Catch up time

I've neglecting the blog for the past couple of days because we've been working until 9pm... it's just been too hot to work during the middle of the day so once it's cooled off we've been getting stuck in!

I'll start with the stuffed pumpkin Dave made for dinner on Monday night. It was so delicious! Basically he cut the lid in the pumpkin, scooped everying out, mixed the pumpkin with potato, kumara, onions and mushrooms... added a jar of pasta sauce and stuffed it all back inside the pumpkin and then baked it for 2 hours and this is how it turned out:

On Tuesday I had an appointment to get my Christmas present to myself done. I had a tattoo done 12 years ago now to cover up a horrible scar that I had... this is the original tattoo: (Close your eyes now Mum and just scroll down!!!)I designed it myself and I still really love it but a lot of the colour had faded out of it so my present to myself was having it re-coloured. One of my ex-students dads is a very talented artist/tattooist/DJ/musician... very, very talented man plus him and his wife have become good friends of mine over the past 6 years :) I've been saying for about 5 years that I must get him to redo my tattoo but never got around to it so this time I booked myself in and I love how it's turned out... Thanks heaps Vernon!!!That brings us to Wednesday... and I started the day with another gym workout... just love how energised I feel after a good workout!!! I decided to ring around some more scaffolding places to see if I could get some reasonably priced scaff so that I could stain the deck fencing and I hit paydirt!!! I ended up chatting with a lovely man who's got scaffold for hire and couldn't believe how reasonable his prices were. The other day when I rang a different place they were going to charge me $89 PER DAY to hire what I needed... the lovely Barry charged me $20 for the WEEK!!! And he loaded it all into the trailer for me as well :)

Here's some before and after pictures of the deck so far: these ones are over the garage doors...

And these ones are facing out to the park... and I'm even getting over my fear of heights pretty quickly! See Mum... no sky hooks or abseiling required LOLMeanwhile, Dave has been working on levelling out the patio area and boxing it all up. It's amazing what a difference it makes and I can actually 'see' what the area is going to look like now!I've decided that I'm not going to have a permanent herb garden included in this area... instead I'm going to pot some plants in a couple of old tin baths I've got (after they've been re-painted) and that way I can change the plants around to suit the seasons so that it always looks good!

So it's now Thursday and luckily the weather is a bit cloudy today so I should be able to get a lot more deck stained... yippee!! Dave is pretty thankful for the clouds too because it's been really punishing working in the sun... so pleased we're not on tank water with the way we're guzzling it back! He's going to get the last of the levelling done and then I'll go down and hire a compactor so that it's all ready to go and we should be pouring concrete tomorrow!!! I'm so excited to see how it's all going to turn out!

Thank to everyone who's following this project... it's been lovely to read your comments :)