Shopping for shoes and stationery

Had a couple of quick visits to the shops this week. Mainly because I needed some shoes for school, which goes back tomorrow! Saw this great sign in Typo. Love it!

So I bought these:

and these:

on sale from the Shoe Rack.

And I couldn't resist buying all these gorgeous things for school from Typo, which is my favourite shop:

The A4 notebooks are 3 for $10. Gotta love that. And the hopscotch pic is a mouse mat! xx

Foo Fighters Sunday Session

The Foo Fighters are very cool.

I can't believe that their song, Walk, didn't make it into the Triple J Hottest 100.  This song rocks! I love the melody. And the clip is amusing.

If you enjoyed that one, here's another one, Best of You, from a couple of years ago:

I love this one too, Times Like These, which is a bit of an oldie:

Joining up over at Do I really Wanna Blog, for Thea's Sunday Session. See you there!

Jason Bateman

So, we happened to watch some Jason Bateman films this last week. They are so crass, lewd and rude that I barely recommend them, but they were very funny. And I've gotta say, Jason Bateman is such a good comedy actor. His face just does everything right. And something that stayed with me through both films was that he looks so much like Neil Finn of Crowded House fame.

I know there is an age difference, but they have the same mouth and hair, cheeks and eyebrows, nose, and ..I could go on but you get the idea! Hold on, they have different ears and their eyes are different colours. But don't you think they look like long-lost brothers??

What I Wore Wednesday

I always get a haircut just before school goes back, and this time I got a colour as well after about 5 years of not having one. I don't like using products with chemicals, but you've got to do something when your hair looks like it's fading to grey!

It's been so hot around here, that I've been wearing dresses all summer. Thank goodness for Crossroads sales! I love this one which looks a bit Moroccan or something. It ends just above my knees which is the perfect length.

I'm linking up with What I Wore Wednesday over at The Pleated Poppy.

A Project A Week - 4 projects in my journal

Just in case you were wondering if I'd managed to simplify my life at all, I'm bringing you 4 pages of my A Project A Week journal today.

Not to say that these projects are absolutely complete, but I've definitely made some progress!
This is the cover of the journal I am using:

And these are the introductory pages
(click on the pic to enlarge, if you like):

My first project was to update my blogs: Achieved!

The Second Project was to sort through my magazines - what a job! I went from 150 magazines down to 20. I'm pretty pleased with that, so this project is now finished and achieved!

Project Three involved going through my hard drive and external hard drive, to find, organise, and label all my photo folders, mainly so that I could find all the photos we have taken of our backyard over the years. My beautiful hubby has done so much work in the yard recently, that it is finally the yard we have always wanted! I will do a post soon, just about our Backyard Blitz,

so you can see all the Before and Afters. 

As I go back to work next week, Project Four has been about planning my year's overview for school, units of study, assessment folders, parent folders, the first week's daily workpad, and generally thinking of ways to make my classroom look fresh and appealing.

My next project is to plan my term's teaching in detail, and then I'm going to move onto doing some of my art for my etsy shop.

I can't wait! xx

Summer Reading Bliss

I've been lucky enough to have some time at a quiet part of the beach this week, and read a couple of books which were perfect for the setting. You can read my reviews of these books here.

The sunsets and balmy nights promise more of this heatwave.

Right now, I welcome it!

I have a stack of books by Australian writers that I'm about to read. They include,
That'd be Right by William McInnes

Jessica by Bryce Courtenay

and The Valley by Di Morrissey.

Just trying to decide which one to pick up first!

Check out what everyone else is reading at Sheila's Book Journey:

David Guetta - Sunday Session

All I've listened to in the car over the last few months is this
David Guetta album:

I just love the vocals of the two songs I'm sharing today. Watch right to the end of both clips, because they have very cool endings.

This first one features Usher, who I first saw in The Bold and the Beautiful many years ago, and now he's mega famous. Such a catchy toon! And a good one to go with these hot summer days we're having.

I've been waiting for AGES for them to release a video for Titanium and I think it's brilliant. Sia is the featuring vocalist. Gotta love those high notes!

I'm linking up with Thea at Do I Really Wanna Blog for her Sunday Session.

