totoro cupcakes camera

happy new year! ever since we've been home, I've gone a bit nuts with the cleaning and rearranging.  it's nice to start the new year with a slightly cleaner house and some lovely new things (check out our new face vase, a gift from tony's friend doris and our amazing bowl of succulents from sophie and tim!)

this morning I awoke to our first batch of homemade yoghurt, which worked! we're excited to try making a few things at home this year, tony made a delicious batch of ice cream yesterday and come autumn we're going to try our hand at a herb garden again. I'm also keen to try our this recipe for no knead bread.

I've had some really good luck with books this summer. while we were away I read helen garner's 'the spare room', bringing my garner book count for 2012 to three. I promptly purchased her collection of non-fiction articles. I also read haruki murakami's 'dance, dance, dance', which is rivalling 'iq84' as my favourite murakami book. the only new-ish book I read was chris ware's 'building stories' which was confronting and totally consuming. there are 14 items in all ranging from hard-cover books to broadsheet style comics and I spent two solid days working my way through them.

and now for a dvd and some homemade tacos. it's back to work tomorrow!