Photographer extraordinare

Self Portraits

Validation

My friend from uni sent me this message on Facebook & it almost made me cry (I'm emotional like that). I just thought it summed up the past 3 years so well.

There've been moments when I've had enough and contemplated quitting uni. There've been moments when I've doubted my calling to be a teacher. There've been moments when I wished I'd just gone straight into an Education degree instead of Arts (Psych).


But this just validated all of those experiences...




"Just wanted to say a bit of congrats for finishing your arts degree! So proud of you for getting through the whole 3 years even though you were so anxious to get to something else, and sometimes it felt like the time was just crawling a...long. Well done Miss Parata, we should go out and celebrate.... cheesecake? icecream?"

(She knows me so well! Cheesecake makes my heart smile.)

Shout it from the rooftops!

Just felt the need to shout it from the rooftops tonight:



I finished uni today!!!!!!
(Even this doesn't do my excitement justice!)

No more classes.

Bachelor of Arts (Psych), you will be missed.

Master of Teaching (Primary), let's get acquainted!

Surprise!

Surprise!

I changed (or at least my blog did) on you!


I thought it was time for a bit of a fresher look. I loved the old layout, but it was quite dark and a bit full-on, so I thought I'd go for something lighter with a little bit more of a vintage feel to it.

You'll notice that polka dots still feature though... apparently I'm a polka dots fan and didn't even know it! You all know about my intense love for pink and damask, so of course they also had to feature in my blog header.

On a sidenote, my friend Laura & I went shopping today and somehow we always end up looking at homewares stores, dreaming about the houses we're gonna have and the lives we're gonna live... anyway, there was this amazing huge, comfy couch that came in a damask print that we both loved, but the best part was, you could choose your own colour! I was torn between the cream/hot pink and the chocolate brown/turquoise.

Definitely filing that one away in the "remember for later" part of my brain!

Sneak Peek

Rainbow Cake

Today I hosted a birthday party for one of the girls from Youth Group. For a surprise, I made this Rainbow Cake that I first saw on MckMama 's blog.

The cake featured on her blog, was made by Amanda, who first saw it on Meg's blog.

(Is that six degrees of blog separation or what? Okay, maybe it's only 3 degrees of separation, but still!)



I decided to try it out for myself. It's not too hard. You make two bowls of cake batter and then split each bowl into three so that you get six bowls (one for each colour). The hardest part is fitting them in the oven! I had to do 3 at a time.


Then the real fun begins... frosting! I made orange frosting because it's Maddi's (the birthday girl) favourite colour.

The recipe called for powdered sugar, but as I stood in the baking needs section of my supermarket, looking at all the sugar products, I could not for the life of me find "powdered sugar" anyway.

Thank goodness for iPhones, I Googled "substitute for powdered sugar" and found that you could use white sugar that had been put through a blender for a few minutes. So that's what I did. Except I don't think I blended it for long enough, because even though it looked "powdery", when I tasted it I could still feel the sugar granules on my tongue and it was weird.

Anyway, at this point I had that much orange frosting that there was no way I was going to throw it out and start again (plus I didn't have time because the girls were arriving in an hour), so I kept at it.


Amanda recommended freezing the layers in between frosting so the cake wouldn't go slip sliding all over the place. I froze mine for an hour and it was still difficult to frost! Even when I was serving it up, I found I had to keep pushing the layers back into place because they kept sliding off each other.

Maybe my freezer is inadequate.

But like the cake, it looks good.




This was the end result:

The girls loved it! (Even though it turned out pastel coloured instead of bright wow-zer colours like Amanda's and Meg's cakes.) They were so surprised when I cut into it and starting serving it up. It was a real hit! I'd definitely make it again.

And it was so fun! Kind of like a crazy science experiment making all the different colours! I had a thought that it was something I could incorporate into a science lesson once I'm a teacher. The kids would love that.

Alicia discovers Photoshop

A photographic venture - Part 1

A select few of the 500+ photos I took yesterday while on a photographic venture. These are of my godson's sister Tegan, who's 8. Her and Ryan were so good as we told them how to pose and how to smile, and to stand there, and look like this... you get the picture!

But when you get photos like this, it makes all the trouble worth it...

Step up to the beat...

I haven't got anything really important to share with you all, but I thought I'd write anyway, because this blog is about me keeping you all updated on what's going on in my life, even if I don't think it's very exciting or blog-worthy!

