Exploring the Land of the Long White Cloud

Now, as you know, I like to make cakes. An opportunity came up (via someone at work) to make a 6th birthday cake in the shape of a dinosaur. Since that's not necessarily the cake I would just randomly try, I decided to do it. I used a tutorial I found here: http://www.soyouthinkyourecrafty.com/t-rex-cake-tutorial-2/ And I managed to come up with this: The pitfall of not putting any arms on it (as I had planned before I chose that tutorial) was that the kid thought it was a crocodile instead. Oh well. I should have known that without arms, it's just not t-rex even though their arms didn't really help . It was a gluten-free cake too which is not something I venture into very often. But I will tell you that the secret is beans. It wasn't long before this cake was extinct.

Check out the tomatoes, basil, cucumber and dill from my garden! My reward for a couple hours of gardening! If only the garden made olive oil, balsamic vinegar and cheese too...

For those of you who haven't visited us between Christmas and the end of January yet, here is a glimpse of the festival of lights that goes on. What happens is they spend weeks stringing up the park in the city with lights and then for just over a month, they light it up each night and most nights there is live music (or movies) for free. It's great. We managed to go about 5 or 6 nights this year (sometimes it was too hard to stay up until dark!) and most of the music was brilliant. Unfortunately they have been cutting back year-to-year so I think the music nights are fewer and overall it was shorter than last year but hopefully with wise spending the council can keep it going. These pics are from the very last night this season. The band that was on was called Sola Rosa and they were the perfect blend of beats, vocals and groovin. I also came across this video tour of the lights at night:  So, if you are considering a visit, we highly recommend planning it f

So one hot summer evening last month, Dustin went out to run an errand and I stayed home. He stopped off at the best ice cream shop in town and came home with an ice cream cone for us both! That's not the interesting part: I am just picturing him driving home with his hands on the wheel, full of ice cream cones, having to catch the drips before they land on the dash (or himself) and trying to save enough to share when he got home... Another summer activity Dustin was busy with was to take down our asbestos fence (only because he wouldn't let me help) and while he was at it, he found a massive weta! Then we fed it to the chooks. So hot evenings and lots of work in the yard have been part of our summer lately.