Anniversary

Yesterday (Sunday) was my one year wedding anniversary with my husband. I can hardly believe it's been that long already! We didn't do too much, as we mostly celebrated a few weeks ago when we went to the Blue Mountains. We did however go out to dinner Saturday night - and got to see a lot of weird halloween costumes also. Unfortuantely Husband had a cold, so we kept the rest of the weekend fairly quiet, we've postponed our trip to the zoo 'til next week. As promised however I will now show you the present I gave him. It's nothing too big (as our present to each other was the trip), but he really seemed to like it anyway which is good. 

What is that? You ask. Well it's a picture frame with the speech I said to Husband at our wedding reception. It's not written in squibbly - it's actually Greek. For those of you who don't know, Husband is Greek and I spent the year leading up to our wedding secretly taking Greek lessons so I could surprise him and his family on the day.

I am usually not the sappy type, but I do think I'll share this. I forgot that just before my wedding I sent myself an email using the cool website FutureMe to be sent on our anniversary. So here it is (slightly edited):

Where have you been young lady!?

scolding old lady from here

Well firstly, thank you for calling me 'young'. Sometimes I feel quite old at 26, so it's nice to be called that (don't scoff older people). Secondly, don't be concerned, the rumours aren't true: I did not actually turn into a zombie and I haven't been roaming the streets in search of brains ever since. The fairly boring truth is that our internet at home has had a lot of issues of late (still dodgy unfortunately), and I've been trying to be studious at uni and not write blog posts when I'm supposed to be PhD-ing.

So just a little bit of a recap on what I've been up to of late, based on three areas...

Science: Well, unfortunately still nobody has been signing up for my experiments. I suspect it's due to all the strict preparation requirements to give a saliva sample to test for cortisol; you must wake up between 6am and 8am, can't have had alcohol 12 hours prior to the experiment, can't have had caffeine a few hours before either, can't have eaten in the last hour, can't be on most types of medication, can't be a smoker... etc. The waking up between 6am and 8am would be my biggest problem along with the no caffeine, so even I wouldn't participate in my experiment! I'm hoping at the beginning of next semester when all the keen beans (i.e., nerds) are excited about experiments, I will get more participants. In the mean time I've just been trying to write papers and parts of my thesis.

Spouses: I only have one of those, but things are going good! It's actually our one year wedding anniversary on Sunday - woohoo! Our main celebration was actually when we went to the Blue Mountains a few weeks ago, but we're still going to have a small celebration this weekend by going out to dinner Saturday, and some sort of outing Sunday (we're thinking the zoo). Since the first year is traditionally supposed to be paper, I have made a present which I will show you after my Husband's seen it. 

Silliness: Not too much in the way of silliness lately. At least on a large scale. You'll be happy to know I still manage to fit in a small amount of silliness into each day. Or if I can't manage it, sometimes Husband contributes which is nice - not that long ago he decided to show me he could jump backwards down the stairs (our apartment is at the top of three flights of stairs). I, more concerned than impressed, yelled out "don't" and at that exact moment he went tumbling down. Thankfully no trips to the hospital were required, just a slightly bruised ego.

Well there you have it. 

 

What have I missed/what have YOU been up to lately? 

Strange things are afoot...

Just thought I'd share three odd/cool things I came across the other day.

The first: love a bit of alien conspiracy!

"there will be space ships by then"

The second: I'd just gotten off the bus at uni to see this - an elderly conga line! So cute, and yet entirely random.

sorry for crappy photo quality - had to covertly snap on my iphone!

The third: thanks to @cestaz for pointing this article out to me on twitter... apparently some zombies got injured on the set of a movie. Paramedics arriving at first thought some terrible catastrophe occurred and couldn't immediately tell all the blood was fake! It's funny to me especially, because the other night when I was dressed as a zombie I said to husband: "today would be a really bad day for a car accident - paramedics would have no idea which were my real injuries!"

That is all.

BRAAAAAINS.

As promised, here are some photos of me as a zombie, from the costume party on Saturday. I had a lot of fun with the fake blood - though it's not so fun to try and clean off when you get home and want to sleep! The main place I had trouble removing the stains was from my nails, so I just put red nail polish over the top. Problem solved (well temporarily at least haha)!

Here is a picture of my shirt, and one of me trying to look super menacing.

And here is me trying to eat Husband's brains! He's dressed as Ron Burgundy, by the way.

Overall it was a very fun night. One highlight was on the way to the party hearing two random girls walking behind us:

Girl 1: Gasp! Look at all the blood!

Girl 2 (to me): Ummm, your hand is bleeding?

Me (turning around): I AM A ZOMBIEEEE!!

Girls: Aaargh! 

Fun vs. Sensible

After the excitement of agreeing to go away next year to the US and thinking about all the places we'd go, we then had to think of the serious (boring) stuff - like will we actually be able to afford this? I do think if we're careful in our spending the next year it should be ok - but considering I'm planning to submit my thesis before we go (aargh!) I will not actually have a scholarship when we get back. So we need to plan for having money for when we return also.

I'm hoping that the 'saving for something fun' thing will be a bit more motivating than the 'saving to be sensible' plan of the past has been. Apologies if this is not super exciting, but here are some things I plan to do to make this dream a reality:

Instead of marking...

...I'd much prefer to pretend I'm still away at the Blue Mountains. We had such a good time, that we didn't really want to come back yesterday. Even though it was cold, and rainy in parts we still managed to do a lot of looking around. Not to mention a lot of eating! There was also the small issue of me forgetting my bag. When we arrived at the B&B (which was lovely, and the owners were so nice), I realised that my bag of clothes, pyjamas etc. was still sitting at home. A big oops. So we did have to quickly find a clothes shop so I wouldn't be stuck in the same clothes for four days. 

We went to Echo Point, which is one of the best places to view the Three Sisters; Jenolan Caves, which was really cool; Scenic World (a bit of a lame name if you ask me but still interesting) where we got to ride the steepest incline railway in the world down to the valley and look around the rainforest of the mountains, and came back up via cable car; and we also looked around Leura, which is a nearby town which is very pretty and has lovely gardens called Everglade Gardens. It was a great early anniversary present, and Husband and I definitely want to go back ASAP - like tomorrow, please?

Click to enlarge

Here are some photos I took! Clockwise from top left: the gardens at our B&B; View of the Three Sisters from Echo Point; Inside Lucas Cave at the Jenolan Caves; Tulips from Everglades Gardens; Another shot of Lucas Cave; Outside Jenolan Caves.