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.......