Adventures in cake making

At work, we always go a little over the top for people’s birthdays. I made this cake for one of the guy’s birthdays – complete with matchbox cars.


I also did this for one of the girls who hates cats.



It’s a lot of fun, and makes a birthday a bit more special. When one girl got married, the other “cake maker” did a cake that resembled a couch, and printed out a picture of the girl getting married from her hen’s night slumped in a couch looking very drunk (but cut just her out), so it looked like was slumped in the couch cake.

I had a triathlon cake for my birthday, with a running track, complete with pipe cleaner people running and cycling (on a pipe cleaner bike), and a “pool” in the middle of the cake.

Now I’m on cake making duties again on Friday for one of the girls. She’s got 4 kids, so I was thinking of a bus/car cake with lots of little kiddie faces hanging out of the car, but it all seems a bit hard. Anyone got any clever ideas for novelty cakes, or an easy way to make a car cake?? Google wasn’t much help :-(

Noosa triathlon

Well. The Noosa triathlon (1.5k swim, 40k ride, 10k run) is only 10 weekends away. I have a free entry for Noosa. I've done Noosa the last 2 years and loved it. I have a number of friends from my club going again. I have been told I potentially have a condition called Familial Aortic Aneurysm, and to keep my heart rate under 140 during any sort of exercise to lower the risk of my heart exploding (ok, a little dramatic, but it IS life threatening if I have it, and I do have an aneurysm). Because of this, I've been a little too freaked out to exercise too much, and also a little busy with getting married, possibly moving to America etc etc.

So I'm unfit. But I love the Noosa race. I can handle the swim pretty easily I reckon. I'll go do a 40k ride this weekend and see how I go. If that's ok, I'll aim to do a 10k walk on Sunday. If I can get through all that I'll speak to my cardiologist and see what he thinks.

I don't care if I do the race and go REALLY slowly - I just want to do it!!

Wedding photos

The rest of the professional wedding photos taken by Andrew Sawatske of Hi-tide photography are now up here.

The photographer did an awesome job, there's of photos with interesting backgrounds, a great range of different photo styles, as in black and white, sepia toned, half black and white, half coloured, funky blurring and other such exciting features :)

Very happy with them!!

Walk after work

Andrew and I went for a nice walk after work today. We went for a nice stroll around the paths near home, and just went out for 30 minutes searching for kangaroos.

A lady walking a sheepdog was not far away from us, so the doggy possibly scared all the kangaroos away as we only saw a couple.

It was nice to go for a stroll together after work rather than sitting on our asses in front of the tv! I did discover that my foot's still a bit sore after my cramps in the pool last night!! How bizarre... :-)

I SWAM!!

I went along to the Bilbys swim squad last night for the first time in about 6 months probably and loved it! I thought I'd drown, feel like a brick and wouldn't be able to swim more than 100m without stopping. It's been that long since I swam I was dreading going back!!

I swam about 2.3k (got a foot cramp that wouldn't go away for a while, and had to get out a bit early to get to a committee meeting, so missed about 500m in total), which is more than I expected, and I wasn't feeling too bad in the water. We did a set that included a 300m, and while my stroke was ugly, and my arms were heavy from being unfit, I managed it fine.

I definitely think I could have done the entire session without too much of a hassle. I was only in the slow lane, so the pace wasn't terribly fast, but of the 5 of us in that lane, I was the second person, and definitely faster than the 3 behind me, so that was good for the confidence!

I'm in a great mood today because of it as well, it was just what I needed, and I realised how much I enjoy swimming!

Today is beautiful and I brought my walking gear in today, but didn't get to go at lunchtime because I had lunch with a friend, so will go after work instead.

Bridge or implant??

Ahhhh so many tooth dramas.... All the wisdom teeth need to come out, and that'll probably happen in the next 6-8 weeks.

I also have a false tooth which is on a denture type thing, which I remove daily to clean. It's also only supposed to last upto about 5 years, and it's now about 9 years old....

So I'm looking at more permanent options. The dentist said my options are either a bridge or an implant. The dentist is pushing for a bridge where they file down the two teeth next to the missing one, and use them as "anchors" and make a false tooth which attaches to two caps that cover the filed down teeth. Mmmm filed down teeth...

Second option is to get a tooth implant. They put a titanium rod into your mouth which attaches to the jawbone, and once it all heals up, they attach a tooth to the rod. Eww.

Neither option sounds particularly appealing, and the dentist pushes the bridge (which he does so gets the money for....) whereas Andrew thinks the whole filing down the teeth thing is pretty permanent for those teeth, and why ruin them??

Has anyone else had a missing tooth they've had to replace? I'd love to hear people's thoughts to help with my decision!

Geek test

Good news - I just got out of the "Computer Illiterate" category, but unfortunately I am in the tech support nightmare category. Andrew will be so disappointed in me. :-)

And to top it off, I stuffed up the HTML code the first time I tried to post this... heh