Warroora photos

Taken from the verandah at the front of our house for the weekend



 The inside of the beautiful house - from the lounge room looking out to the verandah

 On the verandah stringing up halloween decorations

 Driving south from 14 mile camp, headed towards pelican point.

 Amazing blue ocean and white sandy beaches, this is at Sandy Point

Birthday dinner - cooking with wine!

 Greek salad to go with skewers

Don't you wish you were here?

Time flies.....

Ok Ok Ok its been a month.
But let me state my defense! The last post was the 3rd of October I think...on the 5th Justin's grandmother on his mother's side passed away.  She has been pretty sick for a year now so it wasn't really out of the blue but it is still shocking.  She was already in Perth in hospital, she has two children - Justin's mum who lives over on the east coast of Australia and Justin's uncle who lives in Carnarvon.  So we made a mad dash down to Perth, Wednesday after work we drove 5 hours to Geraldton, stayed with friends then drove the rest of the way to Perth on Thursday getting there at lunchtime.  The funeral was Thursday afternoon and then we drove the 9 hours back to Carnarvon with Justin's mum on Friday.  Somehow in between all this we managed to clear a space in our spare room so we could have his mum stay with us for a week.

This photo was taken back in 2007 but it was a great day! We met up in Sydney after coming back from the US.
It was really good having Heather stay with us, we ate lots of delicious things and drank lots of wine! I wish she could come more often.... Yes I know you are reading this! Come back!!
While Justin's mum was here it was his 28th birthday.  It was really nice for him to have his mum around for the celebrations.  We had my mom come over for birthday dinner and presents.  Birthday dinner was Pioneer Woman's steak with blue cheese sauce and desert was Nigella Lawson's gingerbread with fresh ginger.  DELICIOUS.
Heather went back to Queensland a few days later and then it was onto Mom's 60th!!!
http://www.warroora.com.au/images/waroora_map.pdf
A great time was had by all.  Between the gin and tonics, halloween decorations, beer, cheeses, beaches, sheep, skewers, roos, fourwheel driving, sharks, wine, cooked breakfasts, presents, turtles, champagne and orange juice, olives, mussels, beer, swimming, fishing, beer, bbqs, falling asleep listening to the ocean and beer there was a bloody good time had by all.
In between all this happening I will admit that I MAY have forgotten the password to this blog and had what we Australian's call a 'dummy spit' trying to navigate through the not-so-helpful help pages to figure out how to reset the damn thing.

A Beach Day

Even though there is plenty of house work to do.  Even though we need to do some serious work in the garden at our other house.  Even though it's blowing a gale outside.  I can always be convinced to change my plans and go to the beach! Justin - not so much... but there were friends in town to see and we had a fridge full of beer and they had bait so fishing it was!

Driving along the beach to get to the best spot to catch whiting. Actually last time we were here we timed it perfectly with the incoming tide and caught about thirty whiting.  We gave them to a friend's mum who is Vietnamese and they dry them with lots of lemongrass and spices and then freeze them.  Then you put them on a barbeque grill and toast them up and eat them like chips, they are a really good snack!

We drove along the beach under the jetty to get there... Its always a little bit scary because driving in sand you have to keep your speed up so you don't get bogged but in order to drive under the jetty you have to thread the car through those pylons carefully to come out the other side!  The jetty is one mile long (hence the name One Mile Jetty!!) and there is a little touristy train that runs out to the end and back... I have walked to the end but never taken the train. 

Stopped on the beach, "Where are you guys?" they had gone to a different part of the coast about ten minutes drive away so off we went!

This is grampa Grant and the beautiful four month old Ainsley May - enjoying her beach day too!
We didn't end up catching as much whiting this time, only about six, and a few other awful fish like flathead and yellow tail that got thrown straight back (awful to eat!!). Next time we catch a whole lot of whiting I want to try to make rollmops again... I tried a few years ago but must have added too much sugar or the recipe just didn't taste like I expected it too! Anyone have a recipe I can borrow?

Saturday... and Why I Am Not A Great Blogger

So I have decided that I am probably a poor candidate to have a blog.... Although I have plenty of experiences, recipes, occasions etc that are worthy of being blogged about I am terrible at photographing them all. There it is, it's all out in the open now.  I can't take a photo of that great meal I have just cooked - not because I am a bad photographer but because I am greedy and want to eat it.  I can't capture that great laugh and smile that someone had on their face because I am too busy enjoying the joke to whip out the camera.  And I can't show you how great that sunset was because I was too busy drinking my beer and watching it for real. So now that I have put this out in the public forum we will have to agree that on this blog there is likely to be much more typing than pictures!
This morning mom came over and we had homemade breakfast sausage on the barbeque with fried eggs, toast, smokey beans and then a fruit platter for brunch.  It was all very good! Australia does not make a breakfast sausage that tastes anything like American breakfast sausage so it has to be DIY.  I have found a good recipe (and interesting blog to read) here:http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2008/02/breakfast-sausage-to-begin-day.html
After that then it became a regular Saturday: reloading, cleaning guns, putting brass from last week in the tumbler, picking up all the spent primers off the floor, missing one and stepping on it and swearing..... fairly typical Saturday stuff. We usually have about 100 rounds each to use every Saturday for a club competition and can get it done in about 45 minutes.

