Beautiful illustrations

I went into the used book shop  Book Buyers in Mountain View and while I wasn't interested in expanding my to-read list I decided to look for items that I would normally not notice.

I got a book by John James Audubon who is a famous bird illustrator. And why do I need bird illustrations??? Well I don't, nobody does. But I thought the drawings were really beautiful and natural.

Then I also found some cool music sheets for single songs, which also feature some really cool and old illustrations as the cover page. Each music sheet was $1-$5 and the paper is old and wrinkly and smelly and awesome.

I think any of these are going to make some cool wall art, craft or stationary someday. I am such a fool for pretty paper goods.

Hello. Goodbye.

I hope you had a Valentine's day so sweet that your teeth hurt.

M and I are off to San Francisco tomorrow and will be blogging from there for the next two weeks. I will leave you with the android versions of ourselves.

<3

More furniture hunting (and reverse garbage)

The never ending acquisition of old, cheap or free furniture continues.

There's a shop run by a very kind man with acute hearing deficiency on the corner of Addison and Illawarra in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville. His shop is a plain cement room and only opens on weekends but the prices are fair and the stuff speaks to me more often than not. I bought from him a bedside table ($10), a bookshelf ($30), a rug ($10) and a small ceramic bathtub (decorative, $5).

What I liked about this table is: 1. It has a drawer for stuff you want to hide AND a shelf for stuff you want to display, 2. The legs are not entirely straight all the way down which makes it more interesting, 3. The hardware is original and pretty.

Of course I wouldn't be blogging about it if I hadn't changed something :-) so I spray painted it red! It has these beautiful cracks on the top which the paint didn't quite fill and they give the table  great look!

I think it fits much better with my personality now, I'm into colorful stuff lately...

By the way, that lamp is from this insane place also in Marrickville and very near the same shop called Reverse Garbage. The price of the lamp was 3 dollars but then I had to spend another 13 replacing the lamp socket which was cracked. The original lamp shade was a plain (and dirty) white, so I followed this *amazing* tutorial on how to cover a lamp shade with fabric.

Let me tell you some more about Reverse Garbage. There is where the items that are garbage but not really garbage go to die. Things like plaster, art, furniture, boxes, glass bottles, costumes, paint, chemicals, ceramics, etc, and they are all for sale! It is a crazy place! Words cannot begin to describe it so please let me take you on a photo tour:

When you see this incredible sculpture, you have arrived at the right place.

Theatre costumes?

Wigs, shoes and piles of ridiculous clothes.

Metal drums, ceramics...

Doors...

Pink styrofoam bags!

If you are throwing an Oscars viewing party, you'll really need these, however overpriced.

Mannequins, posters, art frames.

You name it...

If you are in the Inner West or Marrickville area, do go check out these places, it'll be worth the visit!

Pros of living in Sydney #47

The most amazing cabbies.

Ok, for the most part they are a hit or a miss. But when they are a hit, oh man.

My last taxi conversation with the driver ended up in exchanging emails and him offering me a job selling his imported goods (from www.madeinchina.com and www.indiamart.com, among others, mind you) on Sydney markets. He said we'd go half and half on the profits.

Lucky me.

The new baby (and blue cheese burgers)

It is 2pm and today I have done two loads of laundry, vacuumed the house, cleaned the bathroom, applied to 8 jobs (2 of which already rejected me, that was quick!). It is currently 37 degrees outside and it comes as no surprise that the highlight of my day was the cold shower I took after lunch.

I'm taking a break now by blogging (ok, I won't lie, I'll probably take a nap after this and then pick up the job search again), because I wanted to talk to you about our new baby.

Our new Weber Baby Q120 that is!

So we got this bad boy last Saturday and took some scotch filets out for a spin in it. M won't let me get near it, not because he is mean, he is doing it unconsciously kind of like when someone doesn't let you drive their brand new car. I hope am sure I'll get to play with it when the novelty wears off...

Since I wasn't allowed to grill, I was on salad duty, something else I am equally good at. I made a heirloom tomato salad with mint, basil and feta cheese. It was light, sweet, tasty and the perfect complement to the steaks.

And the next logical step was burgers of course. These shots were taken the day after, and no we're not eating burgers for breakfast, M just happens to be wearing pijama pants in the afternoon.

By the way there is nothing wrong with burgers for breakfast.

These are blue-cheese and sundried tomato burgers, crickey they were good. There were little pockets of blue cheese oozing out from everywhere. Recipe follows:

{ingredients}

(makes 4 massive burger patties)

• 400 grams lean minced beef
• 100 grams minced lamb
• 50 grams crumbled blue cheese
• 4 sundried tomatoes, chopped
• 1 long stalk thinly sliced green onions, or 2 small stalks...
• 3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic

{directions}

Wash your hands thoroughly with antibacterial soap. Add all the ingredients in a bowl. Mix them with your hands until homogeneous and divide this big lump into 4 small lumps. Shape each small lump into a burger patty. Cook to your liking.

***

See how M has his head cocked when he is cooking? I call this the business angle because that is how I know he means business.

And the end result:

:-X