Many pets

It rained all week! Mr Pickle and I did not leave the house between Monday and Thursday evening this week. It has rained all day, every day. The water butt is overflowing so we don't need any more rain thank you very much. I have had a stinky cold all week too and Mr Pickle has been my little companion in quarantine.

On Thursday evening we went to the shopping centre because it was late night shopping and two of the big stores started their toy sales (for Christmas). Crazy but true.

Mr Pickle wants a pet and I had seen, in the toy catalogue, that one of the shops was selling an ant farm. I asked him how would he like lots of tiny six legged pets and he said 'very well' which is Pickle speak for yes please.

We purchased the ant farm and excitedly checked the weather forecast for the next day. Hooray, a big sun for Brisbane.

That evening I built the farm. It took me longer than I thought it would but it is a structure fit for a queen (ant obviously).

The next morning we built a pooter from a measuring cup, a big blob of play dough and some plastic pipe.

Mr Pickle tested the pooter in the house with some random bits on the floor and we were very pleased with its success. Armed with this, a trowel and pots we headed out into the park to find an ant nest to raid.

The instructions said we needed leaves to make leaf doors and Mr Pickle ran off to find some while I jumped up and down in the vicinity of a known ant haunt.

We then got down to the business of sucking up the new pets. Everything was going swimmingly, little black ants were flying up the pooter pipe, until one rather large green ant ran into the suck zone! Disaster! The big ant started attacking the little ants inside the collecting cup. Noooooo, think of the children, oh the humanity! We quickly opened it up and saved the pets from a painful and slow demise. We put the lid back on and decided that we had enough for our little farm.

We collected two colours of earth from the areas around the nest to make the ants feel at home and then made our way back to our home.

The next job was to fill the farm with the earth for the ants to live in. We popped the ants in the fridge to make them sleepy (to make transfer into their new home easier) and got down to work.

We layered up the earth and then flipped it over to add the ants. 'Where are the ants' I said to Mr Pickle. At that point I realised that I had left them in the fridge a bit longer than I possibly should have. They were all very still when we took them out of the fridge!

We tipped them into the hole in the front of the farm and as we sealed it up they started to move. Thankfully we hadn't bumped them off before we started.

We fed them and watched the spectacle for about three hours. In this time Mr Pickle named his ants:
Herbert Manager
Cottontail
Blackie 31
Blackie 32
Fally Number 1
Jumpy Number 2
Eaty Number 100
Sea world
Smelly
Stinky
1001

Two days later, the ants have settled in and are tunnelling around. We will keep the world posted on their progress.

The start of a very wet week

It was a bad start to the first week of Mr Pickle's two week holiday away from kindy.

It started raining on the Sunday afternoon and on Monday morning it was still raining. As we had no plans we decided to make pancakes.

We quite often make letter shaped pancakes. Today when asked what shaped pancakes I should make, the answer was dinosaurs! Not one to be deterred by a challenge, I think my T Rex pancakes were pretty good.

Mr Pickle was going stir crazy in the house by the afternoon and was desperate to blow some bubbles. He braved the rain in his waterproof monster suit and wellies.

He also did a bit of gardening while he was out there by putting the plants in the rain. He is very proud of his tomato plant.

Drain Fly Maggots......ewwwwwww

I came into the house after dropping Mr Pickle at kindy and went straight into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I didn't even take my boots off because I clean the floors, so I am allowed (when there is no one else to see). I scrubbed them yesterday and they are very shiny.

I got to the corner by the kettle and something went crunch under my foot, I stepped backwards and there was more crunching. Strange, I thought, we didn't drop any crumbs over here this morning.

I looked down and saw a squirm of maggots coming out of the utility room drain, into the kitchen and up the side of the bin! What!?!?!?

Since when do maggots come from somewhere else and migrate to a bin? I have googled this gross phenomenon and have learned that these are drain fly maggots. The fly lays the eggs in the drain slime and then they look for a better food source.

Nasty! Now also very much washed away into the gravel outside.

You learn something new everyday and I will be regularly putting tea tree down the drain to prevent future grossness!

He touched the Butt

That's for all you Nemo fans out there. Alternatively I was going to call this one My butt overfloweth.

