Being Kath is hard work

I got back from school (biked home - another 20 minutes of cardio) and had supper waiting for me. Vic made some sausages, sauteed zucchini and onions, corn and some sliced up avocado with lemon squeezed on top. Yummers. There's nothing better than a supper that someone else made for me. No wine tonight. wah!



So, I didn't get to a lot of the items on my list, mostly because of things that were out of my control (Thoughtful Foods is closed on Mondays, the post-grad coordinator was busy all day and I have no idea where to find fresh flowers on campus or close to campus). But, I did manage to figure out how to download Tasks on to my Gmail so that I can keep track of my to-do lists electronically; meet with Student Liaison at the Graduate Research School; get some writing done on my thesis and go to my qualitative methods class (subject was ethics - interesting stuff).

I'm finding that blogging so often is a lot of work, and I'm not getting around to some vital Kath tasks, like cleaning for example (which, for me, is always the first thing to go when time is precious). Maybe it takes a few days to get into the swing of things?

Vic is tucking Gus into bed, so now I'm going to:

1. Tidy up
2. Make myself a cuppa Twinings Chai tea with an Arnotts tim tam (I can't help myself)
   
3. Watch Desperate Housewives
4. Make lunches for tomorrow so I have more time for blogging in the morning
   
5. Write a to-do list for tomorrow
   
6. Sleep

Good night!

Day 2 of the Kath-off

OK, I admit it - After my post last night, I didn't exercise or write up my to-do list. I actually had a tea with one tim tam and watched The Office before nodding off. But today is a new day - and I'm feeling really good about channeling Kath today.

I woke up at 6am and after checking Michelle's blog, I felt extra-psyched about making today a Kath day. I did 30 min of a sun saluation class from yogadownload.com, then ate some oatmeal, Kath-style. Here's the mix:

1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 banana
1/2 cup light greek yogurt
1 tblspn of almond-cashew butter
1 tblspn of plum spread
about a dozen bitter cherries

I made myself some lunch of carrots, an apple, some wrap fixings (wholewheat wrap, tuna in springwater and lettuce) and a Carman's muesli bar. These are about the only granola bars you can buy in aussie grocery stores whose first ingredients don't include sugar. Plus, they're yummy.


I'm off to bike to school (20 min of cardio), and I've got this to do once I'm there:

1. Meet with my thesis supervisor
2. Meet with the post-grad coordinator for my centre
3. Talk to the Graduate Research School
4. Squeeze in some thesis writing
5. Qualitative Methods class from 4 till 6pm
6. If time, drop by the uni organic foods shop to pick dried beans and brown rice, and find some fresh flowers.
   

See you later!

Becoming Kath

I've had a real downer of a week. Some serious problems with one of my thesis supervisors came to a head on Friday and left me feeling frustrated and a little depressed. If you ever pick up a guide to doing your PhD, you will always find a chapter on how to develop a good relationship with your supervisor and what to do when things go badly, because the supervisor-student relationship is fraught for most. I'm not sure why this is, but I can tell you that it sucks! I've taken certain steps to sort it out, and will hopefully have some resolution this week (my fingers are crossed for a supervisor that is better suited to me and my research), but in the meantime I think I've come up with a good strategy for dealing with the stress of it all.

Michelle and I are followers of a blog called Kath Eats Real Food. We sorta make fun of her (like "why won't she just eat a bag of doritos or drink a whole bottle of beer for once?"), but we will also be the first to admit that we are kinda in awe of her too. She's always upbeat, sunshiney, eats well, exercises all the time and her house is immaculate. This morning, while I was google-chatting with my sister, we speculated that maybe the reason she's so upbeat all the time is that she eats well, exercises and has such a clutter-free house. So, to test it out, we've decided to take the Kath-challenge for one week.

Here are the rules for the next week:

1. no junk food for a week (or just little bites)

2. lots of good food, especially raw food

3. clean our houses and keep them clean

4. 1/2 hour of exercise every day

5. blog about the food we eat every day

6. use place mats and buy fresh flowers

Number 3 is no easy task. Here's a picture of my living room pre-Kath-cleanup.


But I'm up for the challenge. So here goes, the rundown for the day (in Kath style): Today, I woke up at around 7am, made myself a bowl of oatmeal (no pics because this was pre-Kath challenge), chatted with my sister and then ran out to Target to buy cute bowls. Kath always eats out of cute bowls and they may just be the secret to her happiness.

