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capn_n_pyeAs we are wont to do in January, as the new year dawned, we burrowed into D’admiral and Chuckles’ house like ticks and dared them to remove us. Stinky went so far as to even dress like the house!
Indeed, there is a certain spectral quality to Stinky’s infestation, as evidenced here – is she on the couch or in the study OR IS IT BOTH?
In more mundane events, this showerhead in our main bathroom was past its prime…
…but cool ones were few and far between. There was just one in stock in the whole of Bunnings…and it was at Frankston! When we popped back to G-Town for New Years, Pye unleashed her inner plumber, and while it wasn’t fun to watch, the results were delightful.
Less delightful was being confronted by our first Chuckie III coin – it just looks and feels off (rather like Charles III, I suppose).
Back at Somers, Pye installed herself in one of the new beds that have replaced the bunks and saw no reason to ever get out again – it’s like lazing in a renaissance painting!
Well actually, that’s not true, there were actually thousands of reasons she had to get up – until she figures out a way to do jigsaws in bed, that is! Pye was spoiled for choice this year, with TWO Discworld jigsaws AND a cool Dracula jigsaw to choose from. She barely knew where to begin!
She would have got through them all a lot faster if the Powder Monkey wasn’t off galivanting around Scandinavia with the rest of the crew, but that’s a very first world problem. Meanwhile, Stinky was cutting sick on a year’s worth of backlogged craft projects, beginning with turning some of the fabric acquired in Sulawesi into cushion covers.
Not to be outdone, Pye briefly switched her attention to a miniature house – once upon a Spotlight visit, she’d been successfully tempted with a kit, and was curious to see if this would be a slippery slope she would slide down headfirst.
The coefficient of cute (wherein something that is normally big is now very small) was off the charts, even if the scale wasn’t always accurate, and verily, it was like doing a 3D jigsaw. And the light turns on!!! It was a perfect size for the tiny moose that Moose had commissioned as a Christmas gift to D’admiral and Chuckles (so that they would think of him more often). But oh no! Moose got jealous that the little dude has a house, even though according to Moose, any house Moose is in belongs to him. The only reason no blood was shed is that neither antagonist has any!
More important than a moose blood-feud (fluff-feud?), D’admiral had a birthday! At last – an excuse to Dine at one of the Peninsula’s delightful options! Hmmm, where haven’t we been for a while? Ah yes, Rare Hare.
Stinky had taken great care while booking to let them know it was a certain someone’s special day, and what a delight it was when D’admiral’s dessert came out on fire!
Setting fire to food is definitely fun, and that evening we enjoyed a special birthday cheesecake…
Setting fire to food is fun, but setting fire to the state, on the other hand, is less fun. A couple of 40+ windy days in a row and we were worried it was going to be January of 2020 all over again. Luckily, it was not quite as bad – however, we would have preferred the follow up not come in the form of flash flooding down the Great Ocean Road.
We’d already been admiring some cool skies…
…and sunsets (some so engaging they caused the Somers equivalent of a traffic jam)…
… and it must be said, bushfires do make for some spectacular skies of an evening.
Not so sure how safe we feel about the cult down the road, but if they stay in their lane and leave us alone, we suppose it’s okay.
So, unlike January of 2020, we were able to be outside without damaging our lungs, phew. This is important because an important holidays tradition is Milky Foot, and despite half of the crew being missing we bravely sallied forth. We selected our colouring books, popped the bubbles and got to work.
Stinky cheated a bit by doing a beading project instead of colouring in, but the umpires allowed it because the end product is hot.
We had to do it over a couple of sessions, and Chuckles was positively saint-like about the experience!
Maybe she was inspired by Stinky’s new saintly hat!
This summer has seen an influx of rainbow lorikeets moving into the yard, which is very aesthetically pleasing - visually if not acoustically.
Speaking of birbs, over the course of a week we noticed what appeared to be a developmentally-challenged blackbird staggering around the yard. It kept theatrically ‘dying’ in different parts of the garden, and was clearly not in a good way (unless it was rehearsing for Romeo & Juliet and we just didn’t understand). Chuckles hates to see an animal suffering when she can do something about it and decided she needed to take matters into her own hands.
The aspiring actor was gently and lovingly euthanised…
… and respectfully interred in a new garden bed that’s being prepared.
We then promptly forgot about it, even when tilling in a bunch of compost – so it was more luck than good management that its rotting corpse didn’t come flicking out when we dragged the cultivator over it lol.
