Mondaydreaming

Crikey, two posts in the same month.  Has someone let a couple of Horsemen out for a trial Apocalypse run?

It's winter here, and I can't decide if I'm suffering a case of winter blues, or if there's something serious behind the endless second-guessing that I've been doing lately.  I have a horrible suspicion I might be brewing a midlife crisis a few years early, but I'm still hoping to wake up one morning and discover that I've just been winding myself up.

I've been self-medicating with music.  Rebuilt my old MP3 player - surprised to find I know how to use a screwdriver and watch a tutorial on youtube, and even more surprised that it actually works with Banshee - and have been dragging it around everywhere.  The side effect of that is the Other Half never knows if I'm listening to him, or whether I'm having a fit or just dancing to something he can't hear.

At any rate, I've been buying up old albums from bands that I always intended to love: Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden etc.  I seem to running about two decades behind the rest of the planet, which is fine by me.  Means I have another decade of being Bieber-free, at least.

Random blip

Well, if I let a whole year lapse between posts, that'd be downright lazy, so here's a random update.

I have, in the last few months, rediscovered that I might still have some residual writing talent left over from my (long ago) days as an angsty teenage fanfic writer.  I've started writing random snapshots of things, instead of journaling my own life, but I can't decide if it's worth the effort or not.  With no plot, no direction and no real point, I'm collecting a huge mass of words that I have no intention of sharing with anyone.  Except a close friend, who assured me it's not crap (I was kinda desperate for approval and mortified that she can probably extrapolate how weird I am from two pages of drivel).

At any rate, it's keeping me quiet.

Thing is, my hobbies tend to go in a very rigid cycle: discovery, interest, OHMYGODIAMOBSESSEDTHISISMYENTIRELIFE, mild interest, embarrassment that I'd ever brought it up in front of anyone.  Rinse, wash, repeat and revisit in six years' time, when I'll come across a bunch of old writing that, at first glance, seems like it might actually be half decent.

Spice jars

My kitchen is tiny.  So tiny that most of our food is kept in an office storage cupboard by the dining table.  So things tend to get crammed wherever they'll fit, including the herbs and spices:

 

All mismatched, all spread out.  Until...

Yup, cosmetic jars.  Nice and dark, so sunlight won't get to the spices, and labelled on top as well as on the side.  As handy as it is having spices right next to the oven, having a whole collection of bottles getting steamed every night was not so appealing. So, with the top labels, I can store them somewhere else:

It took me over an hour to get them all decanted and into their new jars.  If you decide to do this yourself, definitely leave the ground pepper until last.  By fluke it was the last one I did, and it was the only one having me sniffle and cough.

Photo Challenge Week 29: Fire

Remember how I said I wasn't sure if I'd actually come right out and commit to doing a photo challenge?  Well, waiting three months between the first post and the second is a typical start, haha.

Week 29 for PhotoChallenge.org is Fire:

Feijoa Curry

It's autumn here, finally, and everything is turning golden.  This morning I went and climbed through the back fence to the feijoa trees, which have been dropping their crop for a couple of weeks, picked up a bucketful, and then came inside and found a yummy way of using them:

It's the first addition to my cookbook in what seems forever, using bits and pieces from Scrap Girls to pull it together.  The recipe itself came from here, and I'll hopefully be able to try it out next week.  The page is set up as A5 size - if anyone wants a print-quality copy, let me know :)

Journal spreads

I've given up trying to maintain any one system for journalling.  I flick from one to the other - art, typed, notebook, smash, scrapbook - at least once a month, so I've decided to just chuck it all into one book.  I'm loving it, although I still need to find a decent glue.  Double-sided tape and cheap gluesticks just aren't doing it for me.

These are a couple of digital pages that I've done and printed.  In between are pages from notebooks, index cards, and anything else I feel like pasting in, but I like these pages the best...

The photos in the first spread I took myself at a recent air show; everything else is from my stash of digital scrapping supplies.

Photo Challenge.org: Black and White

I found Photochallenge.org in the communities over at Google+.  While I'm generally pretty awful at maintaining challenges, their challenge this week was something that I actually felt able to do, and not something too intimidating.

I don't know if I'll do it every week, but it was fun to play with the camera.  I've never shot in monochrome before, and love how it turns simple things, like this grass, into something much simpler and more beautiful.