The benchtops were installed today, and the sink and cooktop put into place, though neither were hooked up.
You guys, it’s starting to look like we have a real kitchen now!
The cooktop was about the same size as our previous one, perhaps slightly narrower due to not needing the control knobs on the side, but it looks hilariously smaller since the benches are so much larger.
The kitchen people were finished with the cabinetry today so we’re back at home!
And OH MY GOD, they have done an unbelievably good job. The kitchen looks amazing and they haven’t even put the benchtops on yet, nor done any of the tiling for the splashback (the blue and purple stripes in the picture are tape that they haven’t taken off yet).
It really shows up how shitty the old kitchen was (compare how this unfinished kitchen looks to the old one in my last post), and how utterly wasteful with space it was. There’s a bit less floor space than the old one, but so much more storage!
We’re getting a new kitchen, and today the tradies came around to rip the old one out. Naturally we had to take some before and after photos (well, I suppose more “during” since the “after” will be the finished new kitchen).
The original kitchen seems to have been done as cheaply as possible. Nothing quite fit properly and there were several places where there was just a piece of particle board to fill a gap between a cupboard and the wall. The oven is new because the glass door on the old one (a Bunnings “Homebrand”-equivalent that was here when we bought the place) exploded all over the floor and Kristina last year. The fridge is also staying because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. I bought it over eight years ago and it’s never given us the slightest bit of trouble.
And then there’s now the total lack of kitchen! The space actually feels smaller without the kitchen in it.
Everything except the benchtops are being put in next week, as the they have to wait on the carpentry to be done so they can be properly measured and ordered.
On a lark I did a Google search for “virtualwolf”, and once I got past the first handful of pages (links to main things like my Twitter, Flickr, etc.) I was fascinated to discover just how many of my photos were being used in news articles and the like. I’ve always obsessively tagged my photos so they’re pretty easy to search, but a couple of years ago I went and changed the licensing on most of them to the Creative Commons “ShareAlike” license. The thought process was mostly, I’m never going to earn any money from my photography and have no desire to anyway, so why not! Flickr has the ability to search for images with specific licenses, so I suspect that contributed a lot as well.
There’s quite the range of subjects—
It’s pretty gratifying, really.
We went to a doggy training class today, on the suggestion of the dog trainer we had over a couple of times. She thought that he would do fine whereas we thought he’d just melt down as soon as he saw the other dogs and we’d immediately have to leave.
We’ve never been happier to be wrong! He was initially extremely barky when the first dog arrived but as soon as he got a good butt-sniff in he settled right down. It was quite incredible! I took a few happy-snaps on my iPhone, of course. At the end the next class arrived, which was a puppy class, and Beanie was happily running around and snuffling them as well.
The actual “training” part didn’t go quite so well, mostly because he was more interested in running around with the other dogs than paying attention to us, but still!
We had some friends over for a barbecue and some games last night and invented something awesome*.
We’d recently bought our own set of Pictionary so were playing that with slightly modified rules whereby one person would be drawing and everyone else was guessing what it was (instead of playing in teams, mostly because we initially didn’t have a useful number of people for teams). Someone mentioned Cards Against Humanity, and Kristina and Millsy both simultaneously had the idea of PICTIONARY AGAINST HUMANITY. Instead of playing a black question card as in Cards Against Humanity and everyone putting down the white cards for answers, we’d have our own individual pile of white cards and would choose one and have to draw it and everyone else guessed the card we were drawing.
It’s seriously amazing. Our rules are as follows:
Same as in CaH, the “end of the game” is whenever you want it to be. The best tip is to make sure everyone has played enough CaH that they’re quite familiar with all the white cards. We have the base game plus the first through sixth expansions but the fifth and sixth ones were relatively recent additions and so there were a number of cards we’d either not seen before or hadn’t seen enough to remember. Those ones were just put straight into the discard pile.
It’s all the hilarity of Cards Against Humanity but with the added bonus of making really shitty stick figure drawings. Give it a try!
* Ok fine, I’m sure someone has thought of this before, but whatevs.
The subject has come up on a few occasions recently of how long people have been married for (three years, two years, two months!), and my mind is blown anew each time when I point out that as of today we’ve been married for seven years!