Speaking of birds and forgetting, we have realised we also haven’t mentioned the recent shenanigans of Brian the Raven who lives at Pye’s school! You remember him, he is the leader of the goon squad and is always up to no good. Well, on Muck Up Day morning, Brian dropped a quarter of a rabbit in the middle of the courtyard the Year 12s were gathering in, right where it would get the most attention. He waited long enough for it to be funny watching people scream and freak out, then came back and took it up to the nearest shade cloth to finish eating it where everyone could still see him. What a legend!
Back at the beach, we enjoyed catching up with people such as Cousin Adele and fam…
… and our bestie Dan at Wine Lovers Warehouse. We call him Cousin Dan to differentiate him from Uncle Dan, and when we popped in prior to new year, Stinky had a funny idea. The next time we visited, while Pye popped wine in a trolley, Stinky slapped a cheese board on the tasting bar. Cousin Dan just about peed his pants giggling, and popped a bubbles for us all to ‘taste’ with it.
It was almost as much fun as going to lunch in Mornington and spotting Sgrassatore in the wild! Very exciting!
Not to mention that Mornington visit involved some shopping around that ultimatly culminated in D’admiral and Chuckles buying half a car each for each other’s birthdays! Wow!
The Festival of D’admiral continued longer than usual this year, as it was rekindled when the Cabin Girl, Powder Monkey and their crew returned from overseas adventures. D’admiral got an even bigger cheesecake than the first time around!
And he got a vintage card from 1997 (Stinky had found in a box, just in the nick of time!).
All it needed was a little update from people who hadn’t existed the first time around.
It meant we could finally give D’admiral the picture of the lil idiots he looks after (Robyn & Andrew had found the picture, we had it framed). Delayed gratification, now gratified!
Belated-Christmas was also a delight, and was very moose-themed – just how we like it!
Back home, Pye immediately installed her moose-hook in the powder room. Pros: Very cool; fit for purpose; doesn’t want to keep falling out of the wall like its predecessor; keeps Moose happy. Cons: Higher degree of moose-dribble on hand towel than previously detected; toilet sitters must get used to being side-eyed by a carved moose while doing their business.
So anyway, yeah, it was a very nice and sensible late Christmas.
The return of Camel meant that the jigsawing ramped up even more, from amateur to professional level, and we had to go shopping for more just to keep up with demand!
A shopping outing to Franga would not be complete without lunch…
… with distinguished dining companions all around.
The bit where he hung around outside to offer to sell us drugs was weird, but hey, it’s Franga.
Other shopping adventures included a visit to Hastings. Sometime during the term someone fart-bombed Stinky’s desk, and it was time to get rid of the farty books. We quietly dropped a couple of farts in the op shop…
… and the Powder Monkey bravely persevered in the face of limited options to leave a poo in the $2 Shop.
A little later, Stinky also added a touch of class to our local Spotlight…
Back at the ranch, the weather rewarded the cold, northern hemisphere returnees, which let us do nice things like going for walks to Coolart. Coolart was a bit of a bully, though, tsk, such name calling.
Although it was very blowy, and we were undeterred and ended up doing a Tour of Somers Bridges as we tried to hide from the raging wind.
In fact, it’s been so windy that we’re pretty sure that Chuckles has declared it her personal nemesis!
Look at that choppy ocean and windswept creek!
After belated Christmas and birthday, the next most important thing to do was the next round of Milky Foot. The Crew didn’t actually fancy going back to work with feral feet, so we did the bubbles and colouring part, and soaked our feet in water rather than acid.
Andru was an excellent valet, with a highly sophisticated temperature-control system.
Pye enjoyed the result in her new Goonies colouring book…
…and we were all very impressed at how much Chuckles’ feet popped off.
Even more cosmically impressive was a big fat solar storm. Back in G-town when an aurora shows up, we’re lucky if we can see a coloured smudge above the houses and the streetlights, so we were not about to pass up the opportunity to admire one from a much more salubrious site. D’admiral stayed up way past his usual bedtime and came down to the beach. First stop: the mole!
It was pretty windy, and the Powder Monkey’s loving grandmother was worried he'd be cold - it was probably all 19 degrees, after all! He was probably much colder than a couple of weeks earlier when they were in Norway and saw the northern lights in Tromsø, right? Poor young man!
It’s been ages since we stumbled around the beach in the dark, and it was extra fun this time. Bravely, we didn’t let the wind scare us off, and it’s safe to say that we got a pretty good look at the best aurora ever.