So...

Yesterday we had our dance eisteddfod. We usually enter one eisteddfod a year, and it's always the CBAA (the association our dance studio belongs to) one, but this year we decided to enter others. Yesterday we went to the Step Up to the Beat eisteddfod at Castle Hill.

I was looking forward to a relaxing morning, because we didn't have to get there until 3. We have to have part of our hair braided for the competition, so I'd organised for my friend from church to do it on Friday night before Youth Group, since I am terrible at braiding.
So, I was all organised. My friend Claryse was going to come over at 1.30pm and we were going to drive in together.

And then, at 12.45pm, I get two messages on my phone. The first one, from Claryse saying she's coming over at 1.00 now instead, so we can leave early and get our hair done there.

What?!

The next message, from Sally, our dance teacher says after some reflection, they've decided to change our hair to another type of braid.


So, in the next 15 minutes, I hurriedly wash my hair (there was that much gel and hair spray in it, there's no way they'd be able to do it without me washing it first), blowdry it and straighten it.
Claryse arrives and I'm flying around the house, getting costumes out of the dryer, stockings off the washing line, shoes from my closet. And I'm still not dressed. Not an inch of makeup on, let alone any stage makeup.

Then we walk outside, and it's raining. Awesome. And how are we supposed to keep our hair straight when it's raining?! We run out huddled under our jackets, shove all our stuff into my car, and turn Tom Tom on. I type in Castle Hill and look for the street name that the High School the eisteddfod is at. We know it's Castle something. Well, it turns out there's Castle Street, Castle Road, Castle Place, Castle Hill Road... a million options. Which one is it?

I run back inside, check the note and find it's Castle Street. Sweet.


Half an hour later, it's raining a lot, and it's dark and I really have no idea where we are, but we somehow make it to the school and park where we see Sally's car because we figure that she'll park closest to the entrance. Wrong. We end up having to call her, because we're standing in the rain with our costumes and can't find the hall. After a serious tiki tour where we practically walk around the whole school, trying fruitlessly to avoid the huge puddles that have amassed on the paths, we find everyone.

Only to find no one is there yet to do our hair. And we only have a few sections until our section. A little bit of panic sets in, but we resolve to be efficient and go do our make-up. I take my hair straightener with me because I hope to be able to undo some of the damage that the rain afflicted on my now wavy hair. Well, I plug it in to the one power socket we could find. And nothing. The plug doesn't work. Fabulous. Oh well . We're rocking the messy hair look.

Our first dance is ballet. We manage to find one of the mums to do our hair (and then halfway through she realises she's braiding mine as an outside braid rather than an inside braid, but I tell her don't worry about it, at this point it really doesn't matter!) and we get in our costumes. Luckily I had the sense to grab that second pair of ballet stockings off the clothesline, because the first pair I brought with me have a massive hole in them.

Anyway, finally, finally we are all dressed and waiting. Our section is meant to start at 4.00pm, so we all start stretching while we wait for our section to be called. And then there is confusion about our music. And confusion about what number our section is (they put our jazz section right after our ballet section, which is ridiculous because there's no way we'd be able to get changed fast enough, so we organised with them to put our ballet section earlier, but apparently they forgot about that!) 4.00 comes and goes. 5.00 comes and goes. At about 5.40, we go backstage. All this, and did I mention we were the only group to dance in our section? We could have gone on stage and stood there for 3 minutes, and we still would've won.

After that first dance, the rest of the now night seems to go a bit faster. They are running way behind schedule. We start to wonder if we're ever going to get out of here in enough time to go see the movie we'd planned to go see together. We do our jazz/funk dance and then our contemporary. We don't place in either. The adjudicator only gives out 1st place. No 2nd or 3rd, thanks very much. I could go on about what kind of adjudicator we all really think he was (90 out of 100 only got Highly Commended! We apparently "overdanced" our contemporary! How do you do that at an eisteddfod! Our choreography for jazz/funk was "messy"! Let's not point out that the choreography of everyone else in that section could've been danced by 5 year olds!) but I won't.

Suffice it to say that some of us felt the day was a major waste of time. For us senior dancers at least. The intermediates kicked butt and showed us up with 2 first places.
All the rushing around, then the waiting around, then the confusion and the disappointment.
As I said to one of the new girls, "welcome to eisteddfods!"

Wait. Maybe that is a bit exciting after all!