April Wrap -up and Signs

Also joining Tom for the signs meme. You can check other signs from around the world in Tom's blog via this link

Friday 1st April, I met up with two of my former work colleagues in Coogee for lunch. It's always nice to catch up with them every 2nd or 3rd month.

         

Saturday 2nd - We went to the 60th birthday lunch of our long time friend Wendy. We met each other in Germany, recently arrived from South Africa, and our husbands worked together on the same project in Siemens Braunschweig. Our kids are more or less the same age and they are still friends with each other too, which is lovely. I took two desserts - a pineapple mousse and a milk flan.

Tuesday 12th - About 3 weeks after being diagnosed with a large tumour, we sadly had to put our 15 1/2 year old Shelley to sleep, when she stopped eating. It was a hard decision to make, but I know she was wasn't well and had been losing even more weight since the diagnosis.  Our son Michael joined us at the vet which was comforting.

I wrote a tribute to Shelley, which you can read here.

We had a long weekend over Easter from Good Friday 15th to Monday 18th, and were invited to our friends W and L on Saturday 16th for a Barbecue and I took a salad and dessert. Otherwise we didn't do anything special for Easter.

Friday 22nd - I had to take Twiggy to the vet, as the day before when I arrived home I noticed a little bit of blood on her blanket. Upon inspection she had a sebaceous cyst below one ear which she had managed to scratch. 

She is a scary cat and I couldn't put her in the carry case, so drove the 10min to the vet with her on the passenger seat howling as if she was going to the gallows. On the return trip now inside the cage she once again howled the 10 minutes until we got home.  She was prescribed a course of antibiotic during 10 days and the cyst has healed.

Twiggy peering at me through the top of the carry cage

Cat signs - the middle one - Cat parking, was at my vet, the others were from a magazine

      

Friday 22nd - our oldest friend Idalia celebrated her 90th birthday at the Swan Yacht Club in Fremantle. It was a lovely party with a buffet, music, speeches and we got to meet some interesting people sitting at our table.

She was one of the first Portuguese women to arrive in Perth and she is such a clever and feisty lady and she makes friends easily.

Her husband who died about 3 or 4 years ago, came a few years before her in a fishing boat with around 20 other people, all the way from Madeira Island via South Africa to Perth, a trip that took them over 70 days! Brave "discoverers"!

The sun setting a we arrived, view of the terrace and from the terrace to the yacht club below

Seafood entree, choice of roast meat, chicken, fish... and a mini pavlova for dessert

The birthday girl blowing the candles on her cake and Jose and I with her

Monday 25th - Anzac Day was a public holiday which is still a very important celebration in Australia.

I didn't go to the city this year but near us the local RSL (Returned and Services League) office had some wreaths by the commemorative plaque.

          

Friday 29th - attended a coconut yogurt and ricotta workshop with Megan Radaich  (a food preserving guru), organized  by our "Community Harvest Group". A great morning, learned new skills and brought home what we made. 

We started by making a berry and chia jam which we then ate with yogurt when we had our coffee/cake break. Then we made one of the recipes for the coconut yogurt using coconut meat and then the ricotta which was for me the most exciting process.

Saturday 30th - Jose and I went into Forrest Place, in the city to see "Bindaran" , a 6 metre high puppet, to mark the change of the Nyoogar weather seasons. The puppet operated by 10 local puppeteers and stories from Aboriginal Elders were shared through speakers inside the puppet.

The Nyoongar calendar has six weather seasons - Birak, Bunuru, Djeran, Makuru, Djilba and Kambarang.

Bindaran puppet

Afterwards we went to Chinatown for dinner.

A few photos taken in the city.... I also saw a few murals...

      

A few of Perth's iconic buildings

Probably my most productive month in furniture painting!                                             I painted a few pieces of furniture - this chest of drawers, from my neighbourhood's verge collection had a damaged bottom drawer and I tried a new technique with narrow wooden slats which were glued to each drawer. It took a lot of cutting....

The white one is the before ...

A MCM (mid-century modern) small desk, which I picked up from a verge after seeing it announced on FB Marketplace. It was in a good state, just needed a cover at the back of the drawers and a good clean.

 

A navy blue bed side table

A pink and purple bedside table

I also sold two of my biggest pieces - the recently painted round table and chairs and a corner unit painted last year. The pic on the bottom corner is the before of the side-tables.

We had a few controlled burns around Perth that made for some gorgeous sunsets where the sky turned orange.

The birds keep coming to my front garden to feed on the seeds I put out daily.

I went to the South African shop and in the parking lot was a car with a sign that resonates with me :)

September Wrap-Up

My husband celebrated his birthday on the 5th. This year we didn't do anything special to celebrate, I baked him a simple cheesecake and we went out to dinner with another couple who we've know for 36 years.

