Rum & Dal

Beautiful sunny day, started off with an appointment in St Kilda.  All went ok until we left the building… the parking cost of $24 for only three hours!  You can just imagine how much it hurt the old wallet!

Anyway, moving on with the day we decided to take the rest of the day off work and take a trip to Hoppers Crossing to again look for furniture and ideas for the house.  Merrily going down the Princess Highway at 90kph in the 4th lane.  All of a sudden I realise the accelerator isn’t doing anything.  PANIC! On momnetum alone manage to get the car to the left lane but just missing the slip road by a couple of meters which would have taken me to a service station - damn! “Do we have breakdown cover?” I ask Rum.  “No” he says - damn, damn! “Who do we call?” I say. “Ghostbusters”, he says - damn, damn, damn! So we get out and go to the service station, get the number for RACV (Victoria’s Roadside Recovery), and call them up.  As we don’t have membership we are in the middle of processing this and the phone cuts out! Back to the service station to get more credit for the phone… back on the phone to RACV.  Incidentally, in the UK the first thing the RAC ask you is your mobile number, even before your name, just incase you do get cut off, they ring you back.  Now thats service!

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So we’ve been in Melbourne for 16 months and are yet to have ourselves decent fish n chips.
The quest started a week after we landed here, many chippies were sampled but always failed scoring 1/5. Main reason for the rejection was the batter quality and the use of frozen chips with lemon as apposed to salt and finger. Criminal offence.

Us Brits have a set criteria when we’re abroad, alcohol, tea, fish n chips and someone who appreciates the British sense of humour.

Our dear friends Kate and Gerald, who are born again Brits from East London were very exited when telling us about there experience at a fish n chip shop that they came across in Brighton. (Melbourne also has a Brighton not quite as forward and extravagant, if you know what I mean

So to set the scene… it was a beautiful sunny day, Dal and I walked down to the station to meet Kate and G. We were early so we ducked into the near by pub (Young and Jackson) for a quick pint, as you do and were soon in the mood for a greasy fish n chip, lovely jubbly.

Took the train down to Brighton, if it wasn’t a Sunday Dal and I would have taken our hip flasks, oh well next time. Once in Brighton Kate took us to the chippy via the scenic route, Beautiful houses, lovely lush gardens, automatic gates, definitely dream homes for us.

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Got there eventually.

Well it’s been over a year so we thought we would update the blog theme, something different for the eye.  However we had problems installing and uploading the new wordpress software.  At one point the website stopped working and fell apart, those of you who visit regulary would know this.

We used firefox FTP to upload wordpress rather than the FTP software that came with Windows Vista.  I would recommend not to use the windows FTP as it just doesn’t have the bells and whistles and is a lot slower causing timeout issues.

Now we have wordpress working we are experimenting with various themes.  We have chosen Abstract Green Waves though we just need to tweak it.  Dal and I don’t quite have the know how but were learning slowly.

Bye for now, lets see what else we can tweak

As a birthday gift from Parm and Sian this year, Rum and I received a popcorn maker for the new house.  The idea was we wait until December, have a movie night and enjoy some freshly made popcorn.  Well we couldn’t wait.  It was a nice idea but we simply couldn’t hold out till the house was ready, we had to use it!  It took Rum about a minute to get it out of the box and to plug it in.  Lights on, camera running and action in about 5 minutes.

We let it run for about 3 minutes for the kettle to warm up, added 2 teaspoons of oil, 1 scoop of popcorn and that was it. Popcorn was popping out of the kettle and the room was smelling like a cinema foyer. Two scoops later we had half a bucket of popcorn and a very smiley Rum!

Cleaning it was no big deal, one wet wipe and one dry wipe.  Job done and ready for next time :)  All we need now is to get some popcorn oil and popcorn flavours… this time it was salted… my favourite. Right, I am off to find a toothpick!!!  View video below.

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Happy Birthday Dal

Not quite the same when you not at home in the UK, having a few drinks and home made somosa.

However Dal celebrated her birthday at work.  As you can see from the grin I think she ate most of the cake.  Thanks Mae for making a lovely cake.

All the best for the future