museum. If it wasn’t too busy we would have stopped to get out and take some photos, but as expected the place was absolutely packed and we just drove past. So, my apologies, I have no pics of that for you.
I also have no pics of Chicken Young Lad who has served us on our past 3-4 trips and who is starting to remember that we are the Crazy Bulk Buying People. Even so, after each item he asks “Anything else today” and we’re all.. YEP, give us 4 of those and 8 of those.
Meat wise, we eat quite a bit of chicken in the house. When we lived in Adelaide we had a Lenards close by and we could drop in and pick up chicken on the same day we were going to cook it. We really grew to love their chicken and moving here we discovered two things –
1. It is super expensive to buy pre-prepared chicken here eg kievs & filos.
2. Even though it was super expensive to buy, none of the local options tasted anywhere near as good as the options from Lenards did.
So we make the trek to Warrawong every 8-12 weeks, and we stock up on our chicken, we bring it home, then we food-save it and freeze it. We have the Sunbeam Foodsaver. I’ve tried other methods in the past including freezer bags and ziploc bags and we find the foodsaver to be the better option.It ends up looking like this –
The red chicken breasts that you see paired in the foodsaver packets with Chicken Kievs are the pocketed breast with baby spinach, dill, fetta and ricotta. They are my favourite – so tasty! I don’t mind a chicken kiev, either, but I deeply love these little red thingies.
We took every single chicken mini roast that they had prepared and we would have taken more if they had them out the back – sorry everyone else who wanted one. I normally pre-order but this time it did not happen, for a few non-interesting reasons. I foodsaved 6 roasters but we got 7 – one went into the fridge for tonights dinner, which looked like this –
We also stopped in at Dan Murphys and bought enough cask wine for cooking to last the next 6 months or so. I use Banrock Station Cabernet Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc for cooking and they are routinely $5 or so more expensive locally so if I need them and we’re already up Shellharbour way, I like to stock up.
Last fortnight, I ran out of white cask wine and had to use red wine for our white sauce chicken, bacon and leek pasta. When you use red wine in white sauce, you end up with a delicate light purple sauce. Not that either of us minds that because it still tastes great, and I find the merlot has some interesting flavours which the sav blanc does not. I really do need to put my white sauce pasta recipe up here sometime soon. :)
If you enjoyed reading this, you might want to take a look at this post – some things I know for sure about grocery shopping.
None of the companies or products mentioned gave me anything or paid me to say this stuff, and of course if anyone did I would make that very clear right at the top of the post and it would not change my opinions on things – I call it as I see it.. :)
So, over to you..
Do you meal plan?
The Kitties & Carter
Happy, the little kitty has taken to sleeping on the “lap” of Carter just lately. For those of you new to the blog, Carter is our Costco skeleton friend. Want to know more about Carter? – Meet Carter – Carter Gets Dressed – Carter Got Cold.
Happy truly is the most hilarious kitteh we have ever known. Plus she is amazingly sweet tempered, she has never once bitten or scratched us. She is the only cat I have known who allows us to scratch her belly and actually really enjoys a tummy rub, she turns to jelly.
She is not the brightest cat, if we were to put it into kitty terms, she is a few kibble short of a full bowl. She does not seem to have enormous faith in her own abilities either. It has taken her ages to learn to jump onto the kitchen counter.
Apparently, Carters lap is The Place To Be at the moment. Interestingly the kitties do not find him to be too bony to sit on. Carter moved chairs recently to a spiffy recliner, and his lap has become that place the kitties share regularly. Here is Grumpy hanging out with Carter.
My Living Space
I suppose I am a little odd. Not everyone has a full size plastic skeleton hanging out in their lounge room. I know, that is totally unbelievable, right? Why doesn’t everyone have a Carter? :) But, we had some people drop by the other day and we are so used to Carter neither of us thought to warn our visitors they were about to encounter him. They were a little freaked out when they spotted him.
My recliner is the chair with the blue rug. Let us take a closer look.
Tissues, laptop, tv remotes, water glass, all within reach.
This space used to be cluttered, but I have streamlined, and also did a little re-organising, so all the things that would clutter up this space are now re-organised.
Hand cream, nail clippers and Sally Hansen Hard As Nails which I swear by, nail polish remover, cuticle tools, dental floss, general body care items that you might need in the course of a day are now living together in this cute basket I got from Hot Dollar.
This is what I see from my recliner. There are my trusty cordless headphones. There are my cotton buds. There on the floor is the pair of socks the little kitty picks up with her mouth and runs around with, then throws them on the floor and attacks them. They must have done something really bad to deserve this treatment! ;)
Here’s a look at my remotes, and my clipboard. That might contain a project I am working on – at the moment I have printouts of my blogroll, because I am trying to drop by and say hi to everyone on it. Other times, it might have todays To Do list on there.
It is blank right now, because I Got All My Shiznit Done! YAY!
Oh, why do I have a copy of the alphabet printed out there? I seriously am terrible at alphabetizing things. If I do not have that piece of paper, I do the mental abcdefg thing in my head, and that takes up more time than I would like, so I just printed it out and I keep it there, it works for me.
Next week on Friday I will be sharing my daily routine with you. I am really Getting Shiznit Done here, people, and it is all thanks to my set routine on weekdays. 4 hours each day of solid writing or chore time.
The post you are reading today, I wrote this on the 16th of September. On this blog I already have some blog posts – like the Wordless Wednesdays – scheduled out to December already. No kidding.
On the Rewatch Breaking Bad blog, I am writing the post for Season 2 episode 2 today. I’ve upped the posting schedule to twice a week and even so, that blog is already scheduled out to the end of September and this week, I am planning to write one post a day over there. If I can do that for 2 weeks, I’ll be scheduled out to the end of October very quickly.
Happy moments all around!