Since we moved into our new house we have not had much success with our downpipes and water butt. This issue has featured heavily in my daily life over the last three months and you might have seen any one of our household, including Mr Pickle, inspecting the butt and various bits of water catching paraphernalia, including complicated tied up plastic shopping bag structures, buckets, tupperware, the list goes on.

I am sure that most of you are wondering why that would be such a big part of my existence. Quick answer, you can't flush the toilet without water butt water!

Our landlords changed the pipe work arrangement trying to get the water tank to fill, to no avail, and I carried on catching water in a paddling pool, etc (see previous list) and tipping it into the massive water tank by hand.

I had reached the point of obsession on the day that I found myself outside in the pouring rain emptying the full paddling pool into the tank so that it could fill again. While doing this, Mr Pickle was happily jumping up and down in the rapidly emptying paddling pool fully clothed!

I have watched the flow of water down the guttering (we have open topped drain pipes to prevent forest fires), during rain storms, over the last few months and decided that we needed to plug up one particular downpipe to encourage a greater flow to the tank filler. This post my have started to sound a bit dull but it is very important that everyone out there has the full picture of quite how obsessed about collecting rain I have become.

Anyway, having plugged the appropriate hole, you can imagine how excited I was to see a veritable flood of water gushing out of the gutter and into the downpipe. You would be forgiven for thinking the story ends there. No! But now I have sucked Jeremy into the obsession.

There was no water coming out of the pipe!

This piece of pipe, that had been resited and rearranged, was still the problem! We ran some tests involving Jeremy standing precariously on three stacked up dining chairs (we have no ladder here), me standing on just one under the pipe and a litre of water so we could measure output. Mum and dad, aren't you glad my scientific education hasn't been wasted!

As it turned out, all we really had to do was take the filter off the end of the pipe and shake out the dirt that had collected in it. On the day of testing it was gloriously sunny, as was the next two weeks. Never have I wanted to see rain more.

The rain arrived yesterday. Mr Pickle and I ran outside in great excitement and did a little victory dance on the patio because we could hear the water gushing into the butt. Mr Pickle had to go and touch the butt to feel the level of the water (it is opaque and you cannot see in). Such is the logic of a four year old.

We rang Jeremy, who is in the outback again, to give the glad tidings and I think he was more excited about tapping the butt to guess the level of water when he gets back than he is about seeing us!

We have had torrential rain for the last 36 hours and the water tank is now full and overflowing. Luckily, there is a fully working overflow system that hasn't seen a drop of water for a very long time.

Jeremy, you will not need to touch the butt when you get back! I have hung up my water obsession hat and have moved back to an old obsession of making friends out of socks.

I think I need to get out more. That could also have been a potential name for this post.

Ha ya

Mr Pickle and I went along to a karate club yesterday and joined in.

All was going swimmingly, Mr Pickle was being attentive and focused, he was staying put in his row and was following instructions. I was amazed!

Sensei then said the words 'and with ki ai on the reverse punch. Oh dear! One very sad and soggy small boy attached himself to my leg and got himself elbowed in the head for his trouble!

He didn't run away though, he got back into his row and carried on. Each time there was shouting he covered his ears and cried but he kept kicking air like his life depended on it.

We are going back again tomorrow so we shall see how he fares. I have told him that we have to go for two weeks before he can have his own gi, which for him is what it is all about!

I will be wearing my gi tomorrow and am wondering what the others will think of the embroidery on the back.

Mr Pickle goes to school

Mr Pickle has started Kindy in Brisbane and he loves it!

After months of waiting and with great excitement he joined 22 small people for their first day of school.

Possum patrol

We, like most in Brisbane, have a family of possums living around the house. At night they rampage across the tin roof and they sound like a herd of elephants.

In the evenings, Mr Pickle and I (or daddy) go on possum patrol down the road. It is very exciting for a three year old and it gives him a bit of exercise before bed. The last few patrols have not been very successful so we have taken matters into our own hands.

Mr Pickle likes to eat apples and pears and we have started chopping the cores into pieces and saving them in one if my many Tupperware tubs in the fridge. Tonight we placed the fruit leftovers out on the fence and we had a little visitor for our viewing pleasure.

I have pics to share but I can't work out how to suck them off the iPad onto the blog.

The female of the species is more deadly than the male......

I sincerely hope that mum doesn't see this before she boards the plane.

