Valentines and Sunday Picnic

This is what my Valentine gave me this morning.  A rose from our garden.  Perfect.  We've never gone in for Valentines' Day much but I made them all cards on the computer and left a chocolate for each of them on their bedside tables.  I've made a lamb curry which we'll have with lemon saffron rice and garlic naan.  Got some frozen samosas for an entree and made some cupcakes.

Josh made pancake batter on Saturday night.  I've lost my old Commonsense Cookery book recipe so he Googled one.  Yesterday morning he cooked them for us.  They were really nice, more like the American style pancakes and made exactly enough for the four of us.

We packed up and drove out to Temora for a picnic.  But the lake was overflowing, both with water and dead fish.  We counted nine Murray cod dead at the water's edge.  Phill said that after heavy rain the water can get brackish from debris being blown in, leaves etc and that's probably what killed them.  It wasn't pleasant and none of us were going to swim in that water.  So we ate, not much everyone was still full from the pancakes and Phill got the idea of driving on to Barmedman to the mineral pool there.  We've driven past it many times but never gone there.  It was terrific.  It's a huge pool with a couple of smaller ones, lots of seating, tables and benches and really clean open roof toilets/changeroom/shower.  There's a park next door with electric bbqs and it's all covered with shade sails.  The water is really salty and not warm like Burren Bore.  We ate some more and spent the afternoon in the water.  It's free to use and we're definitely going to do that more often.

Emily doing her "dead" pose.  She has always done this and it still freaks the hell out of us.

Funny thing was there was only one other group of people, two women and three kids, it turned out one of the women was someone we knew but we didn't realise it till she'd walked past us to leave.  I'm hopelessly unobservant.  A few people started turning up late in the afternoon just as we were leaving but I can't understand why half the town wasn't there on such a hot Sunday.

We have a little pumpkin on our vine!

Next to the compost bin up the back a tomato seed has decided to turn itself into a bush and there are little tomatoes all over it.

The fig tree half fell down but it's still got plenty of fruit on it.  It's right up in the back corner and the birds get most of the fruit.  I am thinking of hanging dangly things on the branches to scare them away.  I adore fresh figs and I don't mind sharing but they eat ALL of them.

We found a big fat caterpiller in an old plastic container.  I think Phill said it was going to turn into a butterfly.

Emily and Kim made sushi on Saturday afternoon.  Kim had never had it.  She wasn't keen on the nori but she ate some and I think it grew on her.

Well I'm off to get dressed, Josh and I are going to go for a walk when he gets home from school.  I walked downtown this morning so I'll get two lots of exercise today.