The cats celebrated their 13th birthday on the 17th. Fluffy seems to be going deaf, Twiggy has arthritis and limps when she jumps out of bed after her long naps and Shelley who has always been overweight seems to be the healthiest at the moment.

Shelley, Fluffy and Twiggy

    One of doves that visit our backyard nested in our Bottlebrush tree. A couple of weeks ago two babies hatched, and just today after a few days of climbing around some of the branches, they have taken their first flight.  Mother Dove still eats the bird seed we put in the feeder, so hopefully the babies will follow suit.

    I finished painting a table and chairs for a lady I met via my suburb's "Buy Nothing FB group", and she was thrilled with the result. Her room seems so much brighter now. 

She eventually would like me to paint the rest of her dining room furniture. She has now bought fabric to reupholster the chairs, and I've offered to help her with it.

The bedside tables I bought on Marketplace at the end of last month were painted in pink and sold the day after I finished them.

And this is what the bedside tables and table and chairs looked like... What do you think?

          

I managed to score a lino floor for free on FB Marketplace, and now I have a "wood-like floor" to stage my pieces before advertising them for sale.

The wood like free lino to stage the furniture

Mid month I took the train into the city to meet up with two ex-colleagues.  We walked around Perth's Cultural Centre and to take a peek into the new WA Museum Boola Bardip, which is reopening to the public on the 21st November after 4 years of renovations and building.

  In the area there is a Community Garden, which is very well looked after, with lots of herbs, some veggies, fruit and being Spring some wildflowers.

   

Community garden

Plenty of colour in the city - an orange racing car, a piano covered in Aboriginal art, the colourful pavements leading to the Technical college, a pink food caravan and a rainbow    table and seat.    

            

We had a simple lunch at Yagan Square and the three of us caught the train home.

Yagan Square

   On the 27th, the Western Australian Portuguese Australian Women's Association hosted a High-Tea event for women only at the Scarborough Life Saving Club in the suburb of Scarborough.

The event sold out in the first or second week it was advertised, and it was attended by 77 ladies, and we had a couple of guest speakers - a Portuguese psychologist who talked about Mental Health issues and Domestic Violence and we had a young lady who talked about her personal story about suffering emotional abuse and how she got out of the relationship.

We had a door prize and sold raffles for a few goodies donated to the Association.

The day before the event, while some of the Committee members set up the room and decorated the tables, I was in my kitchen making mini-sandwiches, using 9 loaves of bread.

By golly, I had no idea of the amount of hours I would be spending making sandwiches for that crowd... but I will remember it for the next events and ask that the work be more fairly shared.

Anyway the event was a success and so was the food - far too many mini-cakes, sandwiches and quiches. 

At the end of the event, a lot of people helped us clean up the hall, wash dishes, etc and the left over food was taken home by the Committee members.

When we locked up the sun was setting over Scarborough Beach.

Hope you all had a great month too 👩.

Participating in Feline Friday and Saturday Critters.

Monday Murals - Monkey Bar

Two murals from Mandurah, painted by local artist Steve Briggs, painted at the Monkey Bar, located in Pinjarra Road.

He painted the murals for free as a way to give back to his community.

Apparently the technique used for the eyes of the monkey is the same used with the "Mona Lisa", where the eyes follow you no matter where you stand in the room.

If you like murals or have a mural you'd like to post, this meme is for you; 

just follow the Linky steps below.  Once you start looking you find murals everywhere.  

Be sure to link back to this blog and visit your fellow posters.  Looking forward to your mural finds posted this week.   Monday mural meme is posted at 12,01am Monday, Western Australian time. Thanks, Sami. 

 

Monday Mural - Spring

Just one more day until Spring officially starts in Australia, so I thought I would post a floral mural.    It's called "wildflower wall ", painted in September 2018 by local resident artist Lian with the support of Vic Park Collective, and can be seen at Posier Lane, Victoria Park.

I came across it as well as half a dozen other murals, last week when I went to pick up a pair of bedside tables to paint, in the suburb of Victoria Park.  

When we moved to Australia 13 years ago we lived in a 2 bedroom apartment in Victoria Park during 3 months until our container arrived from Portugal, and we really loved the area. It's such a vibrant and diverse inner city suburb, full of great restaurants and quaint shops, and just 3km south east of Perth's city centre.

If you like murals or have a mural you'd like to post, this meme is for you; 

just follow the Linky steps below.  Once you start looking you find murals everywhere.  

Be sure to link back to this blog and visit your fellow posters.  Looking forward to your mural finds posted this week.   

Monday mural meme is posted at 12,01am Monday, Western Australian time. Thanks, Sami.