Monday 27 February 2012

Show time!

This weekend I took a break from my usual weekend job of making coffee to work at the show! Making coffee! Haha. I was working in a snack shop taking orders and making coffee and it was pretty fun. I met a few of the people working once before so they weren't all new, but I got on a lot better than the last first day I had at a new job.
I got a few chances to walk around the show. I finished at 6 on Saturday and had a quick look around. I also got there early on Sunday and had a look at some of the animals. The animals are definitely the best thing about the show. Far more interesting than all the rides! I also found some Italian greyhound puppies that are up for adoption soon, and I'm currently discussing with the fam whether or not an iggy would be suitable for us. It is looking good so far though! I got a break that day too where I managed to get a few showbags (full of chocolate and lollies!). Here are some photos I got on my wonders around.

Thursday 23 February 2012

What I do...

Now I'm back at uni, I spend a lot of time there, or doing uni work. This semester I'm taking Immunology, Pathobiology, Clinical Microbiology and Advanced Functional Anatomy. They're 3rd year classes so they're getting tough, but luckily they're all quite similar so they cover a lot of the same stuff.

The labs are really interesting. The past few weeks I've done a blood smear (which involves pricking your finger to get a drop of blood which you literally smear over the slide, stain, and then look at it under the microscope), looked at human cadavers (which was unbelievably strange), and taken a swab of my throat and nose and cultured the bacteria on horse blood agar!

As much as I'd like to show you everything I do, I'm not able to get photos of most of it. We're not supposed to have phones out in labs and I'm definitely not allowed to take photos of cadavers. I always get photos whenever I dissect (animal) organs though! But I haven't done that in a while.
Coffee is most important.

Sneaky photo of my throat swab.

Monday 20 February 2012

Things I like...

Giant microbes! Plush toys of pathogens, carriers of pathogens, and cells of the body. The Epstein Barr Virus (causes glandular fever/mono) is my favourite. You can get them all here.

I was going to work for a meeting, and saw this sheep in the carpark! 

This Karyotye, by Kevin Van Aelst, made from sour worms!


This dress from modcloth.

This drawing from a series by Ella Mobs. You can get them as brooches!

Saturday 18 February 2012

possums on the power lines

Found these guys on the power lines last night. When we first saw them they were hanging from each other. There was 2 big ones and a baby. Sadie was going absolutely mental at them, haha.


In other news, I've planted some lettuce, spinach, snow peas, garlic chives and chocolate mint. I'll let them grow for a little bit before I post more about them :)

Friday 17 February 2012

Vegetable Patch

After watching an episode of Jamie at home *swoon*, I got super inspired to grow my own vegetables. It is really surprising how you can get a beautiful garden and have almost all of it edible! I'm talking edible flowers, lots of different herbs and lots of lettuce! He seemed to have herbs and lettuce all over the place... in the ground, in pot plants on shelves. So beautiful. It's hard not to get too excited - I don't have lots of money to pay people to do it for me (not that I really know, but I feel that Jamie would have done most of it himself, the actual planting and care anyway) and getting it looking anywhere near as good as his will take a LOT of effort.

Last night the boy and I went to bunnings to buy some vegetables for him. He's got a polystyrene box that he's using to grow herbs and veggies on his balcony. I saw quite a few things I want to get there... rocket, garlic chives, bok choy, carrots and so many other things.

Today I got home from work and mum had started weeding next to her temporary tomato filled garden bed. She'd also bought 2 large wooden planter boxes to make some raised garden beds, and seeds like carrots, radishes, snow peas, sweet peas and petunias. So I went outside and helped her weed. Basically the weeds had grown so it looked like we had lawn... it took a while to get rid of them all from the area we wanted to use. Then we put down paper, put the boxes where we wanted them and covered the rest with gravel.

This is what it looks like now, you can see next to the gravel how bad the weeds were!


Tomorrow I'm going to bunnings to get some lettuce and also some flowers to put in the garden bed outside my window.

Monday 13 February 2012

Things I like!

Here's a "little" post dedicated to the things that have caught my attention recently.

Cat litas. I've been thinking about getting litas for a while, especially ever since I saw the spike litas. I've recently developed a love for cat print, probably sparked by this post by Kaelah, so I think these are amazing.




Pastel nail polish. Especially greens!


Hipstamatic Disposable! This is a free iphone app I just found, which lets you choose one camera, and wont show you the photos until you've shot the whole 'roll', or 24 photos. It also lets you connect with other friends with the app and you can all use the roll. I can't wait to make my friends download it so we can try it out!


Today while I was trying to decide what to wear I realised I have no pink dresses! This is a situation that needs to be rectified immediately! I think this dress would be a perfect start.


These Harry Potter valentines day cards are too cute! I've never really celebrated valentines day before, but I've been sending these to my boyfriend all day! Check them all here.

Some more:
The fact that my Immunology teacher refers to the adaptive immune system as elegant.

The Grooving the Moo lineup! Bought my ticket and I'm so keen to see all the great bands. In particular The Getaway Plan(!!!) and Bluejuice who are always great live, but I'm also super keen to see newer artists like San Cisco and Matt Corby!

Been really liking Florence + the Machine's new album Ceremonials too. I have no idea how it's taken me this long to get my hands on it though!

