All the birdy action last Saturday reminded me of an old winged pal - the Blackbird, Fly camera that I got for Christmas in 2008! Isn't he good-looking?! Albeit a little dusty (aren't protective camera pouches meant to keep dust out?).
The poor thing has only been fed twice in the two+some years so we went out the next day and got him some Kodak "seeds". I hope he makes some good poo with them this time!
A recent Ebay purchase after a massive hunt. The last time I wanted a wicker basket so badly was when I was 15 and first got into the whole ruffly-blouse-country-peasant-girl look (a look that I still love today) and wanted a picnic basket to use as a book bag for school (I still have it in storage back at my folks). So what revived that "want"? These cute fishermen's baskets in the Italian menswear label Isaia's lookbook. Of all places. Haha!
My penchant for dressing like a boy has me persusing as many menswear lookbooks and blogs as I do the girly stuff. Sometimes I find them a lot more interesting because, well, let's face it, the boys haven't got much to work with compared to us girls so they are all about choice materials, brilliant construction, good cuts, fine tailoring and clever details. All things that I love looking at and reading about. And like all lookbooks and blogs, they make me want things.
The basket that I bought is far from the fish basket that I had in mind but a visit to my old leather bag-fixer man to put in a longer strap will do for now to fill the "want".
Yesterday was a textbook-style Sydney Spring day. Clear blue sky, very light wind and the temperature, at some point, hit a surprising 31°C! My kind of day! For shorts-wearing (first time, sans leggings, in many months!)...for drinking icy beers while sunning myself on our balcony...feeling so very happy knowing that there will be many more days like yesterday in the months to come....WHEEEEEEE! Yes, I'm lapping it all up!
And slurping it too! For Spring also means loads of quick-and-easy, light and chilled healthy-licious meals like this soba salad...
Cold buckwheat soba lightly dressed in sesame seed oil and soba dipping sauce + juliennes of carrot and cucumber (no seeds!) + Japanese-style pickled enoki mushrooms + boiled egg + crunchy seaweed sprinkly-bits + shallots curls + a generous dollop of salty-sweet-and-tart roasted sesame dressing.
Was doing the Winter-woollies-for-Summer-frothies trunk-swap and thought that it's a good time to be taking these pants out of the bedroom onto the streets again. It's been a while. The light-weight fabric is perfect for keeping my not-ready-to-face-the-world Winter-white legs warm on cool and windy Spring days and the prints are so happy!
An unintentional bird-themed day it was yesterday! Haha. Swallows on my pants and pigeons on the boyfriend's shirt.
No, no, no! We weren't doing the smoochie-woochie koochie-woochie his-and-hers thing. You know we hate that. I would have made him change out of the shirt if we weren't running late to meet Ms Carpet and Meeps for lunch at The Carrington (we ate sooo much!). I would have grabbed a different bag too instead of the swallow-print one (with all my essentials already inside) if we didn't have to dash. Birdy-overload, man. Woah. Haha.
I went in with a bottle of the baby blue polish that Ms Carpet gave me a long time ago with the intention of going all-blue with white polka dots. But Lyn had time to spare between my appointment and her next client's so she suggested we have some colourful OPI fun. Colours + Fun?! I'm in! You should have seen us! We were like little girls secretly playing with our mother's nail polish for the very first time. Haha.
I tried describing the Anniecure No.2 to her but she had her own ideas so we ended up with "Clown Camo" - a "print" that I would want to be wearing if I'm hiding from baddies in a circus tent full of clowns - which I love too!
It also reminded me of something else that I've seen recently but couldn't place until I showed my new toe job to Ms Carpet at lunch yesterday and she said it looks like her new Marimekko Connie-wonnies. Jackpot! Yeah!
Chinese black olives. Preserved in brine and dried. They are olive-olives but impart a completely different flavour from those of the European variety.
The best Chinese-style steamed fish I've had in restaurants were made with a generous sprinkle of these salty black chopped up bits and I've always wanted to play with some in my home-cooking. Made possible only last week when my aunt found some for me in a small packet instead of the usual big tins/bottles that I definitely won't be able to use up before their use-by date unless I'm cooking for an army.
