Frank

Having his afternoon nap on the shoes on the step outside our back door.

 

The dude

Say hello to our newest family member:

Some call him The Dude, some call him Tortoise, I call him Sheldon.

Frank and Cleo have been very amused, but so far, have not been able to get too close to him, luckily.

Back to school

Sinead went back to school today. I cannot believe I allowed the entire holiday to go by without even mentioning that she received a Top 10 badge at the end of last term for being one of the top 10 academic achievers in her grade.

As always, we are so proud of her.

Mid term report – 1st term

We got Sinead’s mid-term report card for the first term this year last week, and it is absolutely heart-warming, as you can see below:

We are very, very proud of her.

For record keeping purposes

This morning, I woke up and checked the time. It was just after 7:15. I pulled the curtains closed to block out the sun, moved my mouse to check email and discovered that we were offline. I tried to ping our home server, and, when it did not respond, I got up and walked into the lounge. It took a second or two to register that it was considerably emptier than it should be. And then, I screamed.

I’m a girl. It comes natural.

My screaming woke Quentin and Mike up, who rushed in to see what was wrong.

I noticed the front gate was standing open, but the door was closed. Opened the door to see that the lock on the gate had been broken.

Luckily Sinead was sleeping over at a friend’s house. Because, checking through the house, we realised the following was taken:

From the lounge:

• 2x PCs
• 1x 26” Samsung monitor

From Sinead’s room:

• HP Pavillion laptop

From Mike’s room:

• HP Pavillion laptop

Nothing else was taken. Not Sinead's wallet containing her birthday money. Not the Xbox. Not the sound system.

Mike was sleeping in his room, and his laptop was on the little table next to his bed, less than a metre away.

One of our neighbours happened to be in her bathroom early this morning just after 6:30am, and she had a clear view of the road. She saw a blue Toyota Tazz in good condition pull up outside our house and a well dressed man got out. Then she saw a man sitting on top of the roof over the front gate, who passed items down to the well dressed man, who, in turn, placed the items in the boot of his car. The other man then jumped down and got in the car. They drove off. Unfortunately, she was not able to see the number plate.

Mike got up just after 6am this morning to switch off the porch light.

Luckily none of us were harmed. But, someone was in our house. We feel violated.

12

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Today is Sinead’s 12th birthday.

I wrote this poem for Sinead when she was a baby, and it still holds true today:

Fragile fae queen
fairy tale and mother goose
you could be quite contrary
little princess, butter fae
I wish, I wish . . .
all the wishes in the world for you

Outing: Wedding in Bloemfontein

We attended my cousin’s wedding in Bloemfontein yesterday. The ceremony was beautiful and even I got a lump in my throat and a tear in the corner of my eye on several occasions. It was also lovely to see the family again, and meet the new addition to our family.

Sinead bought herself a new dress for the occasion, and looked like a little lady:

The happy couple

Group photo:

Some other pictures:

Sinead’s Birthday Party 2009

This past weekend was Sinead’s 12th Birthday party and here are some photo’s of the event.

 

2008 – a year in pictures

This is quite overdue actually. I have been working on this post for weeks, and finally got access to the rest of our photos so I could complete this. I like remembering the highlights like this.

January

Blackouts, load-shedding and the chicken run was on every one’s lips and minds. I could not find a single picture from January indicating that we did anything other than try and survive load shedding.

February

Sinead turned 11 and attended the Valentine’s ball at her school. She had attended dances before, but this was her first dance unaccompanied by us.

March

We had our first roll-your-own-sushi evening. It was tremendous fun.

April

Quentin and I went away for our first holiday alone together and Sinead dressed up like Alice (her of Wonderland fame) for Literacy day at school.

May

We helped a friend out with a uni project by pretending to be dead. The result was a deliciously dark photoshoot, with a lot of really scary images of all of us.

June

Sinead got her glasses.

July

We helped out at the 702 Walk the Talk by wearing pink t-shirts and trying to convince people to donate money for breast cancer research.

August

Quentin and I went to Tech-ed together. This was an incredible experience for both of us. Later in the month, in an attempt to become more self-sufficient, we started our own vegetable garden.

September

Sinead was awarded full Academic colours.

October

Summer returned in full force, and so did the butterflies.

November

 

We planted our first vegetable garden, and the plants started growing, amazingly.

December

Sinead received Gold awards for English, Afrikaans and Math, and we gave our dining room a brand new face.

RIP

Loki

25 September 2000 – 2 January 2009.

You will be missed.

The Dining Room

We have finally finished putting the dining room back together. We still have a couple of things we want to do, but they are mostly cosmetic, like putting a thick (black wooden) frame around the mirror and respray the fireplace. But, for now, it is done, and we are incredible pleased with the end product.

We picked up the chairs from my mother’s house yesterday, and they actually fit so well with the overall look. They need a bit of attention (glue and so on), but they are lovely.

The feature wall turned out even better than expected.

My sword finally has a safe resting place and the copper plates against the azure wall are just so beautiful.

On the mantel, I arranged some of our vases, which look absolutely fantastic against the azure wall (especially when they are clean). We also placed an assortment of the Egyptian-themed ornaments.

I found a lovely canvas magazine rack at a local decor shop for next to nothing, which works very nicely to hold all my cook books.

We also put up Quentin’s Stargate dagger finally, as well as the pretty pewter ornament with no name.

To tie the dining room and the kitchen together, we used the left-over paint and painted the kitchen cupboards. My dad also donated brass door-knobs, which were a welcome replacement for the ugly wooden ones we had there before. I have a bit of work left on the kitchen, but that will only really happen in March 2009.

The dining room revamp, part 2

Once the white undercoat dried, we started adding colour. Totally adverse to white walls, we went for a stone colour on the two large walls, and a deep azure on the wall around the fireplace.

This is me, on the second or third coat of stone.

While wet, the stone-coloured paint had a slight silver shimmer to it, which was really pretty, but seemingly impossible to capture with my cell phone’s camera.

The azure-coloured paint went on green, and dried to be almost black, really bringing out the brass on the fireplace.

Almost finished:

Today, we just need to do the finishing touches (like the borders) and then put the room together again.

Next post: The final product.

The dining room revamp, part 1

We started today with our big project for the holidays: revamping the dining room. The dining room was a puke-green colour when we moved in, and it has been driving us a little nuts for the past 18 months.

We started by sealing off the doors:

 

Next, we had to scrape the one wall clean. This was not as time-consuming as we had initially thought, but it was hard work.

Quentin scraping the last bits off:

The pile of scrapings:

Quentin, covered in white dust from the scraping:

Once we had cleaned up the mess, we painted all the walls white:

Next post: Adding colour and the finishing touches.

December in Pictures: Yellow

New addition to a building we drive past regularly. The yellow was glowing in the sunshine today, and I loved the reflections of the trees in the windows.

December in Pictures: Bougainvillea