Sunday 12 February 2012

new camera time

These are the first lots of film from two cameras I bought recently. A fuji instax which I got from ebay and came with 50(!) photos, and a 'panorama' camera that I got at an op shop for I think $5? I can't really remember, it was so long ago but I haven't had a chance to use it till recently. Now, as far as I could tell, most panoramas used more than one regular frame per photo? Not this one... I got 24 photos from a 24 roll. Not too big a deal because it does have a wide angle lens so it is a little special.

Here are the two cameras. I had to get the pink fuji of course!


And here are the favourite photos:
Sadie! First photo!
Dancing in the city and McDonalds after! They've just opened up a 24 hour McDonalds in the middle of where all the clubs are, which I am a little more than excited over! 

This little dog is so cute! When we went to the river for a swim once, he ran in front of us and showed us the way to the island in the middle which is where we like to put our stuff. Once we all got there he ran off! Adorable!


In the middle of Moss Vale 



Two photos from my backyard.

Wednesday 8 February 2012

kitchen inspiration

I cannot wait to move out. Basically, only because I want to have my own kitchen. Mum and I have completely different tastes in kitchens. She likes minimalistic, white and aluminium. I like PINK, retro, and to have things on show. It's not going to be for a while, but I cant' help but look longingly at pictures of pretty kitchens and think of how I'm going to do mine!



Last time I went to ikea, I bought two sets of kitchen canisters.


I love the plain cupboards with pink accessories in this kitchen. I also love the glass cabinets so you can display your kitchenware!

 The pink cupboards in this kitchen are such a lovely colour!

This kitchen is to die for! So much beautiful kitchenware!! And of course, the pink kitchen aid mixmaster!

Sunday 5 February 2012

What I wore... snack attack!

I wore this when I went to a friends house for dinner. I got this dress a couple of days ago and it is so lovely! I've wanted it for a while, but wasn't sure I was ready to spend $70 on it. But, I love food, so much, so I thought I may as well. The print is so bright! It's full of my favourite foods too... burgers, hotdogs, chips, cupcakes, ice cream, milkshakes! At the moment it's a bit low cut, and a bit big in the chest area, which is really unusual in a dress for me! I've heard that it shrinks in the wash, so if that doesn't happen I'll have to get mum to alter it. It goes well with the rings I bought recently too. I'm wearing the green cardigan I got at an op shop for $5 recently, and the red shoes I got from the kids section of a shoe shop. They're so cute!







Today I went back to uni. It was much better than the first day last semester, we only went over unit outlines, but it's going to be a tough semester! One class focuses on muscles, which when we covered those my first year I almost failed! Hopefully my refined study techniques will help me because I do NOT want to have to go back to uni next year, haha! Also, that lecturer is taking a couple of students out to lunch each week for a chat... and free lunch! Which makes up for the hard subject, for me at least. Also had to buy a new laptop charger today because I keep running over my old one and it broke. This is the second charger I've had to buy so I might take care of this one!

I'm cooking burgers for dinner tonight! With cheese filled patty's. Yum!

Friday 3 February 2012

I got 4 rolls of film developed yesterday. Same as last time, it was done same day! It's so exciting getting photos back the same day you put them in. I'm so used to Kmarts over 1 week developing time. These are my favourites from 3 of the rolls. I still have 1 I don't have digitally. I didn't get them burnt to a cd because they were from my new panoramic camera, and I didn't know how they'd turn out. Turns out they're just a normal sized frame, but they're narrower. Weird. I'll scan them soon and post about them soon!


This photo is so old! From my birthday last June!

Boyfriends sunflowers





Some more photos from when I went down the coast.

And this photo of me was taken by my friend. :)

Thursday 2 February 2012

Food!

So last night I went out for dinner with the boy. It was for his 21st (which was late November, woops!) so it was a fancy pants restaurant. It was at the top of a hill that overlooked the city/central Canberra, and it was sprinkling so it was really pretty. Especially when it started getting dark and you could see all the lights.
We had 4 courses - 4 entree sized that we shared, 1 main we shared and a dessert each. The restaurant does entree sized dishes so that you can have a couple rather than just entree, main and dessert, and they really encourage sharing! Which is great, because we both wanted to try everything.
We had polenta crumbed calamari, gravlax with celeriac remoulade and seriously delicious potato croquettes, sweetbreads (glandular tissue, not sure which type though) with a bread sauce hazelnuts and sultanas, glazed duck breast with confit duck and buckwheat, and roast lamb with crumbed confit shoulder, parmesan gnocchi and pea/pea mash and tomato jam. Dessert was white chocolate cake with strawberry ice cream, cream and lemon meringue (which were not so nice), and the boy got Creme Brulee with rhubarb and rhubarb ice cream. It was all incredibly delicious (bar the meringues), and I could not pick a favourite.
We planned to take photos of all the food, but got a bit too excited when it came out that we wanted to eat it all straight away. All we got was photos of the sweetbreads and the duck.
The Sweetbreads
The Duck


Here's the view from my seat.


On another food related note, I've been asked by a friend at work to write an article for the uni magazine about cooking good food on a budget. It has to be my own recipe and he'd like it to be able to feed a few people - for people living in share housing. I want to try something out tonight but I'm completely stumped for ideas. I'm usually good with knowing what food I want to cook (or more like eat) so this is a bit annoying!