B and Grandad - Australia Day 2009

I don’t know what it is about girls and their dad’s and Grandad’s.

I love my Dad…. I always have, even when I was a horrible teenager of 16 or 17 and apparently “hated everyone” I still loved my Dad.  My dad has always loved me… no matter what.  He tells me he loves me and I him.  My 3 younger sisters have always joked that “Dad loves you best”.  I am sure it is not the case.  Parent’s love all of the kids, sort of the same, sort of differently because each child is a different person.

However, I do think that Dad has a soft spot for me after all I was his first, his “Smooch”.  You would think after 40+ years he would stop introducing me to people as “Smooch” the name he gave me when I was a baby!

B loves her Grandad…. and he loves her too!

Tropical Fish

When I was young my grandpa used to have a large tropical fish tank and used to spend hours watching the fish swmming around.  The tank was natural looking with gravel rocks at the bottom and rock with nooks and crannies and lots of live plants.  He had ‘kissing’gourami, black mollies, platti, lots of guppies.  He was quite successful at breeding the fish as many types were livebearers.

Over the past 20 years I have had goldfish and a tropical fish tank.  When we moved to our house in May last year we’ve have a 1 metre deep, large square goldfish pond that is free standing.  We moved our large fan tail goldfish into it as well as a couple of small gold and black koi.  I bought an eco filter that has kills algae and the fish have thrived and grown huge in this short space of time.

I left my old tropical fish tank back at the other house and B uses it for her tropicals.  Instead I bought a 100 litre square tank and moved my fish over in a container along with my Clown Loaches favourite piece of wood.  I had a pair of clowns, one had grown very large though she was the more gentle of the two and the smaller one much more bossy.  They both slept inside the wood in a large cavity there.  Recently when we were away for 5 days the smaller clown suddenly died.  I returned home to tank chaos… it

Kuli Loach

was just awful.  It was obvious that the clown had been dead for probably 3 or 4 days at least and other fish had died since and others were looking sick.  It took several hours to clean out the tank and remove 3/4 of the water that was necessary to clean it sufficently.  I lost quite a few of my Kuli Loaches.  I had about 6 brown and 6 stripy ones.  They are very funny fish and love hiding inside the wood particuarly in the small hollowed out branches and when food was put into the tank they’d all fight to get out through the same tiny hole.  They spend quite a bit of their time hiding during the day but when food is in the tank spend several hours on the gravel at the bottom getting all the little scraps.  They particularly like the ‘wafer’ food that sinks to the bottom and it is like an asp nest at the bottom with them all twisting around each other.

After I got my tank back to near normal except for the water which kept turning acidic no matter what I did to it I headed off to the tropical fish shop to buy a friend for my depressed remaining clown loach.  She refused to eat and spent all of her time in her hollowed out log sleeping.  Clown loach, by far, are my favourite fish.  They actually have personalities, and, each is very different to each other.  I ended up buying two small clowns to add in with her rather than one larger one.  I figured that two youngesters may pull her out of her depression and get her to liven up.   I also bought twenty new platti of different colours from bright orange, pale yellows, silver whites and black/greens.  I only have two tetra left and one scissor tail.

Office Entrance

After 3 years in our building we decided it was past time that we did an reno on our cluttered and disorganised office.

We bought 12 sections of 6ft high office partition and placed them so that it made a separate reception area, an office nook for B and a completely private office for Cliff so he can finally code in quiet.

When clients now enter our building they get to see this wall of posters to the left and back and on the right the new Reception desk where I sit.  They can no longer see through to our dispatch area of into production.

Production Area

It took 2 days to move all the old office out of the way and then an entire weekend to put everything back and re-organise all of the stock shelves in the production area.

It is so much more organised now.  All the paper stock for the printers are on one section of shelving, convenient to the prints and guillotine.  The work space is now central and convenient to laminators, guillotines, packaing and picking stock.

All the picking stock items (staitionery, stickers etc) all in rows according to language with the pad printing area right down the back on the right in front of the roller door.  To the back left is all art stock and then the packaging shelves.  It just feels so much more spacious and organised and it now makes sense!

Cliff & Mahli, Mandurah Jan 2009

We love spending time at the holiday house at the beach.  We headed down on Tuesday night after work and decided to stay until Sunday morning.  M, S & C came down with us and B & R joined us by Friday.

