Have you ever just wanted to look at so many flowers that your brain might explode? Have you ever wanted those colourful displays of flowers to be arranged in themed garden beds?
Well, you need to get yo’self to Floriade, dawg! It’s Australia’s celebration of Spring! And one of Canberra’s most popular events of the year!
Flowers! And rides for the kids for when they get bored of looking at HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS OF FLOWERS.
OK, so I had never been to Floriade before and I was expecting it to be pretty lame because it is kind of one of those Canberra jokes like “roundabouts” “Skyfire” and “Summernats!”. But I was actually pretty impressed. Maybe it is because I share the same interests as many of Canberra’s retirees? Maybe it is because I like colourful things? Maybe because admission was free? Maybe it is because I’ve already lived in Canberra since February , so I’ve acclimatised? I dunno. But I was impressed.
PRETTY!
More photos of flowers after the jump…
Somebody has been sticking these little pieces of masking tape in the girls bathrooms at the ANU, with little messages on them like this one. It is a rather sweet idea.
I took this photo the other morning on my way over to work. Since March, I’ve been starting work at 5.30am, which means a very early wake up well before dawn (especially hard over the cold Canberra winter). It has been difficult to balance with uni… especially since all of my classes are in the evening. Such long days. I’m really pleased I was offered some other work so that now I don’t have to get up so early… I could have lived with the seven-days-a week early starts for longer if I wasn’t trying to balance full time uni as well. Six weeks left until I am a Master… and then, it looks like I am moving to Timor Leste? Should make the blog more interesting, for sure!
A few weeks back I was lucky enough to go to my friend Mel’s wedding to the lovely Martin up the NSW North Coast. We stayed in Byron Bay, but the wedding was held in the Bexhil Open Air Cathedral, which was stunning, and the reception was at Mel’s parents house in the newly landscaped yard (as in… the bride had bruises on her from doing the landscaping the day before the wedding!). It was all gorgeous! It is such a beautiful part of the country up there… an area I hadn’t visited since I was a child.
And what a gorgeous couple as well. (Check out their engagement shoot… the photos are just perfect.)
The wedding was wonderful and so much fun… but it was also super super fun to stay in an apartment in Byron by the beach with my ladies! We had such a great time hanging out in Byron, drinking mimosas and getting glammed up for the big day.
It was a great escape… a way to recharge the batteries, catch up with friends and celebrate the lovely love of Mel and Martin.
When I left DC before finishing my Masters, one of the professors there wrote in an email to me that it was unfortunate that I was leaving, for a number of reasons… one of them being that I would be missing DC at its best, during the spring when the cherry blossoms come out down at the Tidal Basin.
I hope I still get to see the cherry blossoms in DC one day, because I did love that city… but Canberra offered up a little consolation prize right on my own street last month, which was rather nice.
I bought a new bike! I had an old mountain bike that I had been using last summer, but while it was a good bike in terms of having lots of gears etc, the hunching over forward-leaning style bike wasn’t particularly confortable for me as a curvy lady (plus… couldn’t wear low or loose cut tops on bike without flashing everyone!). It didn’t fit my “lifestyle” and so I didn’t ride it enough. So I invested in a cruiser style bike that is very Amsterdam chic!
It is an XDS Limited Ladies bike.
I went for a lovely ride on Lake Burley Griffin yesterday on it and loads of people stopped me to say how cute the bike was! I also rode it to the shops last night and piled it up with groceries, and this morning I rode it to a cafe where I locked it up out the front and then sat on a sofa outside with a coffee and watched all the people wander up and look at it and say how cute it was.
Unfortunately, it’s still too cold to rock a cute dress/leggings look with the bike, and unfortunately Canberra’s helmet laws also cramp my new Amsterdam chic style somewhat, but in summer I will be rocking the dress on bike look for sure. Also planning to cruise on down to the Dickson pool on it in a skirt and my awesome gingham retro swimmers I bought from ModCloth a few weeks back and a pair of oversized sunglasses when the weather gets warm enough for the pool to open.
There was one thing I didn’t notice when I bought the bike though and I only saw it today when I was locking it up:
The bike is called Betty! What a perfect match!! I hope we have lots of fun times together.
Remember when a sick day was actually a sick day? You’d stay home in bed all nice and warm and the only exertion would come from changing the channel from one trashy daytime TV show to another and from coughing up half a lung? There were no other expectations upon you?
Now, thanks to the internet, you can still perform your full duty to capitalism without exposing your colleagues to noxious germs!
Even if you are deathly ill with some evil flu that you got from your ballerina sister, it’s still possible to work from home if you have a WiFi connection and a job where the staffing levels have fallen to the point where there aren’t really enough people to cover your responsibilities for a day or two anyway.
But is this really wise?
For example, today I got a receipt from ModCloth in my email confirming that my order had been shipped out. An order that I thought I decided I didn’t have enough money to make, but my pseudoephedrine-addled mind must have clicked purchase on anyway. Would you let a drugged up snot zombie wander around a retail store to make poor budgeting decisions? No? How come it is OK for the same snot zombie to perform tasks that are important for your company?
Putting paid employment and dangerous access to online shopping aside, Internet access also kills the sick day by making one feel laziness guilt. You know, the kind of guilt that you feel when you aren’t DOING anything except being sick. As a result, I have applied for two jobs for the end of the year in the past two days just to feel productive.
Lord only knows what I wrote to them…
Many of the parts of the museum at the Australian War Memorial are being renovated and updated. In the old-skool part of the museum, however, there are these amazing dioramas depicting battlefield scenes from WWI and WWII. They are so detailed! I hope they stay in the museum for a long time, because they are a work of art… even if they are a little bit kitschy by today’s multimedia museum standards.
Barely a day goes by without our faithful leader, PM Julia Gillard, or our faithful swimsuit-model-wannabe-leader Mr Abbott, dropping the “W.F.” bomb. Working families. Sometimes it is “H.W.F”, or hardworking families, when they feel like sticking it to all those out there who self-identify as lazy. Which is nobody.
We’ve seen plenty of this recently. Depending on who is talking, working families will either feel nothing from the carbon tax or will be reduced to begging on street corners to scrape together enough spare change to afford to turn on the plasma long enough to watch Masterchef each night.
According to every single one of our political leaders, their policies will never, ever negatively impact on working families. The concerns of working families are paramount to both sides of the political spectrum. All in all, it seems that working families alone yield the total sum of political power in the country. No matter your views on the carbon tax, they are grazing on a pretty sweet political paddock (and generating a fair bit of greenhouse gas in the process) in terms of their ability to influence.
However, this raises an important question. Ummm… WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US? Funnily enough, some Australians don’t actually fit into the much-loved yet problematic “working families” category of swing voter. Let’s try to break it down, even though it’s actually fairly difficult to pigeonhole an entire population with any degree of accuracy.
Keep reading… it gets funny I promise…