Today Mr Pickle and I decided to play with a box of toys that had previously been put away in the storage area under the house. We pulled the box from under the chair in the lounge and onto the rug. Mr pickle was very excited as he pulled the lid off and started to rummage around.

We both saw the furry body and many eyes looking at us at the same time. At the bottom of the box was the biggest and hairiest spider I have ever been in the same room as. Mr Pickle looked at me expectantly and then reacted to the look of horror on my face. He grabbed his plastic bubble sword from the floor, pushed it into my hands and whilst running away shouted "hit it mummy, with my sword, my sword, hit it". So I did and it continued to stare at me.

I ran into the kitchen for the insect spray and and squirted it at point blank range. This time I swear I could hear an evil laugh echo around the toy box. Mr Pickle is now in the middle of the king size bed shouting "is it dead yet". At this point I am shouting to him to get his grabber and he refused to move from his safe haven.

I ran to his bedroom and was thankful that I knew exactly where the grabber was. Luckily the spider was so brazen by now that it felt it could mince about in the toy box and not try and escape somewhere. I caught it in the nippers of the grabber and it was waggling it's legs around madly. I took it out on the deck and whacked it with the barbecue tongs.

The spider's body was about an inch long from head to tail and four inches from toe to toe. I sent a picture if the splatted beastie to Jeremy and the gang in his office identified it as a huntsman and judging from the size, a female. I may have overeacted slightly as it turns out they are mostly just scary big and bites hurt but aren't deadly!

Where Are My Shipping Boxes 3 - The Box Room

Having been very concerned about the fact that the ship carrying our cargo from the UK to Australia (according to the tracking pages on the shipping company's website) was bouncing between Egypt and Italy, I needn't have been worried because they were actually aboard a completely different ship and arrived safely in Brisbane port last week.

We were given a timeslot of between 9 am and 10 am for delivery and I thought I was safe showering at 8.30. Wrong! I got out of the shower to be greeted by Mr Pickle saying "Mummy, your phone was making a lot of noises". The delivery man was early and was trying to get hold of me? Unheard of! I rang the number that had been left on the voicemail and heard a ringtone outside of the house. I looked up and saw a face in the window of the front door. Thankfully, I wasn't in the nip!

So, the boxes were delivered and filled one end of the lounge. A return to box city. You might think that this is why I have named the sequel to the sequel The Box Room. No, duh, duh duh....suspence music....all will be revealed.

These boxes contained (past tense, as I have single handedly emptied them with a little interference from Mr Pickle) our kitchen gadgets, crockery, cutlery, Mr Pickles's toys amongst other treasured items. In our house back in the UK, we had lots of cupboards in our kitchen and utility room. This proved just the right amount of space to hide a multitude of items we seldom use but would be desperate for if you didn't have it, i.e. the egg slicer. We didn't think we had lots of cupboards in the UK until we saw what the average Australian kitchen cupboard quota is. We also have a cupboard/bad boy room (that would be for Jeremy, not Mr Pickle) which is labelled as a Butler room. Hmmm, not sure how much butling you can do in a space that is about 10 cm wider than a shipping box (see where I am leading you in my story) and as long as three. It is actually meant to have the washing machine in there with a wall mounted dryer but the door isn't wide enough to get one through. There are even mounting brackets on the wall for the dryer to hang on.

Jeremy has been in the outback for the last two weeks. It is a dangerous thing to leave me to my own devices with lots of empty cardboard boxes and a space that was just crying out for some makeshift cupboarding. This house has now been improved by the addition of an actual 'box room'. There is one cardboard box cupboard hanging on the wall brackets (that took some measuring for the hanging holes on the back) one below it with a piece of flooring as a a worktop (the bread making station) and on the opposite side of the glory hole there is a tall cupboard (two boxes, stacked one on top of the other) containing Mr Pickle's craft supplies and the Hoover.

It was just like being six again, when I used to make Sindy houses and furniture out of shoe and tissue boxes. I think I may have stumbled on to the next big thing! You heard it here first ladies and gentlemen. Forget Ikea kitchens. PikeaTM kitchens are so the thing of next Tuesday.

Happy Birthday to me

It was my first Australian birthday today. I have decided that you need to take a year off each birthday on this side of the world, not add one on. One of my ancestors did a very similar thing in relation to the Antipodes! If it was good enough for her, it's good enough for me and she got away with it.

