Taking Stock

One of the things I truly rooly love about working from home is being able make soup for lunch. Charmaine Solomon has taught me to cook lentils with a stick of celery, a carrot, and some home grown garlic, onion and a few bay leaves. Once this has had the crap cooked out of it  simmered gently during the morning I take out the stock veggies add what ever other veggies are handy - pumpkin, taties, more carrots, just picked parsnips, salt, pepper, spices, herbs from the garden, perhaps some stock, mushies....what ever I feel like eating that day and then let it finish cooking for about half an hour. How healthy and simple and easy is that?

It also means that if someone pops in, there is usually something to feed them too.

On the other hand I do struggle sometimes with getting the balance right. Sometimes I wake up early and get into work - on Monday I started at 4:30am.....and I was still focused on the computer and the phone and my notes and still in my PJs at 1:30pm when I finally stopped long enough to have a shower. Hopeless.

Sometimes I am a bit like a terrier with a bone. Anyway, making soup, remembering to have a shower and get dressed, getting out for a walk or going to the gym, or riding Queenie down to tend my plots at the community garden, or even just going out to feed the ducks in the winter sunshine........all these things are just golden and important and remind me how lucky I am and how gorgeous life is. I tend to work in fits and starts - full on for a day or so where I plow through everything interspersed with days that my brain refuses to focus and I am exhausted or just plain need a break from the mobile/email/'puter/humans.

Anyway, all this gorgeous alpaca yarn arrived this week. Just lovely. I wasn't sure if the rainbow colored yarns would be self striping....it turns out no - the way they are dyed means short colors and a total kaleidoscope thing happening.

 Ziva wasnt really putting much energy into helping me work out what to make first......
She really loves the pink chair. 

And here is another project. My home veggie bed is becoming increasingly shaded and invaded by roots from various plum trees and naughty chickens. Its hard to come up with something that keep chickens out but lets us in. Anyway, I have had the girls in there cleaning all the summer crops up and now I am ready to do something AMAZING. I picked up a full days work yesterday which was enough to cover the cost of some very very very very trendy raised garden beds and netting structures which should give my beds more sun and less abuse from roots, shade and feathered friends. Stay tuned! Watch this space.......

My Mountains

My Brindabellas. 8:00am. Mt Stromlo. enroute for coffee and a hamandcheesecroisant @ SCOPE

Learn to Crochet from a Duck!

OK my feathered friends. This is PRETTY COOL. Remember I went on an adventure to Alpaca Magic to huggle llamas buy BEAUTIFUL ALPACA YARN? Well, the gorgeous Glynda has ASKED ME TO RUN A CRAZY ABOUT CROCHET course for folks wanting to learn crocheting from a Duck, I mean, of fine things perhaps with lovely Alpaca yarn. Imagine learning to crochet and huggling Llamas all on the same day? Times 3!


If you are a fellow ONCian who thinks they might just like to learn the gentle art of CROCHET, then I would love to met you! It would be SUCH FUN!

We are still working out the fine details,and Glynda is still to update the website but at this stage, we are looking at holding a series of 3 workshops on:

Saturday the 9th, 16th and 23rd of July
From 1:30pm - 4:30pm
At Alpaca Magic, 2771 Sutton Rd, Sutton.

• Session 1 will cover the basic stitches, reading crochet recipes, yarns and basic Llama hugging techniques. 
• Session 2 will have you all ready to start on a lovely project of your choosing - perhaps a nice beanie or noodley spiral scarf.
• Session 3 will see us finishing up our projects, leaning another new stitch and going 3D into the world of crochet flowers. 

Cost will be $160 for the whole three days including a cuppa, lots of support and giggles and fun, enchanted encounters with the llamas and alpacas, course notes, your very own crochet hook and some practice yarn.