I picture seven years in my head and I think, “Yeah, that’s a pretty good length of time”, but then I realise that’s how long we’ve been married and it just does not even remotely feel like it’s been that long. It’s witchcraft! Before we got married we always used to joke that we had time-warpy powers because we’d be doing something and a bunch of time would pass and it wouldn’t feel like it’d been several hours. The same powers have clearly continued into marriage!
<3
Kristina and I went up to the Hunter Valley for a long weekend last weekend. We stayed at a place called Hunter Hideaway Farm, and it was mostly nice but… a bit odd.
We arrived at about 2pm on Saturday, and there’s a long dirt road leading to the house that winds through fairly dense trees and bush. The lady that runs the place with her husband does ceramic sculptures and had put some of them on the trees and along the side of the dirt road as you start to get closer to the house. I understand the effect she was going for but it ended up just coming off as really creepy… a distinct “Someone who is insane and is going to kill you lives here” sort of vibe. It was even worse coming home after dinner when it was pitch black.
After that weirdness, we had just gotten inside when we heard a dog barking. We looked out the front door and there was a fairly sizeable dog barking loudly and in a very unfriendly manner at us. The husband rushed up and grabbed a hold of the dog’s collar, saying that the dog isn’t friendly and they weren’t expecting us yet (despite check-in being at 2, and why on earth would you have an unfriendly dog on a place that constantly has new people in it?!). After that he hauled the dog off into their house, but all of this was a slightly off-putting start to the vacation. The place had a kitchen in it, but it also had a sign saying that you needed to wash and clean and put away everything or there’d be a charge. I can understand not wanting people to leave the place as a complete mess but the sign was worded very passive-aggressively and really rubbed both of us the wrong way.
The view from the second story was pretty nice though.
The farm itself is an actual working farm, they breed Angus cows and have some horses and a couple of ponies as well. One of the horses was very derpy, which was great, but the ponies were completely uninterested in people and apparently were also prone to biting.
Neither of us drink wine, so we were mostly interested in the food of the area, but the first night’s dinner was underwhelming. It was at the Royal Oak Hotel and was recommended by the farm stay people but mine just wasn’t hugely flavourful and none of the flavours that were in Kristina’s dinner went together. The sheer distance that everything was from everything else was a bit annoying as well, not that that was entirely unexpected.
Saturday night’s weather was totally clear and a new moon as well, so the view of the stars was incredible; standing outside looking up at the Milky Way is always humbling.
The second day was spent doing some more wandering of the property in the morning (during which time that angry dog was out again and came running at us, but we just stood still and the wife came out and apologised and called him back, saying that he’s normally tied up—so maybe keep him tied up then), going out and buying lots of really nice cheese and chocolates, then relaxing and reading books in the afternoon. There was another, much friendlier, dog there that seems to have been a neighbour’s dog, and she was wandering around with us but mostly just running everywhere at full speed. There’s also an extremely picturesque lake that the cows enjoying sitting in and drinking from.
Sunset brought some really nice light and some great photos. The switch out of daylight savings was perfectly timed because we could admire the sunset and then go out to dinner, as opposed to all the gloriousness occurring while we were out.
Sunday night’s dinner was amazing. We went to an Italian restaurant called Lillino’s, and it was one of those meals where just everything was perfect and it needed absolutely nothing—no extra salt, no extra parmesan, nothing. If you’re in the Hunter Valley you really need to go eat there.
It was definitely nice to get away from everything and spend some time relaxing and taking photos, but overall we’re not going to bother going back to the Hunter Valley, it’s not really our thing (and the farm stay was weird).
Well, Beanie is certainly snuggly today. Some might say somewhat too snuggly. It’s slightly hard to computer like this.
We put up new curtains—and a new curtain rod—on the door leading out to the patio today, and it looks so much more cozy in here now (previously the window had on it the same horrible blue/grey straight-out-of-an-office vertical blinds that are still on the front window).
Kristina commented that it’s the first place she’s lived in that feels like an adult house, and it’s true… when renting you’re really just temporarily occupying someone else’s place for a period of time, whereas now we’re actually able to put our own mark on things and do what we want and it’s pretty great.