This weekend, we’ve been lucky enough to share both of our breakfasts with friends! On Saturday, Joe, Shamine and Harry came to our place, and we devoured some breakfast burritos. Note for next time: refried beans taste fantastic with scrambled eggs! We tired the kids out with some bubble-fun and activity table time in the backyard afterwards.

Today, it was back to Willow & Spoon, this time with Laura and Tim, Bill, Inge, and Monique! Once again, deciding what to order was a task in itself, but I eventually settled on The Harlequin – Smoked Cod, brioche, avocado, tomato & green onion salsa, artichoke, veloute. Of course, I had no idea what that translated to, but I was pleasantly surprised when it came out looking like this:

Delicious! And, it was great to see so many Foleys again; we hadn’t seen Monique since shortly after she was born!

• Photos from breakfast with Joe, Shamine and Harry on Google+ and Facebook
• Photos from Willow & Spoon with the Foleys on Google+ and Facebook

As mentioned in our last visit to Settlement Cove, we were so impressed by the location and the facilities that we booked the same gang for a follow-up visit! Today though, we decided to go for breakfast, in an attempt to beat the crowds and the heat of the day. It was a total success! The lagoon was much quieter upon arrival; we even managed to secure a covered gazebo with tables and chairs for our visit.

The other advantage of breakfast is that eggs and bacon are much quicker to cook compared to sausages and burgers, so the sub-par heat from the BBQs wasn’t as much of a problem. And the bacon and egg rolls that we enjoyed afterwards were delicious! A big thanks to chef Stu who did a pearler of a job with all the cooking!

Once again, the kids had a great time running amok through the lagoons and the playground, while the parents supervised and chatted.

What a wonderful way to start the weekend!

More albums on the gallery page, Google+, or Facebook.

The fuel light had been solid on my scooter for a few days, so this morning I finally relented and pulled over at BP at Bowen Hills to fill it up. 5.76 litres later (which averages at 23.47 km/l in case you’re curious) and I was all ready to finish the commute to work.

That is, until something went POP!

It was ridiculously loud; so loud that I was convinced that one of my tires had blown when I demounted the scooter from its stand. Given the recent run of flat tires I’ve had on my bike, it certainly would have been fitting! But no, that wasn’t the problem – both tires were intact. Instead, the scooter’s electrics had gone completely dark! And, given that it has an electric starter motor, that meant that the scooter wasn’t going anywhere!

Thankfully, the lady working at BP – Carol – was very understanding about the whole situation, and she was happy for me to leave the scooter there until I could figure out how to move it. As soon as the scooter mechanics opened, I called them for some advice, and they told me how to check the battery terminals and the main fuse. Cam (from work) and I drove back to do this, and we both thought that everything looked as it should, which confirmed that the only way the scooter was going to leave the petrol station was via scooter taxi.

As it turns out, Motorcycle Freighters will transport your scooter from Bowen Hills to Fortitude Valley for $50.

In the end, the problem was one of the cells in the battery shorting. That means about as much to me as it does to you – unless you’re a mechanic of some sort, in which case it probably means a lot more to you than it does to me. Anyway, the cell shorting caused the lid of the battery to (literally) pop open, hence the noise that I heard. And the cure? A new battery, which set me back $88.

I can think of better things that I’d rather put $140 towards but I guess sometimes you don’t always get the choice!

On the first Sunday of every month, Blackwood Street at Mitchelton plays host to a farmers market. It’s only a five minute drive from our place, so we’ve been there a couple of times; Ian has now gone one better than us by moving to the neighbourhood! So on Sunday, we decided to use his house as a carpark, then walk to the markets to find ourselves some breakfast.

Be honest now; does my hair always look that bad? What’s with the double sticky-up bit at the front? I mean, I can’t even blame hat-hair, or Oscar-on-top-of-shoulders hair; that was all me. What was I thinking?

