Tassie trip and other things

Hello, it's been a while! I didn't mean to take so long but a mix of holidays, preparing for future holidays, trying to make a new summer wardrobe before said holiday, getting sick, stressing about trying to get 3 projects done at work in too little time, and other misc worries have meant my motivation to blog has been pretty low! But I wanted to get one out before two months went past, so here it is!

Tassie trip

In June, Henry and I headed to Hobart for a week with some friends for a little holiday!

We really lucked out with lovely weather. It was cold but mostly sunny, and warmer than back home.

tassie-1

tassie-2

We also went to a miniature village of old Hobart. I love a miniature village and this one was fantastic, so many fun details and I really enjoyed the landscaping.

Also, Tassie has some great food, so we ate well! Made an effort to have a lot of seafood, and I also managed to get everyone to head down to my fav cider place Pagan Cider, where we tasted a ton of great cider and brought back some cherry and plum with us. Highly recommended, as they are not too sweet!

Also that baked alaska you can see on the top right is one of the best things I've ever tasted.

tassiefoods

The main reason we headed down to Tassie was to go to the Dark Mofo winter festival. We have been once ages ago, so it was interesting to see how it had changed since covid etc. I would say I felt like there was a lot less free accessible interesting art installations around compared to when we went previously, it seems to have tilted more to ticketed music events. But we still had a nice time, it's a good atmosphere to be out there in the cold and the dark and having a shared experience with other people :)

dark-mofo

Also how good is this lil cocktail shaking robot working hard at the winter feast? Look at him go!

roboshaker

We also discovered that Tassie has some great second hand stuff. Some smaller second hand markets and op shops, but we hit up two tip shops while we were there and they were amazing. Everything tidy and well organised, and so much good stuff! If we had driven over on the ferry I definitely would have picked up one of the 20 or so vintage singer sewing machines I found there.

I did pick up the full collection of the Dragon Age series on disk though, which was a nice find! Collecting my analogue stuff as who knows if those games are going to be deleted off the internet at any time.

second-hand

Getting Sick

Of course, as soon as I got back from Tassie, I got sick and isolated myself in the spare room for over a week getting slightly better and slightly crazier as every day went on. Bagheera occasionally tried to heal me with his purrs while I watched some old musicals. Also my sister sent me a photo she found of me as a kid being sick so I thought that would be fun picture to throw in to complement how I was feeling:

sick

Thats how I was feeling inside.

Sake festival

When I was feeling better, we headed into Melbourne to go to the Annual Sake festival, and hit up some Korean BBQ beforehand to line our stomaches. The festival was pretty fun, tried a lot of nice sake and bought a bunch to take home, including some yuzushu and some sparkling sake which was delish.

bbqsakefest

New car

We also made some big changes recently, we decided to finally sell our old car and get a cute little electric car. I don't really care about cars but I love this lil guy - it's so tiny, and it's nice to be off petrol and being able to charge the car off the solar. Car name suggestions? We took it for it's first test drive up to Maryborough and also took Henry's new film camera for a spin too.

newcar

Learning new things

I recently also decided to start learning Japanese again, so I have been taking some private lessons with a local tutor. I'm enjoying it quite a bit and feeling good that I remember some of my old pre-covid lessons. I am hoping just to get to a basic enough level to have simple conversations when we travel there again next!

Sewing projects

I have made a ton of new things in the past few months but I haven't gotten around to photographing them so I'm not ready to share yet, but I will soon!

Upcoming holidays

We're going to be heading off to Europe very soon. Looking forward to escaping a long dreary rainy winter. We've planned out most of our European travels - Milan, French alps, Bologna, a nice scenic train trip over to Switzerland, and then a sleeper train to The Netherlands, before we head off to the UK to spend time with my sister in Kent, with probably a few day trips to London and a trip to Bath.

trip-map

📺 What I've been watching

  • Hadestown - I went to see it with a friend a few weeks ago and I enjoyed it a lot - I went in not knowing much about it at all.
  • Murderbot Diaries - I've always enjoyed Alexander SkarsgÃ¥rd and he's really fun in this, as is the rest of the cast. Wish episodes were longer, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

📚 What I've been reading

  • Leigh Bardugo - The Familiar - Halfway through this one and I'm enjoying it quite a bit

🎮 What I've been playing

Nothing much except Balatro. Suggest something for my switch that will be nice and chill for my long upcoming plane trips?

🎵 What I've been listening to