When I got home, I helped Gus make a birthday card for a birthday party he was going to. Then I had a lunch of some leftover pumpkin (it was really butternut squash but they call it pumpkin here) potato soup and some bean salad. (check out the cute bowls, which actually did make me pretty happy)


Vic then dropped Gus off at the party, and he helped me get into the spirit of Kath, by cleaning the bathroom and bedroom while I cleaned the kitchen and living room. When we were done, we watched Twilight (I know Kath would have gone out for a run at this point - but Gus was at the birthday party and what better time to watch a girlie-teen-flick about vampires??) and had this snack of oranges and ryvita crackers.


After the movie, I made supper, a big veggie stir fry, some basa fillets and basmati rice. I also had a glass of wine, but only drank about 2/3 of it, then gave the rest to the husband to finish.


The day is slipping away from me, and to do this right, I'm going to need to work on my to-do list, fit in some exercise and pick up some fresh flowers. I'm thinking I might just get to those first two, but the fresh flowers will have to wait till Day 2 of the Kath challenge - it'll have to go on my to-do list for tomorrow!

Room with a view

Two things I love about Australia:

1. Cheap wine. In Ontario, a cheap decent bottle of wine would run us about $10, and you couldn't get much cheaper than that. And, since liquor stores are run through a crown corporation, there is no such thing as sales on liquor. When it comes to wine, the situation couldn't be more different in Sydney. There are often sales on wine, including 2 for 1 sales and 20% off when you buy 6 or more bottles. But, the best deals, by far, are "Cleanskins", which are basically a "no name" brand of wine. My understanding is that the wine comes from a variety of sources, including excess from big winemakers who don't want to sell their brands cheap. This means that buying cleanskins are a bit of a gamble and you can never be too sure what you're going to get. Yesterday, we spent a lazy afternoon with some new friends, drinking their $2 Chardonnay, which was truly a decent wine to start with that got better and better with each glass. (sidenote: surprisinly beer is a lot more expensive here than it was in Canada - much to Vic's dismay)

2. The views from our apartment. We live in a tiny little apartment, but one of its saving graces are the trees just outside our windows that provide us with fantastic views, especially on bright sunny days like today.

Road Trip!

The school year here starts in late January and is made up of four 10-week terms, each separated by two weeks of holidays. The first term of school ended right before Easter and we all decided to take a week off for a little road trip. We drove up the coast to an area called Port Stephens, and spent a few nights at the local YHA. Before we got there, I was worried that we might be kept awake by partying backpackers, but it was really great. We stayed in a little cabin, there was a pool and shared outdoor kitchen facilities. The outdoor kitchen was one of our favorite parts of the hostel. It was surrounded by huge trees and plants and felt very tropical. Here's a pic:

The funny part was that the first two nights there were backpackers in the cabin attached to ours and we didn't hear a peep out of them. The third night, a family of five arrived and they were up at around 6am, loud as anything, (which I know can't be helped when you have a kid under 4, but man - were we ever happy that we had the backpackers beside us the first couple of nights!)

The YHA advertised that they were located in a "koala corridor" and we, and most especially Vic, were determined to spot a koala out in the wild. Every afternoon and evening we would head out to the most likely koala viewing spot, and try to find them in the trees. No luck. But, we did find this guy right outside our cabin door (look above Gus' head in the pic below).

Possum, up close.


We also spent some time surfing in the sand dunes. The sand dunes stretch about one km wide and 30 km long, all the way from Newcastle to Port Stephens. They were quite spectacular. There were a few moments when all you could see was sand, think desert scenes from Lawrence of Arabia or The English Patient.


Wipe-out!!!

The hard part (just like tobogganing in snow) was walking back up the hill, ugh!


We also found a really great snorkeling spot, and went on a short hike in a nearby national park.

While we were in the sand dunes, we spotted a group of tourists who were jumping up and down while someone was taking pictures of them. It was hilarious to watch, and after that Vic and I kept trying to take pictures of each other jumping in the air. Here's one of the funnier ones taken on our hike.

The views on the hike were something else. Take a look at the background in this picture below. And no leeches - yay!

It was such a nice break. I read a non-thesis-related book, and caught up on some of the lighter podcasts that I subscribe to, like Q from CBC radio, which reminds me...have you heard/watched that interview between Jian and Billy Bob Thornton? Wow - (in the words of a friend and former co-worker) Billy Bob is a real douchebag!

Back to school and work tomorrow. I feel refreshed and ready to get back at it.