The weather was extremely hot and hit 42 degrees on Thursday.  The beach was lovely though and there was a nice breeze.  The only problem with a cool breeze when you’re at the beach though is that you under-estimate what a killer the sun is and I got nasty sun/wind burn that left me looking like a startled racoon (with only the area where my sunglasses where deviod of burn!).

Mahli loves coming to the beach.  She doesn’t like swimming out as even the smallest of waves are large to her as she is so small.   When we take her for long walks up the beach she loves to walk on the rocks and chase the waves coming over the top of them.  She will swim in the still pools between the rocks where the waves can’t get her.

On Thursday P & R took out their boat and S, C & E had turns on the sea biscuit in the Estuary.  Cliff and I decided not to go on the boat and stayed on shore in the shade reading with all the gear.

This is a photo of my daughter “B” at the age of 16 back in 2004.  She will be 21 this year!

Beautiful Bee 2004 at 16

GP Allergy

In my younger years I didn’t seem to be allergic to anything.  Not food, nor animals, or plants of any kind… but now, in my (early) 40’s I seem to be picking up an allergy a year.  My recent, and unfortunate, allergy is an allergy to guinea pig fur.  Now I guess this would not affect ‘normal’ people in as much as they wouldn’t care if they were allergic or not to guinea pigs… but I, as a guinea pig owner find this allergy very frustrating, and painful.

I had guinea pigs as a child and into my teens.  My kids had guinea pigs when they were young and I was in my 20’s and in my early thirties I still had guinea pigs as personal pets.  Then I went about 5 years not having any guinea pigs until we bought Larry & Guy four years ago… and that is when the guinea pig allergy started.  At first I’d just get a ‘prickly’ feeling and occasionally a mild redness on the skin where the guinea pig and been laying against.

Then last year I began getting fast and nasty reactions almost immediately on touching a guinea pig.  Nowadays though the allergy has stepped up.  The photo shows my reaction from a split-second touch of GP fur against the skin on the inside of my forearm.  It immediately was extremely itchy, red and welts, similar to blisters showed within 30 seconds.  The nastiest response I get is if the GP brushes against the skin on my face where the resulting rash is just awful and very painful.  The rashes here also last a lot longer too. So….it seems that the allergy is escalating

My “evil” son M said that would “love to rub a guinea pig all over me to see just how bad the rash could get!

Home Grown Tomatoes

There is nothing easier to grow in your backyard than tomatoes.  They seem to grow anywhere you plant them…. whether in a pot or against a fence or amongst your other plants they grow, thrive and produce tomatoes.

I bought two punnets of tomatoes about 6 weeks ago.  A cherry tomatoe variety and a bigger tomatoe for salads.  The weather, up until a week ago was fairly mild and the tomatoes grew at a fast pace and slowly ripened.  This week however the weather is 10 degrees hotter (in the late 30’s c) and the tomatoes have all ripened at the same time.

Tonight when I got home from work I picked a dozen of the cherry tomatoes and a small tomatoe from the larger plant that had early ripened in the hot sun today.  I put them in the fridge for 1/2 hour to cool down then added them to our salad for dinner.  We had grilled chicken and salad with a glass of chardonney.  The tomatoes were delicious!

If only a few of the cherry tomatoes ripen each day I end up eating them as soon as I have picked them.  Even though they are warm, they are delicious!  I have always loved tomatoes and Mum and Dad used to grow them when I was a kid.  I love firm, ripe tomatoes, refridgerated then cut in half with a shake of salt and pepper on them and them and them I just bite into them.  Cliff hates them this way, prefering them thinly sliced in a sandwich or sliced into a salad.  I like thick slices in my sandwich and can just bite right into a tomatoe off the Plant.  Tomatoes would have to be one of my favourite salad vege!

Larry the GP

Larry and Guy are 4yo guinea pigs.  The joined our family when they were just 8 weeks old for Cliff’s 37th Birthday in February 2005.

I had guinea pigs in my childhood.  They are easy to look after as long as the weather does not get too hot as they easily, and tragically die from heatstoke very fast.

When we lived on our larger property we used to let “the boys” out into a ‘day cage’ made of fence palings on our paddocks where they could eat grass all day without the confines of a small cage.  They loved it!