Well, it's nearly Sunday anyway. Head on over to hear some more great songs. xx

A Hot, Hot Day

Yesterday, we had some catch up time with family and friends, in the 39 degrees heat. We went to Mum's place for lunch with my sister and her two little cuties. Thanks for the yummy lunch Mum! Blake is getting mighty big now, he's three months old already!

Lily was busily playing all afternoon, so that I could barely get a shot of her! So here's a blurry one.

She is such a bundle of fun!

That night we went out to dinner with our friends Richard and his Mum, Betty. Betty goes back home to NSW on Monday after being here since Christmas. She is so sweet!

We went to Caffe Amaretto, which has the BEST food! I had chilli mussels, which is my favourite dish of all time, and a yumlicious slice of cookies and cream cheesecake. Gosh.

I managed to avoid fizzy drink all day. Yay me! xx

Goodbye fizzy drink, hello water!

Last year around this time, I was heading the raw food revolution, and pretty much eating nothing but raw fruits and vegetables. It was great! I loved it, but I started to look a bit wasted away. So I went back to normal food and now I have beefed up again, and ...well, my hips don't lie! I'd like to lose a bit of this extra weight, particularly the tyre around the middle, so I'm going to choose just a few changes to my diet, which should help the cause.

This week's challenge is for me to stop drinking fizzy drinks, and get back to drinking water. We have a water dispenser, which is brilliant, but over Christmas I got a bit excited about fizzy grapefruit juice, apple juice and lemonade in general. Naughty, naughty, naughty!

I started drinking only water yesterday and am loving it already! So refreshing and cleansing, and got to be better for my teeth!

Anyone want to join me in conquering the fizzy?

Rue Magazine

I am full of admiration for people/bloggers who have created their own online magazines. It truly astounds me that so few people working on an idea can come up with something so polished.

Check out the newly released issue of Rue, created by one of my fave bloggers, Crystal from Plush Palate.

It is an interior decorating magazine, and also features some Valentine's Day gift ideas in this issue. I already have taken away some inspiring ideas from it! Just click on the magazine cover to read. You may even want to check out past issues too!

Golden Globes 2012 - Pretty girls and dresses

I spent the morning watching the Golden Globes, which I love to do to find out the best movies to see and also to see all the pretty dresses. I even shed a tear when Morgan Freeman won the Cecil B.Demille award.

Love Morgan Freeman.

Here are some of the prettiest ladies in the world looking really good.

My fave was Natalie Portman:

And second standout was Dianna Argon from Glee:

I love the detail in that bodice!

Then Kate Winslet. Her outfit wasn't amazing but I loved her hair and makeup:

Nicole. Her dress was a bit weird, but from the waist up it was stunning, and I loved her hair and make-up:

Kate Beckinsale. Love that nude colour. I prefer the bottom of this dress to the top, as that square shape just doesn't look comfortable. Again her hair and make-up were gorgeous:

And those earrings!

 I loved the colour of Jessica Alba's dress:

Oh, I do love a good awards show!
Which is your favourite dress?

Taking Down the Christmas Tree

One of the bloggers I follow was talking about what to do with the pretty boxes from their Christmas presents, and I thought I'd show you what I do - store Christmas decorations in them!

I was lucky to get a Scarlet ghd hair straightener from Jonathon and Jack and it was in such a pretty box! One side opens out when you take off the lid, so I stored all the soft material decorations in that one.

My Mum bought me a pair of sparkly black shoes, and all my round baubles went in that box:

Jonathon and Jack also bought me a pair of shoes, and a bunch of pretty ornaments went in that box:

I received a star shaped Christmas platter from one of the children in my class, and I used that box to store small metal and wooden decorations:

Our friend Richard gave us this box of amazingly beautiful smelling aroma reeds (oh gosh, if you could just smell them!) and I put all our delicate paper decorations in that box:

My Dad and stepmum Jane gave me Heidi Klum's yummy new perfume Shine, so I put all the Christmas cards we received into that box.

You know the clear boxes that hold star bows? I filled two of those with more decorations. One has precious decorations that Jack made when he was in Pre-Primary.

And I got this box of Lindor chocolates for Christmas which is good for holding fragile and little ornaments:

So now the Christmas decorations are all packed away for another year. By the way, when they were on the tree they looked like this:

Oh, such a lovely time is Christmas!