Christmas eve party 2010

It was that time of the year again, all of us put our busy schedule aside and get together to celebrate Christmas. It was a big crowd, 20 of us and everyone bought a plate and a present for Kris Kringle. We sure were the noisiest bunch in the whole area. How did I know? I could hear them laughing miles away when I brought Ace for his night walk.

This embrace the spirit of Christmas, all of us decided to wear either green or red. It should look very nice in a photo.

It was really good fun, had plenty of laughter, good catch up with everyone, food was sensational and Ace had plenty to socialize with Jeeme and Tarzy as well.

Kris Kringle was exciting as well, not knowing what presents everyone will be getting. We are very happy with our presents, especially my egg timer. :D Now I can make perfect hard boiled eggs every time!

The photos below were taken by our reliable friends, Carrie and Hennley. We thought that we should leave the photo taking to the pros and we were right! They were much better at it than us.

Our delicious Christmas eve dinner - plenty of selections

Lily's champagne salad

Mine a-tad-spicy chicken wings

Aries's very-delicious roast lamb (worth mentioning as he is a vegetarian)

Lily tossing her champagne salad - making sure every leaf was well coated with the dressing

Devin's very-crunchy popcorn chicken & Carmen's delicious fried rice noodle

"Feeding time"

Kris Kringle presents

Kris Kringle - each of us pick a random number and match it with a pre-numbered present

My turn to get my present

Ace & Jeeme in santa suit - 1

Ace & Jeeme in santa suit - 2

Ace & Jeeme in santa suit - 3

Ace & Jeeme in santa suit -4

Jeeme giving Ace a kiss

Jeeme: "the night is still young, hehehe..."

A very tired Ace sleeping in the background when Jeeme was still filled with energy

Ace was knocked out

The people that made this fun party a reality!

Our backyard had a makeover!

Ever since we bought our lovely home, we have enjoyed every inch of the house. We can't say the same for our little backyard though. It was filled with weeds and that has deterred us from enjoying the beautiful Melbourne weather at the back. It just makes no sense to mow the weed every month. It's just horrible especially during spring & summer. Its dying for our personal touch!

We have been looking around on ideas how to give it a little makeover. Our initial plan was to lay a layer of golf grass but the price tag put us off. It seems that we need to recondition our soil before laying the grass, which I have to get someone in to get it sorted (labour cost too expensive) and we still need to maintain it every month or so. I am a little discouraged in that! 

We then started looking into decking and turned out to be something we can manage without much effort.  We can either do it ourselves or get someone in to get it all nicely done up. Good old friend of ours, Devin was looking into decking for his love nest as well and found a bargain on deck tiles at a local furniture shop. It was a bargain too good to refuse, we ended up saving a couple of hundred bucks! Sweet! 

It's not fixed in the ground, so we can take it with us if we decide to move to a bigger place 10 years down the line. Double Sweet!!

To be honest, it was a leap of faith. In theory the preparation and fixing the deck tiles seem easy but once we get into it, it quickly proved otherwise.

We bought the deck tiles end of April, we had to wait for 4 weeks before we can start to rock and roll. Weeds need to be killed, make sure they are stone dead before putting anything on top. Didn't realize it would take 1 month for the darn weed to die! A slight bump in our plan. That's ok.

Last weekend was the 4th week since poison was sprayed. Weather was beautiful, the sun was out, occasionally getting some cool breeze from the south with a maximum temperature of 20 degrees, it was the perfect condition for the makeover to happen. 

It took us the whole weekend, the first day (Saturday) spent more on re-planning and "discussion". :D The second day was a much better and it went by fairly quickly. We knew what we had to do and we had a firmer picture what's the end result we want it to be. 

When we finished laying the deck tiles, we were quite satisfied with our great job. Once we filled in the gaps with pebbles, we were just blown away with the effect. It's much prettier than we first thought and it looks better at night when the pebbles reflect the moonlight. It illuminates our backyard! Triple Sweet!

We are really happy with our backyard project. Though my back still hurts from the constant lifting of the deck tiles the whole weekend, it was well worth it! 

REALLY HAPPY!

 Our horrible weed garden at the back

 

The horrible weeds up close

The savior - deck tiles. 12 packs in total (1 pack = 4 tiles)

Horrible weeds exterminated

The casualty from all the stone-dead weed digging

Laying the deck tiles on top of the weed mat (1)

 Laying the deck tiles on top of the weed mat (2)

All deck tiles joined up (1)

All deck tiles joined up (2) 

White pebbles in, adds a new dimension to the whole area 

Next... BBQ.

Lily's Birthday - Surprise "Party"

I had this crazy idea of giving Lily a surprise party, filled the rooms with balloons, banners, streamers, etc to celebrate her birthday. I was procrastinating simply because we didn't have the space for such in our tiny apartment. 

Now that we have a little more space to play around in our house, I told myself, this IS the year. If I don't do it now, I'll never do it. 

Invitations were sent out early to our friends to join in the fun. I was expecting a number of couples to be not available as Lily's birthday fell within the CNY period. We were quite lucky that we still have enough headcount for the surprise. 

That was back in January. From then till the second week of February, I was tossing with a number of ideas on things I can do on top of the surprise "party". I couldn't decide and ended up using most of  it for the whole weekend (saving some for next year). 