Jeremy took over Pickle duty for the morning and left me lounging in my bed awaiting my birthday phonecall from mum and dad. We have no Internet at the moment and you know what that means. No skype, no facebook and no emails. So I didn't get to see them but it was nice to talk.

I am developing twitches and tics. I keep going to look things up on the Internet and getting as far as loading the browser before I remember. I am like a sniffer dog when it comes to wifi hotspots, I can smell them from 20 paces and I am there armed and ready with my iPad at all times! It is the only way to get through the withdrawal symptoms. I am having to write my blogs offline and then upload it when I find a hotspot. I am an Internet Nomad. No fixed Internet abode. 

Anyway, back to my birthday shenanigans. Jeremy made us breakfast on the barbecue and we ate it on the deck. How Australian was that? Even better because it is actually winter here. 

Then we went out into Brisbane CBD. Jeremy was going to buy me something shiny in Tiffany but the shop assistants did not Even acknowledge that we were in the shop so we stomped out in high dudgeon, pretty woman stylee. We stomped all the way around the corner to the Pandora shop where I had to take over the shiny shopping for two reasons. 1) Mr Pickle does not like to shop and he had reach critical mass and 2) Jeremy was taking work phone calls (on my birthday of all days and it was a Saturday). So I chose some locking beads and a peridot (birthstone) charm from Jeremy and a tiny Babooshka charm from Gran.

I was then rushed out of the shop and frogmarched to the other side of the river, my attempts to pop into the library thwarted! All the while Jeremy is taking what I thought were work calls (some were) and I am fuming thinking that this is pants on my birthday.

Little did I know that Jeremy had planned a surprise picnic for me in the Southbank parklands with Heidi, Nigel, Nicky, baby Sophie and Ewa. As we were marching to the playground I noticed a baby on the ground and thought, why is Sophie lying on the grass?All of the grownups had looked away so I wouldn't see them and then they all turned and shouted surprise. it was completely unexpected and a lovely surprise that was very well organized by Jeremy and kept secret by Mr Pickle, who for the previous two days had kept telling me that he and daddy had bought me two birthday cards and a small triangle.

The longer you animals bark, the colder your lunch gets....

Yesterday, Jeremy and I escaped for the evening!

Our friend Heidi kindly offered to babysit Mr Pickle so that we could go and watch The Goonies at the cinema.

We sneaked off at five o'clock and caught the train from behind the house. Having the train station two doors up is very handy. We travelled to Roma Street Station and walked to the cinema from there.

After grabbing a subway sandwich each we got to the cinema about 10 minutes before the film was about to start. We bought tickets and went into Screen 1. We were the only people in there.

Sadly, there was no balcony for Jeremy to climb up to and make fake puking noises from! Three minutes before the film was about to start two more people came in, they were very shocked to see us sat there.

At six o'clock the projectionist walked up the stairs to start the film rolling, the lights dimmed and the film began without trailers or adverts. We were very excited as the giant skull was projected onto the screen. It was at that point that we were expecting the flood of late comers, as is the norm in Indonesia. We weren't disappointed. A stream of four people rushed in, doubling the number of the audience!

We sat back and enjoyed the classic that is The Goonies. The truffle shuffle is a sight to behold on the big screen! Jeremy took some sneaky photos of the classic scenes for posterity and my blog. I will post them up when we have found the camera cable.

Where are my shipping boxes 2, the return of cardboardiness

They're here!

Update: Jeremy has posted pics of the new house on his blog.

Boxes arrived today as promised in a massive container at the arranged time! I was late as the truck I was driving got stuck in reverse gear!! Jeremy thought that I had driven over to the house. My name is not Mater and I am not the world's best backwards driver. I managed to fix it somehow.

Anyway, Mr Pickle and I arrived and we set to work pointing in directions for the boxes to be taken. It got to the 3 seated sofa coming off the van and there was much concern about it's size and the fact that it would not go through the two turns needed to get it inside.

Luckily Jeremy chose that minute to come for a nosey. It took four grown men, one step ladder and a wheelie bin but it came through the front of the porch (one story up). Phew. At one point we thought we were going to have the most comfortable deck furniture in the world!

