I am incredibly anxious

It's a secret for now. But just wish me luck. I promise to let you know the good news if there's any, finger cross >_<.

I will need to hibernate during this week. si~gh…

Illustrations by AshleyG. You can buy the prints from her etsy, ashleyg.etsy.com
Btw, this illustration reminds me of my best friend :P

A perfect t-shirt to wear in front of my sister

I chuckled when I saw this t-shirt. Wow! this is so perfect. It's witty and cute, but straight to the point at the same time. My sister has been like that, honestly I can't remember when she was being positive.



This is the other t-shirt that I like too. It's illustrated by Adrian Johnson, I'll post more stuff about him. You can all buy the t-shirts from here. If you are in the States, you're lucky, you'll get free shipping if you buy 3 or more t-shirts.

It's probably what I needed

I've recently seen this photographs featured in many blogs. Melting Words, word series photographys by Kotama Bouabane. It's nice but cruel. Not after a small thing happened to me over the weekend, this photo is a great as awake up call to the reality.



Yea, it's over (it had been over). I definitely need a new start, another fresh chapter of my life. It's about time (I promise to my self, no more sulking!).

Kimchi fried rice and enoki mushrooms pancakes

Korean food is my current favourite dishes. I don't know how long has it last, but I always crave for Korean dishes. I would suggest going to Korean restaurants for most occasion.

During winter, Korean dishes are the best to serve. Since most of the cuisine is always hot and spicy. It's not hard to cook Korean dishes, once you know their basic fundamentals, which are:

• hot & spicy, they use Gochuchang (Korean fermented chilli paste) for their spicy dishes.
  
• Sweet, they always add sugar in their dishes. For beef marinade, they use Nashi pear to give the sweetness. This is used to marinate Bulgogi beef.
  
• Garlic, they love garlic. Garlic will always be in the main ingredients.

I cooked Kimchi fried rice (Kimchi Bokkumbap) and enoki mushrooms pancakes (Paeng-ee Beosut Jeon) few weeks ago. I found this really excellent blog called My Korean Kitchen filled with simple, original Korean recipe written by a Korean girl. Sadly, the blog has stopped. There was no explanation why she stopped writing. Although, surprisingly, the forum is still alive, people still come and discuss the recipe that she posted.



You can follow the simple Kimchi fried rice recipe from here. But I made my own modification by added Gochuchang and tomato sauce mixed with sugar and water. Since there is only little kimchi juice when you bought the Kimchi. The combination sauce that I added was actually a based sauce for Bimbimbap (hot stone rice).



The enoki mushrooms pancakes wasn’t quite look the same from what it looks like at Korean Kitchen. But it was taste great, I am happy. Definitely, going to make them again. The recipe is available here.

So, care to give it a try? Do you have any favourite dishes that you would like to share?

Curtis's Botanical Magazine and Kunst-Formen der Natur by Ernst Haeckel

I just wanted to share a really lovely amazing botanical illustrations that I found it last night via Cherry Fields, Melissa Haslam's blog, an Australian illustrator based at Melbourne.

The first one is the Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. It’s filled with big range of species of botanical illustrations with the detail descriptions. The book is published around the late 18th century. Everything is very nicely detailed illustrations and has a lovely colour.




According to Cherry Fields the copyright has already expired, so it’s safe to use them in drawings, collages etc. The pdf is available to download. You can found the download link through the original post.

The second one is Kunst-Formen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), by Ernst Haeckel, 1898. This is a wonderful book, which features all sorts of illustrations of the natural world. It is very exciting to discover plenty of organic forms which is very unique. It’s such an excellence reference book.



It’s available from FLICKR. One of the illustrations was also used by Audrey Kawasaki in one of her ornaments painting. Via Cherry Fields too.

MALTE bar stool as a bed side table?

I just recently found this nice bar stool from IKEA. The height and the depth is just so perfect for my slim space bed side table. It's also available in three colour white/birch, black and red. I think all of them is nice. I am considering either black or red. The red will give a good punch to the room. The price is $49 AUD (which is good!). You can read the detail here.

Do you think it's hot or not as a bed side table? Red or Black?

G’morning

I need to wake up extra early to get in time since moving to the new house. It takes longer walk to the bus stop. It has been quite hard to wake up early during winter, since it's cold and the sunset was not even up yet.

Nonetheless, by the time I was ready and got out the house, the atmosphere outside was just so beautiful. The air is just so fresh (little chilly though). You can feel, its fills in your lungs when you taken a deep breath. Even the trees look so lovely in the morning. The grass were sparkling, covered with dews.



The first thing that we saw was this little guy. They seem happily hanging on the Australian wild flowers trees around our complex area. You can hear them cheeping every morning. They really make my day^^




It makes me feel very content every morning. It's such a blissful experience to start the day. And I am really loving it.

How is your morning routine? What time do you usually wake up in the morning?

I am back online

Finally, the internet get sorted. I feel quite relief that it goes well without any more drama. We signed up for wireless broadband plan with Optus. I was anxious that the modem won't be compatible with my macs. It works straight away out of the box, just needed to connect to the power supply and use the ethernet cable.

The wireless signal is quite strong, although from my observation, it seems the signal goes weak at night from 10pm. So far, the speeds is acceptable, it tends bit slower than ADSL2, but I am not complaining.

Quick Recap
ADSL2 doesn't work with our telephone lines. Surprisingly, even though, we had been using ADSL2 when we were renting where it located just another 10 minutes walk. The news was just dropped like a bomb. I was like going to face a reality to live without high-speed internet FOREVER. I wasn't even living in rural area!!! (They said we were on RIMS, some kind line sharing thing, rather than using the cooper wires direct to the exchange). It's one of the things you forgot to check when you're buying a house (sigh). But I blame it all to stingy monopoly Telstra!!!



My mum arrived here at Brisbane on Friday, picked her up at the airport straight from work. I am glad that she's here, I admit that I miss her. I was overjoy when she showed me the black heel shoes for me, it was what I always wanted (Mum always knows). Although, it was half size too big but I'll figure it out how to make it fit!!! (it's better than too small). It's from Charles & Keith.

We managed to shop at IKEA, it was so crowded. We didn't manage to get the dining chair, the one that I wanted was sold out, since it was on sale (half price!) So far, the house is still quite messy, but we'll get there.

Mondayne update

It's been such a rainy week and I was completely drench arriving at work T_T I think I really need to get a raincoat (I'm thinking navy blue). It is nice to have such a rainy day all week since we haven't got much rain. But it's not so pleasant if you have to catch public transport to go around.



I just stayed at home during the weekend. I managed to get my studio set up. My sister and I place our desk next to each other. The studio basically is at the same room with the dining room. It's probably my favourite room since there's so many sunlight comes through. (I call it, the sun room!!!) Even though, it's been raining on the weekend, but there was time when the sun shines brightly. So it's been quite a lovely day. (Although, we haven't got any dining table yet, lot's of boxes still stack in the dining room. To be honest, the dining room is the big dumped).

I am hoping to get the dining table and a bookcase at IKEA by next weekend. So no more messiness. I also want to get some frames to hang some artwork at the sun room.

I'll post photos tomorrow. Still no internet 'till next week