I don’t have a costume this year.. but I had a lot of fun making a Spongebob Squarepants jack-o-lantern! I love spongebob. He’s just my favourite cartoon character. Well one of them anyway! I had to choose between him and Flapjack, but Spongebob was less detailed and I think more recognizable for some.
So I finally got this CD in the mail that I had been waiting for. The album by Ilona Mitrecey, “Un monde parfait”. It has most of the songs that I had wanted on it, and the cover is super cute to boot! My only complaint is that it’s too short! Most of the songs are only 3 minutes long which I guess is average for a song for radio play, but I’m just so used to rock and electronic albums having something like 10-14 tracks which sometimes go for over 5 minutes each.. But anyway. I really enjoy it, and it’s fun to practice my French through music.
So the other day I was grocery shopping for herbal teas. I figured it would be nice if I got something that wasn’t loaded with caffeine and wouldn’t make me all jittery, since I normally drink tea all day. I had been thinking of ordering tea online for ages but just never got around to doing so. I just randomly googled a whole bunch of places, and ended up with this one, Imperial Tea Garden. I had looked up many others as well though, just to compare prices, but this one was definitely the cheapest. Most of the other sites were the same as buying boxes of tea at a grocery store. I was specifically looking to buy loose leaves so that I could avoid all of the packaging that normal teas have. Normally you’ll see that tea is sold in cardboard boxes that are sealed in plastic, and then inside the tea bags are individually wrapped in foil or paper based wrappers, and the tea bag itself is made of paper or cloth and has string.. it’s a whole big mess of stuff that I just end up throwing out! So I opted for this place because they sell their tea by the gram in larger bulk bags. I bought several different flavours, and they arrived yesterday in the mail for me! I even got two free samples! Having loose leaf tea is a lot nicer because there is virtually no waste – the leaves are able to be composted, and the bags they came in recycled. I’m a happy customer, and the tea tastes great!
Cupcakes that Brad’s mom made for him for his birthday! Lemon cake with strawberry icing. They look delicious! I haven’t tried one yet though, I want to wait until Brad can get one first. He turned 24 on the 24th this year!
I went to a work related lunch with Brad and his coworkers and they got a big tasty Halloween cake! It was delicious. They were going to throw out the leftovers so I told them that I’d save them the trouble and take it home. <3
If you noticed the little bat and cat on the cake, those were actually silly but cute little plastic rings that were used as decorations. I’ve been wearing them all day now, after I licked off all the icing, haha.
And.. this is just Dizzy being silly. <3
We think it’s a dung beetle.. either way, was something neat that flew onto my back porch while I was working so I thought I’d take some glamour shots of his shiny shell.
So yesterday I ran out of bread and couldn’t find the kind that I wanted at the store. There was some nice bakery bread that I had had last week but the store that I got it from was really far, and I was in no mood to go get it. So I decided that I would use this opportunity to make my own!
I got a recipe online and saw that i had all of the ingredients and went at it!
Beating the dough.. it wasn’t long before I realized this was a horrible tool to use once the dough got a lot thicker!
After the dough had risen and then I had to punch it around and roll it down. There was a lot of labour involved!
They look so weird before they expand and rise!
This is the third amount of time they spend rising.. this interval was about an hour underneath a wet towel. The towel couldn’t touch the bread so I had to make a funny arrangement. Brad and I watched Equilibrium during the rising times. Yay for killing time!
Brad hard at work after the movie was over and we wait even more for the dough to rise..
Look at it go! It’s already starting to smell good here 
The tasty finished product!
Okay so this isn’t the most flattering picture of me, but hey. You can’t go wrong with fresh bread and Nutella!
So all in all.. next time.. I STRONGLY recommend that you read through the entire recipe and directions FIRST. I ended up spending 5 hours making this bread (mostly rising time) and was up until midnight cleaning up after myself! So yeah. Next time, bread is definitely an all day endeavour!
I saw this on my walk this morning and thought it was just too cute NOT to take a picture of. The poor tree is using all of its strength to grow out those two little oranges, and it’s practically weighing the entire thing down! Too cute.
A new hanging plant! I liked the colours of the flowers on this one. It actually has both red and purple, but the reds don’t seem to be showing up as much.. Oh wells.
And this one reminded me of a full head of hair! So I had to get it. Another hanging one for the other side of the patio.
The lettuce planted into its new home!
I planted a couple of things. More lettuce from seed, arugula, varied greens (mesclun mix) and cilantro. I used duct tape as the labels with sharpie, so they’ll at least be water proof for a little while.
I separated the different rows with yarn because I am most likely to forget what is what, and where the divisions are.. I don’t know how long this will last, but it looks good and makes sense for now at least!
And that’s all for my gardening stuff <3 I hope everything has a chance to grow!
Yay drawing! From this pokemon haha. good times!
I recently received some beautiful lettuce plants and seeds from my mother-in-law. It was a great gift from her, especially after she helped clear out a spot in our back yard that the previous home owners had been using to plant things in. I should be able to get a decent setup going now. Apparently I can grow things here almost all year round, so that’s a bonus! I’ve usually only thought gardening was for spring and summer, but things can grow here forever it seems! I’m excited to get things growing Having fresh lettuce all the time is also going to be super handy. For some reason every time I buy lettuce, it always seems to go bad so quickly. I never use it up fast enough.
Here are some pictures of our back yard before I cleaned it up a bit. By the time I finished cleaning it up though, the sun had gone down so I’ll have to take more pictures later. Not a huge amount of work needed to be done, mostly just tidying up and raking. I swept the patio area and washed off the tables, and drained the pots that had somehow turned into ash trays for visitors who smoked. Weeded the gardenish area and had to push around all of the soil, pull out old roots.. i found a bunch of labels for previous vegetables and plants that the last people had used there, hehe. Apparently they grew squash!
This is our compost pile, hehe. Rocks added by Brad’s mum We just kind of throw things onto it, and let nature do the rest. Sometimes it gets coverings of mulch and whatnot, but normally it’s just the debris from waste from the kitchen like potato and banana peels, apple cores, that kind of thing. And then last but not least, the expectant bed of dirt! It’s encased in a nice box and everything. Should be fun! first things to go in there are the pre-grown lettuce, and then I’ll see about which seeds (probably all) that I’ll plant!
