One of our friends recently bought a place and after an enlightening evening talking all things property and investment I took one little step closer to owning my own place – Baby plants.

My ideal place would have to have some sort of outdoor entertainment area whether that be a backyard, a courtyard or a balcony. Whatever it is in the end, I’ll need plants. Sure I could wait till I’ve actually found a place then buy some full grown plants, but why not start now and start small.

These two were about $8 each, but by the time they’re full grown and ready for my place they’d probably be about 5 times the price. I know it’s only one teeny tiny investment (if you could even call it an investment), but I’m super excited to watch them grow (gee my life is exciting!).

After six year of religiously watching Lost I’m still confused. For the final season I wanted to wait till the whole series had screened so I could watch non-stop hour after hour of Lost, which is exactly what I did yesterday (and my head is still buzzing). And with the series finale screening in Australia last week I knew it was only a matter of time before someone would ruin the ending for me, so I had to act fast.

Now that it’s all done and dusted I’m really sad … and still lost, so over the next couple of weeks (or months, or even years) I’m going back to where it all started – Season 1. Can’t wait to start all over again and pick up all the little hints and clues along the way. Oh and if you want some help with clues and story analysis, check out Lostpedia – my new favourite website.

With Nat moving to the UK next month we’re about to start a series of farewell dinners, drinks and BBQs. Oh heck, whatever we do in the next few weeks we’ll just label as “Nat’s Farewell”.

We started at Kuleto’s in Newtown because we all love 2-for-1 happy hour, then slowly made our way down King Street. In the hunt for food we stumbled upon Cafe C. Good service and good food, what more could you ask for (maybe some lamb meatballs aye Lisa?).

Polenta chips with what’s suppose to be aioli but I think it was fetta.

Some spicy potato tapas dish. Can’t remember what it’s called but I was yummy.

Even though most of us ordered our own separate dishes, by the end of the night there were forks and spoons going all over the table. Felt like I was sitting at the family dinner table – love it.

It must be this cold weather that’s been making me crave a good bowl of Har Mee (Prawn noodle soup), but for the past couple of years I haven’t been able to find a decent bowl. The best in Sydney was ‘the dungeon’ (as we called it) on Castleraegh Street, but ever since it closed about 4 years ago I’ve been left stranded (and hungry).

When Vick introduced me to To’s Malaysian Gourmet in North Sydney I knew the drought was over, though my laziness to walk to North Sydney does prevent me from time to time. I really should make the trip to North Sydney more often, their Har Mee is awesome! And when you order take-away you get 2 bowls! Yum yum. Though the only problem with eating at your desk is that you’re left with orange spots all over your screen and keyboard. Oh well, it’s worth it!

No one cooks better than my Grandma, seriously. I don’t care how many awards you’ve won or how many hats you have, my grandma’s cooking tops them all. And if you’ve ever eaten her Asam Laksa, you’d know what I mean. Asam Laksa is slightly different from your usual creamy laksa, it’s more of a fishy sour laksa. Probably doesn’t sound too nice from that description, but trust me – it’s amazing!

She only really cooks Asam Laksa once a year for my cousins birthday, so when she does I try fit as much of it in as physically possible; I even skipped lunch to make sure I could eat more. The only problem this year was she’d also cooked an awesome dessert, one that she hasn’t cooked in nearly 20 years: Bubur Cha Cha (Funny name, great dish). As soon as I saw all the pretty colours on the kitchen counter I knew we were in for a treat.

Different families have their own version of Bubur cha cha and none is more right than the other. My grandma’s version has sago (the coloured balls), yam, sweet potato and banana all cooked together in a pandan coconut soup. Once the sago is cooked the colours are super bright.

I felt like such a big kid watching my grandma cook it. I was literally jumping up and down singing “Bubur cha cha, bubur cha cha”. Here’s the finish product, served nice and hot. Perfect for winter.

