Toowong Cemetery Part 2 - Impressive Grave Sites

These are some of the bigger grave sites in Toowong Cemetery that caught my attention.  First up two shots of the monuments for Mayne.  I haven't read the Mayne Inheritance yet, but I did do a bit of snooping into who the Mayne family were and they were pretty big around Brisbane.  For one the university I go to (University of Queensland) I'm told the land was donated by the Mayne's.

And I live just across the road from where their main estate used to be - it is now part of the Wesley Hospital.  They of course also have a very interesting involvement with some murders in Brisbane, which I believe is what the bulk of the Mayne Inheritance is about.  And here's an urban legend for you - supposedly there have been a few incidents of a 'red liquid' seeping out from the grates below this monument.. ooooh creepy! ;)

Next up is Governor Samuel Blackall's monument.  It is by far the largest and most imposing monument in the cemetery - and to top it all off it sits on the highest point of the grounds, so I'm pretty sure you can see it from the highway but don't quote me on it.

Not sure if this is anyone important, but I was struck by how nice the sculptures were on this one.  Love how creepy the photo looks too!

Now Bonus photo - City views in the afterlife!

Toowong Cemetery Part 1 - Jack the Ripper?

So since the start of the year Justin and I have this new past-time hobby of going to the local cemetery, which for us is one of the biggest in Brisbane - the Toowong Cemetery.  We were sitting around doing nothing one Sunday in January and I had the idea of going to go check out the place, because I'd never walked through a cemetery and though it might be interesting.  Then I googled the history of the place and 'urban legends' - I am completely obsesses by UB's, I'll have to do a post about what I've found out over the years - anyway I discovered that a Jack the Ripper suspect is buried in TC.  It took us two days to find the grave because the first time I didn't bring a map but find him we did!

Anyway today we went with Justin's sister Sian and her beautiful little doggy Monty for a walk through TC.  We wanted to show her some of our finds in particular Mr J. Ripper and I took a few snaps of my favourite graves that I'll talk about spread over blog posts.

Our suspect Mr Walter Porriott was buried in 1952 in the same grave as his last wife Eliza (known as 'Bessie) - the surviving generation of Porriott's claim that he is not named on the grave because of a deeply shameful reason that no-one has discussed since that era.

The gravestone has been damaged but you can go to the Brisbane Times article to see it in it's former glory.  This is a shot of the gravestone listing of Eliza and Walter.

This is a shot of the grave from Sian's blog - because Justin pulled horrid faces in the shots I took!

This grave site can be found at "Portion 7A, Section 185, Grave Number 9/10".  The map for the west side of the cemetery can be found here and the east side can be found here if you'd like to have a look for some graves yourself :)

Studying

Today all I did was study from about midday to 9pm. So due to that this blog is now about the things that can be found on my desk including one very special little item...

These are my spanish revision notes. I find learning languages that the best way for me to learn is to write idiot-proof notes about rules and verb endings. Then I stick them up on my wall to read a few times a day.

This is my little fluffy stick thing.. it doesn't actually do anything but it lives with my pens to make them more interesting. Every now and then I might bring it out to piss someone off with.. it confuses the rattikins when I tickle them teehee.

This is Lappy 3: The Mac Reincarnation. My parents gave me it for christmas after Lappy 2: The Sony Vaio turned into a technicolor dreamland one day.

LOL. This.. I don't know what the crap this is. It's supposedly a 'wrist rest' but I think that all falls apart once you realise what you're looking at has a pile of poo in it's mouth. But wait! That pile of poo has a function! If you pull it out the little animal that is lovingly about to digest it will vibrate to 'massage' my wrist. The only thing it's massaging is my ribcages from laughing at its existence. Justin gave it to me for christmas last year - there was an entire stall of these guys! All I need to make my life complete now is one of their poo toys - literally a pile of poo that stands about 30cm high. Win!

Food - A Night In India

Not literally haha, that WOULD be something! Friday night we went to a restaurant called 'A Night in India' in Toowong. We'd been there once before and couldn't remember if we actually liked it or not. But Justin wanted to get his curry on and hey, who am I to get between a man and his curry?

It was fairly busy for a friday night, but we still managed to get in. Started off with pappadums with raita and mango chutney. The raita was epically yum, I seriously need to have a go at making one myself because I could have eaten buckets of it. Then I had my usual Butter Chicken (Mild of course, because I'm a wuss) and Justin thought he'd be different with the Madrasi.


The good thing about this restaurant is that they serve all the meals with saffron rice by default instead of just normal rice, which we thought really added to the meals. I think I prefer the Butter Chicken from Punjabi Palace or Karma, but I really liked the Madrasi that J got. After the massive meal (of which we had leftovers of course!) we decided to go for a walk along the river. It's not as romantic as it used to be though, because of all that construction they are doing, but it sure stopped me from falling into a curry concussion on my lounge lol.

