We’re going to the zoo, zoo, zoo…You can come too, too, too…

It wasn’t long before I was missing Pete too much to last six weeks, so I booked to go down to Glasgow for a few days between my new job to see him, and we decided to take a trip to the Edinburgh Zoo! 🙂 I was all excited to take loads of photos to put on here, but after packing my bag with about a zillion batteries, I found out that they were all run-out of battery juice…or whatever. So we had to resort to our phone cameras the whole day! Which meant that not many photos were taken, certainly none that were very interesting – especially as none of the animals actually wanted to stay still (that’s right, meerkats! i’m talking to you!!!)

It was a little expensive, I have to admit (£13 each for students, but then if you unclick the ‘donate’ box you get a couple of quid knocked off – an essential for students, unfortunately!)…We got the bus from Glasgow to Edinburgh which cost just £13 for both of us to return – shame I decided to book it two hours after the zoo closing time…silly me…ended up with us sitting in a pub drinking for an hour or so, and then falling asleep on the way home!

So here are a couple of photos of just a handful of the animals we saw! 🙂

hippos! mummy and baby hippo.

 

 

…For some reason only the first caption has saved! Silly thing. The last photo with the monkey is a really bad photo taken through the glass – but we sat and watched it eating grapes for ages, then it put it’s little hands up against the glass – it was so cute!

Then Pete bought me my own little furry (and overpriced) panda to take home! 🙂 It was a lovely, if not expensive and tiring day out and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who gets the chance! (But wear appropriate shoes…it’s ALL uphill!)

Kids are simply the best

my personal favourite  – “the rule goes like this : If you kiss someone then you should marry them and have kids with them. It’s the right thing to do” – Howard…awww, I hope he still believes this in ten years time, I really do…what a bunch of cuties!

I want this dog.

Mango and Passion Fruit Smoothie

I’ve never been much of a smoothie drinker. The school canteen always used to sell the little cartons of Innocent smoothie but I always found them too sharp or they had a weird creamy sickly texture that just made me feel like being sick. Yuck.

BUT. This all changed when I was shopping with a friend from uni and she said ‘I’m just going to pop in here for a smoothie…’ to a juice/smoothie bar in the shopping centre (Fuel Juice Bars – check them out here – also, i’m not sure if they’re in the US, I’m only aware of them in the UK!)…While we were in there a smoothie on the menu caught my eye and I decided to try it – it was called ‘Passion Dash’ (mango, passion fruit, tropical juice, fat free vanilla frozen yoghurt and fat free mango frozen yoghurt) OH. and they’re all 99% (or something) fat free. Lovely.

And it was amazing. And I must have spent about £150 on smoothies since I made the discovery. But they’re healthy, and fat free, therefore it’s a completely okay thing to waste my money on…that’s what I keep telling myself anyway! Infact I’m pretty sure they stopped giving me the “buy nine get your tenth free” loyalty card on purpose, and I started to feel really self conscious when they knew my order off by heart before I had to even say anything…Maybe I should buy shares.

So after having my last smoothie a week ago and waving bye bye to Glasgow for 12 weeks, I decided – surely it couldn’t be THAT hard to make a similar smoothie at home…? I’d already tried sainsburys version, but just like all other shop bought smoothies, it was disgusting.

I sent mum off with a shopping list yesterday and she came back with everything, minus the mango frozen yoghurt and with a tub of natural yoghurt that we shoved in the freezer instead of vanilla flavoured frozen yoghurt – I don’t think I’ve found any shops that sell frozen yoghurt, definitely not vanilla flavoured.

And baring in mind I have no idea what the quantities are supposed to be, this turned out pretty well!

You will need:

1 passion fruit – cut it in half an spoon out the flesh and seeds into a blender.

1 mango – cut it in half (you’ll need to twist it to get it to come apart from the weird fleshy-seedy thing) and spoon it out into the blender too.

frozen yoghurt, I put in about a small yoghurt pots worth (that’s a crap measurement, I’m sorry!)…maybe about the size of a mango!? haha. didn’t bother trying to substitute the mango frozen yoghurt.

apple juice, they use tropical in the shop but we didn’t have any. orange/pineapple would probably be too sharp!

ice – I didn’t use any as I thought it might break my blender

shove it all in the blender and blend itttttt.