Mr Pickle is very pleased to have his Thomas Trains back, along with his building site and Lego. The beds are built and the mattresses were supposed to arrive today too. I was very excited and measured the holes for the mattresses to fit into as we weren't 100% sure they would. They will and I dug out the bedding in preparation. At lunch time I rang the bed company to get an idea of delivery time. It was a very sorry person on the other end of the line who discovered that there had been a mix up and there would be no delivery to us today. They will be with us in Thursday instead.

Everything made is through quarantine and customs, even the mankey seed pod and pine cone decoration that actually belonged to the Balikpapan house. Jeremy has already installed my hanging chair and my giant pod seat is under the deck waiting for us to move in and choose the perfect place for it in the garden.

Mr Pickle had a fabulous day reacquainting himself with his toys and Spongebob Squarepants on the telly. He is now tuckered out and we have had to return to the apartment to sleep following a very yummy barbecue, cooked by Jeremy, to say thank you to our helpers who ably assisted me while he was beavering away in work.

I wanted to take pictures of the grand moving in but the camera got covered up in the kitchen and never resurfaced. Will try and take some pics tomorrow when it is dug out of the Tupperware land slide!

Tomorrow Mr Pickle and I are heading down to Ikea. Smaland awaits the invasion.

We are special

Mr Pickle's classic quote of the day:

"I am very special mummy and so are you." I asked, "what about Daddy?" Mr Pickle's reply, "Daddy isn't special, he is all funny and silly with big eyes."

Ha ha.

We are off to the park again this afternoon. There will be scooting and pictures to follow.

That cannot be very comfortable!

Now that I know the shipment is imminent, I have been surfing the Internet for new and interesting felt creations. I found a great website:

www.cutoutandkeep.net

There are some very funny things on there with instructions on how to make them.

As with many websites, this one is supported by advertising and sponsorship. This particular website is sponsored by American Apparel and has the most uncomfortable looking banner that I have ever seen. Just two words - Tank Thong! All the girl needs is the leggings and she could be living in the 80s.

Hurry up felt stash.

We love you Bris-Vegas

So, having taken a hop over to the UK where I spent most of my time surrounded by cardboard tea chests, we are now in Australia!

Mr Pickle and I did manage to spend some quality time with family and friends in between moving boxes between storage units and Mum and Dad's garage. We are missing everyone but our surroundings are definitely making up for the fact that we are so far away.

Mr Pickle and I have been here for two and a half weeks and we have been to the park every day, because we can. We miss the friends we made in Balikpapan but we don't miss the fact that we couldn't take a stroll outside without being eaten alive by mozzies or nearly being knocked over by ankots and motorbikes.

So far we have taken the river cat across to Bulimba to make use of the fabulous playground there, we have been on the Brisbane wheel (a bit like the London Eye but smaller), splashed about in the water features on the South Bank, joined the library, put Mr Pickle's name on a waiting list for a pre prep school and found a Thursday morning playgroup and done some shopping, some more shopping and then a bit more shopping. We have even been to Ikea.

Jeremy found us a fab house and we signed the tenancy agreement while I was still deranged with jet lag. We take over the place on the 19 July but it looks like we won't have any beds on the day. All we need now is our stuff! Hurry up shipments.

Celebrations

So it has been decided that having waited this long to organise a Birthday party for Mr Pickle, we will be having an impromptu pool party on Thursday (Chinese New Year and a Public Holiday).

I am planning the cake. It is going to be a Very Hungry Caterpillar cake, as seen on Facebook when Rachel asked Rudy if she could make her one.

I bought the small round cake tin today and Yuni and I will begin the grand bake off tomorrow afternoon. I am going to be making red fondant icing and two tone green swiss meringe buttercream icing for the cupcakes that will make up the body. It is a great cake for a party as the body is made up of two dozen cupcakes and we won't have to cut the face cake up. The cakes are going to be chocolate cakes, as requested by the birthday boy. Daddy will also be pleased.

Watch this space for pics.

What's black and blue but thankfully not red all over?

The answer is.........me! Bruises but no sunburn.

I joined the cycle group on Thursday up at the Chevron site, located at the top of Balikpapan. As Angela's car climbed up the steep hill with our bikes on the back I was thinking a) we've got to come back down this and I don't know if the breaks work that well and b) OMG - I've got to cycle back up this!