Mt. Cootha Picnic, Magpies and Ants

Today my lovely boyfriend decided we should have a picnic. So after my class at uni, I came home and Justin was making some little lunch rolls and I cooked up some eggs and we hopped in the car to find a nice spot at Mt. Cootha. We are very lucky to live just a short five minute drive from the gardens and we've discovered lots of nice quiet areas that tourists and day visitors often don't drive to. So we stopped at one site surrounded by trees and not a person in sight.As we were unwrapping our rolls I noticed a few magpies (no surprise) making their way over to a nearby tree to scope out the sucker-value of these picnickers no doubt. Then quite suddenly we found ourselves encircled by an entire family of magpies (mum, dad and three babies) all very keen to have a piece of our lunch.

I honestly have never seen magpies get so close, Justin of course fed them from afar at first. Then we started testing how close they would come until I literally had one a few inches from my lap sitting on my satchel bag. At this point Justin could hand-feed them, they were taking it reasonably well from his hands. But it was seriously freaking me out, I thought we were going to get rolled for our food by this pack of magpies!

After we ran out of food, they eventually flew back to their tree. And then we had the displeasure of meeting the most vicious bloody green ants. One bit me behind the ear (Man, the pain!) and another bit Justin in the back of the neck. After spending half an hour in peaceful nature, the picnic had turned into a warfare zone and we decided get the hell out of there! I think next time we'll have to scope out the ant situation before we set up our picnic ;)

My Rattikins: Coco

We have three female rats in our family, todays blog will be about Miss Coco (aka Coco Pop, Coco Monster and Coco Puff). I chose her first because it turns out she's the most photogenic - well she must be because I have 5 photos to 1 of the other two girls! (Although the food in the above picture probably has a lot to do with it).

I lubs Coco. She has these little eyes that pop out slightly more than the other two and she is the smallest of the three. I think this is because Coco prefers to have adventures and test her limits rather than chow down on food all day. Unfortunately my little munchkin is the most unwell of the three - she has Respiratory Mycoplasmosis (So does her sister Creamy but Coco's is much worse). It's a common disease in rats and they all apparently have the genetics for it, but it is up to the individual immune system whether they will present with symptoms or not. So every couple of months she will start sneezing and wheezing, which means we have to start her on antibiotics. But she's very brave and takes them well :)

Above she is giving smoochies to her Aunt Sian ;) Coco has probably given me the most strife out of all of them for her escape antics. She's made it behind the dishwasher in the kitchen, even managed to climb into the walls through a powerpoint her daddy left open. She's escaped upstairs to the apartment above us and I've spent hours sitting in front of small holes trying to coax her out with food. She is a little troublemaker but I wouldn't have her any other way :)

Breakfast at UQ

Today I had my second last spanish exam for the semester. I think it went well for the record.. I just spun a whole lot of BS and tried to spell it as well as I could with my broken spanish vocabulary. I also somehow managed to get 10% out of 15% on my previous grammar test - in my eyes I couldn't ask for more bahaha.

Anyway I got to UQ an hour earlier than I would normally and my sole mission at 8:15am was to get me some Merlo action! I freaking love Merlo coffee, I'm going to have to address this addiction some other day though because something else distracted me from my goal - Ye awesome Ham/Cheese Croissant!

So damn good! And I had a decent view from the Pizza Cafe:

Anyway, while I was sitting down murdering my HCC and mulling over recent developments, I saw this bird just swoop like a ninja into the slightly ajar door of the Pizza Cafe restaurant. He then proceeded to jump from table to table picking up crumbs.. I seriously loved his arrogance, so much so that when he swooped near me for a croissant crumb I took a quick snap of him:

Origin Scarf DIY

Last year I said I was going to knit my boyfriend Justin a scarf for the Origin football matches. I got about 10 rows in and then said 'To hell with this!' and hid my sad little scarf in a box for a year. I have not lived this failure down, even last Saturday my dad brought it up when we saw some Origin merchandise >.>

Well yesterday I decided I was going to give it another go, but this time with knitting needles double the size (10) instead of 5.5 needles.

Armed with the book I gave my mother for christmas (Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Knitting Book) and a great deal of patience I managed to cast on my knitting (after about 10 attempts) and did about 10cm of knitting. Yay! And as promised a photo of my crap-tastic creation so far.

Note the way it looks all puffy up close (Thoughts: I think it's because I haven't got my tension consistent?). Hopefully sometime in the near future I can show the finished result. For now this is how I spent 2.5 hours today instead of studying lol.