These, on the chopping board, went into a fried rice with loads of minced garlic. Nyum! Going to tackle the steamed fish next. Wooooo!
We drove 32km out of Sydney to Smithfield, a suburb we've never been to! Yay! To go to a car graveyard to pick up a spare part for the boyfriend's dad.
An old-school sodapop vending machine in the office of the car graveyard. It'd be so cool to have one of them at home! Not for the drinks but for the colour-coded display.
New Spring leaves in suburbia. Don't be fooled by the clear blue sky! The 40km/h wind that day cut right through to our bones. Brrrrrrrr!
A gigantic puppy spotted on a puppy car-ride! Excitement!!!! Wheeeeeee! He's advertising the Pet Fest in the suburb of Merrylands. Damn! We were there a week too early.
The junk "sculpture" in the backyard of an antique shop we stumbled upon where we found my new bunny pal...
...a taxidermied American Cottontail! In pristine condition. He's not mine yet but we're going back to take him home when I've saved enough pennies, if he's still there.
We were hoping to find a bigger new-old dining table on this puppy car-ride. This cute one with the sexy chairs was one of the many that we saw. Sadly, none of them were right for us. I guess we'll have to keep on truckin'! Or puppy car-ridin'.
We did, however, found some good shit at the various suburban charity shops that we hit. Four happy printed and patterned Summer shirts for the boyfriend, a vintage ruffle-y floral peasant blouse for me and a few CDs for our listening pleasure. Yay!
The calamari sliderat The Carrington. Another old-man pub in our neighbourhood that's been recently "hipsterised" with the addition of a funky cool eatery. It's a food "trend" that I whinge about quite regularly here. Sometimes we just want to have a quiet drink somewhere close to home where we don't have to wait for a table while listening to loud hipsters trying to out-talk and out-cool each other. Sadly, there are not too many of those places around here anymore.
But we do win in a way, I suppose. New places to eat fun food at right on our doorstep! And the selection of tapas at The Carrington are certainly delicious and so much fun to eat. Besides the mini calamari burger, we liked the kingfish pastrami, the chicken parfait, the sobrasada on toast, the white anchovies + smoked eggplant and the spicy Basque wings. Washed down with their special shandy and one of their many cocktails.
The Carrington 565 Bourke Street Surry Hills Phone: (02) 9360 4714 Website: the-carrington.com.au
My favourite track from this album. Played on "repeat" mode for the whole of yesterday morning. And irritating the boyfriend in the process. Wahahahahaha! And the cute video!
There are things that the boyfriend and I are happy to purchase on the world-wide web. And there are things that we can't bring ourselves to. Music is one of those. Maybe we are old-school. And old too. We still like flicking through CDs, from A to Z, at the music stores like we used to in our vinyl-buying days decades ago. The thrill of finding something that we like, touching and feeling the jewel case in our hands, admiring the cover artwork and taking it home to listen to right away! Downloading tunes bought off the internet is just not the same. It's too easy. And we don't feel that we own them?
I've kind of given up on finding this 2006 Darkel album (by one half of Air) in a brick-and-mortar shop. And where did we find it, a record company sample copy, on Saturday when we least expect to?!!!!! At the last stop of our puppy car-ride in an op shop! (We never leave one without going through their CD racks.) You can't imagine my excited squeals when the boyfriend showed it to me! At The End Of The Sky was, of course, the first track I played the moment we got back to the car. What a great end to an already-good day! Hope the tune will make you smile too! (Yes, I've learnt how to plonk videos on the blog. Finally. Yay!)
We popped our roller derby-viewing-cherry on Saturday evening at the Sydney Roller Derby League's Finals!
A good night was had by all and was made even better when the Beauty School Knockouts won the cup! They were the team I wanted to win! A decision, seeing how it was my first time at a bout, that was based purely on how much cuter they looked in their pink uniforms with the swishy skirts compared to their opponents in gold hotpants. Haha. "Cute always wins!" is a line I often say to the boyfriend.
Here's them whizzing past right in front of us in a blur of pink...
