The last few weeks have been ones of crushing lows and soaring highs.
I'll start with the soaring high of welcoming Miss April Rose last Tuesday 27 July at 2am.
Labour started Monday morning, a bit of deep breathing some hollering and 20hrs later she arrived (6 days late even). Everything about her is perfect and utterly adorable.
I'm still in recovery mode although in the scheme of it i've come out of it somewhat unmarred for a natural delivery.
However despite reading about what my post labour body might be like it did not prepare me for the reality of how labour would affect my body and what living with that is like.
It is getting better, slowly and I'm looking forward to taking April out into the world and sharing it with her.
Mr Blue-eyes is totally besotted and loves taking her for morning walks (i love him doing it so i can get an hour or so real sleep).

The crushing low we experienced was the loss of our Bruno. It happened a couple of weeks ago but i was unable to write about it because it was so upsetting. I still can't really go into details even yet but can say that it was a car out the front of our house. We were both there at the time and Mr Blue-eyes lost his best mate in his arms.
We miss him so badly and had really wanted him to meet April...

Thank god we have a coffee machine and grinder at home so we can have a decent coffee every morning.
mr blue-eyes sometimes has a 2nd cup during the day but I'm sticking to my ¹in the morning with ¹sugar cube in a Bodum double walled glass so I can see that crema. I think I let it pour a bit longer than is strictly correct for a proper espresso/short black but it works for me.

We discovered this plump fellow when clearing out some damp old carpet that was down the side of the house. This Striped Marsh Frog has done well to get from Vineyard Creek which is about 300m from our house and across 2 streets. We put it back into some nice shrubbery and they were gone the next day, i'm hoping our resident magpie family didn't help themselves to a froggy meal...

In my new role of domestic house-person i thought the least i could do was tie an apron on and get baking (in between naps and watching Mad Men).
Motivated by fresh rhubarb from our trips to Flemington markets and a never ending stash of mini italian style baking cups it was time for muffins (i scored mine when working at a food magazine but i believe Essential Ingredient has something similar).
I dont really have many cookbooks with baking recipes and tend to turn to the interwebs, finding this Rhubarb Muffin recipe from cuisine.com.au the best fit for what i had.
I don't know how you'd get 15 muffins out of this, i got a dozen and they were a nice size. I guess 15 would be rather tiny.
The cinnamon sugar worked a treat and i think i will do something similar on all muffin like things i bake in the future.
I also tossed the chopped rhubarb in a bit of caster sugar before mixing it in as it was kind of sticking together.
Apologies for the pic not being of the usual food-blog standard, my photographer was at work and i revert to lo-tech iPhone snaps when he isn't about to wield the Canon 4D.

Every month or so Mr Blue-eyes gets the urge to bust out the yeast and whip up a batch of pizzas for dinner.

A nice puffy dough from the right flour with yeast for the right amount of time to rise.

Aint it cute, all the toppings prepped in little bowls just like on the telly. The bowl on the far right is one of our home made sausages cooked and unskinned.

All topped ready for the oven.

And now ready for slicing, although tempting to tuck straight in one has to wait for the molten tomato bits to cool slightly so you don't burn the roof of the mouth and leave that flappy bit of skin.

One of the projects on the list for the new house will be the construction of a proper woodfired pizza oven, but there are just a few things ahead of it on the list. Like putting doors back on the bedrooms after the floors were sanded.

• We went to melb to visit mr blue-eyes sis and family. Hung out at Hosier Lane, still couldn't manage to get into Movida though. Managed to time trip with torrential rain. Did Queen Vic Markets until morning sickness overwhelmed me.
  
  

• I've spent the last 6mths contracting to a big telco doing internal comms. Good hours, good money and very relaxed culture (compared to smaller agencies.

• Amongst other books i have read Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (i say a cross between Love in the time of Cholera and Harp in the South). I've also thrown myself into Neil Gaiman and am working my way through his work. I'm going to need to join the library at the rate i'm reading between the cost and the space i can't keep up.

on the hunt for Halloween costumes, you can just see his blue eyes peaking through...

Macau is a curious place, once a Portuguese colony it was handed back to China like Hong Kong in the late 90's.
Now it may as well be a colony of Las Vegas with 28 casinos that make it the highest-volume gambling centre in the world.
We went there to escape Hong Kong and to live it up 5star style with a cheap deal at the Sofitel.
Not being gamblers we only ventured into 2 casinos. One being the obligatory one in our hotel, a very dull affair with none of the hilarity of Star City, Sydney.
The other we stumbled into was the MGM Grand, the most exciting part of the complex for me was the Dale Chihuly Gallery. Dale Chihuly is a renowned glass artist that i first saw at the Sydney Bienannle about 9yrs ago where he had installed giant luminous onions around the botanic gardens.

I've been quite enamoured with his luscious bold glass pieces that are often on a huge scale filling atriums with thousands of glass tendrils.

There was a gallery shop that could sell you a piece to take home for a tens of thousands of dollars, shipping included.

I was content to gasp at the collection they had in a quite hall at the casino.

I've been noticing these pieces popping up around here, round, red, lines. All different, no tag so i don't know who it might be...
I find them pleasing and hope they don't get painted over.
Corner of Shepherd and Wilson St....