You could kind of see the vertical streaks with the naked eye, but it really came to life with the camera.
https://youtube.com/shorts/1El2VvQFtr0?si=VEj0ZoRGP7692028 (you have to click the link, stupid YouTube shorts can’t be embedded, bah).
In the words of Stinky – look at this shit!
This is one of our favourite shots, in spite (or because) Stinky and the Powder Monkey are flipping the bird.
Nighttime beach walks require nighttime beach selfies, everyone looks normal and cool.
Aurora Two Electric Boogaloo was predicted for the following night, but ended up being just a tiny tear in the universe, nothing the Ghostbusters can't handle.
We were able to draw some strong scientific conclusions from the solar storm – such as how looking at auroras makes selling your trailer a cinch. D’admiral popped it on the local Facebook page and before you could say, “How much do these even go for?” a couple of farm-owners from down the road had sprinted over, Melbas in hand. Then it turned out we could have started a bidding war – they and another local were all in the market for a trailer to mount their water tank and fire-fighting pump on. Who knew a thirty year old trailer could be such a hot commodity?!
Thus, January slipped rapidly between our fingers. The Cabin Girl and crew popped back just as we were packing up to go – just in time to enjoy Finnish reindeer poo lollies (they look terrific, but the taste is less good – but maybe it’s just cos we don’t enjoy liquorice flavour, not a poo-related issue).
It took us almost three hours to get home - summer road works and accidents made traffic a nightmare – but we managed to make an adventure of it. Google advised avoiding the Monash entirely, which meant we ended up going via the Eastern Freeway and the new Westgate Tunnel. Find your excitement where you can!
We spent the last couple of days of the holidays beating up the garden and catching up on house jobs. Stinky pickled our beetroot and dealt with about 3kg of nectarines which had grown while we weren’t looking – and this carrot wants to give you a hug!
We need a hug, having to go back to work at the end of January is actually the worst thing anyone has ever had to do, and wouldn’t you fucken know it, the weather decided to be a prick and all.
Stinky’s school doesn’t have air con, and nobody has had the kindness of heart to say we could do all our pointless meetings over Zoom. But hey, at least the new split system outside her room upstairs decided on the Sunday of the long weekend to develop a leak into the ceiling below it *record scratch* *checks notes* Ah fuck.
So yeah, don’t mind us, we’ll just be hiding in the dark watching the 2026 lamb ad to try and make ourselves feel better. Stinky will just have to sleep in the loft which still has a working split system (cries in First World Problems)
Indeed, there is a certain spectral quality to Stinky’s infestation, as evidenced here – is she on the couch or in the study OR IS IT BOTH?
In more mundane events, this showerhead in our main bathroom was past its prime…
…but cool ones were few and far between. There was just one in stock in the whole of Bunnings…and it was at Frankston! When we popped back to G-Town for New Years, Pye unleashed her inner plumber, and while it wasn’t fun to watch, the results were delightful.
Less delightful was being confronted by our first Chuckie III coin – it just looks and feels off (rather like Charles III, I suppose).
Back at Somers, Pye installed herself in one of the new beds that have replaced the bunks and saw no reason to ever get out again – it’s like lazing in a renaissance painting!
Well actually, that’s not true, there were actually thousands of reasons she had to get up – until she figures out a way to do jigsaws in bed, that is! Pye was spoiled for choice this year, with TWO Discworld jigsaws AND a cool Dracula jigsaw to choose from. She barely knew where to begin!
She would have got through them all a lot faster if the Powder Monkey wasn’t off galivanting around Scandinavia with the rest of the crew, but that’s a very first world problem. Meanwhile, Stinky was cutting sick on a year’s worth of backlogged craft projects, beginning with turning some of the fabric acquired in Sulawesi into cushion covers.
Not to be outdone, Pye briefly switched her attention to a miniature house – once upon a Spotlight visit, she’d been successfully tempted with a kit, and was curious to see if this would be a slippery slope she would slide down headfirst.
The coefficient of cute (wherein something that is normally big is now very small) was off the charts, even if the scale wasn’t always accurate, and verily, it was like doing a 3D jigsaw. And the light turns on!!! It was a perfect size for the tiny moose that Moose had commissioned as a Christmas gift to D’admiral and Chuckles (so that they would think of him more often). But oh no! Moose got jealous that the little dude has a house, even though according to Moose, any house Moose is in belongs to him. The only reason no blood was shed is that neither antagonist has any!