My grandma is so sweet, she only cooked it because I saw it on a menu the other day and got excited. I didn’t ask her to cook it, in fact I didn’t even know she was cooking it till I got there. Just as well a prerequisite for going to my grandma’s house is a big appetite. YUM!

Nothing beats grandma’s cooking.

Esta’s recently moved in with some of her mates in Byron and the house is filled with dogs. The house holds 4 people and 4 dogs. As crazy as it is with 4 dogs, it’s a heck of a lot of fun, especially when there’s always such happy faces to greet you.

Just like me, the dogs love the beach. I was able to capture this fleeting moment of stillness before we unleashed the craziness of sand, waves, water, various treasures along the beach and a lot of “Sunshine / Dooby NO! Come here!”

Sunshine the doggy pinup?

Seriously, who can say no to these puppy dog eyes?

It’s been about 3 weeks since I’ve been home and boy have I missed it! I love coming home to a delicious home cooked meal, especially when my G’ma is around. Tonight she cooked a mean chilli crab for dinner. Yum! To go with my meal I went to grab a drink from the bar fridge in my room and found a nice surprise. Looks like the fridge got to the Coke before I did. It’s probably better that way – Coke’s not good for you anyway.

Getting festival tickets is always a stressful event, but with Splendour in the Grass it took it to a whole new level. Tickets were due to come out at 9am so I logged on at about 8.50. Already the server was busy (as expected) but after a few refreshes I managed to log on to the moshtix page and join the queue. I was 13,313 in the queue. After about 20 minutes in the queue I made it up to the 4,000 mark, then disaster strikes.

Fricken bleep bleep!

So I hit ‘back’ and try again. I’m all the way at the end of the queue this time around the 21,000 mark! Thinking I wasn’t going to get tickets I left the page going in the background and again I get the error page – 3 more times! After what felt like the 10th time I finally make it to the booking page. I enter my email address and password, hit send and then… You guess it, disaster strikes again.

I hit ‘back’ and again I’m in the queue, I think I was around the 16,000 mark. After a few more visits to the error page I make it to the booking page, again I enter my email address and password and hit send (with my fingers crossed). Success I make it to the next page, I fill that page out and hit send (without crossing my fingers) and…

W..T..F..!

By this stage I’m about to give up but I thought I’d give it one more shot. This time (after the many error messages) I make it to the page where I enter my credit card details – the final stage. I enter my details and hit process.

You’ve got to be fricken kidding me!

I didn’t know what to do. I had just entered in my credit card details and didn’t want to hit refresh in case my credit card gets charged twice. Stuff it, I hit refresh and cross my fingers. The page sat there for a good 10 minutes just thinking … thinking … thinking, then finally.

SUCCESS! I couldn’t believe my eyes. It actually worked! And gee it only took 1 and a half hours.

Anyway, looks like I’m going to Splendour! Yipee..!

Byron really is my favourite place in the world and one day I will call it home (hopefully one day soon aye?). Whenever we’re in Byron we always to go Belongi. It’s an awesome place for fishing and a great place to take some snaps.

Another place we’ve been to time and time again is the tea tree lake. We didn’t have enough time to take a dip on this trip, but we managed to get a few happy snaps.

I love the reflection in the water. Because the water is so dark it’s almost like a mirror.

More picture from the trip are on my flickr page.

I’ve had a DSLR for a while now but I rarely use it, it’s too big to bring everywhere. But since we took my car on our latest trip to Byron, luggage weight and size wasn’t a problem. I still don’t really know how to use it properly, but hey, practice makes perfect right? And what better place to practice than the most beautiful place in the world: Byron Bay. That’s pretty much all we did in Byron, take photos. I’ll upload some more photo in the next post, but in this post I want to introduce 2 friends.

First up is our little friend squash. He came with us everywhere we went, not by choice though.

Next is Bella, who would also go everywhere you went, but by choice.

I love Bella. She’s so sweet and polite (look at how she crosses her back legs). Aww Bella…