Happy GM’s Birthday ♥

It’s GM’s bday today!

Happy birthday GM!  May you have a wonderful, successful, happy, prosperous and smooth sailing year ahead! *(^______^)*

GM’s colleagues at work gave him a huge (and very funny) card and a little Transformers present.  How sweet.  Everybody knows he loves Transformers!

They also gave him this very tasteful, and tasty, present.  Hahaha.

Before his birthday, I asked GM what he wanted to do.  He said, “Nothing really”.  So I planned a very relaxing day of going for sushi, followed by a movie.  However, when GM got up this morning he decided he didn’t want to see a movie after all!  And in the end we didn’t go for sushi neither because he felt like takeaway thai.  And what the birthday boy wants the birthday boy gets!  So I treated him to thai food, from right – pad thai (bit sweet), tom yam soup (good, it was nice and spicy today), green vegetable curry (we always get vegetable curry because we don’t like big hunks of meat in our curry), red vegetable curry (this was better than the green curry today), special fried rice and coconut rice.  We didn’t finish all of it because even though it doesn’t look like much, it was actually really quite a lot.  So that’s thai food for breakfast tomorrow! :D

Incidentally, if you look at the top left of the photo you can make out a steering wheel on a wheel stand.  That’s my birthday present to GM!  The steering wheel that is.  He won’t let me pay for the stand.

In the evening we went over to his parents’ place for a roast that his sister and her bf had prepared for him for his birthday.  How lovely.

GM’s plate of birthday roast.  Yum.  It was roast lamb studded liberally with cloves of fragrant garlic, accompanied by honey carrots and other vegetables, creamy mash, steamed white rice and onions in reduced lamb roast gravy.  Very good.

GM cutting the cake that his entire family baked him.  Isn’t that sweet?  Apparently this was a real joint effort by everyone, from GM’s mum to the kids (GM’s little cousins).  Awww.  I did some of the piping!  I did the chinese words (Gor gor) and some of the letters!

Cross section of the cake.  I think GM was happy.  Which is nice :)  I’m happy that he’s happy!

Drink Your Dinner

Another of our new favourite meals – homemade mushroom soup.

We had this with lots of pepper and bagels with ham and tabasco sauce.  Today I had it with pepper and bagels with Vegemite!  I have decided I really like Vegemite, it’s like Marmite but not half as salty.

You’d be surprised how satisfying and filling a bowl (or two) of soup can be.  After all, it’s just a liquid right?  Well, it’s a liquid which is chockful of chunky bits.  Yum.

Springtime Easter Weekend

Spring is in the air at last!

We had a four day weekend here because of Good Friday and Easter Monday and it was a very welcome break from work.  Despite that though, we didn’t rest much and did lots of fun things so it was a very hectic weekend!

On Friday we went to our mates’ for a whole day and night’s eating, drinking and hanging out session.  I watched lots of movies, some of them gambled (mahjong) and I even fell asleep for a bit on their couch!

Unfortunately it was a bit drizzly and grey that day so we couldn’t have a barbecue like we had first planned, but we still went ahead with drinking Pimms with strawberries anyway haha.  Mna made us roast chicken for dinner which was nice – it would have gone down better if we hadn’t all pigged out on KFC for lunch before he arrived.  Oops.  Our fault, not his.

The next day GM and I went to watch a play called New Boy out in central London.  We bumped straight into the Tamil protests that were going on and had to take a detour round the block even though the theatre was right across the road.  We got there in good time for our play though and it was really really good.

Photo by Tim Whitby/Getty Images Europe

The theatre was really tiny so it made for a very intimate theatre going experience as the actors were just in front of us.   It felt like someone was staging a play in a living room!  The staff of the studios added to the cosy, informal atmosphere by laying chocolate on every seat in celebration of Easter.  Aww, how sweet!  GM and I were in the second row (there were only four rows) on the side so we had a very good view, although I think it would have been impossible to have had a lousy view in that theatre.  The play was really funny, a little bit touching, the actors were charismatic and likeable (apart from the young girl who let her fellow cast members down with her inferior acting skills) and I enjoyed it so much that it ranks up in my top three best theatre going experiences so far.

