Back yard BBQ math

+

=

Why won't our chickens eat all the spiders in the yard?

I thought they were supposed to be controlling our insects. They left these behind:


Do they eat spiders or did I get the wrong ones?

My day in the kitchen.

This was the lovely set of drawers our kitchen came with:



As you can see, the middle drawer wasn't a drawer, and the drawers were so tight (mmm, chipboard) that the knobs couldn't pull the drawers:


So they had to go:Then for the Pikea:


Luckily I had preassembled the Pikea otherwise I don't think I would have had enough time to do it today.
Et voila:
The toll included one hammer:
a couple of bent jigsaw blades, and a few trips to the hardware store. I also put sealant between the benchtop and sink and between the benchtop and wall. Not neat, but should at least stop it leaking everywhere in to the chipboard. Breaking the hammer gave me a good excuse to buy a fubar. I also wish I had bought the jigsaw earlier as it would have got me through one of the early bits faster.

We now have trained guard chickens!

Kill, Cujo! Kill!
An unsuspecting juvenile kookaburra looks on...


And the extreme training regime continues....


All the cool kids are doing it!

Christmas adventures!

So this year, Christmas was spent down at Margate. So what mayhem did we get up to down there? Well, some of us became Wii statistics, but in our spare time... here was my first ever balloon animal:

It's a dog. Can you tell? We also went to Salamanca markets where I was forced to have a tasty tasty German sausage.

I ended up with the Pork Bratwurst as the Weisswurst wasn't cooked yet.
I also needed to have the Gillespie's Alcoholic Ginger Beer through a traditional paper straw. Very tasty. While we were eating, a Town Crier came by although he was rather quiet. More ringing than crying.

On our walk around the harbour, we came across this:
Extreeeeeme pudding delivery!!!!!

In the IXL building further along the harbour, they've made a water feature out of one of the original jam pots:

In one of their shops, they had this:

which fills me with confidence. Prawns in a tetrabrick.... perfectly natural!
Here's a photo of the Margatian landscape:

and another (on the way to Margate Train which was shut for some reason during peak tourist season..... who would have thought there would be no Pancakes in high tourist season? Maybe they were all up in Hobart for the Taste of Tasmania)

Here's a lovely vineyard, although the cafe-ness of it was more interesting than the wine. It's a very nice cafe!

We had delicious scones with coffee!

One little bit of Margate decoration was the mosaic on the concrete barrier on the Channel Highway in Margate.

It was done by local school kids according to one of the panels, and sponsored by local businesses.

On our walk around the bay in Margate, we found a bush television.

We also went to the Taste of Tasmania before we left, where we had some lovely food and wine. When I spotted this:

So I *had* to have the Ancient Mariner. With a name like that, I had to find out... it looks like this:

And tastes delicious! It had blueberry, raspberry and vanilla icecream along with blueberries, raspberries and cream. Of course, the weather was very Tasmanian right up to the last:


When we got home, the warriors of Christmas gifts were set up to defend the kitchen!

Destructomeg's little Iron Chef looking egg cups.