Anyway; it was super hot in the sun! That didn’t stop the craving for hot food though, and between us, Kristy and I enjoyed some dim sum, coffee, and a German frankfurter before leaving. We also walked away with french bread and cheese, all of which was devoured back at Ian’s house.

An awesome way to start a Sunday morning.

To make the most of all this awesome summer weather that we’ve been having (yes, I’m being sarcastic) we headed to Settlement Cove Lagoon for lunch yesterday, along with The Threebies and The Donnachies. Actually, as luck would have it, yesterday turned out to be a beautiful day, with plenty of blue sky and sunshine to accompany our outing. Most impressed!

My only memory of being at Settlement Cove is from many, many moons ago, and I don’t think I’ve ever swum there before. It’s a very impressive installation, and it’s all completely free (well, run at the taxpayer’s expense at least!). The BBQs aren’t the world’s most flash to cook on, but did you see the price? Free! No-one’s can complain (much) about that!

Sadly, I didn’t get even one photo of the lagoon; in fact, the only photo I took all day was this one, of Oscar and Kristy playing in the playground next to where we were camped.

We’ve booked a follow-up visit with the same gang for March, so with any luck I’ll remember my camera and take some photos then, instead!

Most people write themselves some very sensible goals for the New Year, such as, “Put 10% of my income into savings”, or “Read more non-fiction books”, or, “Eat less meatloaf”. Well, I’m certainly no different from most people, and this year, my list of goals has (so far) topped out at the grand total of seven. Goal number one on that list is: “Learn to juggle”.

I know that by this point, you’re probably thinking one of two things; either, “Hey, awesome idea! You’re awesome!”, or, “Why? You’re a dork!”. Likely it’s the first one, but for the haters in camp two, let me answer your question with another question: “Why not?”. Kristy also agreed that at least one of us should know how to juggle, just in case such a skill should one day be needed to save our lives, and to this effect, she bought me a set of juggling balls for Christmas.

You may think that a handsome young father of a toddler (such as myself) would be somewhat short on time for juggling practice, but as it turns out, it’s completely the opposite! You see, said toddler has never been motivated by food – something we really should have seen coming – and as such, we’d do pretty much anything to get him to eat. And now, with juggling practice on the books, we have one extra distraction to use while the other person quietly encourages food into his mouth in the background.

Actually, his comprehension is getting amazingly good, to the point where eating has now become a negotiation. “Oscar, if you eat that quarter of ravioli, Daddy will juggle for you”. Yes, we realise that negotiating a child to eat probably isn’t something you’ll see on Supernanny, but since Oscar would be pretty happy to skip solid foods entirely, we don’t feel like we have much of a choice. Worse, I fear that we could be setting him up for long term disaster in his adult life, whereby every time he sees someone juggling, he feels a sudden urge to eat pasta.

Worse still, it’s not even the juggling that entertains him; it’s the failure at juggling that really makes him laugh. The whole time I’m delicately managing three balls in the air, he’s staring at me, just willing one of them to go astray. Thankfully though, he’s such a lovely, helpful little boy, that when he’s not strapped into his high-chair, he’s only too happy to go and fetch the fallen ball on my behalf.

Ahh, service with a smile!

Blood is totally awesome – just ask Dracula! And as it turns out, it’s transferable too – and it doesn’t even have to be via the fangs-in-neck method that our favourite vampire is so fond of. (Is Dracula our favourite vampire anymore? Who would win in a fight to the death between him and those Twilight hipsters? Twilight is about vampires, isn’t it?)

In support of this transferability, the Red Cross blood van was inconveniently parked right along our path from work to Nandos, and try as we might, we just couldn’t not notice it. It’s huge!

If I were the type of guy who was into pimping out caravans, I’d definitely be stealing some ideas from these guys; their air-conditioning is the hammer!