The star of the show was Nicholas Hoult who was the kid in About A Boy.  He looked like the child of Satan back then but he has blossomed so much!  He’s extremely goodlooking now and is a very competent actor; his portrayal of his character was very endearing and he really connected to and engaged with the audience.

I’m really glad I went to watch this play as I was wavering between going and not.  In fact, if it had a longer run in the theatre I would go and see it again but unfortunately it was only playing for a little less than a month and we caught the second last performance.   My review is – FANTASTIC!  I am now a Nicholas Hoult fan.  And also Mel Giedroyc’s, she was so hilarious in her first scene I nearly killed myself laughing.

After the play GM and I were starving as we hadn’t eaten the whole day (we had to rush out after returning from the gym) so we went to have Chinese food at Wong Kei’s.  We were meant to meet up with Tap and Hic for dinner maybe, but I texted to say that we’d finished earlier than expected so we were going to eat and then head home.  However, in the middle of our meal Tap texted to say that they were on the way out!  So in the end we met up with them anyway despite having bought takeaway for supper even!  And we had ANOTHER dinner!  I tell you, all this effort in the gym is going to waste because I’m seriously eating double/ triple what I used to and I swear I’ve gotten chunkier.  It was fun anyway, we had a fun time traipsing around Chinatown trying to hunt down a Chinese teapot set.

The next day was a horrible day.  We were meant to have lunch with my neighbour and her family but she texted to say that she had a stomach upset and couldn’t make it.  That was okay because I kind of expect her to cancel most of the time as she has a kid and needs to tend to the kid’s needs first and it’s invariable that sometimes she wouldn’t be able to make the time stipulated or if her kid was sick or sleeping she’d have to cancel.  So that wasn’t the bad part.  The bad part was when GM and I decided to take the train to the shopping area nearby to get some shopping done.  The trains were working fine, we got to the shopping area and I remarked, “Oh nice and quiet today” and soon found out why.  The shops were shut.  For Easter.  I just couldn’t believe it!

After walking down the whole of the shopping street and ascertaining that all the shops were really closed, we went back home.  Sadness.  But at least we had our takeaways from the day before to look forward to.

Today is Easter Monday!  We were given this egg by GM’s sister.  I ate it ages before Easter haha.

Today we went back to the shopping area by train to finally get our shopping done and luckily the shops were opened this time.  GM made doubly sure by phoning up M&S in the centre to make sure they were trading.   I don’t like shopping these days unless I absolutely have to so I made a whirlwind trip around the shopping centre picking up the stuff I knew I wanted (no window shopping for me!).  GM and I did our shopping in about an hour!

When we got home it was nice and quiet so I took the opportunity to take photos of the beautiful flowering trees in my neighbourhood.  We get sakura too!

I love spring, the flowers are so beautiful.  The weather was so beautiful today as well, that’s why you’re seeing blue sky in all my flower photos.  Actually even though a couple of days this weekend has been grey and drizzly it has been very mild.  But of course we prefer it when it’s sunny and warm!

I have been looking up all the wonderful food available in Perth because we are going next week!  Yayyy!!!!!!  I can’t wait!!!  I’m really looking forward to it and it seems like time can’t go fast enough.  In the meantime, I’m torturing myself with photos of all this really scrumptious looking food; I was looking at some first thing this morning and GM had a look too and we were both starving afterwards.  So after our shopping trip we drove………. to the McDonald’s drive-thru.  Hahaha.  And ate shitloads.  Oh dear.

Our new favourite meals are homemade soups with toasted bagels.  This is a butternut squash soup I made, very tasty!

What a lovely weekend.  Now rush forth, week, and let us have the weekend and Perth trip post haste!