More important than a moose blood-feud (fluff-feud?), D’admiral had a birthday! At last – an excuse to Dine at one of the Peninsula’s delightful options! Hmmm, where haven’t we been for a while? Ah yes, Rare Hare.
Stinky had taken great care while booking to let them know it was a certain someone’s special day, and what a delight it was when D’admiral’s dessert came out on fire!
Setting fire to food is definitely fun, and that evening we enjoyed a special birthday cheesecake…
Setting fire to food is fun, but setting fire to the state, on the other hand, is less fun. A couple of 40+ windy days in a row and we were worried it was going to be January of 2020 all over again. Luckily, it was not quite as bad – however, we would have preferred the follow up not come in the form of flash flooding down the Great Ocean Road.
We’d already been admiring some cool skies…
…and sunsets (some so engaging they caused the Somers equivalent of a traffic jam)…
… and it must be said, bushfires do make for some spectacular skies of an evening.
Not so sure how safe we feel about the cult down the road, but if they stay in their lane and leave us alone, we suppose it’s okay.
So, unlike January of 2020, we were able to be outside without damaging our lungs, phew. This is important because an important holidays tradition is Milky Foot, and despite half of the crew being missing we bravely sallied forth. We selected our colouring books, popped the bubbles and got to work.
Stinky cheated a bit by doing a beading project instead of colouring in, but the umpires allowed it because the end product is hot.
We had to do it over a couple of sessions, and Chuckles was positively saint-like about the experience!
Maybe she was inspired by Stinky’s new saintly hat!
This summer has seen an influx of rainbow lorikeets moving into the yard, which is very aesthetically pleasing - visually if not acoustically.
Speaking of birbs, over the course of a week we noticed what appeared to be a developmentally-challenged blackbird staggering around the yard. It kept theatrically ‘dying’ in different parts of the garden, and was clearly not in a good way (unless it was rehearsing for Romeo & Juliet and we just didn’t understand). Chuckles hates to see an animal suffering when she can do something about it and decided she needed to take matters into her own hands.
The aspiring actor was gently and lovingly euthanised…
… and respectfully interred in a new garden bed that’s being prepared.
We then promptly forgot about it, even when tilling in a bunch of compost – so it was more luck than good management that its rotting corpse didn’t come flicking out when we dragged the cultivator over it lol.
Speaking of birds and forgetting, we have realised we also haven’t mentioned the recent shenanigans of Brian the Raven who lives at Pye’s school! You remember him, he is the leader of the goon squad and is always up to no good. Well, on Muck Up Day morning, Brian dropped a quarter of a rabbit in the middle of the courtyard the Year 12s were gathering in, right where it would get the most attention. He waited long enough for it to be funny watching people scream and freak out, then came back and took it up to the nearest shade cloth to finish eating it where everyone could still see him. What a legend!
Back at the beach, we enjoyed catching up with people such as Cousin Adele and fam…
… and our bestie Dan at Wine Lovers Warehouse. We call him Cousin Dan to differentiate him from Uncle Dan, and when we popped in prior to new year, Stinky had a funny idea. The next time we visited, while Pye popped wine in a trolley, Stinky slapped a cheese board on the tasting bar. Cousin Dan just about peed his pants giggling, and popped a bubbles for us all to ‘taste’ with it.
It was almost as much fun as going to lunch in Mornington and spotting Sgrassatore in the wild! Very exciting!
Not to mention that Mornington visit involved some shopping around that ultimatly culminated in D’admiral and Chuckles buying half a car each for each other’s birthdays! Wow!
The Festival of D’admiral continued longer than usual this year, as it was rekindled when the Cabin Girl, Powder Monkey and their crew returned from overseas adventures. D’admiral got an even bigger cheesecake than the first time around!
And he got a vintage card from 1997 (Stinky had found in a box, just in the nick of time!).
All it needed was a little update from people who hadn’t existed the first time around.
It meant we could finally give D’admiral the picture of the lil idiots he looks after (Robyn & Andrew had found the picture, we had it framed). Delayed gratification, now gratified!
Belated-Christmas was also a delight, and was very moose-themed – just how we like it!
Back home, Pye immediately installed her moose-hook in the powder room. Pros: Very cool; fit for purpose; doesn’t want to keep falling out of the wall like its predecessor; keeps Moose happy. Cons: Higher degree of moose-dribble on hand towel than previously detected; toilet sitters must get used to being side-eyed by a carved moose while doing their business.
So anyway, yeah, it was a very nice and sensible late Christmas.
The return of Camel meant that the jigsawing ramped up even more, from amateur to professional level, and we had to go shopping for more just to keep up with demand!