I was expecting (actually, hoping) to see loads of violent tough-chick-action* in the rink. A bit of blood and chunks of hair would have made my evening! But it was all quite WWF, really. Kind of rehearsed? And made wholesomely family-friendly (there were loads of kids about)? Still, it was highly entertaining (like WWF was for me years ago) and we're already looking forward to 2012's programme!
*I learnt how to roller-skate when I was 9 or 10 and taught all my gal pals in the neighbourhood how to in the rink in the playground near our homes. Our pretend-bouts were quite pushy-and-shovey (and screamy) rough affairs. Often with scraped knees and elbows and ripped clothes to take home (those were pre-protection gear years). Haha. Happy days!
1. September in Sydney = Spring! And soon Summer! Whoopeeedoooooo!
2. Fresh-from-her-garden salad greens that my aunt dropped off yesterday.
3. Sparkly(!) green and baby blue skinny leather belts found in the op shop yesterday. To wear with some green vintage summer dresses! Ms Carpet told me recently about the "blue and green shall not be seen without a colour in between" rule. I never knew! Haha. It's always been one of my favourite colour combos. Ooops.
4. Look at the Spring-y print on this t-shirt I found in the kids department earlier this week! I think blue and green are a match made in heaven! The sky and the meadow! With nothing in between.
5. Secondhand Patrick Cox Wannabeloafer-mules in a rare rare shade of green! The Spring/Summer sister of his loafer-loafers. They are so 90s, I know! I used to wear a lot of them then. I still have a quite a few pairs in storage back in Singapore but they have not stopped me from slowly adding secondhand pairs to my collection since this brown pair. To me, the style of the Wannabes never date and they are some of the most well-made and comfortable leather shoes ever! I wish Patrick Cox would quit his new-ish cupcake business and go back to making shoes.
Ms Carpet and I popped in on our lunchtime playdate earlier this week and being the shop-shop-shopping-girl-maniacs* that we are, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves learning (in a real fun way) about the (Australia-centric) history of our favourite past-time at this wonderfully-curated exhibition. Much fun was had at The Library Shop after too.
Another good-ish history lesson on the subject is a documentary that the boyfriend and I watched recently - Seduction in the City: The Birth of Shopping. It's not done in a style that we particularly like but I did pick up some interesting facts from it.
2. The The Mad Square: Modernity In German Art 1910-37 exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW (which is just a 5-minute walk across the Domain from the State Library - you can do two shows in one day!).
Another history lesson of sorts. It is an art exhibition (a bloody good one, I thought) that links the backstory of the various German art movements to the political climate in Germany in that era. Politics and political history usually bore me but learning about it via art makes it a lot more exciting. Haha.
The boyfriend and I were there last Saturday and managed to squeeze in quite a bit before the gallery shut. Don't miss the John Kaldor Family Collection in the New Contemporary Gallery! I wish I was born a Kaldor! There are soooo many pieces in the collection (like the miniature of Jeff Koons' Puppy, the Sol LeWitts and the Richard Princes, just to name a few) that I would love to own (and would not so generously donate, like John Kaldor did, to the gallery this year). The David Aspen show was good too! Would love to see some of his colourful "camo"-like paintings screenprinted on dresses!
Have a fantabulous weekend!
*A line from a song by Voodoo Queens, one of my all-time favourite all-girl band. They sing about handbags and Keanu too. Tee hee hee.
Crocheted + Denim Patchwork Vest - Strummer, T-shirt - Country Road, Denim Cut-offs - from secondhand jeans, Shoes - denim Connie-wonnies
All the birdy action last Saturday reminded me of an old winged pal - the Blackbird, Fly camera that I got for Christmas in 2008! Isn't he good-looking?! Albeit a little dusty (aren't protective camera pouches meant to keep dust out?).
A recent Ebay purchase after a massive hunt. The last time I wanted a wicker basket so badly was when I was 15 and first got into the whole ruffly-blouse-country-peasant-girl look (a look that I still love today) and wanted a picnic basket to use as a book bag for school (I still have it in storage back at my folks). So what revived that "want"? These cute fishermen's baskets in the Italian menswear label Isaia's lookbook. Of all places. Haha! 