Now however, we live in Leeming and they spend their lives mostly in a wooden cage.  It is not too small though….. it has two compartments, a sleeping quarters and a

Guy the GP

living area that is about 4 times the size of their bedroom. For 3/4 of the year life is easy and good as the weather is reasonable and doesn’t get too hot.  This time of year though when the weather is hitting the high 30’s or even 40’s (celsius) life is not so good.  In fact, it can be uncomfortable and dangerous.  So we freeze several 2 litre plastic bottles of water each night and put these into ‘the boys’ cage in the morning before the heat sets in.  One goes into their bedroom and one in their living area where their food is.

Guinea pigs are pretty clever…. well ours are in any case.  They both stretch themselves out as long as they can and they right up next to the frozen bottle of water to keep cool.  When we get home from work of an evening we let them out on our small patch of grass.  It is buffalo grass… which they are not keep on as it has sharp edges….. but it is grass, and they love grass.  They gorge themselves and jump around in delight at being ‘free’.  Before it gets dark we put them back into their cage, safe from cats and other preditors at night.

Redback Spider

Outside of our house has been over run with Redback Spider lately.  Redbacks are an Aussie icon… but they are totally evil.  They are very poisonous.  Though we have a lot of poisonous animals and insects here in Australia… from spiders, octopus, fish to snakes and even platypus!

Redbacks have a very messy web.  They put out web in a messy, criss-cross, type of setting that leaves and bugs settle on.  They tend to put their nests at floor level and the spider hides in some crevice being or under something dark.  This particular spider is a nasty big female.   She was hiding behind some bags of potting mix but her tell-tale web branched out messily between the bags and a big terracotta plant pot.  It was close to the floor and had leaves and numerous beetles and bugs in the web.  She also had two huge egg sacks hidden away behind the bags - which I squashed straight away.

These nasty redbacks seem to be in plague proportion at certain times of the year…. mostly it seems from spring through to summer… just in time when you are outside doing gardening.  It is always wise to wear gardening cloves this time of year because you never know where redbacks are hiding.  Their bite is painful and requires a cold pack to elliviate the pain while you get to hospital.  I squashed this one after I took the photo!

My Hopman Cup VIP Pass

I was thrilled when Kev at Lamb Print rang to invite Cliff and I to join him in their VIP box at the Hopman cup to see Australia vs Germany on Monday 5th Jan.  We thought it would be interesting to see a live match.  I have only watched Wimbledon and the Hopman on TV before.

The women’s singles match started at 10.30 am with Germany’s Sabine Lisicki against Australia’s Casey Dellacqua.  Casey is a local Perth girl of 23 and an up-and-comer, though getting over a shoulder injury from Sept last year.  She started out fairly strongly winning the first set 6-4. However the second set went to Lisicki 6-2 and they went to a third and final set.  Again Casey started out very strong and was in a winning position of 5-2… but then Lisicki fought back in brilliant fashion.  Her services were blisteringly fast and she clocked up 12 aces over the match compared to Casey’s 0.  Lisicki took the final set to 6-6 and then a tie break.  Again in the tie break Casey had her chance was just out played by a fitter and stronger player on the day.  The fastest service Casey managed was 164kph to Sabine’s just over 200kph… though a huge number of Casey’s first serves missed their mark and the second serve was a slower paced 145 or 150k. Sabine Lisicki won her opening singles match 406, 6-2, 7-5.  I think that this young German woman is going to be a force to be reckoned with in the years to come.  She gave a great winners interview with a beautiful smiling face, gracious comments and a great sense of humour.

Then came the Men’s singles match of Germany’s Nicolas Kiefer and Australia’s Lleyton Hewitt.  Now I am no Lleyton fan…. in fact in my mind, he is one of my least favoured players.  I find him arogant in the way he plays, his shouting “c’mon” (which is his trademark), he argues with the linesman and quibbles with the umpire.  So… of course I was not expecting to enjoy this match.  However, it turned out to be quite a thriller.  Lleyton also had an injury last year and a hip operation so was not completely in form.  He played very well though and had quite a blistering serve.  He also had a great, strong return and for most of his came seemed to be concentrating too much to yell out “C’mon” in the first two sets (thank goodness!).  His top spin shots were pretty spot on too.  Lleyton lost the first set 6-7 on a tie break and won the next two sets 6-3, 6-2 to bring the overall score to one match all.  This made the doubles match much more exciting.

Dellacqua annd Hewitt started on fire winning the first set 6-7.  It was apparent that Lleyton was telling Casey what he wanted to do and where he wanted her to stand for most of the time…..

more to come….