In which I become older, eat a lot, and be spoilt.

It's so waaarm today. Well, me with my English-person-temperature-tolerance thought it was warm anyway. I also saw a mega-cockroach scuttling across the pavement on the way home from work this evening, a sight normally reserved for summer, so I'm obviously not the only one that thought it was warm.










Mark and I walked the full Bondi-Coogee cliff walk over the June bank holiday weekend. It was actually the first time we'd ever done the whole thing in one go, which was surprising! We did it both directions for good measure, which took about 3 hours with a good bit of dilly-dallying thrown in. It was a glorious day for it, blazing sun, warm but not hot. I carried my jacket most of the way but wasn't sticky and uncomfortable. I guess something like this is much better done in winter than summer.
When we got back to Bondi we went straight to Fishmongers on Hall Road and STUFFED ourselves on fish and chips.

My birthday was fun! I especially liked having a birthday on the Saturday of a bank holiday weekend! And it was the Queen's Birthday Holiday so I was able to fib that I was actually the Queen and the day off was in my honour. We got up and went for breakfast at Black Star in Newtown - delicious pastries and coffee and it was great to sit out on the pavement in the winter sun. Then we hit the CBD for some shopping - I ended up with a great leather jacket and a new blouse - and we ate lunch at the antipasto bar in the food hall of David Jones. Cheese and antipasto plates and a glass of wine later, we headed to Surry Hills for a little more shopping and a coffee in Kawa on Crown Street, before heading back to Newtown for a cocktail in Corridor followed by dinner at new restaurant Bloodwood.

Bloodwood was a really good experience. It's quite an industrial looking place, with exposed bulbs and pipes along the ceilings, so a bit different to the average cosy restaurant set up. The menu consists of lots of smaller dishes made for sharing. We ordered cuttlefish salad, polenta chips with gorgonzola dipping sauce, mushrooms in red wine sauce and trifle for pudding (posh trifle!). Haha, I was on the phone to mi madre and told her I had "mushrooms on toast and then trifle" and realised it sounded like I'd been to a rubbish cafe in the 70s or something. It was good, honest!

For my birthday I got cake forks, cheese knife, cake slice, the new Snow Leopard operating system for Mac (haha, a bit like the Simpsons episode where Homer buys Marge the bowling ball that says "Homer" on it hahaha), and SEWING MACHINE(!!!) from Mark, sewing bits (including the best pin cushion EVER) and books from Mark's parents, and Alice in Wonderland DVD, jewellry and poems from mi madre and padre. What a lucky pie !!

After all that fun it was so hard to go back to work after the bank holiday! It doesn't help that my job has been a bit frenetic these past couple of weeks. It's the end of financial year on wednesday this week so the pressure is on!

Mark has been a bit under the weather this week - on Thursday morning he was in bed until 9.30am which is quite worrying for someone who considers 7am to be an EPIC lie in. He's a bit better today though so hopefully a great deal of marauding can be done at the weekend. We need sun to be healthy!