I haven’t been brilliantly well. Please don’t worry, it’s nothing serious – just a couple of non-fatal, age appropriate “women’s issues” – but it has been oh so wearying. I just wanted to let you know why I’m not online much at the moment. I’ve been taking it easy.
As a result, this month’s snippets are quieter and gentler, but they’ve made me happy nonetheless. Let me catch you up on what’s been happening.
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We’ve been celebrating Chinese New Year! A quiet one for us this year, as it’s our first year without Dad. I’ve been making angpow fans and chocolate treats…
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I’ve finally (finally!) tracked down a good place to eat hot stone bibimbap. It’s my favourite Korean dish – all the ingredients are piled over rice in a hot stone bowl which keeps the meal piping hot as it’s eaten…
Bulgolgi in Strathfield is a fabulous restaurant – it’s set up in a small house on a side street, and at 7pm last Wednesday night, it was packed with Koreans, both milling on the lawn outside and occupying every table. Because the house is quite small, each room only has a few tables, giving it a very cosy feel. All the banchan in the photo below came free with our bibimbap….
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On Hallmark Day (our house name for Valentine’s Day), Pete and I popped into Circular Quay to visit the MCA. We wanted to catch the Mikala Dwyer installation before it finished…
As we’re members, we also went to the Grayson Perry exhibition. It was glorious. I’ll be writing a separate post on it when I get time…
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Pete bought me a couple of fossils as a Hallmark Day gift. This mid-sized cleoniceras ammonite has unusual black crystal formations. I can’t stop looking at it. I said to my adorable husband..”I love fossils!” and he replied “lucky me! You could have loved diamonds..”
The second part of my gift was this whole ammonite fossil, still with its pearlescent red sheen, and the imprint of a small orthoceras shell in the side. I like to think it might have been the ammonite’s last meal…
My friend Pete Jones drilled a hole in my baby fossil for me, and I’ve been wearing it on my sterling silver chain as a pendant. I find myself rubbing the flat surface with my thumb – Mum asked me if I was planning to gamble, as it looked like I was rubbing it for luck…
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I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. My new favourite author is Claire North – her novel The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is a fabulous read. It’s well crafted, compelling and beautifully elegant. It’s 80 odd chapters long, but I read the whole thing in two days…
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I haven’t been sleeping very well, but the upside is that I was able to catch the planets before sunrise recently (Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter are all aligned at the moment and visible to the naked eye).
And just as the sun is rising, our little homemade chandelier (which is still up from Christmas) provides a brief Pollyanna light show…
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It’s funny the things that make us happy. Chores have slipped a bit here, and a couple of days ago I saw Small Man put a load of washing into the machine. He didn’t complain that he’d run out of clean clothes, he just did something about it.
When I got up the next morning, I found that Big Boy had taken out his brother’s washing, hung it up for him, then put a load of his own clothes into the machine. We are so blessed to have kids who just quietly pick up the slack – they don’t whinge, nor do they demand thanks or praise for helping out…
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Wishing you all a very happy weekend! ♥
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 