I have to say, it did have that weird creamy texture that I’m not a fan off…the ones that I buy from the juice bar are almost kind of ice-creamy (I guess that’s because the frozen yoghurt isn’t just a tub of yoghurt from the freezer, and they put ice in too, which gets all crushed up) and it didn’t taste QUITE like the ones I buy, but I put that down to the quantities being different…I think they might even use frozen cubes of mango…

You do need to blend it quite a bit though otherwise the passion fruit seeds are a bit TOO crunchy…but it’s yummy and healthy and really quick to make. And with all the excitement, I forgot to take a photo! Sorry!!

I’ve become one of the employed again!!

Happy days, today I became employed after a two month long job hunt with a result of about 560382745 rejections and 0 interviews. The job I got I applied for two nights ago, was phoned the next morning, and was interviewed and offered the job today. Kind of feel I shouldn’t have even bothered with the stress of the last few months! NEVER MIND. I’m employed now. In the Next stockroom, with a friend who I also worked with last year :).

I got home from uni last Sunday and I’m here until the end of August…wasn’t really looking forward to it as I have zero money and, until today, no job. Now it won’t be sooo bad…at least I’ll be working a couple of days a week. Can’t complain! Rockness is in about three weeks, then I have my brothers graduation and then I’ll be seeing Pete for the first time in about six weeks! 😀 Just another six after that until I go to his, and then back to uni not long after that…so I’ll get through, I’m sure…

Decided to take some photos today of my house 🙂 I was outside filling up the new boiler hut thing with wood (my parents have gone all crazy eco-friendly with solar panels and such…this is the new heating system, but there’s never enough hot water for a shower in the morning…never thought I’d say this, but I miss the showers at uni)…

So this is where I live 🙂

back of the house with the deck we built a few summers ago

view out of the back gate onto the footpath/track

Buster again 🙂

 

 

 

 

It’s actually quite nice being home, even though I didn’t think I’d be saying it 🙂 I miss Pete, but the time will go fast…It’s already only 4 weeks until I see him! Not sure what my posting/blogging activity is going to be like over the summer…don’t really have anything of that much importance to say, and I rarely do the cooking when I’m home 😛 We’ll see 🙂

 

EDIT – some of the captions are refusing to work for the photos…no idea why, but you get the idea!

This Week

..has been hectic! My birthday was on Wednesday and I’ve been packing everything in my room as I’m leaving Glasgow to go home tomorrow for three months summer…I’ve so far had no luck finding a summer job and am pretty disheartened with all the rejections I’ve had, and I’m not looking forward to leaving Pete and not seeing him properly until September…but I woke up with a sore throat this morning so I guess it’s time to go home whether I like it or not!!

Pete got me this awesome clock for my birthday – it even speaks!

…some fairy lights and a years subscription to Cosmopolitan – what a great boyfriend! He even got me a caterpillar cake for the evening (and sparkler candles that my mum sent specially!)

We’ve spent a lot of money this week going to the  cinema (the new American Pie and Tim Burton’s ‘Dark Shadows’) as well as eating out a few nights and taking a trip to IKEA yesterday…

Either my blogging activity is going to go crazy over the next three months while I desperately try and find things to do to entertain myself, or I’ll drop off the face of the blogging-world because I won’t have anything interesting to talk about…three months of no plans, no money and no boyfriend is going to be boooorrrrinngggg…

IT’S MY BIRTHDAY :D

Found this on twitter earlier – couldn’t resist posting it!

Just a quick one…

image courtesy of google images

My mum is running the Edinburgh Marathon for the second time soon! She’s aiming to raise £1200 for a local day care centre that cares for cancer patients. Last time she was raising money for kidney research. So far she has managed to raise nearly £500, but she still has a long way to go!

If you would like to donate (every penny counts!) please go to her JustGiving page (you can also click on the ‘donate now’ button above)  or (if you’re in the UK) text SJMW57 plus the amount (for example SJMW57 £1) to 70070 and the amount will be deducted from your mobile phone’s credit.

She would really appreciate it and so will all the cancer patients that benefit from the care they receive at the care centre.

Thank you!

Doughballs and Fajitas

A few days ago I said I was going to make doughballs…and I did! I found the recipe from here and the photo looks exactly like the doughballs we had in Pizza Express! I won’t bother rewriting the recipe, you can see it all on there! The first time I made them the oven had been on cooking my dinner for ages, so ten minutes turned the little balls into mini bread rolls! Hard on the outside and bready on the inside…they still tasted great but certainly weren’t ‘doughballs’ so keep checking them so they don’t get too hard.

I cooked a second batch last night for desert after Pete and I had dinner with two friends. We made fajitas! We just got one of the fajita meal packets and added chicken, peppers and onions…yum yum!

So tasty. Then we went out to the cinema to see the new avengers film…great day!