Bush turkeys, leeches and goannas

We just got back from our first camping trip in Australia. I was pretty nervous about it, likely because of a story my sister told me years ago involving a large bug that crawled into her ear while she was sleeping in a tent in Australia. The bugs here FREAK ME OUT, and I just can't seem to get used to the sheer size and quantity of them. And, based on the size of the cockroaches and spiders that we've seen in our apartment, the thought of what they must be like in the outdoors creeped me out.

It turns out I was needlessly worried. Camping in Australia is similar to camping in Canada, and it felt almost comforting to do something so familiar...sit in camping chairs by the fire, tell stories, let the kids run around like a bunch of crazies. We went with Gus' classmate's family, which was great because Gus was kept entertained the whole time by his school friend and her sister.

There were a couple of differences, no picnic tables on the sites (standard issue in Canadian campsites), an absence of marshmallows and hotdogs for roasting (both are hard to come by in Sydney, and when you do find them, they just don't taste the same), and the campground is self-serve - no rangers in sight. You book ahead of time by phone, then when you get there, you pay by putting your money in an envelope and sliding it into a sort of mailbox-type thing. They also had big gas barbeques every few sites, very handy for cooking up snags for supper.

We went to Dharug National Park, just 1.5 hours northwest of here. The park was beautiful, with a large escarpment as a backdrop. If you look really hard at the bottom of this picture, you'll see Gus with his friend and one of the grown-ups checking out the Hawkesbury river, which ran close to our campsite.

Here's Gus, as we head out on a bushwalk on the first morning we were there.


When we finished our bushwalk, we realized we all had leeches burrowing through our shoes and socks and spent about 10 minutes flicking them off our ankles, feet and shoes. ewwwwww. As luck would have it, I was one of only two of our group of eight that got bitten (is that what it's called?) by a leech. I'm just thankful it wasn't Gus, cause that would have spelled the end of bushwalks for the next few years.



LEECH!!! Ewwww!


We had really hoped to see some wallabies or wombats out in the wild. Vic below, looking for possums in the trees.


Instead, we saw a whole bunch of bush turkeys walking around the campsites and this goanna by the outhouses. This thing was about 3-4 feet long. No kidding! We stayed a good distance away, because our travelling companions informed us that they sometimes mistake people for trees and have been known to try to claw their way up people. They said that you should quickly lie down if you see one running towards you. I'm not sure if they were messing with us, but I'm hoping I'll never have the opportunity to test it out.

D-A-N-A

Capping off a week of high productivity on my thesis (have I mentioned that my mood is contingent on how productive my day/week has been?), we've just finished a really nice weekend. Friday night, I went out to a Canadian-Australian club function. Ah, the comforting sounds of Canadian accents. I can't even begin to tell you how nice it is to have people pronounce my name right the first time I tell them. Here's a typical conversation with an aussie:

random aussie: What's your name again?

me: Dana

random aussie: oh, Deena.

me: no, DANA (in a slow, loud voice)

random aussie: How do you spell that?

me: D-A-N-A

random aussie: so your name is Donna

me: sigh, yes, you can call me Donna.

At the beginning, I kept trying to get them to make that hard 'a' sound in my name, but they often became completely flustered, and would mutter "I'll never get it right". So, I've given up, and I'm now known as Donna by many of my aussie coworkers and acquaintances.

Also this weekend, Gus had a friend sleep over. So we had an exciting Saturday night of pop, chips and kid movies. And Sunday, we did a little prep work for our upcoming camping trip. We are now better equiped than we ever were in Canada after buying up a ton of camping supplies from an Irish couple who just finished a cross-country tour. We've also gotten our big ol' car serviced and picked up a NRMA membership (like CAA) for extra piece of mind, in case our car decides to give up while we're on some remote mountain road. We're all set and very excited for our first camping trip in Australia planned for Easter weekend.

Pics from the weekend:

Chips and jelly beans for the sleepover. Is there a better combination?


This weekend, we also did a little tour of Bare Island Fort, which is in a suburb called La Perouse, and was one of the sites used in Mission Impossible.

The tour was a nice way to spend a sunny afternoon, despite being a little spooky with all these crazy little rooms that soldiers and others lived in thoughout the past two centuries. Here's Vic walking through one of creepy hallways.

For some reason, all our outings seem to involve ice cream?!? Funny how that happens. I'm not sure if you can tell from this badly taken picture (really I should find the manual for this camera), but Gus has the funniest expression in this picture. The kid cracks me up.