Ice Skate for Your Kitchen Design!

designer kitchenThese reality TV prizes are getting a bit silly, it must be said. Don’t get me wrong: I love me a good TV competition. I tuned in almost religiously to The Great Australia Trade-Off, and even The Fermentist, which is surprising for me because I’m not a huge fan of conflict. Now it’s in the off-season, where they give all the lesser shows a chance. I’m happy to sit down for fun evening of a famous Yugoslavian ice skater teaching a bunch of complete novices to compete in a huge ice skating competition, but why is it that they win a full kitchen renovation at the end? You’d think it would be a trip to Yugoslavia, or maybe tickets to go and see a show on ice, but no…they win kitchen renovations. Melbourne has seen a massive boom over the last few years in designer kitchens so I somewhat understand this decision. Why can’t I win kitchen renovations? We need it more than a bunch of millenials who probably don’t even own a home anyway.

I’m just saying, if it was a renovation show, this reward would make perfect sense. But it’s like they just got a random sponsorship from some renovation professionals and decided to run with it. Now they have to make every single confession-cam segment all about the contestants weeping salty tears and talking about how they’re just imagining the wondrous kitchen they’re going to have when they ice skate better than all the other ice skaters. And you just think…what’s actually going on here??

Well, I suppose not every single reality TV show can have the budget of GATO, and thus they just have to pick the prizes that come to them rather than shopping around. And the prizes at the moment are kitchen and bathroom renovations. Melbourne must be experiencing some kind of…renovation renaissance. Hey, that’s not a bad name for a show.

-Evelyn

The Ultimate Zen Experience…Indoors

garden supplies Carrum DownsSo, what we have here is me making the best of a bad situation. We probably weren’t meant to receive what seems to be just over a ton of crushed rock, particularly since we live on the sixth floor and nobody ordered anything like this. The polite delivery men checked their records and said that there couldn’t be anything else, and they can’t come up with anywhere the rock could be. But by then, they’d already kindly lugged most of it up the stairs and left it in the hallway. Plus it’s been paid for, so…I took it in, like a good citizen.

All the housemates were away for the weekend, so they basically left me to deal with this myself, even though they didn’t know it was going to happen, but it’s STILL selfish. Very selfish indeed.

What I’m trying to say is that we have a zen garden inside now. I had to drive to Carrum Downs, buy garden supplies and make sure I had a really sturdy rake, because I’ve seen the way you rake the stones on those tiny little ones that you put on your desk and I knew we’d need something a lot less dainty than that. I managed to spread the crushed rock over basically the entire floor of the apartment, after which I set about looking in the garden centres nearby for a bonsai. Those are not available, so I swapped in an Albajerian maple, which is now in the middle of the lounge.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I bought wooden sandals for everyone so we can traverse the stones. I think it’ll give us a real appreciation of the Japanese ways, and how they are vastly superior to our own. Oh yes, indeed.

The way I see it, this was the only thing to be done. If the housemates don’t like it when they get back, well…they can find somewhere that sells aggregate in Berwick or wherever to take all of this rock. But I really do think we have something great and unique here.

-Bani