kungfupolarbear is in the US visiting her family, she left yesterday and arrives back in the country two weeks later. It’s weird not having her here, I feel like I’m just biding my time until she’s back.

The whole stereotype of “The wife is away, I’m going to do all of these things that she doesn’t let me do normally!” just doesn’t apply to us at all. We both will happily play video games or putter around on the computer or whatever. I’m having gypocalypse, wobin, and some other friends over on Saturday to play this Warhammer 40,000-themed D&D-type thing, and that wouldn’t matter if kungfupolarbear was here, she’d happily hang out despite having zero interest in actually playing it and would absolutely not begrudge us spending time playing it. Everything is just so totally effortless, it still amazes me. <3

I had yesterday and today off (yesterday because we woke up at 3:30am in order to get to the airport on time D: ), and am working from home the rest of the time she’s gone since Beanie needs looking after and obviously can’t be by himself for 11 hours a day.

In other news we bought an Xbox One, a colleague of mine was selling his as he’s moving to Paris. We’ve got Forza 5 (a racing game) to tide us over until the Diablo III expansion comes out, and man the graphics are nice. This is only a launch title too, so they’ll be even more impressive once developers get a handle on squeezing the most out of the system. One very slick thing is that you can have the Xbox turn the TV and amplifier on when it turns on, and it’ll turn them off when the Xbox turns off too.

Nanny’s funeral was yesterday. It was sad, of course, but mum made a really nice speech with lots of funny stories, and she was holding up really well. Several people commented that mum looked much more relaxed how — I can’t imagine how stressful the last few months had been for her. They had a slideshow of photos from Nanny’s life, and I was happy to see a number of my photos of Nanny from various Christmases being used. The music played as everyone was leaving the ceremony was Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, which everyone cracked up at.

There were quite a few relatives there that I’d never even laid on eyes before, apparently we have a number of them from Queensland. It was nice to catch up with some of my other relatives that we don’t see too often, too. We’ve never really been a family who had those stereotypical massive family gatherings, which I’m quite okay with, heh.

Today we’re off to see the Dogs on Show, well, show. It’s only purebred dogs, which is a bit annoying, but it’s great to wander around and see all the different breeds that you’ve never seen before. There will of course be lots of photos taken.

Five years of awesome marriage

Good lord. FIVE YEARS. Crazy! It’s seriously just so effortless, I think that’s why it’s gone so quickly. kungfupolarbear has commented that it feels like we’re having one big long sleepover, and it’s totally true.

Every marriage should be between people who are best friends, and that’s absolutely the case with us. <3

One year to the day

One year to the day since we moved into our house! It astonishes me that it’s gone by that quickly, it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s been a year.

This is the first place I’ll have lived in for more than a year since moving out of my parents’ place back in 2007. …actually that’s not quite true, now that I think about it. I was in the unit in Dee Why for probably 18 months or so, but that record will soon be eclipsed.

And kungfupolarbear informs me that this will be the first place she’s lived in for more than a year since 2002!

Eeeee!

Productivity!

We had quite the productive weekend this weekend!

This is how the front garden looked back in December.

The two ground-cover plants in the front there ended up being a bit ugly, and the left-most one had all but died. I pulled them out, put a weed mat down (including cutting out slits to go around the daisies’ stems), and finally put to use the enormous bag of mulch we’d bought a number of months ago.

I am exceedingly pleased with my efforts. We also put up a shelf in the office to put all of kungfupolarbear‘s stuffed animals on, as they’d previously been sitting in amongst the books on the bookshelves. It looks rather snazzy.

Being able to just decide to do this stuff is SO GOOD!

My grandma (my mum’s mum, who’s my sole remaining grandparent, known as “Nanny”) has been in and out of hospital a fair bit in recent years. She’s turning 90 at the end of this year and has been having heart troubles for a while, though her mind is still sharp as a tack.

I got a call from mum on Monday night saying that Nanny had decided that she was sick of hospital, wanted to be discharged, wasn’t going to be taking any medicine anymore, and was just going to let nature take its course. She was going to have to take thirteen tablets in one hit, which is astonishing (and horrible, and I can see why she decided to do what she did). I said we could come to visit on Saturday, and mum said that she wasn’t sure Nanny would still be around by then. Naturally there was a whole lot of sadness and tears. Nanny had a doctor’s appointment yesterday, so I took the day off work today and kungfupolarbear and I went over to visit today.

It was actually quite a happy visit, Nanny was in really good spirits, much better than I’ve seen her for a while. Mum was there, my sister had driven up from Nowra, and my uncle was up too. We had a good chat for a couple of hours, filled Nanny in on all Beanie’s latest happenings (she’d been absolutely delighted by him when she came over a month or so ago), and griped about the state of politics, hehe.

Both kungfupolarbear and I feel a lot better about things now, and who knows, now that Nanny’s not on a heap of medicines she may last another number of months. Either way, she was really happy to see the both of us, which was nice.

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Nanna Win

Nanny

Finally

We bought a desk last weekend, and it was delivered on Friday. It’s gone into the back room, along with the chair we bought at the same time, and I FINALLY have a place to both paint my miniatures and to leave them out rather than having to pack them away. I’m unreasonably happy about that, as I’ve not had such a thing since I moved out of mum and dad’s house seven years ago!

I still have a few unfinished Imperial Guard but my current project is the Skaven side of the Warhammer starter game (the other side is the High Elves). They’re all glued together and base-coated, and I’ve just started to do the skin tones on the rank and file troops.

\o/

In other news, kungfupolarbear is going back to the US in July to visit her family, and wanted to get a camera that was good but smaller than our 7D+35mm combo. We’d been wondering what to get ourselves as a 5th wedding anniversary present, and I had the brilliant idea to get a Fuji X100S! It’s small and extremely well regarded, and should be arriving tomorrow! Very excite.

Five years!

Not quite five years marriage yet (that’s next month), but kungfupolarbear and I arrived back in the country five years ago to the day today! So many changes since then (we have our own house and little doggie!), but everything is still so effortless. <3

We’re heading up to Newcastle tomorrow for gypocalypse‘s wedding! Should be nice, we have enough spare time that we’ll do some wandering around and photo-taking too (the rehearsal is tomorrow, but the actual wedding isn’t until Sunday).

In the fitness news, I just tonight did a full five kilometres! That was including the warm-up and cool-down, so it wasn’t actually 5km of running, but still. Definitely glad we bought the treadmill.

Holy crap!

I just jogged for 20 minutes straight! \o/

I’ve been doing the Couch to 5K (the goal at the end is to be able to jog for 5km) on our treadmill, and the day I just completed was just purely “jog for 20 minutes”. And I did it! It got slightly rough towards the end, but nothing terrible.

Pretty happy right now. 🙂