It didn't take me too long too arrange the plans leading up to the surprise "party", as I knew exactly what I need to do. It started off with sending her a bouquet of lilies & roses on Friday morning to her workplace. She was shocked when her receptionist passed it to her. She was pleasantly surprised through the phone and embarrassed from all the attentions from her colleagues. :D Plan accomplished! 

We took it nice and easy the next day, enjoying ourselves our well deserved weekend after a hectic working week. She was expecting us to go our for dinner and that was it. What she wasn't expecting was that we were going for one of the well acclaimed restaurant in Australia - Cutler & Co. We had a really good time, one of the best dinners we had.

Sunday was THE day. The day that she needed to be pampered. From the very beginning, I was giving her the impression that I didn't have anything planned, mistaken her birthday to be on Saturday. We then went out for our usual Sunday brunch, not realizing I found another great cafe to dine. - Cafe Vue at Heide. Went there early, savored their menu and was very impressed with the quality of food. We then took a stroll along the park next to the cafe, enjoying the sunny, cool Sunday morning. She was happy!

On our way back home after our brunch, I dropped her off at the local beauty therapy for 3 hours of pampering. She was really shocked as I had already made the payment, there was no backing out. Left her there, while I took the next 3 hours to decorate our house with banners, balloons, streamers and gathering all our friends. 

When I picked her up shortly after 3 hours, she was going on and on about how much she enjoyed her pampering and dying to show me her pedicure.

I was saying quietly to myself that the bigger surprise is yet to come. hehe :D We reached home, she opened the door and all our friends that were waiting quietly in the house shouted "SURPRISE" and started singing the birthday song. :D Plan accomplished! 

She was speechless for the first 10 minutes, trying to digest what has happened! hehe... slowly, she warmed up and back to her usual self. Occasionally, she would give me the "you are so dead" stare, for once I didn't mind at all.

Living room filled with balloons

Happy Birthday balloon filled with helium

The gang waiting for the big moment

A very surprised birthday girl

 

Still very surprised birthday girl

 

Giving her a birthday kiss

Everyone that made it a success!

Lily with the girls

Lily with the boys

Lily's birthday cake

Happy Birthday Lily!

DIY for the house

We are slowly getting the hang of doing things ourselves. One of our latest addition to our list of DIY is the tv shelf. We were shopping around looking for a tv shelf as the old one is bit low. After a long search around furniture shops, we decided to stick back to Ikea. At least we can mix and match the way that we want and it is also one of the cheapest around.

It took us 2 trips and a long discussion on which layout to get. Finally we settled on having one tall shelf for mags, one shelf for the tv and one small shelf on the other side for miscellaneous. When we were at the collection area, we were surprised with the number of items needed to fix up the whole 3 piece shelves. It got us worried in how were we going to fit all the boxes in the car????

Good thing about Ikea is that all the boxes are flat but still it took us a while at the loading bay to fit everything in the car. It is really like doing a box puzzle, interesting if you can solve, if not it is frustrating. Not only we had to put the back seat down, we also move forward the front passenger seat to the max! I can tell you that the going back home was like sitting in an Airasia flight. Normally its comfortable and spacious like MAS business class. =)

There were 16 boxes in total - managed to squeeze everything in!

All 16 boxes ready to be assembled

Wanted to take the whole process but the we got carried away to finish up the shelf. Only managed to take the process of the big shelf.

The frame of the shelf

Shelf with legs and glass door.

Shelf with legs, glass doors and lower drawers.

Completion of the shelf no 1.

The whole complete 3 piece shelves took us around 5hrs and the final product!

We are really pleased with the result, now it fills up the room and it also makes our small tv looks bigger!!! Even Stephen say so... looks like he does not have any reason to get a bigger one!! =P

Housewarming

Last Sunday 3.Oct.09, we had our first housewarming party. We decided to do steamboat without much hesitant. We both are not great cooks and we don't have a barbeque. Potluck? We thought that since it's our housewarming, we don't feel right asking our friends to bring food for this occasion.

It turned out to be a good choice, some of them came later than the rest, so we ate and chat while waiting for other rest to arrive, and not cooking too much each time. There were 19 of us that day? We created a lot of "noise" which is really good to warm up our house. haha! We were busy entertaining our friends that we forgot to take photos on our own! Bugger!

We didn't realise that the day we had our housewarming was the day Chinese all over the world celebrated mooncake festival. Double celebration!! Our friends bought mooncakes and lanterns over for everyone to enjoy... It was very good... comparable to those we usually get back in KL.

Wii time after heavy lunch

Mooncake time!

Mooncake imported from Hong Kong (I think)

Group photo

When the sun was down, we lit up the lanterns at our backyard and one of us came up with the idea of walking around the neighbourhood with our lanterns. We thought "why not??!!". This is old school and gold! We did just that but to a nearby park. We would not want to cause any concerns with the locals which are not accustomed with this sort of festival.

It was good fun... raised a few eyebrows from the locals passed by, heads turned, cars stopped wondering what we were up to, we made ourselves noticed! haha!

Oh yeah, I am begining to believe that the number "3" is our lucky number. A lot of occasion/event occurred have some connection with "3":

1. We got our first house in our 3rd year back in Australia
2. I was wearing a shirt bearing the number 3 on my right arm while bidding for our house
3. If we add our house settlement price, it comes back to number 3
4. Our house number is 3
5. Our first house warming was held on 3rd Oct 2009
6. It took us 3 weeks to decide the type of furniture we want to buy and how to place them in our house

Bear in mind, none of these were planned! Maybe I should start buying lottery with the number 3 only. Haha!