montage monday: jacaranda

While today's Monday Montage possibly isn't one of my most polished efforts, it's less random than usual in that it's in honour of Andrew. Every time I see the Jacaranda blossoms start to fall all over everything (well, since last year anyway... but then I don't know that I'd even noticed them before last year), I automatically think of him... and then he went and posted a gorgeous image of the fallen blossoms.

Plus, hello, purple... I just loves me some purple...

Of course, with the weather that way it's been the last couple of days, when I went out this morning without my camera there were fricken blossoms all over everywhere... carpets of the things... typical...

Just quickly before I go any further... Glow in the Dark Bubble Bath... who the hell comes up with this stuff? My kingdom for a bathtub...

Moving on...

Saturday's weekly shopping adventure was a big-ass exercise in frustration... firstly, because Ma had her hair cut (I realised this morning that the little gay boy that cuts it was chanelling Kylie's new short 'do in not just the cut but also the way he styled her hair... but whether it was conscious or unconscious I don't know) we didn't get to go out superduper early (ie 8am), instead it was more like 10am or so, which is actually still earlier than we used to go shopping before we started going really early (that makes sense, right?)... but ME NO LIKEE! I've obviously gotten used to shopping nice and early with only the Elderly Insomniac Brigade to keep us company, and there just seemed to be too many people... yucky ta...

I'm like this far away from turning all Howard Hughes, I swear...

I grabbed a couple of packets of the Sanitarium Vegie Delights "meat free" products... the Stir-Fry Strips and the Traditional Soy Sausages BBQ to be exact... just to try... quit making that face at me Tom. While I can cook chicken 108 different ways, and do a great line in slow cooked red meat in curries and whatnot, for whatever reason me and quick cooking of red meat... either stir frying beef, or even just cooking a steak... all goes to hell in a handbasket and ends up looking slightly grey... so I reasoned that if it's not really red meat, I should actually be able to cook it properly... we'll see... I'm pretty sure these are the same ones that I tried at the Body Mind and Psychic Expo with J and Monkey when they were here, or, if not the same brand, then at least variations on a theme, and those ones were actually really nice...

Anyway, after food shopping we headed into town to make use of another one of those Border's vouchers (yay, 40% off this time, although the book I actually wanted wasn't in stock) and to track down a packet of the paper for Stu to print the Seahorse Calendar Project on, since Ma was very pleased with the samples from Friday...

We started off going to Officeworks... which is where Stu sent us... then we tried WC Penfolds (which could have had it, but was closed), Premier Art Supplies, Ted's Cameras, Harvey Norman, Woolworths, and eventually took a side trip to Kmart... nobody had that particular Canon matt photo paper. On the way back from Kmart, I sent Stu an amusing text message full of profanity (not directed at him, just at the paper and the situation) and he called and advised us to try a Harvey Norman store other than the one in the city... which Ma did on her way home from my place... and yes, you guessed it... they had the paper in stock... Grrrr...

It's good that we finally found it, but highly annoying that we ran all over town with no success...

Oh, and to top it all off... I realised when I was poking through my cupboard for some dinner that I'd actually managed to leave at least three or four items in the bottom basket of the cute little basket trolley (or EZcarts as I just discovered they were called) that I always use around the supermarket (in fact, the supermarket that I go to is one of the few who have them)...

On a side note, I freakin LOVE the EZcart... with two baskets, it's just big enough for everything I need, I can zip in and out of really narrow spaces that you could never get a big trolley through (like when random people are blocking up most of the aisle trying to make a lifestyle choice on an item), and unlike big trolleys they never seem to have steering problems... sorry... didn't mean to turn into an infomercial there...

So yeah, I'd put some stuff in the bottom basket because the top one was overflowing, and then for whatever reason, got about three of the items out (including my Iced Coffee), and for some strange reason, I left the rest behind. Now that I think about it, it's doubly ironic, because I nabbed the cart off someone who had just finished with it, and she'd left something in the bottom basket, which I returned to her. Karma obviously hated me on Saturday for some reason.

Sunday seems to have become my scheduled painting day... I'm very, very nearly finished two out of the remaining three blogger canvases... and probably would have totally finished those two had it not been for the fact that I smudged one (only a little, and a second coat in the offending area will fix it right up) and need to touch up the sides of the other one to finally finish it off. Sadly, the fourth blogger canvas is going to have to go to canvas heaven... or wherever it is that completely ruined canvases go when you can't rescue them... I just overworked the damn thing, and because I used the gold paint quite thickly on it in a couple of spots, I can't even paint over it and start again. We also picked up some slightly better black and white paint while we were at Kmart (the same brand as the gold and silver), and it looks like that solved my problem with the Asian inspired canvas I'm working on... nice thick black coverage.

Oh, and on the subject of Blogger Beta, I have to say, I very much prefer the new spellcheck to the old one... although it did try to eat one of my images somehow yesterday... don't know what happened there...

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