Yes this is the same table in the foreground that minutes previously was a breakfast table.  We have a small but versatile house!

Business trip to Perth

Half of my job is being a retail pharmacist at the chemist in town, the other chunk of my work life is taken up with being a hospital pharmacist.  Twice a year all of us Regional Hospital Pharmacists are flown to Perth for a meeting to discuss issues in pharmacy, policies, etc.  There are only seven of us there (WA is divided into 7 different regions) and being a smaller meeting it seems that lots can be achieved in one day! I had to chair a few of the discussion topics along with the Regional Pharmacist from Port Hedland (a predominantly mining town about 800km North of us)
Travelling on my own has never really bothered me...a good book and an iPod and I can be amused for hours. The flight from Carnarvon to Perth takes about two hours and from the Perth airport I got  taxi to my hotel in the Perth CBD.  I got in pretty late on the first night but room service and the mini-bar make it bearable!



The meeting is normally held on a Friday but this time the head offices didn't have a meeting room free for use so the meeting was held on a Wednesday.  The next flight back to Carnarvon however wasn't departing until 4pm on Thursday so I had a whole 24 hours in Perth to wile away!



The western streets of the CBD have undergone a face lift since I used to work in the area.  King St now has Gucci, Louis Vutton and a Tiffany & Co.  I am not a big fan of Tiffany's jewelery but it is a nice spot for a bit of window shopping!

Having not lived or worked in Perth now for almost ten years I can begin to enjoy it! I used to work in the mall parallel to this one in a pharmacy as an assistant.  It wasn't the best place for job satisfaction and I had to commute a 2 hour round trip each day and understandably the 'fun' of going to the city to shop was lost.  Coming back now for a quick trip a couple of times a year I really like to wander around the malls (looking like a real tourist I'm sure).  Both big department stores already had their Christmas decorations out... the older I get the more I like Christmas, the cooking required in the lead up, the decorating, the small traditions that are starting to become familiar... but more about that in a few months!

Flying out of Perth in daylight it really makes you realise what they mean by the words urban sprawl.  While the city is a pitiful collection of a dozen or so tall buildings when viewed from the air; the back to back quarter acre (and less!) blocks with homes are smashed  together for miles.  I understand that the 'suburbs' of Perth spread about 50km either direction.  Flying away always makes me happy to be getting out of there and back out into the country

Ahhh now THAT'S more like it! And that's all there is of Carnarvon.  And it suits me fine.

Home. <3

comfort food

Soooooooooo yesterday. The house is feral and needs a good clean.  The thing I'm waiting for in the post hasn't come.  Staff are sick and so we were already totaly short staffed.  And there are still so many tourists in town.  So the shop is really busy AND you have to navigate around lost tourists going slow/the wrong way on the drive to work.  Then at work before I can put my handbag down there are rapid fire questions from a couple of different doctors about uncommon medications involving complicated calculations you hope you aren't going to have to do once you are out of university. And I have not one but two students that I am teaching looking up expectantly at me....
Big deep breaths..... YOU CAN DO IT!!! (Insert picture of Jessie with superwoman cape flapping in the breeze)
So my point is - coming home from work and cooking THIS fixes everything.  I don't know how food can do that but it does.

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2008/04/simple-hearty-chicken-rice-soup-itll-keep-ya-honest/

Probably a little too much butter is used in this to classify it into the healthy dinner section (but then who ever thought the words 'healthy' and 'comfort food' could ever both be used to describe the same meal....) Certainly simple, inexpensive, soothing and falls into my favourite category - 'Bowl food'.

Oh and I didn't have yellow food colouring.... I had pink and blue but I just didn't think that would be right.

roadtrip

Mom and I drove to Geraldton last weekend.  We had such a good time! It is a four and a half hour drive down an isolated highway.  We have both done the drive so many times before but this was the FIRST TIME I have ever seen an echidna in the wild! I was so excited - I was driving and I shouted and pulled the car over and spun around to whiz back and go look at it.... unfortunately the poor guy had been made into road kill a few hours ago... But I'm still claiming that as 'seeing an echidna in the wild'. Fair enough right? Another first for that trip was a sighting of a red tailed black cockatoo - they are as big as a crow but fly with the movements of an eagle and have an intense red tail. Very cool.  On that drive it is always a given that you will see goats, pink & grey galahs, cows, roos (alive or roadkill), sometimes foxes and wild cats (usually road kill) and hopefully they stay on the side of the road... but more often than not, especially the cows decide to wander across just as you are driving by... Its best to watch their heads - if the head is down and eating grass then you are probably alright.... if the head is up and looking around your best bet is to drop your speed by half and keep a watchful eye on them..... Hitting a roo is not so bad, their main weight is at the base so they don't normally flick up and do much damage to the car, but cows are much more bulky and dangerous!
The rest of the weekend was full of shopping, eating, talking and beer drinking - all good things.

And of course we had to dress up a little to take ourselves out to dinner - beautiful salmon the first night and a lovely Italian meal on the last night. A really nice weekend away!