Five new people joined the group (including me) so I was hoping that the ride wouldn't be quite as crazy as advertised. We cycled around the kampungs and trough the city, up and down pretty steep hills and I only had to get off and push near the top of one of the hills where I ran out of momentum. It was perfect cycling weather, overcast and not too hot.

We were on the home stretch, which happened to be quite flat, when my front wheel went down a hidden deep hole. In the seconds before I completely wiped out lots of thoughts went through my head, including:
1) here we go again (this is not the first flight over the handlebars I have made)
2) this is going to hurt, alot
3) try and do a break roll, try and do a break roll, which I tried.

So, I let go of the handlebars and as the ground came up to meet me I put my hands on the floor, brought my shoulder round, tucked my head in and.........stopped, suddenly. What a shame the hole was so deep that my bike was embedded in the road and my right foot was trapped underneath. I was also wearing Angela's long sleeved cycling shirt.

So the upshot of the accident is that I have a skinned elbow from trying to push myself round, and a bruised leg from the crossbar. Not a mark on my face and I have all of my teeth still in my mouth, not in a jar for the tooth fairy. By all accounts, the fall looked quite spectacular from behind.

Apart from the slight mishap, I enjoyed the ride around the parts of Balikpapan that most ex-pats never see and I will be donning the bright pink shirt again next week and hopefully I won't be told off for pedalling to slowly because I don't think we will be going as easy as we did this week. I will also have to take more water as I drank the whole two litres in my camelbak plus my emergency bottle of water before we reached the finish post.

Thank goodness for friends

For reasons that I don't want to dwell on, I have lost my laptop. If you would like to read why I have lost my laptop you can read Jeremy's blog. I would like to put an R rated warning here because Jeremy's language is a bit naughty.

http://northseaadventures.blogspot.com/2011/01/thieving-indo-bastards.html

Thankfully, a friend here in Balikpapan has lent me her spare laptop so that I don't feel completely cut off from the modern world. All I need to do now is work out how to get Skype working so that I can see eveyone across the miles. Thank you very much Fiona!

Also, thank you to the expat community here for all the goodwill and support over the last few days.

On saturday Mr Pickle and I went to the cinema for the first time here, to see Yogi Bear. It was a 3D showing and Mr Pickle wore his glasses for the whole time and only tried to escape once.

We were having a great day on Sunday, we went over to Liesbeth and Jos' house where Liesbeth and I made 6 curries with basmati rice while Jeremy and Jos entertained Mr Pickle with a trip to see helicopters,a walk around the BHC compound and a freindly game of football with some other expats. 

Anyway, I am going on a crazy bike ride tomorrow. There are quite a few new cyclists joining the ride with me tomorrow so I am not so worried about being the only one puffing away at the back of the pack!

In between looking after Mr Pickle and the daddy, cycling and cooking Indian banquets with Liesbeth, I have crocheted a chibi totoro and am in the process of making some play food for Mr Pickle out of felt.

I have also started crocheting a blue Totoro and found a pattern for a very cute cat called Amineko.

So, for now I am making do with 20th century technology to keep in touch with Nana Mac.

Crazy cyclists

Balikpapan has a group of ex-pats who enjoy punishing themselves at least once a week by heading out on their bicycles and propelling themselves up hills on two wheels for about 40 kilometres. I have also found out that most of them pedal going downhill too. Completely nuts.

I will be putting down my crochet hook and sewing needles and will join them on Thursday. I am sure I won't be able to walk for days afterwards. 

Hummus a-go-go!

I have whipped up a batch of hummus! Yippee!!

It looks and tastes exactly like it should and by tomorrow will be so garlicky it will probably blow ours heads off! I made tahini from scratch to make it too.

I have also sewn the eyes on the white totoro so I just need to finish off his crocheted body and sew his tail and feet on and he is good to go off on an adventure with Mr Pickle. Every time he sees me stitching away on the little creation he asks 'is he ready yet? is he for me?' Still a touch of the Dorys going on in our household.

We hashed tonight. It was quite a long course with the last bit on the main road so Jeremy ran on ahead and rounded up a couple of cars for the smalls to be ferried on to the finish line for their pic-nic tea. Jeremy is now the Grand-poo-ba of the family hash which calls for him to be a bit shouty and boss people about. I think this role was created for him! We need to come up with a hash name for him by next Tuesday so answers on a postcard to Borneo please.