Better Homes and Gardens

We watch Better Homes and Gardens every week. It's one of the few shows we all watch together as a family and is actually one of our favourite TV shows. So, when we learned that they were shooting an episode in Adelaide, we wanted to catch the team in action. They were actually shooting at a Bunnings Warehouse store, sort of like a huge hardware chain store, close by and we were lucky enough to come in just in time for them to shoot some of the opening sequences.

The kids were even able to get a picture taken with one of the presenters, Tara Dennis. Unfortunately, the little boy was a bit shy and missed his chance to have his picture taken with Rob Palmer, the builder in the show. The boy always likes Rob's segments on TV when he starts building stuff. He always says he wants to be a builder someday and Rob is like an idol to him.

At any rate, we stayed around a bit to watch some of Fast Ed's cooking segment but too many people started crowding around so we decided to head home. We got Olympians yesterday and today we had TV celebrities. It's been an exciting weekend so far.

Maybe we might end up on the TV show one of these days, hehehe.

Olympians At School

Olympians At School
Originally uploaded by chazzvid

This morning, Claire Woods and her fiancé Jared Tallent, both Australian Olympic athletes visited the kids school.

It was awesome to see them both as Jared brought his Silver and Bronze medals along. Claire is actually an old scholar ( alumnus ) of the kids school so it was terrific to see them come and talk to the kids.

To think they are actually going to get married tomorrow and still took time out to come meet with the children says a lot.

The kids were clearly excited to see them as it was all a bit of a surprise. We were there because it was our boy's assembly day and he had a part to play being one of the commentators. We had no idea that they were having such distinguished guests this morning so it was also quite exciting for both the wife and I to see Claire and Jarrod in their Australian tracksuits. We saw these athletes on the TV from Beijing a couple of weeks ago and to see them at our kids school was quite a thrill, even for us parents.

Lumpiang Shanghai

Lumpiang Shanghai
Originally uploaded by chazzvid

I was still recovering from the flu even over the weekend so we decided to stay at home for the most part. It was still cold and real soup weather but because we had prepared and frozen some Lumpiang shanghai from last week, we decided to have that for Sunday lunch instead.

Lumpiang shangahi or meat spring rolls is one of our easy cook meals we usually prepare and store in the freezer ahead of time. All we would do is just defrost the spring rolls and just shallow fry them a few minutes and there's a meal already.

Preparing it is easy as especially when we use prepared lumpiang shanghai mix. We just combine pork mince with some oyster sauce, soy sauce, chopped carrots, chopped onions or spring onions or coriander. We'd then top it off with Mama Sita's Lumpiang Shanghai mix. Then just roll the meat mixture store bought spring roll wrappers and freeze for another day.

Flu Season...

And I got it. Actually, it was our little girl who had it first. When we picked her up from school last Friday, her teacher told us that she actually was so tired that she had a nap in the middle of the afternoon. It turned out that she caught some virus and she ended up getting a high temperature that night. She got better over the weekend but sure enough, it soon passed on to me and I got waylaid by chills and aching joints early this week. Although, I thought I got over it but I'm still not feeling 100% so might have to take some more rest.

It's not easy getting the flu, maybe next time I should take the free flu vaccines they've been giving out in the office...

Olympic Weekend

We did nothing this weekend but watch the Olympics on TV. It started with the spectacular opening ceremonies on Friday, the kids and I even tried our best to watch all of it but we all fell asleep halfway through the athletes parade. On the Saturday, we watched as the first of the Aussies battled it out for the early medals in the cycling. It was quite exciting as we all got carried away cheering on the Green and Gold. On Sunday we got to see Stephanie Rice's gold winning 400 Individual Medley in the swimming. It was quite something and we ended up cheering her on in front of TV.

It was fun to see the kids getting into the spirit as they cheered the Australian Olympic team on with chants of "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi" from our living room.

A Night Out

The wife had an office function last night. It was a dinner out with the grown-ups and we decided to go. For the first time, we actually left the kids over at our friends' place and the wife and I had a nice proper dinner out, albeit with several other people! We were at first anxious about leaving the kids but because we've known our friends for a long time now we weren't really worried.

We actually arrived early at the Indian restaurant so we killed some time walking around Rundle Street, one of Adelaide's night out spots. It was still really cold, not really walking around weather but it wasn't long when we were all seated in the warm restaurant with my wife's co-workers.

Dinner was nice and quite a change for us without the kids. We had a good time and the night just went past so quickly we found ourselves driving back to pick up the kids soon enough.

We were glad to know our kids behaved themselves. So much so that we could find ourselves making this into a habit! :)