A shopping outing to Franga would not be complete without lunch…
… with distinguished dining companions all around.
The bit where he hung around outside to offer to sell us drugs was weird, but hey, it’s Franga.
Other shopping adventures included a visit to Hastings. Sometime during the term someone fart-bombed Stinky’s desk, and it was time to get rid of the farty books. We quietly dropped a couple of farts in the op shop…
… and the Powder Monkey bravely persevered in the face of limited options to leave a poo in the $2 Shop.
A little later, Stinky also added a touch of class to our local Spotlight…
Back at the ranch, the weather rewarded the cold, northern hemisphere returnees, which let us do nice things like going for walks to Coolart. Coolart was a bit of a bully, though, tsk, such name calling.
Although it was very blowy, and we were undeterred and ended up doing a Tour of Somers Bridges as we tried to hide from the raging wind.
In fact, it’s been so windy that we’re pretty sure that Chuckles has declared it her personal nemesis!
Look at that choppy ocean and windswept creek!
After belated Christmas and birthday, the next most important thing to do was the next round of Milky Foot. The Crew didn’t actually fancy going back to work with feral feet, so we did the bubbles and colouring part, and soaked our feet in water rather than acid.
Andru was an excellent valet, with a highly sophisticated temperature-control system.
Pye enjoyed the result in her new Goonies colouring book…
…and we were all very impressed at how much Chuckles’ feet popped off.
Even more cosmically impressive was a big fat solar storm. Back in G-town when an aurora shows up, we’re lucky if we can see a coloured smudge above the houses and the streetlights, so we were not about to pass up the opportunity to admire one from a much more salubrious site. D’admiral stayed up way past his usual bedtime and came down to the beach. First stop: the mole!
It was pretty windy, and the Powder Monkey’s loving grandmother was worried he'd be cold - it was probably all 19 degrees, after all! He was probably much colder than a couple of weeks earlier when they were in Norway and saw the northern lights in Tromsø, right? Poor young man!
It’s been ages since we stumbled around the beach in the dark, and it was extra fun this time. Bravely, we didn’t let the wind scare us off, and it’s safe to say that we got a pretty good look at the best aurora ever.
You could kind of see the vertical streaks with the naked eye, but it really came to life with the camera.
In the words of Stinky – look at this shit!
This is one of our favourite shots, in spite (or because) Stinky and the Powder Monkey are flipping the bird.
Nighttime beach walks require nighttime beach selfies, everyone looks normal and cool.
Aurora Two Electric Boogaloo was predicted for the following night, but ended up being just a tiny tear in the universe, nothing the Ghostbusters can't handle.
We were able to draw some strong scientific conclusions from the solar storm – such as how looking at auroras makes selling your trailer a cinch. D’admiral popped it on the local Facebook page and before you could say, “How much do these even go for?” a couple of farm-owners from down the road had sprinted over, Melbas in hand. Then it turned out we could have started a bidding war – they and another local were all in the market for a trailer to mount their water tank and fire-fighting pump on. Who knew a thirty year old trailer could be such a hot commodity?!
Thus, January slipped rapidly between our fingers. The Cabin Girl and crew popped back just as we were packing up to go – just in time to enjoy Finnish reindeer poo lollies (they look terrific, but the taste is less good – but maybe it’s just cos we don’t enjoy liquorice flavour, not a poo-related issue).
It took us almost three hours to get home - summer road works and accidents made traffic a nightmare – but we managed to make an adventure of it. Google advised avoiding the Monash entirely, which meant we ended up going via the Eastern Freeway and the new Westgate Tunnel. Find your excitement where you can!
We spent the last couple of days of the holidays beating up the garden and catching up on house jobs. Stinky pickled our beetroot and dealt with about 3kg of nectarines which had grown while we weren’t looking – and this carrot wants to give you a hug!
We need a hug, having to go back to work at the end of January is actually the worst thing anyone has ever had to do, and wouldn’t you fucken know it, the weather decided to be a prick and all.
Stinky’s school doesn’t have air con, and nobody has had the kindness of heart to say we could do all our pointless meetings over Zoom. But hey, at least the new split system outside her room upstairs decided on the Sunday of the long weekend to develop a leak into the ceiling below it *record scratch* *checks notes* Ah fuck.
So yeah, don’t mind us, we’ll just be hiding in the dark watching the 2026 lamb ad to try and make ourselves feel better. Stinky will just have to sleep in the loft which still has a working split system (cries in First World Problems)
