Last weekend was a long weekend due to Labour Day on Monday. I think it's pretty much the same concept as the American Labor Day, except of course with a "U". The Moomba Festival takes place every year during Labour Day weekend and consists of a lot of family-friendly carnival activities and rides, water sports on the river (wakeboarding, etc.) and the annual Bird Man Rally. Basically, people create "wings" and attempt to fly off of a platform into the river. The person who goes the farthest wins money for charity. We got to the event an hour early and it was already packed; I guess there's a certain entertainment value in watching people attempt to fly. There were some hilarious contraptions, including this person below dressed in a bird costume with about 30 balloons attached to his back.
None of the contestants were able to fly all that far...go figure. Below is another contestant jumping with some umbrella-like device and the lifesaving boats waiting to swoop in. Apparently it's not easy to swim to shore with wings:
Overall, the Birdman Rally was super entertaining. I don't know how they choose contestants, but I'm considering entering Peter next year. I would do it myself, but the Yarra River isn't exactly clean, so Peter it is!
I took this picture of St. Paul's Cathedral (across from Flinders Street Station) while running some errands this week.
On Thursday, I met my friend Katie for dinner, as she just returned from a trip to New Zealand with her family. After hearing about her travels, I am more motivated then ever to book our flights. I've heard from so many people that New Zealand is amazing!
We went to Peko Peko in Fitzroy and started with sushi.
We then split this delicious soba salad.
We intentionally didn't stuff ourselves at dinner because Gelato Messina, which I'm convinced makes the best gelato anywhere in the world, is conveniently located right down the street. We really have a knack for choosing restaurants within walking distance of award-winning dessert. Totally coincidental.
The big news of the week: we FINALLY got a washer and dryer! Our apartment is rather...cozy, so we have been using the laundry closet for storage up until now. We finally decided we had had enough of dragging our clothes to the laundromat so we caved and purchased a washer and dryer earlier this week.
Peter's golf clubs, rendered homeless by the washer and dryer, have now taken up residence in the bedroom, which I'm super thrilled about. Anyway, the washer and dryer were delivered and installed today and I've been happily doing laundry all day! That's a first.
I have only had two little conversion mishaps so far. First, the user manual recommends running an initial load on the "quick wash" cycle to clear out any dust or debris in the new washer before actually putting clothes in. The directions specially say to add a small amount (30 ml) of detergent to the cycle. Seeing as I don't really know what 30 ml looks like, I dumped about half the lid in and pushed start. It became clear that I had added wayyyy too much detergent when soap began to fill the whole washer. Luckily, it didn't overflow and most of it drained out at the end of the cycle.
Here is the moment I realized I may have put in too much soap.
Next, I made a potentially more damaging conversion error. The washers here (at least the one we bought) have the option to manually select temperature. There isn't a warm or cold setting, it's just cotton, delicate, etc. So I chose cotton, which had about four temperature options. I decided 95 degrees sounded nice and warm so I went with that. I pressed start and the timer showed 3 hours remaining in the cycle. That seemed a bit long to me, so I decided to check with my friend Lauren to see if their cotton cycle ran that long. I'm glad I did! Turns out, 95 degrees would have almost boiled my clothes and probably shrunk them to infant size. So, after Lauren educated me on appropriate temperatures (something I somehow haven't managed to learn yet), I put my clothes in at 40 degrees, which is "warm". Shoutout to Lauren for saving my wardrobe!
Now I'm off to move the golf clubs to the balcony...sorry Peter!