EVEN IF YOU HAVE NEVER HELD A CROCHET HOOK BEFORE AND ARE ESPECIALLY SCARED you are very very welcome. You will be able to buy beautiful yarn made from the fleeces of the alpacas that live at the farm - home grown fleece! Of course you are welcome to use other yarns of your choosing because THIS IS ABOUT CROCHET LOVE.

What do you think? Prospective Gentleman Crocheters are very welcome - CROCHET IS NOT FOR SISSIES you know.

Enrollment forms are available from the Alpaca Magic website. Is this a nice thing to do?
 
Lordie I am so excited. 

THIS is what living a post project existence is ALL ABOUT.

Mountain Beast

We had fun today. We took The Beast all the way up Mt Stromlo and had lunch at SCOPE It has taken 8 years but finally there is a cafe at the top of the mountain again. Yay! It was pretty fun riding up the hill and SUPER fun riding down. Lunch was pretty good too.

Queen of the Sun

Lacuna Sabbath

 Ok so last week I went on an adventure to Alpaca Magic near Sutton. My golly. I got to huggle some marvelous Llamas and bury my nose in beautiful soft gorgeous Alpaca yarns. I can not tell you how blissful it was/is to be surrounded by Mama Llamas and their little ones, feeding out the chopped up carrots I bought out 'specially. I was made to feel so welcome by the humans and by the llamas. What a lucky duck I was that day!

Mr Duck had been quite specific. He said he wanted a beanie with three grey stripes. So here it is. Hmmmm, that yarn. Alpaca is my new forever favorite. These are all natural colors - can you believe that?

And here are Mr & Mrs King Parrot - back again for winter.

And here is one of my loves for winter - parsley. Super.

Stay warm ya'll

Winter Harvest - kiwifruit

June is all about kiwi and lemons. I know, every year I DO GO ON about how wonderful home grown kiwi fruit are. I know. I know. But they ARE. The best thing about home grown kiwifruit is that you can leave them on the vine until well into winter and they just get sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. They need GOOD HARD FROSTS to make them sweet I reckon. They don't ripen until you pick them - even then it can be days or weeks until they soften. But they are SWEET. Nothing like those tart sour yuckballs you buy in the super market. IMHO commercial kiwifruit are picked WAY too early.

How do you get the best out of your kiwis? Well, most of the Vitamin C is in the skin....so I reckon the best and easiest way to prepare them is to gently scrub all the fur off with a scourer - and then the skin is soft and not fury. And they are easy to cut up - not messy - or you can just eat them like an apple. How wonderful to be able to pick fresh, delicious fruit in the dead of winter.
  

From my desk, I can see cold spoilt chickens wanting to come in.


Kiwifruit. Get into it.

Forgive me Bruce for I have sinned.

There has been a %#@load of airyplane travel lately. ONC - Tas, ONC to Armidale and now ONC to Sydney all in the one month. I am not sure how to fit destroying the planet through plane travel into my efforts to help shift the current trajectory of the universe. Efforts to not have a job seem to have fallen by the wayside. The good news is the universe completely supports (and indeed is DEMANDING) that one commits totally to diversion of organics from landfill (yay!) and helping folks get their composting processes all sorted out. I love my job(s).The duck even found herself at a FEEDLOT if you can imagine. My what endless possibilities for composting there are there. Its like heaven. But without the sad cows of course. Who would have thought all that work and study in anthropology and other human related fields would land one so knee deep in photosynthetic bacteria........best not to dwell on it.

Anyway, here is where the pink chair is currently parked. In my office. Facing the hug window. Separated from my desk by a book case. Perfect for reading and thinking and drinking tea and cushioning sleeping cats. Having a good workspace is reaping its rewards one hundred fold. I have managed to solve the whole preference for having one's back to the wall while facing the window quite nicely thank you. 

So now there is actually a floor in the office/cat room/hooch room. And no hole in the floor.

Here is a cat.

And here are the bees. Queen Malina on the Front Deck.  All packed down for winter. Enjoying the sun. Hooray for deciduous trees.