My penchant for dressing like a boy has me persusing as many menswear lookbooks and blogs as I do the girly stuff. Sometimes I find them a lot more interesting because, well, let's face it, the boys haven't got much to work with compared to us girls so they are all about choice materials, brilliant construction, good cuts, fine tailoring and clever details. All things that I love looking at and reading about. And like all lookbooks and blogs, they make me want things.
Yesterday was a textbook-style Sydney Spring day. Clear blue sky, very light wind and the temperature, at some point, hit a surprising 31°C! My kind of day! For shorts-wearing (first time, sans leggings, in many months!)...for drinking icy beers while sunning myself on our balcony...feeling so very happy knowing that there will be many more days like yesterday in the months to come....WHEEEEEEE! Yes, I'm lapping it all up!
Chambray Peasant Blouse - Strummer, Pyjama Pants - Peter Alexander, Shoes - Connie-wonnies
Peasant Blouse - Country Road, Handkerchief Tank Top - Don't Ask Amanda, Pyjama Pants - Cotton On Body, Shoes - Connie-wonnies
An unintentional bird-themed day it was yesterday! Haha. Swallows on my pants and pigeons on the boyfriend's shirt.
Friday fun with Lyn, my pedicurist!
Chinese black olives. Preserved in brine and dried. They are olive-olives but impart a completely different flavour from those of the European variety.
We drove 32km out of Sydney to Smithfield, a suburb we've never been to! Yay! To go to a car graveyard to pick up a spare part for the boyfriend's dad.
An old-school sodapop vending machine in the office of the car graveyard. It'd be so cool to have one of them at home! Not for the drinks but for the colour-coded display.
New Spring leaves in suburbia. Don't be fooled by the clear blue sky! The 40km/h wind that day cut right through to our bones. Brrrrrrrr!
A gigantic puppy spotted on a puppy car-ride! Excitement!!!! Wheeeeeee! He's advertising the Pet Fest in the suburb of Merrylands. Damn! We were there a week too early.
The junk "sculpture" in the backyard of an antique shop we stumbled upon where we found my new bunny pal...
...a taxidermied American Cottontail! In pristine condition. He's not mine yet but we're going back to take him home when I've saved enough pennies, if he's still there.
We were hoping to find a bigger new-old dining table on this puppy car-ride. This cute one with the sexy chairs was one of the many that we saw. Sadly, none of them were right for us. I guess we'll have to keep on truckin'! Or puppy car-ridin'.
The calamari slider at The Carrington. Another old-man pub in our neighbourhood that's been recently "hipsterised" with the addition of a funky cool eatery. It's a food "trend" that I whinge about quite regularly here. Sometimes we just want to have a quiet drink somewhere close to home where we don't have to wait for a table while listening to loud hipsters trying to out-talk and out-cool each other. Sadly, there are not too many of those places around here anymore.
But we do win in a way, I suppose. New places to eat fun food at right on our doorstep! And the selection of tapas at The Carrington are certainly delicious and so much fun to eat. Besides the mini calamari burger, we liked the kingfish pastrami, the chicken parfait, the sobrasada on toast, the white anchovies + smoked eggplant and the spicy Basque wings. Washed down with their special shandy and one of their many cocktails.
Cool type.
A good embroidered shirt.
We popped our roller derby-viewing-cherry on Saturday evening at the Sydney Roller Derby League's Finals!
I was expecting (actually, hoping) to see loads of violent tough-chick-action* in the rink. A bit of blood and chunks of hair would have made my evening! But it was all quite WWF, really. Kind of rehearsed? And made wholesomely family-friendly (there were loads of kids about)? Still, it was highly entertaining (like WWF was for me years ago) and we're already looking forward to 2012's programme!
For a more flavoursome and tender keychain. Tee hee hee.
1. September in Sydney = Spring! And soon Summer! Whoopeeedoooooo!
1. The On Sale! Shops & Shopping exhibition at the State Library.
2. The The Mad Square: Modernity In German Art 1910-37 exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW (which is just a 5-minute walk across the Domain from the State Library - you can do two shows in one day!).
