Monday 30 September 2013

True crime


Seen at my local Target, August 2013.

Been a long time gone...

Has it really been so long since I posted on this blog? Feels like an eternity!

I've been persuaded to have another go at the whole blogging thing, so brace yourselves cos winter is coming.  Just kidding!
  
Here's sweet little Clara tempting fate and climbing  into her favourite place :-)

 Brace for more chickens, more cats, and a lot of random stuff to follow.  I've now got less time, more animals, a Real Job, and a Masters Degree that's leaking out of my ears...  

Friday 1 March 2013

Aussie slang

Budgie smugglers... (men's swimming trunks)

The very talented John Murray illustrates the term PERFECTLY!
 A mouth like the bottom of a cockie's cage... (dry mouth, particularly when hungover)

Dunny documents (toilet paper)

And other such phrases that are causing our current exchange student much confusion and hilarity (particularly the budgies, as her grandmother has pet budgies!).

I love Aussie slang, it's versatile, humorous, clever and irreverent, all the best things about Aussies.  It can also be impenetrable, head-scratchingly obtuse, rude and all kinds of wrong!

What's your favourite piece of Aussie slang??

Wednesday 20 February 2013

Doctor Who?

How do you explain Doctor Who to someone who has never seen it before, or even never heard of it?

This may only make sense if you've seen the 2012 Xmas special!

I've been attempting this with our new German exchange student, and telling her 'it's about an ancient alien who travels through time and space in a blue phone box, and takes people away with him' makes very little sense and makes the Doctor sound a tad serial-killer/stalker-ish.  Also the whole regeneration thing sounds well suss. 

It is kind of hard to sum up this culmination of 50 years of British eccentricity in a few sentences.  It's been part of my life for as long as I can remember, so it takes a real cultural mind-set shift to be able to contemplate how you could exist without it in your life!

There's a young man on youTube called Charlie McDonnell (?) who has done a pretty good summary of why Who rocks, and why we love it despite and because of its faults.  Check him out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf6H4gkErt4

If you're a Whovian, how would YOU describe Who to a newbie?
If you've never seen it, please consider having a go, it's got a lot to offer if you let it try :-)

And yes, I named my cat after a character in it. 

Tuesday 12 February 2013

New kitten - best puppy toy ever

Jenny and Clara - BFFs

To add to the crazy mix at our house, and because of the time share situation with our middle cat, Lister, who has left home and now lives up the road, I finally allowed Darling Daughter to talk me into getting another cat.  So we trotted up to the Animal Welfare League and came home with little Clara, a 16 week old dark tortoiseshell, with a massive purr and beautiful markings.  Jenny is absolutely smitten, Clara is extremely tolerant, and they spend a lot of time chasing each other around the garden and wrestling.

Growing Clara in a basket



In a nerdy moment I decided to name her after Clara Oswin Oswald, the new Dr Who assistant (or companion, as they call them these days), who made a great impression in the 2012 Christmas special.  Geek attack!

Wednesday 30 January 2013

Road Runner (Adelaide style)





This little fella lives in a street in Clearview, near a friend's house *waves at Ms C!*.  He saunters along the pavement, pecking for food, or waddles along the side of the road, blithely ignoring cars, who have to go around him. My thought the first time we saw him was that he was lost and needed rescuing.  But let me tell you, they are remarkably hard to catch, so I couldn't take him home!  Having seen him 3 or 4 times now in the same street, it seems that he lives there as a free ranger.

He (or more likely She) is a guineafowl, a species of ground-dwelling  bird native to Africa.  According to Wikipedia guineafowl have a long history of domestication, mainly involving the Helmeted Guineafowl. The young (called "keets") are very small at birth. The keets are kept in a brooder box inside the house until about six weeks of age, before being moved into a proper coop or enclosure. They eat lice, worms, ants, spiders, weedseeds, and ticks while on range, or they can also eat chicken layer crumbles (one kind of commercial bird feed) while housed in a coop. The cooked flesh of guineafowl resembles chicken in texture, with a flavour somewhere between chicken and turkey.

There is also a band in Sydney called Guineafowl, and you can like them on Facebook here.



Wednesday 23 January 2013

Chicken + cola flavoured potato chips

I find the idea of these strangely appealing!  But only for sale in China, sadly...  Thanks to International Business Times for the story. 

Pepsi-Chicken Chips By Lay's Added To Weird Potato Chip Flavors, Snack Epicureans Delighted

BY IBTimes Staff Reporter | December 13 2012 2:35 PM

Crab, Seaweed, Pickle and Lobster. Bizarre flavored potato chips flavors are nothing new internationally. But Lay's has a brand new bag in town: Pepsi-Chicken flavored chips.