Anyway – they didn’t appear too busy, so after filling up on chicken and chips, Ben and I signed up to bleed. I’ve tried to donate blood in the past – once, and it was way back when I was working for Compaq down the Goldie. They turned me down! There was too much iron in my blood, so they were worried that I might have haemochromatosis – a disease which causes you to have too much iron in your blood.

Now however, many years later and haemochromatosis free, the Red Cross was only too happy to harvest my goods. Of course, donating blood isn’t a competitive sport, and yet somehow they managed to turn it in to one by equipping the van with a leaderboard for fast bleeders! Apparently anything under six minutes is fast, and I managed to bleed out in 5:52. Yeah! My name and time is now written onto that board for the rest of eternity, or at least until someone wipes it off at the end of the day. If only there was a trophy that I could have unlocked.

I ride past Teralba Park at Mitchelton every time I ride the treadly to work. From the road, it looks like it has quite a large-sized play area for the little ‘uns. And so on Saturday, we went down to check it out with Karl, Sibylle, and their two boys Anton and Ferdi.

Now, I’m certainly not going to be one to complain about a free park – in fact, quite the opposite; I think it’s remarkable how many awesome parks the council provides/maintains around Brisbane. We love the little park at the bottom of our street, and we can get to at least two others that are equally awesome in under 10 minutes walk!

However, Teralba Park did not live up to my expectations (though perhaps my expectations were a little unfair). As I said, from the road, the play equipment for the kids looked huge, so I was expecting a closer-to-home version of Arthur Davis park at Sandgate. But actually, there isn’t all that much there, especially given that the park is always so busy – there was easily a hundred other kids around while we were there. The slides with the steps next to them were a bit hit with Oscar, but overall, there wasn’t too much for a little boy of his age!

Of course, we still made our own fun, mostly just chasing after kids who decided to run in every direction they could. Poor Oscar didn’t have much luck running through the various lengths of grass over uneven ground, though his frequent falls didn’t seem to dampen his spirit at all. We had one very dirty little boy by the time we got home!

One of our goals for 2012 is to spend more time enjoying our beautiful Australian beaches. It’s only 1 hour 10 minutes from our door to one of my favourite beaches up the coast – Mudjimba – which is just about the maximum length of time that Oscar can tolerate a car seat whilst awake.

I’m very lucky to have a workplace that is very flexible with hours, so we’re going to try and start making regular mid-week trips, probably on a Wednesday morning. We figure that if we leave home by 6 AM, we’re at the beach just after 7 AM, which means even with a good hour-and-a-half of beach time, I can be at work a little after 10 AM.

So far in January, we’ve managed two trips in 15 days (one weekend and one midweek), which I think is a decent enough ratio. If we could hit three to five trips a month I think we’d be doing well!

The right-hand side of our herb garden was looking a bit spent by the end of 2011. Our parsley and chives – which had both been very good to us – had gone to seed. Our sage was being eaten by something-or-other, and our original basil plant had never done too well in the soil.

Since digging up and replanting everything on the left-hand side of the garden, the plants there have been growing amazingly well. The basil grows faster than we can consume it (clearly we need more uses for basil!), and our cherry tomatoes have just started fruiting.

Given how well the left-hand side of the garden is now doing, we figured that the right-hand side should be treated to a little bit of replanting love as well. And so, we went through and dug up all of the dodgy old soil, and replaced it with about 150 litres of fresh new potting mix. The stuff that ended up on top was pretty loose, so we all had a go at stomping around to try and compact it a bit.

We’ve put in some new parsley and chives, and replanted the sage, oregano, plus the original basil plant. Only a few days on, the chives are already looking bigger and stronger – hopefully the same will be true for all the other plants soon too!

Because we’ve been a bit more organised about the position that the herbs are planted, we’ve got a decent chunk of space left over – I think we could easily fit another two plants in there. Any suggestions? We’d love to grow some coriander, but every time we try to, it dies! And we already have mint (growing very well in a pot), some lemongrass, and two chili plants (one which is doing exceptionally well this year). What are we missing?