Truffle Festival

We are going to a truffle festival tomorrow with some friends from the rowing club. It's an hour or so north of Perth. I've got to say, they look pretty gross. But seeing as potatoes are so delicious and they come from underground, I'll give truffles a go.

Portal 2

This is the latest game we've been playing. The idea is that you are trying to escape from a vast factory/laboratory where you are an unwilling test subject in intelligence experiments. You have a portal gun which fires 2 shots. The first makes a blue circle appear on any white surface and the second makes an orange one. Walk through one, and you come out the other moving at the same speed. It's really good fun playing with the physics of it. If you want to shoot out of a portal and fly across a gap, you figure out a way of falling into the opposite portal at great speed, etc.

We have yet to play the 2 player version, but I give the 1 player 2 enthusiastic thumbs up. A flash demo of the game developed years ago is available here and it is good craic - Portal

Colour Decision

Now that the bathroom is starting to look like a room again, we are thinking of what colour to paint it. Blue perhaps. We've put up a few sample splotches to see what they will look like. At the far side is a very light blue, and closer is a slightly darker light blue. Oh these difficult decisions.

The purple masking tape marks where the towel rails and vanity unit will be. These are getting installed today!

Shiny White!

Look how shiny and new this is! We have a team called Smart Style Bathrooms, lead by the wonderful Cameron, renovating our bathroom at the moment. It took them half an hour to rip out the old shower, bath and sink. 1 week later and it's already plumbed, rewired and tiled. Amazing! Over the next few days they will install the vanity, taps, mirror and glass door for the shower in the bath. Can't wait to use it!

Check out the old bathroom. The new bath above is in on the left where the shower was. The vanity will go on the right where the old bath is, and then there will be lovely floor space in the middle.

Rock Garden

This is the beginning of the pretty planting in our garden. We've been making a lot of structural changes - putting up walls and the like - but now we've started actually planting stuff. We're going to run this rock garden the length of the right side of the back garden. We have hundreds of these big red rocks in the garden, and all the plants are in pots from the previous owners, so all we have to do is drag them in place and cover them in pebbles. The pebbles act as a mulch and also keep weeds down, I hope. The weeds here are pretty grizzly though and grow easily through concrete so we'll see how effective it is!

The mini trees are called money trees and are a bit like bonsais. They will probably not get much bigger than they are now. They must be very old as they take years and years to grow. We have around 10 good sized ones in pots and hope to use them all. The other plants are various cacti and we have put flower bulbs under the pebbles for the spring. It should all be in full flower for our guests in September and October!